My Beauty Best Teacher

The unelected bureaucrats of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have decided in their infinite wisdom that they will put in place new federal laws regulating acceptable levels of ground-level ozone. This move will put 21 Michigan counties in noncompliance and cost businesses and residents millions of dollars to improve air quality.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackass in a press release Thursday said that "smog dirties our air, clouds our cities and drives up our health care costs across the country." Dirty air, clouds, and an occasional cough are indeed bad things, but so is being unemployed, sucking down welfare, and having nothing to do every day but agonize why no one will give you a job. Think about it- in a perfect world, you could have everything, but in this world, if you had to trade having a job, a paycheck, a house, cars, and a secure future for your children in a cloudy world with an occasional cough because of bad air, or you could be unemployed, losing your house, have no security, but be breathing nice clean air, which would you choose?

Choices matter. And it is wrong that it is unelected bureaucrats who are making these choices for our lives. Our elected officials should be making these decisions, and then we could hold them accountable for the resulting loss of jobs and income. But we are not living in a republic any more, or even a democracy, but increasingly a tyranny of unelected czars and bureaucrats headed by one person intent on gaining state control over every aspect of our lives.

The EPA estimates that implementing the changes would cost between $19 billion and $90 billion. The health benefits could save between $13 billion and $100 billion, it said. There are no other analysis done, no auditing by any other agency, and little data to back up those claims. I bet it'll cost more like $90 billion, and save more like $13 billion in health care costs, meaning it better be worth it to suck another $77 billion out of taxpayers pockets.

If a county is not in compliance with these arbitrary standards established by unelected bureaucrats, the government will grow angry and punish its puny subjects by reducing their road funding and putting in place additional regulations in retribution. For Michigan, already struggling under years Democratic rule marked by high taxes and regulation, any added burden on development will be crushing.

Information for this story was pulled from this article from the Detroit News.

Monique Maddy founder of Adesemi Communications and author of 'Learning to Love Africa' pointed out the lack of understanding the Aid Industry had (and still has) for wealth creation and entrepreneurship.In explaining the unsuccess of her then company she stated:

the real reason for Adesemi's failure and Africa's continental mire can be traced to the international development agencies that are designed to help the region. "Africa is worse off today -- in many countries -- than it was at independence, even though billions and billions have been spent," says Maddy, who herself served for five years as a United Nations Development Program officer. "As long as you have these kinds of institutions, you won't have any change."

...she called

for a radical departure from a system based on an international aid bureaucracy. "You basically have bureaucrats trying to develop countries," she says. "How many bureaucrats started Microsoft?"

via GhanaWeb

Via theblogprof, there is this interesting article From World Net Daily today:

A newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed "right-wing extremists" concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats.

The report from DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines right-wing extremism in the U.S. as "divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."

Those of you attending the Tea Parties, here is what you stand for: America, federalism, 2nd amendment, pro-life, and the military. Here is who opposes your views: the US government, particularly bureaucrats.

This is getting weird- it is almost as if these tea parties were being held back in the pre-revolutionary days, when King George and his bureaucrats and their anti-freedom, anti-liberty, pro-bureaucracy policies were the norm. King George wanted you to stay home and sit out the pro-freedom events like this one- he didn't support federalism, gun ownership, and America. King George is the bad guy.

Today, it is King Obama- to be honest, it's not just Obama and it's not just the Democrats- it's also the big government Republicans and liberal RINO's who collaborate with those who would take our freedom. It is those out there who do not believe that I was given by God the right to own property (as much property as I want and it's a good thing!), that I was given by God the right to liberty, and that God gave me and others the right to live. Liberals and those who oppose these tea parties do not believe that governments were created by men to protect those rights, and that whenever they no longer protect those rights, they are no longer moral, they are no longer good, and they deserve to be changed.

Those of you who are going to Tea Parties this Wednesday- and here is the information you need for that- you are the good guys, you are the freedom fights, you are the right in this world. You are the ancestors of those who fought in our Revolution, you are the sons and daughters of the Revolution, and cheer with pride in knowing that by attending these Tea Parties, forget what the Department of Homeland Security says, you are doing the right thing.

UPDATE: Hot Air has a good story about the DHS report and other issues. Check it out, but don't be too worried- remember, aim to misbehave.

In a recent interview with ABC, President Barack Obama was talking about the fee that Bank of America believes is now necessary to charge customers because of recent changes to bank card fees imposed by Democrats in the Dodd-Frank bill':

“This is exactly why we need this Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that we set up that is ready to go," he said. "... (petty government bureaucrats) can stop (the fees being charged by private banks) because if (petty government bureaucrats) say to the banks, ‘You don't have some inherent right just to – you know, get a certain amount of profit. If your customers – are being mistreated. That you have to treat them fairly and transparently.”

I made some changes- I removed the word 'you' that Obama used and replaced it with what I thought he meant, and I removed the word 'it' and replaced it with what the 'it' was.

As you can see from this statement, the President does not believe that privately owned and operated companies in the United States have an inherent right to create wealth. He believes that wealth did not exist before the government was around and does not exist after government is not around- if Obama and a bunch of hard workers landed on a deserted island that was in a state of nature, he would believe that he would be morally correct to take the fruits of the labor of others since they have no inherent right to what their own labor produces. Obama thinks that government has the right to take from others, whether they created that wealth through their own actions or not, because he thinks that wealth and prosperity is created and sustained by government policies, even though all experience hath shown that this is incorrect.

America was founded on different ideals- our nation was founded on the idea that property existed before the government and will continue to exist after government, and that even in a state of nature with no government, people do have an inherent fundamental natural right to the property that they create through their actions. If a bank charges a fee and gets a profit from this, they have every right to keep that profit, as it is their inherent natural right to create and keep property in our nation, free from government intervention and threats of confiscation. Only in tyrannical governments are the rights of life, liberty, and property not protected, and tyrannical governments then are those which have less happy lives, less free people, and are always considerably poorer in property than those nations which have embraced natural rights philosophy like our founding fathers did.

As we all know, in order to support yourself through reason and stay alive in a society, you must be able to own and use the product of your labor- you must be able to create wealth and keep that wealth in order to live and live free. If the tools of your survival and the products of your hard work are subject to random confiscation by the Obama administration, then your life also becomes subject to possible random destruction- or to put it another way, the tyrannical nature of the Obama administration to target businesses as 'enemies' is making our nation more poor and bit by bit making your life more miserable and less rich in goods and happiness and freedom.

Obama is increasingly by his own statements demonstrating his unfitness for the office of President of the United States of America; 2012 can't come fast enough to get rid of this guy.

The Inside Deal is Democratic President Barack Obama's domestic economic program and is characterized by extensive government spending for politically connected groups within American society. Increasingly during the height of the Inside Deal, there is a link between who receives taxpayer money from the federal government and their political connections. It is called by some crony capitalism. For some politically connected groups in American society, the Inside Deal allows them to to avoid or delay certain mandates, fees, regulations, or restrictions, due purely to their political connections and status in society. During the height of the Great Recession, these deals between Democrat politicians and regulators and bureaucrats and politically favored businesses became increasingly more common.

