The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Insanely Races to Liberal Sanity with Our Tax Monies in Education. Pay Raises for Incompetent Teachers!

Abstract: David Brooks inspects the current educational system and discovers a new and wonderful attitude about reforming poor schools in our nation.  In his quest for solutions to the problems he finds a “pretty good foundation for a political philosophy” from a recent Obama speech. Here, $4.5 billion of our tax monies has been placed on the block to attract schools to “… hang [my word][1]  tough, demanding real reform in exchange for dollars. The example given for this ‘get tough’ mentality was a poor school in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where all teachers were fired. After a few circus performances featuring  the unions, President Obama and Frances Gallo, the ‘solution’ to the problem was that the teachers would all get a raise and a chance to be rehired by the end of the school term, probably about now.  True to form, all the teachers were hired back with pay raises for their needed ‘extra’ work and a promise not to sue the school system.  There are apparently no standards or metrics demanded of the teachers for this next round. Our school system will now become progressively worse and any attempt to fire incompetent teachers will result in pay raises as a reward for their ineptitude. That is the kind of “education” that makes us noncompetitive with Asia, the rising economic tide of this planet as we can forget Europe because their system is not much better than ours and they are going broke and will experience defaults and more unemployment. To keep the liberals sane we need to just spend more money on ‘education,’ clearly an undefined political term.

The New York Times: The Swamp Siren of the Hopeless

The self-inflicted mental  torments celebrated by the far left in the near-bankrupt New York Times—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[2][3]-- have produced nothing but new theorems on racial bias, reversed racism and all sorts of projects to increase our taxes but they have yet to  redirect their course to enlightenment.  They love to wallow in misery and, apparently, anguish is such beautiful sorrow.  They managed to win some seats and the White House over some inept politicians in the last round and got to print money without limits so now we are bankrupt.[4] But that is no reason to cast away reason and think of new financial adventures of this government—it is time to spend more! We can spend our way out of debt!

The net consequence of the last election was to animatedly endorse government spending and even more spending and hike our astronomical national debt[5] to almost the sum of a year’s GDP[6] and this has become the very favorite non-debatable subject of the Times. Keynes is now the craven image that they sacrifice their futures upon with our tax monies and debt, but today our Chief Babbler David Brooks[7][8][9][10][11][12] broaches the outer walls of the already politically polluted topic of ‘education.’ This nostrum is also known as the welfare rip-off circus and sometimes even branded as ejukashon[13] as it might be more colloquially pronounced in places like California[14][15][16]  and all this inspires our leaders to spend more money.  

How to best read my blogs:

[I offer extensive quotes in this blog so that the reader can view the exact language and can be confident that nothing was taken out of context or that nobody was misquoted. The easiest way to take in the salient points is to read the emphatic points in the quotes and then peruse my comments. Comments on my comments are always welcome: ryckki@gmail.com.]

More spending in ‘education’ is Sane we learn:

“Sometimes it seems as if we’re doomed to fight a new culture war between orthodox liberals who have lavish faith in the power of government and orthodox conservatives who have almost no faith at all.”[17]--Race to Sanity By David Brooks Op-Ed Columnist Published: June 3, 2010 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]

This comment makes me wonder if Brooks spends most of his intellectual time off world or in the mystic past studying some Eastern religion. We have been in a constant war with the socialists since the 1890s. But, maybe Brooks needed some puffy fluff to open his screed with.

Brooks envisions a new vision:

“But occasionally a politician comes along with a more measured vision of a limited but energetic government. Recently, for example, I read a speech by a politician who gave examples of both when government had failed (the old welfare system) and when it had succeeded (the railroad legislation under Lincoln, the bank reforms under F.D.R. and the highway system under Eisenhower). “Our government shouldn’t try to guarantee results,” this politician said, “but it should guarantee a shot at opportunity for every American who’s willing to work hard.”” --Race to Sanity

The idea of opening up the West with the rail system was not novel and certainly not new to Lincoln. The Brits started up the rail system in the 1820s. The reference to ‘bank reforms’ under F.D.R must not include his bank holidays blunder and the way he selected those banks  that would reopen  [it was random] or the way in which he increased the price of gold and debased our currency with the increase sum of 21, which was a lucky number since it was three sevens. He must have had a dozen strokes before he gave Europe off to the Communists with, of course, the able help of the slimy Communist-paid traitor Harry Hopkins, yet another good liberal Democrat.

Some traitors:

“It was okay for John Kerry [18]to talk with the Communists in Paris and try to defeat the US in the Vietnamese war.  It was okay for Harry Hopkins to be a paid Soviet Stooge for the Russians and sell of Eastern Europe to Stalin or for the Rosenbergs[19] to be paid Soviet spies [his code name was ‘liberal’—how fitting!] who then sold our nuclear secrets to the Communists. That is okay. It is fine that Mumia is a cop killer and can have routine radio broadcasts from his cell.[20][21][from a previous blog[22]].

