Say Anything Blog

I just love how liberals can’t come up with a solution that doesn’t entail pushing people around. 

Sounds pretty fascist to me.

What’s going to happen to US industry when the global warming extremists like John McCain double the price of electricity?  I would think all these factories will close and set up in countries where they aren’t scared of technology.

Not just pushing people around, but wasting hours of their life each day in the process and endangering the safety and even lives of those children.  Does spending a few hours each day on the school bus help children get their homework done?

This has already been tried in Kansas City.  It failed miserably and cost $2 billion.

The Kansas City school district is still considered one of the worst in the nation, so much so that middle class families who can’t afford private school won’t even buy houses in the district.

The entire program was built on the premise that extremely good schools in the inner city combined with paid busing would be enough to achieve integration.  A number of local factors made the program unworkable. The school board never really functioned to enable the program to succeed. The administration in charge of the district was ill equipped to handle the amount of money it had available. Due to wounded racial pride, concerns about closing neighborhood schools, and the large percentage of local jobs provided by the schools, the community was alternately distrustful and demanding of the program. Perhaps most damaging was that parents in the surrounding area didn’t send their children to be educated in the inner city. It ended in 1999.

How ‘bout gittin’ some dem poor folks half million dollar salary jobs at an off-shore hedge fund instead?

Four years after allowing himself to be expertly sliced, diced, and butchered by Dick Cheney in the 2004 VP debate, John Edwards demonstrates why it is that fresh meat ought to be sealed and frozen, rather than left lying around all this time.

“Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.”

...is it really fair to make some suburban kid go to an inner city school just because his/her parents happen to be rich?

Even if this solution were implemented, this would not be the result.  Middle class families will move to a smaller home / apartment in a better school district before they will send their kids to a substandard school.  The rich go to private schools.

The only result is wasted money, removal of many of the best students from the public schools system, and black eye for public schools in general.  It’s been tried.  It didn’t work.

Sorry for all of the posts.

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can’t be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.

I thought we are supposed to be conserving energy instead of using it up on cockamamie social engineering schemes.

a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

I was just moving myself from the area when this hit.  A judge ordered 2 Billion dollars of taxpayer expense without vote of people or law enacted by representatives. 

The model UN was particulary ironic in light of the expensive failure.

Middle class families will move to a smaller home / apartment in a better school district before they will send their kids to a substandard school.  The rich go to private schools.

I will opt out of public schooling if my kids are subjected to the negative influence of kids whose parents just don’t care.  We live 6 miles from the old town of Goodyear, AZ, in a new suburb and share the same school district.  Three schools are “No Child Left Behind” schools and the other are rated either good or exceptional (the schools where upper middle class folks living in cookie cutter new homes like me live).

If they try to bring the poor mostly Hispanic kids that don’t speak English from the old town into my kids’ school, how does that benefit anyone?  Are these kids going to learn any better when their parents have no incentive to master English and often are illegals that frequently move?

I will simply send my kids to Catholic School (though I am not Catholic) and eat the $5k per year so that my kids get a decent education.  But I am sure that John Edwards is telling Kennedy and Kerry to send their kids to public schools.

BTW, this is one thing I respect Edwards for.  His kids went to public schools, not elitist snob boarding schools like the rest of the super-rich.  Public schooling for his kids is at least Johnboy’s brush with the other America.  But unless he wants to take real action that doesn’t simply discriminate against the uppermiddle class suburbanites like me and wants to grab the superwealthy’s kids from their boarding schools and send a bunch of illegal alien kids to the elitist schools that cost $50k a year, his little idea doesn’t affect that other America he keeps talking about.

This issue has been brought up the the courts just recently and denied.  A school district can not compel someone’s child to be sent to another just to achieve “diversity” (read shade balancing).  What really was being attempted was slaughter of good students at the hands of hoodlems and gangs.

Communism is evil

BTW, this is one thing I respect Edwards for.  His kids went to public schools, not elitist snob boarding schools like the rest of the super-rich.

Justin,

Actually, I’m inclined to disagree with you here.  Like any parents, the Edwards’ first obligation is to their children.  I see this as one more political ploy, pandering to the whims and sensitivities of the egalitarian left and using his kids to do so.  I guess its how liberals make up for having a lot of money. (And considering how he earned it, he’s got a lot of makin’ up to do!)

“Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.”

Actually, if I were a poor inner-city parent, I’d be scared as hell for my kids to go to a middle class school.  At least in the ghetto they wait until recess to start shooting each other.  White kids are crazy!

Per what BatOne says, I’m not all that fond of the idea that a multimillionaire abandoned his children to the government schools for political points.  Especially in light of what k-Lunch says--I want my kids in schools where predators don’t know a priori that nobody there is armed.

What kind of school did the hair shirt wearing, Jimmy Carter, send Amy to?
She hung out with Abbie Hoffman, anyway!(:^)

Actually, I’m inclined to disagree with you here.  Like any parents, the Edwards’ first obligation is to their children.  I see this as one more political ploy, pandering to the whims and sensitivities of the egalitarian left and using his kids to do so.

Note the case.  Edwards was a lawyer in private practice (of destroying OB’s and channelling the unborn) until the death of his teenage son.

From Wiki:

Their son, Wade, was born in 1979 and daughter Cate followed in 1982. In 1996, Wade, age 16, was killed in a car accident when strong winds swept his Jeep off a North Carolina highway. Following Wade’s death, Edwards and his wife had children again: Emma Claire, born 1998, and Jack, born in 2000.

After Wade’s death, Elizabeth quit practicing as an attorney and Edwards decided to go into politics, running for the Senate the next year.

Wade was 16 and died the year before Edwards ran for Senate.  That does not count as a political ploy.

As I defend Mr. Two Americas.

It is tough to consistently demonize folks and question every single intention they have as some sort of political device.

Jenna and Barbara Bush went to public high school in Austin, so I would challenge you to use the same logic about Bush as about Edwards.

Making this exchange will give poorer kids an opportunity to a scholarship and a very good education but the rich kids will probably oppose to changing their life style. I’m a student at Nouveau Riche and here we have all sort of society ranks because the University cares more about results than money. We all learn in perfect harmony and we know one’s rich and the other poor only in the parking lot. In the classroom we’re all the same.