One such deal was recently struck between McDonald's and Obama's bureaucrats. McDonald's (which has CNN on in all of its restaurants, doubling CNN's viewership) apparently is going to be able to allowed to waive certain requirements of the new health-care laws. After Micky D's threatened federal regulators saying that it would drop its health-insurance plan for nearly 30,000 restaurant workers, Obama's officials jumped to announce that they will exercise discretion this time. There was no announcements as to whether or not the thousands of other employers would be allowed to waive the requirements that will cause thousands more to lose their health insurance coverage.

This McDonald's announcement highlights the kind of healthcare law that Democrats passed into law last year- one that will cause employers to drop coverage of thousands of employees, who will then be forced to go on the government's health care plans paid for by taxpayers or lose health care coverage altogether, unless businesses are politically connected like government officials or labor unions or companies that threaten retribution, who are all allowed to waive the requirements and continue to provide service to their employees free from government interference and fees.

Obamacare is the kind of legislation that creates a society that is based on who you know, on who you donate money to, on who you have political connections with- it creates a deal between favored groups in society and the government masters who dictate policy over them. There might be some incidental good side effects, but at a fundamental level it is tyranny that degrades the human condition and lessens our protections of life, liberty, and property.

When Barack Obama ran for President in 2008, he made a great show out of his spirit of bipartisanship. One of the central themes of his campaign was how his presidency would be post-partisan- how he would welcome and support Republicans within his administration and how he was friends with and close to many Republicans such as John Huntsman or Doug Kmiec. These Republicans believed Obama and trusted him and believed that he really was a post-partisan President who would bring change and hope to America, but much like Obama's grandmother or pastor or best friend Bill Ayers, once these Republicans were used as props to demonstrate Obama's 'post partisanship' they were soon thrown under the bus in the names of Obama's real objectives, which are radically leftist and deeply partisan.

Doug Kmiec is just the latest in the exodus of US ambassadors which this year already includes John Huntsman (former US Ambassador to China, resigned in April of 2011, possibly to make a run at the President himself), Carlos Pascual (former US Ambassador to Mexico, resigned in 2011 and waiting to be replaced, a casualty of a WikiLeaks cable that was critical of Mexico), and Cynthia Stroum (former US Ambassador to Luxembourg, resigned early 2011, was corrupt and a bully).

Via the Los Angeles Times:

The American ambassador to Malta resigned his post Saturday after criticism from the State Department's inspector general that he was devoting too much time to promoting better relations between religions. Douglas Kmiec, a prominent conservative constitutional lawyer and member of the Pepperdine University faculty, said in letters to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he rejected the inspector general's conclusion that his advocacy was outside his official mission. Kmiec wrote that the inspector general had a "flawed and narrow vision of our diplomatic mission" and said his writings had a "highly positive effect on our diplomatic relations."

Kmiec, a devout Roman Catholic and a onetime frequent contributor to The Times opinion pages, held important legal posts under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He has been a prominent figure in the antiabortion movement and in efforts to give greater latitude for religion in public life.

He was also impressed by President Obama's religious faith and interest in improving relations between religions, and he supported him during the 2008 presidential election campaign. After Obama was elected, Kmiec was appointed ambassador to Malta, a conservative Catholic island, and White House officials said that one of his roles would be to advance Obama's views on interfaith dialogue.

But the inspector general's report, issued in February, says he had an "unconventional approach to his role" and devoted much time to writing on the "interfaith initiative." It said his official schedule was "uncharacteristically light," and that he had had "friction with principal officials in Washington, especially over his reluctance to accept their guidance and instructions." Department officials spent considerable time reviewing and editing Kmiec's writings related to religion, and they barred him from organizing conferences aimed at improving relations between religions, officials said.

At the same time, the report says, Kmiec had "achieved some policy successes" and was respected by Maltese officials and embassy staff members.

The most important aspect of this report is that Kmiec was a Republican who wrote about his religion and was a religious man and that bothered the career liberal bureaucrats who habitat the State Department. Although he was doing a good job and everything liked him and he was effective, the leftists who blunder their way through foreign policy at the State Department didn't like him and spent their time censoring their boss and trying to control their bosses efforts to do a better job, and eventually got one of their own unelected bureaucrats to write an unfavorable report of him. Kmiec turned to his friend and ally, Obama, for help, and got a shrug of the shoulder as he too was thrown under the bus, and so he leaves, and once more, America is made worse off by liberals their career minions in the bureaucratic bowels of our government.

Doug Kmiec is the author of Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Questions about Barack Obama and The History, Philosophy, and Structure of the American Constitution.

From the International Herald Tribune: The era of Obama is here, and many scientists in bureaucratic agencies around the country are exuberant- staff members throughout the government's scientific agencies held inaugural parties on Tuesday, and many reported being teary-eyed with joy. Frank Press, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and former science adviser to President Jimmy Carter said "It's not just getting money- it's (Obama's) recognition of what science can do..." Carter's former advisor probably commented off the record that money and results don't' even matter- the only thing that matters is Obama recognition that scientists can do anything that God did, and giving them the power to do so.

The article goes on to accuse the two-time democratically elected President of the United States of interfering in the work and policies of government bureaucrats. 20 Nobel laureates issued a statement claiming that the Bush administration had treasonously attempted to achieve its policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry, and they are outraged that they didn't get to set those goals and control our society using their obviously superior intellect.

Last month the inspector general of the Interior Department, a cabinet department under the control of President Bush, determined that Bush's policies often interfered with his personal agenda of massively expanding the power of government over our society in order to protect 'species in danger of extinction.'

Obama transition officials said that the new administration would also loosen the oversight that the Bush administration imposed over federal scientific agencies, letting them play God with science without any elected officials meddling in their taxpayer funded business. Scientists are most excited about the prospect of expanding stem cell research now that they don't have to deal with foolish notions such as religion and morality.

William Hubbard, an associate FDA commissioner who retired in 2005, said that top Bush administration officials were so opposed to taking away our freedom and liberties that they callously ignored the attempts by lawyers, lobbyists, politically-connected businesses, scientists, and bureaucrats to put in place new rules to govern us serfs and control our behavior.

Meanwhile, there is a new poll out that says that the majority of people in the United States are no longer buying the myth of man-made global warming. Most scientists' have all reached consensus on this issue, deciding that the world is warming, that the warming is continual and exponential, that it is man-made, and that the only way to prevent a catastrophe is for the government to control every aspect of our society. In spite of this, the idiots of the United States, by that I mean thousands and thousands of real people with brains, no longer buy this load of bull, and feel that the Earth must warm and cool periodically, regardless of human behavior, and government action is not needed on this issue.

The breakdown is 41% are Believers, 44% are smart, and 16% are other- it's surprising that 2/3 people in this nation don't buy into Global Warming, and yet we just anointed a Head Shaman who is going to radically change our nations policies to confront it. I'll never understand voters, or whoever put Obama in charge of our once great nation.