All this hashed up lingo from Brooks apparently sets us up for spending more money without the guarantee or even the intent of success. If true, that is the most intelligent remark he has made in years. This model allows the liberals to spend and prevents criticism when they go back on their promises as this echo from one of President Obama’s case stooges:

“"Read my lips," Biden said, using Bush's famous phrase while referring to a Barack Obama administration.”Nobody, nobody making less than $250,000 is going to see a penny of their taxes go up."[23]—Biden[24] in an incoherent rant at some county fairgrounds near the campus of Ohio University in Athens on Oct 15, 2008.

Brooks now bases our future on this speech:

“That sentence struck me as a pretty good foundation for a political philosophy. It was delivered by President Obama at the University of Michigan commencement last month.

Obama administration policies haven’t always hewed to this limited but energetic approach. But there is one area where they sure have: education. The Obama approach to education could serve as a model for anybody who wants to build a center-out governing majority.” --Race to Sanity

I am certain that Brooks suspects that Obama has speech writers.  I wonder who wrote his comment, parroted by Plugs above, about taxation above the level of $250,000? The terms center-out are undefined here but must relate to propaganda induced citizenry.

Now, we have some contest:

“First, Obama and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, set up a contest. They put down $4.5 billion in Race to the Top money. They issued some general guidelines about what kind of reforms states would have to adopt to get the money. And then they fired the starting gun.

Reformers in at least 23 states have passed reform laws in hopes of getting some of the dough. Some of the state laws represent incremental progress and some represent substantial change. The administration has hung tough, demanding real reform in exchange for dollars. Over all, there’s been a tremendous amount of movement in a brief time.” --Race to Sanity

“This is not heavy-handed Washington command-and-control. This is Washington energizing diverse communities of reformers, locality by locality, and giving them more leverage in their struggles against the defenders of the status quo.” --Race to Sanity

The status quo, not defined here, coupled with the comment about struggles reads like some Lenin letter from around the turn of the last century.  This paragraph gives no clue about what the ‘reforms’ might be about. Whatever they are, there is money on the drum for them.

Here, we focus in a bit and filter some of Brooks’ contorted new-speak and center in on the objections:

“Second, the Obama administration used the power of the presidency to break through partisan gridlock. Over the past decade, teacher unions and their allies have become proficient in beating back Republican demands for more charters, accountability and choice. But Obama has swung behind a series of bipartisan reformers who are also confronting union rigidity.” --Race to Sanity

This is the core of his message, no so much disguised and washed with gooey leftist clap trap as in the above paragraphs. The ugly facts are that: [1] certain minorities cannot compete in any equal academic setting, [2] that this cluster of deficiencies that prevent them from having an equal outcome is highlighted by the publication of standardized test scores and these results spur on the quest for charter schools to escape the horrible conditions of the union-dominated ‘school’ system and we now want some system where accountability is not a factor. Is too bad the IRS doesn’t offer this much latitude in interpreting the tax codes. In other words, we will just spend more and more money on the minorities who have little or no chance of attaining par with others [even at the Supreme Court[25] ] and will not subject them to group metrics that might illustrate their manifold deficiencies. In modern parlance this must be something like blackwash. This battle has been going on for 50 years now since Brown v. Board of Education.

The much maligned book The Bell Curve[26], sometimes accused of actually causing the ‘problem’ of cognitive distribution in the US, actually states the blunt facts about our societies and the distribution of mental skills. This salient fact that half the people who take the standardized test will score below the median is the rallying point for ‘change’ in ‘education.’[27] That is not fair. Society must be equalized.[28] Thus propaganda must replace education.

The tragedy of our educational system is that efforts to help certain minorities gain par with the broad majority of other citizens have failed and programs like affirmative action, set-asides and quotas have been conjured to attain not equality but an ‘equal outcome.’ Such measures sometimes consisted of race norming, demanding new tests and other measures of obfuscation. Standardized tests will always highlight these deficiencies thus they are politically incorrect and need to be avoided. President Obama was against more testing.[29] The German testing tuition system of Arbitur[30] [the "Begabtenprüfung" or "test of aptitude"] actually is a fair plan  and it works very well in  Finland too, but does sort out students by IQ and this in unacceptable in a progressive society like ours because it leads to inequality.[31] What else does and IQ test do other than rank test scores by cognitive ability?

