Destroying Political Class Myths, Part 1: No Child Left Behind, Voter ID Laws,and Global Warming

We are going to have a little fun the next few days exploring the many myths that the politicians of this country would like us to believe. You see, if we believe the myths that they create than we are more likely to vote for them to resolve the unreal issues and problems associated with these myths. 

But what if what they tell is not the true reality? What if we are getting all worked up and headed in the wrong direction for a mythical problem that does not exist or for a mythical solution that resolves nothing? All it does is send us chasing our tails while the same inept politicians get reelected over and over based on nothing more than their own greed, their rigging of the election processes, and the myths that they feed us and control us with.

So starting today we are going to look behind the myth curtail and reveal what is the true reality. With that truth we may finally start resolving some of the major issues of our times. Lord knows the political class has failed miserably over the past fifty years in eradicating poverty, winning the lost war on drugs, fixing our failing public schools, securing our borders, etc. 

Maybe it is because we have allowed them to work on myths that they created and not the true problems of our age. Keep in mind the following wise words of Groucho Marx over the next few posts: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Sounds like myth building to me.

1) One of the biggest national initiatives under the Bush administration was the move to try and improve education in this country. He tried to do so under the banner of “No Child Left Behind. (NCLB). 

According to a late 2013 Education Action Group article by Ben Velderman, 89% of Congressional members voted for NCLB, which became law in 2002. Politicians supported the NCLB legislation because “it represented the first major effort by the federal government to impose academic accountability, through annual standardized testing, on public schools that received federal assistance.”

But liberals and Democrats pounded it for what they positioned as ineffective and an expensive failure. That became the storyline and assumed truth of this program that spend tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth.

But was total NCLB failure the reality or the political class myth?

According to Mr. Velderman’s article:

• Paul Peterson, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance completed an in-depth analysis of NCLB in 2013 and wrote a very credible defense of the legislation based on real data, more than a decade after the law became a reality.
• He goes as far to seriously call it one of the Bush administration’s “crowning achievements.”
• Using 2012 math and reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Peterson found that NCLB helped African-American and Hispanic students make “remarkable gains” in learning.
• Additionally, it actually helped close the achievement gap between white and minority students” “For the first nine years, the average gains (in reading and math scores) were six points annually for African-Americans, five points for Hispanics and three points for whites. Over that stretch, the test-score gap closed by two to three points each year, on average. While minority students did not attain the proficiency NCLB expected, the record shows steady positive momentum.”
• Unfortunately, according to the Peterson, those gains came “to a virtual halt” after the Obama administration decided to stop enforcing most of NCLB’s primary provisions and offered waivers to states that signed up for more lenient rules implemented by the Obama administration.
• According to Peterson, minority students benefited under NCLB largely because the law forced schools to produce learning results or face a series of penalties.
• In other words, the law held people accountable for results, a novel idea when it comes to government programs and employees.
• This notion of accountability was another key to NCLB’s success, according to Peterson, since it required that students’ test scores be made public. Letting parents and taxpayers know how much (or little) their students were learning in school put pressure on administrators and teachers to step fix their broken educational processes. But that transparency has been lost under the Obama administration, an administration that was supposed to be the “most transparent ever.”

So, what was supposed to be the worst bill ever passed turns out to be not so bad, according to an education expert from a university that will never be mistaken for a right leaning, conservative, Republican institution. The sad thing is that the Democrats and Obama, in this case of myth building, destroyed something that was working to some degree and replaced it with nothing that is working to no degree.

But somehow they got the myth established and minority kids, the people they brag they support, are the losers.

2) The Obama administration, via Eric Holder and his renegade Justice Department, have been going around the country and pressuring state government’s to abandon or severely water down their voter id requirements for elections. The mythical reason for the crackdown was to avoid the Jim Crow restrictive voting rules and laws of the past, laws that restricted the voting ability of African Americans. Holder’s public reasoning was that tight voter id laws restrict minorities’ abilities to vote.

The real reason, in many peoples’ minds, was to loosen voting rules so much that voter fraud could be practiced on a wide spread basis. What is reality and what is a myth of Holder’s intentions does not matter in this case. Late last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of its investigation into how Georgia’s strict voter identification had affected the voting behavior of different demographic groups. The tight voter id laws had been in effect for about five years. 

Their findings kill the Holder myth that tight voter id laws suppress minority voting volumes:

• While it is a reality that the tighter Georgia state voter id laws failed to catch a single documented case of voter fraud, it did not suppress minority voting in the state either.
• The paper’s analysis found that during the five years of tighter voter id rules, minorities are actually turning out to vote at a higher rate than the rate that their population of their demographic is growing: “Turnout among black and Hispanic voters increased from 2006 to 2010, dramatically outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period,” according to reporter Shannon McCaffrey.
• Elections data reviewed by the paper’s research proved that black voters election participation actually rose by a whopping 44% from 2006, before the law was implemented, to 2010. 
• The increase for the Hispanic population during the same period was even more impressive, 67%. 
• As a benchmark, voting turnout among whites rose only 12%.

Thus, according to real life data, the Obama administration was perpetrating myth, at least in the state of Georgia, when they claimed that voter ID laws were discriminatory and detrimental to minority voting. Minority voting rates increased during the five years after the tighter restrictions took hold: “If you look at the numbers, they clearly show that critics of this law were wrong,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former legal counsel to the Justice Department’s civil rights division who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the newspaper. “Their argument has always been it would depress turnout, but it didn’t happen — quite the opposite.”

Political myth destroyed by real life results. And really, given how easy the state of Georgia made it to get a valid id to vote besides making getting the id for free, shouldn’t the price of citizenship include at least a little effort on the part of citizens to get an id to exercise their right AND privilege to vote?

3) One more myth destruction for today. For well over as decade, we have been bombarded with politicians telling us that we had to give up a lot of our wealth and a lot of our freedom because of global warming. Passively implied in this campaign, or this myth, was the reality that we were giving up these precious things, our wealth and freedom, to politicians which would increase their control over our lives.

But what has happened to global warming over the past 17 years or so? In reality, the myth died on the vine since global warming stopped a long time ago despite the dire warnings and forecast models of the political class’s climate scientists:









That is why the myth had to be adjusted in mid stream by the political class. After almost 18 years of no warming and the failure of almost every climate forecast model to take this into account, we now have a rebranded new myth called “climate change.” But like most myths, how can we believe this new political class myth when the old myth they so passionately and vehemently defended for decades turned out to be false?

So what is the lesson learned today? The political class stays in power and office by manufacturing myths to excite their base and show how important they are. In reality, the myths are not important because they never resolve real issues but we end up paying with our wealth and freedom for very little in return.

I once worked for a boss whose favority saying was: “There is nothing more devasting to an opinion [or in our case, a myth]than the right number.” The No Child Left Behind failure myth was destroyed by the number analysis done by a Harvard professor. The voting id laws prevent minorities from voting myth was destroyed by a newspaper research effort of real life data and numbers. The global warming myth is destroyed by simply looking at a single graph's numbers. Boy, who thought destroying political class myths could be so much fun? More fun at least through tomorrow.

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Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w