At the start of the 2011 model year, customers will look in vain for four well-known American car brands that were the victim of government policies. While many customers enjoyed these cars and many people had jobs making them, they were unable to withstand enviornmentalists who pushed for higher gas prices and arbitrary fuel standards or government bureucrats who pushed for fewer brands and smaller cars.

The push by environmentalists to make cars smaller and more fuel-efficient is based on the desire for clearner air and to fight global warming. Cleaner air is a worthy goal and speaks to the failures of firm property rights with regards to air, but global warming is a passing fad that is based on religion more so than any real science. And yet in spite of the evidence regarding global warming, the evidence that it is purely harmful, the evidence that humans are the cause of this global warming, or the evidence that government policies will have a meaningful positive effect, the government has acted and put in place 'fuel efficiency' standards that are arbitrary numbers made up by some bureaucrats. In addition to forcing car manufactures to use lighter materials which have led to increases in automobile deaths, for some car brands these government standards are too difficult or challenging to reach.

The second assault on traditional American car brands was waged by government bureaucrats who took advantage of a downswing in finances for GM and Chrysler (caused by government attacks on them through regulation, taxes, cap-and-trade, and other government policies) to seize these formerly private companies, steal the wealth and investments by private investors, and then use the power of government to transfer that power and wealth and investments to government officials and politically-connected unions. Then these government officials, most lacking experience in business in general and almost all lacking experience running automotive companies in particular, decided that these companies they had seized needed 'fewer brands' and 'smaller cars.'

But for the 2011 model year—thanks largely to the huge economic downturn that began in late 2008—four well-known American nameplates have gone the way of the Edsel, so to speak.

And so this year we say goodbye to good American brands such as Hummer, Pontiac, Mercury, and Saturn.
Via Yahoo Auto's:

Of these four, the Hummer brand was the most short-lived. The original Hummer H1 (or Hum-Vee) was a celebrity of the Persian Gulf War. In 2002 came a smaller and (slightly) more manageable version, the Hummer H2. Exactly what made suburbanites decide they needed a four-wheeled facsimile of a machine-gun toting, troop-hauling war machine parked in their driveway is best left to future generations to explain. Perhaps the supersized and fuel-guzzling excess of the Hummer brand will someday look as quaint as towering tailfins from the late-1950s? Or perhaps not.

Pontiac and Mercury always maintained a far more balanced product portfolio during their much longer life-spans. Founded in 1939, Pontiac was introduced as a companion make to prop up sales at GM’s Oakland division. Pontiac immediately outsold, and eventually far outlived, its parent brand. Oakland faded away in 1931. Pontiac’s historical highlights include the 1964 Pontiac GTO (the car that defined the muscle-car era) and the Firebird sports coupe.

Mercury was introduced in 1939, not to boost another brand’s sales, but to fill the price gap that had emerged between Ford and its upscale sibling, Lincoln. Cars like the 1949 Mercury Coupe driven by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause all but guarantees the brand immortality – even if the nameplate itself has finally driven into the sunset. Years of badge engineering eventually dissolved Mercury’s identity, squeezing the brand out of the Ford Motor Company family tree.

Perhaps the biggest surprise – at least in terms of positive automotive karma – is the loss of Saturn. Created by GM to take the fight to imports, Saturn was marketed as “a different kind of car company,” thanks to a lineup of fuel-sipping small cars and no-haggle pricing policy. If only the cars lived up to the feel good dealership experience. A lack of development and new models left Saturn spinning out of orbit. A list ditch effort to market vehicles built by GM’s German-based Opel division as Saturns proved too little too late.

If the national government wants to save education in America, I have become increasingly convinced that it needs to let it go, and for that matter, if the states want to save education in America, they have to let it go to. The education of children needs to be shoved as hard as it can be shoved to the lowest local level of our governmental system so that parents, local community leaders, and stakeholders in the educational system can regain the power and control over the education of their children's lives. What made our nation great was decentralization, local control, and personal responsibility, and by moving more and more control to the state and national levels we have lessened the very things that made us great.

America is not China, nor is it Finland, nor is it Germany, nor is it Singapore- those nations, although perhaps doing well lately, didn't conquer a continent, win two major world wars, and in recent years become the world's sole superpower. So we should not look to them for solutions on how to build and design and run an educational system for our nation- we should instead take those things that made America great and helped it to become what it is and modernize them and improve them and build on them, and that means not adopting statist models built on communistic principles designed to suck massive amounts of wealth from the system and funnel it through large bureaucracies to favored politically connected groups within societies. That's not our model to follow- our model is to return power over education back to the local level, which will then experiment with public policy solutions and funding models in order to achieve a democratic solution to providing high quality education at minimum cost to society with little loss of efficiency.

Rules regarding what is taught in each district need to be returned back to the district. Funding for each district needs to be returned to the district. Rules regarding discipline need to be returned back to the district. Control over hiring and regulations over hiring and rules regarding hiring need to be returned to the district. School districts at the local level must once again be where the education of children is designed, set up, and practiced, and this power and money and decisions should no longer to sent off to far-away places where faceless bureaucrats who don't know your kids make decisions that are very important to your children and their futures.

Democrats and Republicans alike make the mistake of trying to fix education by moving more and more power to the national or state levels, killing any innovation that local districts may experiment with to build better educational systems in favor of trying to adopt one-size-fits-all models that not everyone wants and so no one adopts. Creativity, growth, and great ideas come from people who actually work in education and manage education professionals and whose children go through the education system, and yet in our nation, more and more of decisions, funding, and power is flowing rapidly away from those people to unelected bureaucrats, childless professors, and scheming politicians. Republicans and Democrats alike need to reject this siren song of government power fixing everything, and take a deep breath and a leap of trust and once more empower the people of our great nation to do what needs to be done to fix and improve education by returning powers and funds that once were at the local level- once when America was great- back to the local level.

Representative Dave Reichert (R-WA8) has recently sponsored an education bill (House Resolution 1738) that should be quickly passed with bi-partisan support- the Teacher Tax Relief Act of 2011. This bill amends the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to increase deductions that teachers can make for certain elementary and secondary school teachers from $250 to $500, extend indefinitely this currently year-by-year deduction, and expand it to include professional development activities.

Republicans and Democrats talk often about 'helping teachers'- but the money that goes into the Department of Education gets trapped in Washington or by bureaucrats at the state levels and much of the 'help' never actually gets to the actual teachers. A better approach by Washington to 'helping teachers' would be to cut the size and budget of the Department of Education and to take half of those savings and transfer it to teachers in the form of tax deductions.

These tax deductions would reward those teachers who already spend money in their classroom- after all, teachers already spend out-of-pocket considerably more than $250 (sources- the NEA's 2003 report, Status of the American Public School Teacher, 2000-2001, found that teachers spent an average of $443 a year on classroom supplies, and The National School Supply and Equipment Association found that in 2005-2006, educators spent out of their own pockets an average of $826 for supplies and an additional $926 for instructional materials -- for a total of $1,752). By allowing more to be deducted, this may perhaps encourage more teachers to buy more supplied for their classrooms, especially if those teachers are not well-off or working in districts that can not afford to pay them a lot. And by expanding the tax credit, it may encourage teachers to seek out more professional development opportunities, knowing that these will be deducted from their tax bill.