One school in New England attempts to fire some teachers:

 “In Rhode Island, the Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, fired all the teachers at one failing school. The unions fought back. Obama sided with Gallo, sending shock waves nationwide. If the president had the guts to confront a sacred Democratic interest group in order to jolt a failing school, then change was truly in the air. Gallo got the concessions she needed to try to improve that school.” --Race to Sanity

This sounds tough but all the teachers could reapply for jobs at the end of the school year.[32] The high school is one of the lowest performing in the state. Only 48 percent of the students graduate. They reached an ‘agreement’ with the expectation that all teachers will be rehired at higher pay. They wanted $90/hr to work after the union-specified work period that might help the students.

Here is the catch:

"So if a school is struggling, we have to work with the principal and the teachers to find a solution," Obama said. "We've got to give them a chance to make meaningful improvements. But if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show any sign of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability."[33]—Obama quote.

Nobody seems to know what this accountability might be. Higher pay for teachers?

 “Fourth, the administration has encouraged local officials to raise educational standards. The feds are not imposing national standards. But the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have come up with blueprints of what kids should be learning in math and English. According to the Thomas Fordham Foundation, an authoritative source on these things, these new standards are tough, rigorous and practical. The feds are offering incentives to states to embrace these goals.”--Race to Sanity

Raise standards to what standard. This process is made moot and absurd by the very fact that the verification process [testing]  is not allowed.

“Fifth, the administration is opening the door for more fundamental reform. Andy Smarick of the American Enterprise Institute and others have piled up data showing that it’s nearly impossible to turn around failing schools. Once mediocrity infects a school culture, it’s nearly always best to simply replace the existing school with another. The administration has a program called School Improvement Grants, which is helping a few remarkable local reformers, like Joel Klein of New York City, to close miserable schools and put new ones in their place.

In short, Obama’s activism isn’t overbearing. It’s catalytic. The administration hasn’t defeated the forces of the status quo, but in state after state, you’re seeing reformers moving forward.” --Race to Sanity

This all sounds good on the front page. But, we must inquire if merely exiting the bricks and mortar and moving poorly-performing students and questionable teachers to new digs just repeats the failed elements of the projects, known in the 60s as high rise slums or is a mirror of the school they just left.  A while back, [Jan 2009] I wrote a blog on the Obama Metrics.[34] The point here was to find some quantitative way to measure progress in his administration.  Here is a portion of that blog:

High School Dropout Rates:

We find that “almost half of all public high school students in the US’ fifty largest cities fail to graduate”[35] and the difference between success and failure at the suburbs [right next to these cities] is immense:

The City-Suburb Graduation Rate Split for Several Large Cities.[36]

Ref: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/scho-a03.shtml

Note that the trend is everywhere. We should expect to see places where blacks graduate at higher rates than whites if there were no cognitive differences among these two groups and if there were sufficient monies to encourage better minority education as in Washington, D. C.  For a spending rate per student that is nearly double the average for whites in America, the D. C. School System is by far the worst in American. Barack Obama is not sending his children to public schools there.  Why is that if he believes in education? There are essentially no examples of any school district where about half the students are black and the others white and where the blacks score significantly higher than whites in academics. We would expect that to be the case particularly in affluent black areas and we do not find that anywhere. This is a structural problem and solutions like the Germans have for their citizens who have different skills is not a possibly.  The minority problem is further complicated by the fact that Asians generally score about 1-2 points higher than whites in standardized IQ tests. [Whites = 100, Asians = 101-102]

David Brooks sums up with a question:

“So why don’t we use a similarly light but energetic, decentralized but forceful reform approach when it comes to health care, transportation, energy or environmental policy? Good question.” --Race to Sanity

I didn’t even bother to think about this horror unless the ‘decentralized approach’ might include vouchers for home schooling, school choice and more charter schools.

Conclusion:

The fact is that nothing happened here. A school system, typical of inner city schools as given in the chart directly above, was perturbed by the threat of discharging all teachers. Some meetings were held, President Obama intervened, a ‘solution’ was found and the net result was this:

[1] They identified a lousy school but this was not news.

[2] The teachers were threatened with discharge and rebelled.

[3] The unions and school administrators ‘agreed’ that the teachers needed a pay raise.

[4] The Obama notion of  “a sense of accountability” has meant nothing other than to continue on with this farce.

[5] Not a single poor teacher was either identified or fired.

[6] The same teachers and staff occupy the same building with the same students less those who might graduate this June or drop out.

Exactly nothing happened except the costs of that school system went up and the taxpayers got stuck again. All teachers got their jobs back with pay raises and the promise not to sue the school district.[37]

This is typical liberalism—failure oriented to a fault.  There is NO WAY any incompetent teacher in a union is going to be fired for any reason particularly incompetence. This trashing of our school system, perpetuated by federal tax monies derived from deficit spending, will continue on until businesses refuse to hire these students for any job and our unemployment rate soars up to the 20 percent level that it deserves.

Our lousy school system now has a financial impetus to become lousier.

rycK [a 5^th generation Californian in exile]

Comments to: ryckki@gmail.com