The federal government allows small-business owners to deduct expenses, those who work for other companies to deduct expenses, and bureaucrats deduct costs all the time from their taxes, and so expanding the already existing teacher tax deduction would be in line with what is acceptable in other policy areas.

Some of you may be thinking- why should only teachers get this sort of tax break? You may be right and perhaps taxes should be cut for you too, but just because you want something too should not mean that you oppose tax cuts to teachers (unless you're just a small and spiteful person and can't stand to see anyone else get better if you're not too). You want tax cuts, this bill is tax cuts- don't be petty and jealous and oppose it just because those tax cuts don't go to you. I suppose you could oppose this bill because you want to see the government collect more from teachers in taxes, but that's got to be a small minority- not even liberal Democrats really could have as their objective to just take more out of teachers pockets. Or perhaps you're worried that this sort of thing will add to our deficit- if that's the case, just make in kind cuts from the Department of Education budget based on how much you think this sort of thing will cost, or even 2-for-1 cuts- HR 1738 will be better for real teachers in the end.

The federal government can play a role in improving education by encouraging teachers to spend more of their own money in their classroom and improve their skills through professional development, and HR 1738 does this.

Please contact your Congressperson and encourage them to co-sponsor this legislation and work to push it through the House Committee on Ways and Means, where it is currently stuck.

Currently cosponsored by Shelley Berkley [D-NV1], Doc Hastings [R-WA4], and Aaron Schock [R-IL18]- please thank these Congresspeople for cosponsoring this legislation.

Here is a thought-provoking essay that recently appeared in the the American Thinker called The Elephant in the Room:

For the first two hundred years of America's history, there was little in the way of public education. Thus, from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century, education was most often a family affair (though churches, literary societies, and apprenticeships also contributed to the education of early America's youth).

As youngsters, our Founding Fathers were educated like most other children of early America. Of the six Founding Fathers, three were homeschooled: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Two were self-taught: Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin (though Franklin did attend primary school for two years). And one, John Adams, was both homeschooled and privately taught (at a very small school).

How far from our early ways America has strayed! Today, only a minority of children are homeschooled. Granted, the homeschool movement is resurgent and growing at a healthy rate of 12% a year. Even so, the majority of America's children attend public schools, learning not at their mother's knee, as previous generations of Americans did, but under the tutelage of government employees, per the dictates of statist bureaucrats. To top it off, a growing number of America's children receive their very sustenance from their school benefactors. In San Diego, California, for example, more than 46 elementary schools begin their day by feeding all of their students breakfasts at their desks.

Is it any wonder, then, that America's youth has a cozy relationship with statism and a relatively high regard for big government? How can young Americans not feel a fondness for government when they have more or less been raised by it? Would it not, in fact, be somewhat immoral (or at a minimum, ungracious) for children to be raised by their surrogate parents -- government teachers -- and then oppose teachers and their employer, big government, at election time?

The truth of the matter is this: as long as America's children continue to be educated (and fed) by government employees, conservatives will make precious little headway in preventing America's steady march towards statism. This holds true no matter how well conservatives organize or electioneer or broadcast their limited-government message. It simply defies logic and historical evidence to believe that a populace raised and educated by government employees will choose to move away from government encroachment. True, there are exceptions to the rule. But these are so few (and decreasing yearly) as to be little more than the Ciceronian gasps of a dying Republic.

If America is to return to her founding principles, she must become a nation whose children are raised by parents who teach them not only their A-B-Cs, but also the proper path to virtue and the importance of liberty. When we sequester our children five days a week in age-segregated government institutions, we minimize the time our children spend with the very elders who might pass on to them the immortal truths enshrined in our founding documents -- truths passed down from Athens and Rome to the Medievals and, ultimately, to our Founders.

Not only that, but by sending our youngsters off to public schools, we force our children to spend their days learning to behave as good drones do, thinking not for themselves (as liberty-minded, self-reliant individuals), but for authority figures hired by the government. The authority figures are grooming our children to become not individualists and innovators, but worker bees who may someday do their part to maintain the health of the collectivist hive. Like good little worker bees, our children learn to pick up their pencils when the bell rings, to regurgitate facts that bureaucrats have decided are good to memorize (facts that rarely align with the truths taught by Aristotle, Cicero, and Madison), and then to put their pencils down when the bell rings again.

Though most of us grew up holding our public schools in high esteem, I believe it is time we rethink our loyalties. We ought to understand that the modern public school system is no friend to liberty. If in doubt, consider the fact that Karl Marx included free education for all children in public schools as one of the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto. Consider, too, the fact that America's modern public school system was not invented in early America, but in Prussia. It was the Prussian educational model that advocated compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, and a uniform curriculum for each school grade.

America adopted the basic tenets of the Prussian education system at the end of the 19th century. Should America, the last, best hope of mankind, continue to goosestep along with a Prussian model for educating its youth? Or is time to cast aside a system that is unfriendly to our founding principles and return to the educational methodologies of our forefathers? A lot rides on the answer to that question. May we choose wisely.

Personally I disagree with a lot that this essay suggests, but the larger point remains that the entire structure of our education system that we've been locked into for the last 100 years needs to be seriously reconsidered. In my mind there are still schools, but they are more free-market businesses that compete to educate children who each carry with them some sort of foundation-grant voucher. The details for my dreamscape of education of the future are still fuzzy, but I know that the reality of education today is not the vision for a bright future for America.

Check out Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling from John Taylor Gatto.

Via Doug Ross:

Should you need additional proof that the Democrat-controlled federal government is completely and utterly out of control, may I present Exhibit 9 Bazillion?  The last paragraph is important: after all (Democrat-passed) regulations failed to avert the mortgage crisis (thanks especially to Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Maxine Waters), the Democrats are busy building up new agencies and new offices to oversee the same losers that failed the last time. Democrats don't mind that the country is bankrupt. They've emptied the Treasury with trillions in failed spending programs. And still they spend, hiring new bureaucrats as greedily as Michael Moore hordes french fries at Johnny Rocket's. By the way, if you want to apply for the job, please contact Marisa Harper, a Human Resources Specialist at Federal Housing Finance Agency in Washington, DC. Please be polite and tell her I sent you. Maybe I'll get a referral fee.

This is the reason that America is in a recession and has an increasingly hard time recovering from it. There are leeches on the system, sucking at productivity and labor of our nation so that they can engage in community activism and indulge in their personal power trips. Teachers are doing more and more with less, and yet more and more money goes into education- the disconnect is because union staff and ISD's suck more and more money out of the system. Civil servants are doing more and more with less, and yet more and more money goes into government- the disconnect is because salaries are skyrocketing at the top levels of government and more and more agencies are being added, sucking more and more money out of the hands of productive civil servants. America is being dragged down by inefficient, highly-paid, top-level bureaucrats and union leadership, who are using their political connections and expensive lawyers to transfer more wealth to people who do less work.

One of the other school districts that I worked in has a gifted and talented program that I thought would interest some of my readers because it shows how possible and how extensive the liberal agenda can stretch into the government-run schools in our country.

In some schools, gifted and talented programs for students may offer increased enrichment opportunities, ask students to take more leadership on important issues, hold seminars to improve critical thinking skills, or include visits to local museums. But in other schools, just the the program that I observed in a local middle school, the gifted and talented programs instead are serving as laboratories for molding future communist-left-leaning Democrats.

In this government school, gifted and talented students are usually identified in elementary and middle schools and then put into a program apart from other students, where they learn and work on an additional or alternative curriculum. They are told over and over that they are not different from other students, just unique- separate, but equal. Myself, I'd just tell these students the truth- 'hey, you're farther along and advancing more rapidly, so let's put you in a different class or give you additional projects and challenge you.' But the liberals who run the education system instead say to these students 'we're all equal, but we're going to put you in a special class to mold your unique skills.'

And the scary part is what they are trying to mold the best and brightest into. Apparently what this school is trying to mod its most gifted and talented students into is government planners, communists, bureaucrats, and solid liberal Democrats. They do this molding in several ways.

These gifted and talented students have to create and run United Nations type projects. That is, the United Nations projects that are funded with other people's money, unaccountable, full of corruption, and tend to make the situation they are supposed to 'fix' worse. Students work on projects that have to deal with environmentalism (how to force businesses through government power to do certain things, or propose laws to do this, etc.), global appeasement policies (peace on earth, how to stop the war, stop the war in Iraq, how to make friends with France, etc.), tax and spend schemes (pretend money comes from air and isn't stolen from hard working people's pockets, and think up ways to spend it, etc.), wealth-redistribution schemes (collect for charities, can drives, etc.), and focus on human rights abuses (especially caused by the US).

The gifted and talented programs that some government-run school districts are setting up for their impressionable youth steer clear and never mention anything related to individualism, morality, or personal rights. In fact, not a single project touched on those issues. The goal apparently with these programs is to emphasis themes of government control and elitism, but steer clear of morality, individual rights, and individual responsibility.

The students get the time to put together these projects by being pulled out of classes that are deemed 'unimportant' by the liberal elites who run the school- they are pulled out of business or economics classes, they are pulled out of shop, home economics, or auto mechanics classes, and they are pulled out of gym and physical education classes. According to the liberals who run the school, these are 'dumb' classes for the 'dumber students', and the gifted and talented students should instead be learning how to rule us, make decisions for us, and control our behaviors.

Where gifted and talented students could take on more real life examples and challenges, and begin to train to be our future business leaders, and improve their discipline and teamwork skills, and be part of the tradition that made our nation great once- skilled mechanics, dedicated farmers, good shop keepers, smart accountants, and hard-working factory workers- these students instead spend vastly more time talking and learning about government intervention in business and society in the belief that if our country had more lawyers, bureaucrats, and communist leftist pinko's, it would be a better country.

It is a scary thought- in schools all around the nation, our future leaders- our most gifted and talented- are being put into government re-education programs designed to make students into liberal Democrats. Scary indeed.

And the Award Goes To: Bill Myers, Staff Writer for the Washington Examiner

The good thing about having a record is being able to run on it, and I have a track record of posts on my blog that make Obama pretty jealous. In November of 2008 I pointed to an interview that Obama gave where he said that as part of his 'green energy' policies he intended to use the power of the federal government to bankrupt all coal producers in the United States. As I quite accurately wrote:

Obama is telling anyone that uses any energy at all that he intends to drive up the price of it. Combine this with his anti-drilling stances for oil, and get used to an economy that is starved for energy- high inflation, low growth, unemployment, and bad times.

This recession is not 'Bush's fault'- it is the result of government policies that Obama put in place that have led to a rise in prices for energy, and when it becomes more expensive to produce energy, the result is as predicted. As I wrote in Democrats Energy Policies Continue their Assault on Wealth and Jobs:

Our economy is struggling for a reason- Democrats and their policies are crushing human liberty and freedom, attacking wealth and wealth creation, freezing in social and economic structures, limiting mobility and change, and disincentivizing economic growth. Their policies are quite clear- these energy policies are a great example of how Democrats are increasing 'safety' or 'environmental' regulations that will drive US companies under, kill jobs, and drive business to other nations which have lower standards (thereby causing more harm to people or the environment), resulting in a net loss for society and America. Similar policies are found in healthcare, defense, education, etc.

This is not just fun and games people- these are real policies being put in place by real people that are having real job-killing and wealth-destroying effects. Democrats might want to run next election by churning out negative attacks and finding the one bad thing that their opponent did in the past, but that's just a side-show to distract you from the real results of their policies.

And the energy policies of the Democrats in the House, Senate, and Presidency are bad policies. They are not resulting in any sort of 'safer' environment. The man-made caused global warming that was going to destroy the world in the near future has been proven to be an utter myth promoted by corrupt scientists and 'green energy' producers who both live on kick-backs from the government. And it appears that under Obama and the Democrats administration, oil spills and mining disasters are getting more common and having worse effects. This isn't a shock- being safe is more about kicking back money to the right people now and much less about everyone following the law. And there attempts to kill coal production and mining in the United States just means that an unsupervised and unregulated communist China will produce and mine for more coal, doing far more damage to the environment than if it was done in the United States.

And the negatives of the energy policies of the Democrats in the House, Senate, and Presidency are becoming more obvious. The latest example of their bad policies is the latest rules that the EPA has put out on 'pollution' and energy production. These rules are draconian in nature and by design are supposed to be as unfriendly to energy and business as possible- the exact opposite of flexible and smart policies that allow businesses to thrive in a creative and business-friendly environment.

These new EPA rules are designed to choke job creation, especially in rural areas and states that produce coal, but these states don't vote Democrat and don't give the Democrats lots of wealth, so they think it is okay to hammer those states and punish them for their sense of liberty and freedom and equality.

These new EPA policies are also designed to ensure that consumers are stricken with higher utility bills. Oh, your Al Gores and John Kerry's and John Edwards and Barack Obama's will be able to pay those higher utility bills, but the middle class will be hard hit by these policies and driven into poverty and become a serf to the government system.

Coal plants will soon be forced to install new scrubber equipment that provides marginal improvement in air quality at tremendous expense. Producers of this new scrubber equipment will benefit and thousands of unionized bureaucrats who will be hired to ensure that these new standards are met will benefit, but the quality of air will see little improvement and the costs associated with installing and running these new energy-eating scrubbers will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher costs, or the company will absorb the costs by delaying investments in improvements in technology or safety, or the company will be forced to become more efficient by laying off many workers and employing more automation (they'll also save money by laying off workers because they won't have to pay the ever increasing costs of employing people that Obama and the Democrats are piling on). Or the company will go out of business.

The Washington Post reports that electric bills will jump 12 percent nationally by 2016 to comply with these new policies that the Democrats are putting in place, with residents in areas such as Kentucky and Tennessee seeing a 24 percent increase in their utility bills. These policies are project to eliminate 1.4 million jobs, and those people will no longer be paying taxes any more and will now be sucking down government benefits, all thanks to these policies pushed by Democratic bureaucrats employed by a Democratic President supervised by Democrats in the House and the Senate and supported by Democratic unions and a Democratic media. They are responsible for these bad policies- these aren't Republican or conservative or Bush or tea-party policies that are killing jobs and destroying the middle-class- they are Democratic policies.

When a party pushes for policies that achieve little good at the cost of a great number of negatives, it doesn't matter how much spinning they do and it really doesn't matter how good or bad the individual candidates are who they are running against- that party needs to be thrown out of power until they learn just how much damage their policies do to the life, liberty, and property of the great people of the United States of America.

One of my brothers recently was invited by the Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education to come and discuss the long range vision of education policy in the state of Michigan. This special task force composed of Republicans has been touring the state looking for both successes and failures in Michigan's education system. It was on the west side of the state and after talking to my brother about how it went, I have the following comments to pass on to you.

What the task force does is get input from parent teacher associations, student council members, administrator, teachers, board members, and students, from public schools, special education, alternative education, charter and private schools. The end goal is to develop ideas on how to improve the quality of the education system here in Michigan.

The result of these task force meetings is predictable and an indication of everything that is wrong with education in our state. Three hours of discussion produced all the wrong policy suggestions for education, suggestions politicians should not consider. The following account is a way for you to see how policy is created in our state and helpful in developing your own opinions about the future of education.

The first step in the discussion was to answer the question "What is the purpose of education?" Do that right now in your head- think about what you want the education system in our state to look like and do. Is it prepare students for college? Prepare them for future jobs? Mold good citizens? Give all students a broad base of knowledge? Or did you, like most people at this forum, say "everything!" The mission of education needs to be focused, clear, and consistent, and it can not be everything to everybody all at the same time. There is only enough time in the day, only enough resources to spend, and our state needs to think long and hard about what they want the goal of education to be.

In my opinion, our school system should move to a two-tier system- K-8 the goal is to provide a broad range of knowledge for all students, and 9-12 students will either go into a college-prep track or a job-preparation track. That's just my opinion though.

The next question the group that came to this task force meeting was asked is "what are we doing well right now in education?" Think about this question. Education is doing a lot of things well- babysitting students 8 hours a day, running great sports programs, educating a lot of top students, running a good special needs program, helping students learn how to think, giving students opportunities, offering many innovative learning styles, and nationally our K-5 program is the best in the world.

The next question the task force had us think about was "what do you want the education system to look like 10 years from now". I think the overall consensus of the task force was that we want education to do more to teach students critical thinking skills, to learn how to be innovative and creative, to teach entrepreneurship and job creation, and to have students focus more on the career paths that they are headed into after school rather than just focus on school.

The last step is the most important step, and the step that resulted in disaster for this task force and that produced information the Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education should utterly disregard. The question that was posed to us was "how do we build on what we are doing well to make our education system look like we want it to look 10 years from now?"

Here is the information the task force received, and it is a good lesson on why sometimes special interest groups should not be the ones designing the policies in our nation. The task force was told to drop all standardized testing and to just hand the money to districts with no more accountability. The task force was told that one way to increase the education levels in our state was to give more funding to teachers, have them work shorter hours, and give them more training. The task force was told that students should teach classes, as if they were subject matter and teaching experts. The task force produced a lot of garbage ideas, and in every hearing they conducted they pretty much got the same garbage.

This is why the state should not be trusted with running any sort of service industry. The failures in education are the failures of government planning and funding. The failures of education result from this idea that bureaucrats working in distant locations can issue rules and decrees and that will somehow make things better. And the failures of education and this process demonstrate that a system that ignores values and character will produce a valueless result.

The way to fix education is to increase choice, increase personal responsibility, increase local control, and increase the focus on value and character education. Students need to take classes that emphasise creativity and entrepreneurship and they need to buy into the system by making them realize just how much it is costing them to go to school (or at least their parents need to realize what the cost is for education and then demand the results to justify the cost). Standardized testing needs to be increased, but the information that comes from these tests needs to be disseminated throughout the system and analyzed and studied by everyone- teachers, students, and administrators.

Education needs to run more like a business, with the service provided being learning and the learning delivered by skilled professionals. It can not run like a government agency, answering to dozens of constituents and staffed by bureaucrats.

Please take a moment to look up your state Representative and pass on your thoughts to them about education and the types of policies that you would like to see put in place in this state. If you don't speak up, they will have only heard from others, and those others are pushing groups like that Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education to put in place policies that will only erode the educational quality of our great state.

UPDATE: Here is a story about the event... notice the utter lack of anything productive or useful mentioned in this article.

Today let's learn about our Science Czar, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren.

As the United States of America continues its descent under President Obama and his New Democrat Party into a third-world dictatorship, I still find myself unfamiliar with the overlords who now control my behavior and distribute to me gifts and favors. Oh, I know who is elected into office, and being a teacher of this sort of stuff I understand the bureaucracy and how it works. But who the heck is John Holdren, what role does he play in our political system, how did he get that role, and what sort of a person is he to be controlling me?

It's tough to keep all these czars straight, you know, since under Obamathe number of unelected, unconfirmed offices who go by the old imperial Russian title of Czar has gone up quite a bit (although to be fair, the number of people who have been considered czars under Obama is still just under the number of people who were considered czars under Bush, a two-term President roundly criticized by both the right and left as being undemocratic and statist). Still, I'm determined to get to know all of them- from Kenneth Feinberg, Head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront and Pay Czar who although being a long-time Democratic operative and chief of staff for Democratic Senator Kennedy was put in charge of determining how much CEO's should be paid in once-free America, to Gary Samore, former US Communist party member and current WMD Policy Czar, to Ed Montgomery, auto-worker czar and distributor of gifts and favors.

It's going to be important for all of us to become more familiar with how things work in America now- after the change- we'll need to know how to curry favor with royal envoys, how to avoid being intimidated and bullied by bowing low and saying the right things, and how to bow get gifts from to our new overlords, who now tour around the land giving gifts to favored people.

So today let's get to know a little bit better our Science Czar, John Holdren. From Who Runs Gov:

Holdren is a powerhouse in the world of science and public policy. As director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST), he is the top adviser to President Barack Obama on science and technology, issues that are increasingly relevant to homeland security, energy and the environment. Holdren casts all of the above as priorities.

He also leads interagency efforts to develop and implement sound science and technology policies and budgets, and works with the private sector, state and local governments, the science and higher education communities, and other nations to advance his policy initiatives.

Although a lot of conservatives may focus on other aspects of John Holdren- for example, in a book he published in 1977, he wrote about and appeared to be supportive of forced abortions, mass sterilization, a "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens, populations that would be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food, and other similarly frightening ideas. This research is important and should be realized, but I want to focus instead on another aspect of Holdren- his belief in a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite that will forcibly transfer wealth for some reason or another.

Holdren is a believer in the so-called Unified Theory of Left-Wing Causes. This theory is that all left wing causes- including global warming, global cooling, overpopulation, endangered species, poverty, diversity, and many others- can all be solved by a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite that will force others to live their lives differently and will redistribute their property as they see fit.

Basically, Holdren is a run-of-the-mill tyranny supporter, and was appointed to his position by tyrant-in-chief President Barack Obama, and he is to be opposed by all freedom and liberty loving patriots out there.

The worst part about Holdren, aside from the fact that he seizes on the left wing cause of the day to push his tyrannical beliefs, is that his ideas and theories about everything are wrong. From Forbes:

....In keeping with his dogmatic limits-to-growth convictions, Holdren joined his frequent co-author, eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich, in a famous bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon. In 1980, Holdren, Ehrlich and Stanford colleague John Harte picked a basket of five commodities--chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten--that they were sure were going to rise in price as they became increasingly scarce. They drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Holdren, Ehrlich and Harte the same quantities of five metals that could be purchased for $1,000 10 years later at 1980 prices.

If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. Simply put, the combined real prices of the metals selected by Holdren and his colleagues fell by more than 50% during the 1980s, confirming cornucopian claims that the supply of resources over time becomes more abundant, not scarcer.....

...Holdren introduced in 1971--with his colleague and perennial population-alarmist, Ehrlich--the concept of the I=PAT identity. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world.

History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology actually promote environmental flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams cleaner and the forests more expansive....

...Holdren doesn't appear to have an adequate understanding of the economic process through which these technological advances are achieved. He seems to think new technologies arise full-blown from government agencies and university laboratories....

This is the general flaw to the Unified Theory of Left-Wing Causes- that bureaucrats like Holdren know what they are doing and if they are given more power over others- power that those free people once exercised- and are given more resources- resources taken from the labor of once-free people- that these bureaucrats will make the world a better place for us all to live- a more prosperous, free, and happy place. It turns out though that he is wrong in almost all of his theories- from bets he placed to equations he invented to his general understanding of economics. He is a failed person- perhaps no more failed than the rest of us, but yet given more power and authority and wealth over the rest of us by a government not in any way empowered to do so.

People are not completely 'benelevent', and neither are the governments they create, and there are no 'enlightened' people in charge of our government today, either Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative. Whatever the cause that you believe in or support, the answer is never the Unified Theory of Left-Wing Causes, and yet the Obama administration has appointed as Science Czar one of the greatest believers in this theory- a guy who is supposed to be a scientist actually at his heart a firm believer in a theory that is demonstratively wrong.

John Holdren is yet another example of a failed administration based on failed theories and ideas putting in placed failed administrators who implement failed policies- and we can see the results of this failure in America today.

Sickness is everywhere. In my house. In our schools.

Sitting here at 6:42 am in the morning, I am in my comfy chair for a brief moment at the start of my day about to head a school after another night with a sick child. The worst has past and she should sleep comfortably through the day with her bottle of Gatorade nearby. I know because she is the fourth of the five of us to have this same virus. (I'm the only one left standing but as the nurse, I have to admit I'm completely worn out.)

Last Wednesday afternoon my iphone got sick. It would not update to iOS5. I was getting Error 3200 (like many other hundreds of thousands of people, it seems.) I got on Twitter and eventually got onto some reputable blogs to determine that this error that no one had ever seen before was due to lack of capacity on Apple's servers.

Last Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) customers around the world, primarily non US, could not use their messenger service. This was due, we now know, to a major switch failure where the backup switch did not take over.

Measuring and Placing Blame for Failure
As I was facing my own 3200 error on Wednesday, it struck me that in the US, we have a whole different standard of measurement for businesses versus schools.

When we judged Apple for the 3200 error, everyone knew it was a systemic problem and that somewhere there was a technical reason for the error. We also knew that if Apple was an effective company that they would move heaven and earth to take steps quickly because their core mission was at stake. They would spend what they had to, do what they had to, because an inability to scale up in this way would harm their long term growth. They are positioning themselves for the next ten years, not the last.

When we judged BBM for their error, they took quite a bit longer to fix it, but we still knew there was a systemic error somewhere. Many do think that their inability to find the problem more quickly points at bigger problems within the company.

But in neither of these cases did you hear:

• All of the engineers at Apple are sorry wastes of human flesh who are just drawing a paycheck.
• BBM engineers should all be fired for this.
• All technology companies have bad, sorry, engineers and programmers.

If someone said this, a whole industry would be up at arms. And yet, for example in Rhode Island last year, a school literally fired every teacher.

When business fails we blame the system. When education fails we blame the people.

The other struggle is that you can see an Apple or a BMM outage immediately but often it takes a decade to see a failure at a certain grade level. We should be able to "deconstruct" what is happening with the failed classes that are coming out. We have plenty of students and parents (and teachers) to interview. Where did they lose interest? What happened? When did the situation turn for the negative with this class of students? Are we deconstructing today's failure and analyzing what we did 10-13 years a go to cause it? Ships like educational institutions don't turn on a dime.

Find the problem and fix it.
Neither can we say "one thing" has gotten us here. That one thing isn't just teachers that one thing isn't just administrators. Never to shift blame, we must examine ourselves closely for any failure in the system, but let's look at some other things too.


There are a few questions I think we should ask ourselves in every schools. (In my few brief moments I have left in this chair before I go help my fourth grader review his wordly wise words (again) for his big test today.)

• Discipline. One student can disrupt learning for a whole class. Are we so eager to give another chance that we've made teachers impotent? Are the corrective measures we're using actually correcting anything? Does one student have the right to disrupt learning for everyone else? Can't we use video and document what is happening and stop having one persons word against another?
  
  
• Classroom environment. Each classroom should be a place where learning can happen. Are their noise interruptions or basic flaws that are preventing learning from happening? When these happen, are the systems in place to promptly fix the problems? (Leaks, loud/broken Air conditioners, etc.) Do administrators and others respect class time and rarely interrupt on the intercom or impromptu assemblies?
  
  
• Class size. There is definitely a point where it becomes significantly harder to teach a class. My largest class was 26. We had to be in desks because I only have 21 computers (not counting mine at my desk.) One time I had 22 students and had to let a student use the computer at my desk. I have to say that the 26 and the 22 situations were very tough to manage for me. It took everything I had and I know for a fact that I couldn't cover as much as I did when I had 18 or 12. For me, the point where it becomes a bit more challenging is somewhere around 19 or 20. I don't know why it gets tough at that point but I have a computer lab and it is. I have friends with 30 and even more in a class. I've heard of 40. In South Africa, I saw a teacher who had 150 students. She said, "I couldn't help everyone but I helped the ones I could."
• IT Purchasing policies. Why do we buy what we buy? There is no doubt, corruption in the system. Right now in Alabama, their 2009 move to a glitchy  state-wide SIS system without going to bid has raised eyebrows and my inside sources say that it is sparking an investigation. (The Mobile School Board demanded it this summer.) IT is not an afterthought it is as important as the plans for the new school building. We need people who understand the specific needs of education making decisions and the position of IT directors escalated to a level where less temptation for corruption is there. Many IT decisions should really be curricular decisions anyway. We still treat it like a black box in most schools.
  
  
• How we look at research. We talk about research based best practices and in some ways it has become the Achilles heel of education. All a company has to do is go out and fund research proving their product improves learning and we'll buy it and cite the research. Are we blind? Are we so eager to believe there is a quick fix that we'll swallow such nonsense? When I dated guys, I knew not to believe half of what they said about themselves on the first date because they were trying to make themselves look good. Salesmen are trying to SELL. If we're sick we get a second opinion. Take a look at the What Works Clearinghouse but know also that sometimes we should test new things and innovate as well. Can we "BETA" test before we go full scale? WE should.
• Do we listen to contrarian voices? Stephen Downes and Gary Stager, God bless 'em, they are often contrarian voices. I read them for that reason. While I don't always agree with how they disagree with  people sometimes (everyone deserves respect) I do think that we need to listen to all sides of issues and topics. If you only listen to people just like you when people just like you are wrong, you'll be wrong too. Balanced voices make for good decisionmaking. Contrarians are sometimes right and the general viewpoints are sometimes wrong. Get the facts, listen to both sides and make up your mind.
  
• Do we educate parents on their role? One thing that could improve learning by next week for every school would be if parents made sure their children got 8-9 hours of sleep a night. That one thing. Read Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and other research and you'll find that student learning is negatively impacted by lack of sleep.(One study equated the IQ drop of 1 hour less of sleep to that of lead poisoning.) Yet, parents persist on letting their kids sleep with their constantly buzzing cell phone on their pillow denying them the ability to get a good night's sleep. If we know that a child drops two grade levels in their ability to perform in class after losing an hour of sleep, then do we have systemic problems with our education system because of a nationwide inability to put our children to bed at a decent hour and take cell phones out of their hands?
  
  Don't stop there. How about having a place to do homework? Making sure they have their assignments written down and are bringing homework home. If the kid has "no homework" then are they studying anyway. Studying for a test is homework too. To think you can have a good school system without parental involvement is like thinking you can be a healthy athlete without drinking anything. Parents are a higher indicator of success than teachers.
  
• Are teachers free to teach? (I wrote about this in a Washington Post oped this summer.) Who is the customer? How much time are teachers spending filling out paperwork for administrators?
  
  What is a better measure of a good teacher: good paperwork and detailed lesson plans or what is happening in the classroom with the students? What makes a good bureaucrat doesn't make a good teacher and yet we have a system that consistently rewards teachers who are good paper pushers and hurts teachers who aren't. The customer is our students after they've graduated from high school. Will they thank us for what we taught them?
  
  I had a time during my teaching career where I had to do detailed lesson plans and honestly, sometimes I realized that I had finished my plans but wasn't ready to teach. I hadn't made the copies and done the work to really teach. Flat Classroom was invented the year that my interim headmaster (now my curriculum director) said - stop filling out lesson plans and start teaching - keep a general overview of what you cover in your lesson plan book but I'll be in your classroom 3-4 times a week. Then, I really started teaching. I was a good teacher but focusing on teaching and my students is what made me a great teacher and that was when this blog was born too.
  
• Do we look at what is happening in the classroom? Are administrators in your classroom more than once a week? Do they know what is happening there? A poor teacher becomes a bad teacher without supervision. A great teacher loves showing off and feels valued when their administrator comes by. All teachers appreciate this because we have the chance to point out obstacles that administrators can fix. (i.e. that loud A/c unit.) Why do we make teachers fill out paperwork about what they are doing with students, couldn't we have a recorder of some time document what they are ACTUALLY doing? Paperwork is antiquated and unnecessary in a world of digital recorders. Is anyone looking at it anyway?
  
• Stop looking for quick fixes. Quick fixes don't fix education. If you have a massive failure, you have massive problems. A quick fix is what you do when your child scratches their knee and needs a band aid. Major surgery happens after a horrible car crash. This car has run into the 21st century head on and most in education weren't ready. Certainly, we have some work to do. As I said in Alabama last week - maybe it is time to kill some sacred cows if we can't afford to feed them any more.

My Management professor, Dr. Phil Adler, always said that

"Accountability without Authority is a recipe for disaster" 

and that is what we have in education right now.

We have a lot of accountability on the heads of teachers and administrators.

• But do we give them authority? 
• Can they change a curriculum that is not working? 
• Can they fix things that are broken? 
• Can they handle discipline and be backed up? 
• Can they appeal to have the schedule changed or class sizes altered? 
• Can they  get rid of a computer system that is causing problems for everyone? 
• Can an administrator who identifies a personnel issue actually have the authority to fire the person who deserves it? 
• Can an administrator who is constantly causing classroom problems be reported in a way to reduce the problems or let other administrators know that this person is harming the learning environment.

We've made educators into bureaucrats by this massive move to centralize the education system in America. Bureaucrats are infamously horrible at moving quickly to fix things. BBM and Apple would still be trying to get things fixed today if they had to push paper like many of my public school friends have to do.

I'm quite tired of business people criticizing educators for not running education like "a business." The last 30 years of lawsuits and centralization of education has turned many schools into behemoths where it is very hard to get anything done, even if you are in charge. I can say this because I've worked with public schools for the last 15 years and have many close friends who are administrators.

Let's hold people in education accountable but first, let's give them the authority to do something about the myriad of problems they face.

When you have a system wide problem with low test scores you have systemic problems.

No one can tell me that every teacher in a certain town is a sorry teacher or that every principal is a bad principle. The logic just doesn't add up. We have great teachers and great principals losing their jobs today.

Why Destroy and Start Over Doesn't Make Sense
And to those who say, just destroy it and start over. That would be like me saying that I'm going to solve this stomach virus in my house by killing my children and adopting new ones. Eventually my new children WILL get sick too. Besides, it would be a horrible waste of human life and all of my love for them knows that is a horrific thing to even suggest.

And yet, people ever day call to destroy all the schools and start over. It may solve your problem temporarily but if we keep moving "best practices" that aren't best practices at all to new places then we have problems. My private school friends who say they are having problems say they start when the public school testing environment moves into their walls. It kills learning.

If the chicken is always on the scale being weighed, she's never in the barnyard eating grain.

If we've learned anything in the last ten years is that much of what we've put in place in the last ten years should be called to question. When you have teachers who have thrived for 20-30 years getting out because of the system, its the system.

Let's open our eyes and look at 3200 error in education for what it is: systemic problems that require a fix. Stop blaming ALL the people and start getting practical here. We have a mission and the future of a nation is at stake.

Jennifer Brea writes:

Many of Africa's best and brightest become bureaucrats or NGO workers when they should be scientists or entrepreneurs...We let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa