Some Thoughts On Fixing Public Education

Yesterday, we talked about two major issues facing the country that the American political class has been totally unable to resolve. In the late 1960s, President Richard Nixon declared "War On Drugs" to combat the illegal use of drugs in the country at that time. As we discussed yesterday, that war is currently not going well as the examples we reviewed starkly illustrate. In 1986, the U.S. Congress ordered the National Guard to secure our border with Mexico within 45 days. That deadline has not been met, twenty four years later.

Today we will talk about public education in the United States and the failure of the American political class to resolve that problem also. But first, consider the following facts:

• As documented in Step 27 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," in 2006 the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) released its periodic study of education performance from around the world. The 2006 study covered 57 countries and reported on how well students were being educated in science and math. The United States finished twenty third in science and thirty second in mathematics, scoring below the international average in both categories.
• In 1983, President Ronald Reagan's Commission On Excellence In Education released its landmark report, "A Nation At Risk" that concluded public education in America was not adequately preparing American students to compete in the world. The Commission and its report laid out a series of specific steps and recommendations that should have been implemented to fix the problem. In 2008, the Strong Americans Schools organization concluded that"stunningly few of the Commission's recommendations have been enacted."
• The Yankee Group recently estimated that within three years, 54% of kids aged 8 - 12 years old will have their own cell phone.
• C&R Research recently reported that 22% of kids aged 6-9 already have their own cell phone, 60% of kids aged 10-14 have their own cell phone, and 84% of kids aged 15-18 have their own cell phone.
• Although I could not find any hard numbers, how many kids do you know who do NOT have at least one presence on a social networking page (e.g. Facebook)
• An article by Katherine Mangu-Ward in the August, 2010 issue of Reason magazine reported that 1) per student spending on education has more than doubled (in real dollars) over the past 30 years with no academic improvement to show for it), 2) today, kids spend about 7.5 hours a day in front of some type of screen, and 3) according to Ms. Mangu-Ward, the "price of a decent laptop and the price of a single hardback biology textbook will soon converge. Books full of nonhyperlinked text already must seem like a cruel joke to the congenitally connected."

How are all of these points related? Namely they expose a number of problems of why kids are not getting educated properly in the country today. First, the political class has not taken the necessary steps to fix the problem even though they were handed a blueprint on how to do it almost three decades ago. It is one thing to not know how to fix a problem, it is entirely unacceptable not to fix a problem when somebody shows you how to fix it. It is even worse when you double the amount of money that is spent on the problem without getting it fixed.

Second, kids today are much different from kids long ago but the education process has not changed to account for the difference. Today, kids march into a class, 20 to 30 at a time, sit at desks, and listen (or not listen) to a teacher lecturing. Gee, sounds like it was the same for me during my education experience forty some years ago. Kids today are tuned into amazing technology, technology that is not being fully deployed in the education process. If kids are in front of screens 7.5 hours a day, why not use that screen exposure to help educate them?

That is the basic theory of Ms. Mangu-Ward's article. While I will not go into the details of this great article, suffice it to say that she makes a great case of leveraging technology and blowing away the ancient and out of touch process currently used to educate our kids. On a positive note, she reviews how many thousands of kids are already getting at least some of their education through cutting edge technology. By dealing with the education process through technology, smart kids are freed from waiting for slower kids to catch up in the classroom and can learn even more. Slower kids are not ashamed to ask questions and ask for help, something they may not do in a traditional classroom, lest they be thought of as less smart than the other kids. Ms. Mangu-Ward does a thorough job of reviewing the past experiences and positive potential of marrying education and technology in our modern world, breaking free from an ancient education model that is not working, as evidenced by the points listed above.

She also points out the major obstacle facing this movement: teachers' unions. Teacher unions have usually been strong opponents of this approach since they perceive it may result in fewer teachers being needed. They are still stuck in the old education model, regimented classes with minimal technology learning, an approach that we know usually does not work in today's world. The unions also like to insist that schools helps develop the social skills of kids. However, the reality is that kids develop social skills in all different types of ways these days, not the least of which is through technology. Cell phones, texting, email, instant messaging, etc. are just as important to kids social development today as sitting in a classroom was for us.

The dangerous aspect of the union opposition is the sway they hold over the political class. The teacher union cartel is big enough to influence elections and who gets elected. As long as that link is in place, it appears it will be difficult to break out of the current, inadequate model into a more technology oriented and effective model. Unfortunately, status quo gets us unprepared students that become unprepared adults in the world wide economy.

I do not pretend to be an expert on education. However, in my reality, the current process of educating our kids is failing them miserably while the technology to do much better is available but not being utilized due to the political class being too close to teachers' unions. That is why Step 27 in "Love my Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. It would update the Reagan administration's approach via a national commission and come up with an updated set of steps needed to fix our schools, especially in light of the wonderful technology we could deploy in this area. Step 39 is also critical in that it would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, hopefully minimizing the impact of the teachers' unions in determining who gets elected and who does NOT improve our public schools. Twenty seven years, much like the time frame relative to our War On Drugs (42 years) and our leaky border (24 years), is much too long to wait for the political class to solve a problem.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

Status Update On The War On Drugs - Still Losing

Keep in mind the acts of stupidity and insanity we have discussed over the past two days as we go through our status update on the war on drugs. Remember, President Nixon in the late 1960s declared war on illegal drugs. Forty two years later that war is still unwon by the political class and is probably in a perpetual losing state:

- An article by Radley Balko in the August issue of Reason magazine, talked about a drug raid gone bad in Missouri. In a nutshell, police were given bad information about drug activities at a residence, raided the house, fired seven shots (even though a 7 year old child was present), shot and killed one pet dog, wounded another pet dog, and ended up finding a tiny amount of marijuana, not enough for more than a misdemeanor possession charge that was later dropped.

The unique thing about this raid is that it was caught on video and has been viewed more than a million times on the Net. This gave many Americans a real life perspective in the war on drugs, where militarized police break into a home, guns afiring, based on shaky intelligence. According to Mr. Balko, this type of raid occurs somewhere between 100 to 150 times a day in America. Without a comprehensive and effective illegal drug strategy, this is the type of America we live in today: police breaking down doors thousands of times a year. Mr. Balko correctly points out that it is not the fault of the police relative to these raids. It is the fault of the political class that cannot come up with a strategy and approach to illegal drugs that would eliminate these government sanctioned home invasions.

- In an Associated Press article from July 4, 2010, it was reported that Ecuadorian police had raided a shipyard in the jungle and came across a 100 foot submarine that was going to be used to smuggle illegal drugs into the world, including the United States. Details of the article and the submarine include:

• The submarine was big enough to have twin propellers
• It was a fully functional submersible ship that could do transoceanic voyages.
• It had a cunning tower, periscope and air conditioning system.
• It would have been able to carry 19 tons of cargo and could support a crew of five or six people.
• It likely cost multi millions of dollars to build.
• It was mostly likely to be used by drug traffickers in Columbia, the source of 90 percent of the cocaine sold in the United States.

Think about the amount of money that is flowing out of this country in the illegal drug trade. Enough money for the foreign drug traffickers to design and build a multi million dollar, modern, fully functional submarine. This is what our country's lack of a cohesive and effective drug strategy has caused to happen. Unsavory characters building such ships because it is a good multi million dollar investment. Two questions were not answered by the article: was this the first and only submarine to be built or is there already a fleet out there operating in the ocean, secretly bringing tons of illegal drugs into the country? Second, imagine the potential to smuggle terrorists into the country. The submarines were probably built with the intention of smuggling drugs into the United States, but I am sure if the price was right, the traffickers would have no problem smuggling humans from terrorist cells into the country. Thus, our lack of a drug strategy could result in a hole in our terrorist protective net.

- In late June, the Associated Press reported that more than a dozen Americans living in New Mexico and Texas have been identified to exist on a murder hit list of a Mexican drug cartel. While this type of behavior has existed in Mexican towns and cities along the border, this was the first indication that the drug cartels would target Americans, on American soil, for assassination on American soil if they got in the way of the illegal drug flow. On Fox News today, a county sheriff officer in Arizona reported that he has been receiving death threats as a result of his vocal support for the Arizona anti-immigration law. According to Fox, law enforcement sources from outside of Arizona have investigated the threats and have found them credible. The source of the death threats is likely from the same type of drug trafficking organization that the Associated Press reported on in New Mexico and Texas: the sheriff was a potential impediment to the flow of illegal drugs coming over the porous Arizona borders.

So forty two years or so after Nixon got the Federal government involved on the war on drugs, domestic law enforcement officers are under siege by Mexican drug lords, our own police are required to break down the doors of Americans homes as a result of no effective national drug policy and strategy, and the runaway illegal drug problem could result in a new way for terrorists to enter the country. There can be no doubt in most rational people's minds that we are losing the war on drugs despite the brave efforts of our police forces and other front line people in the battle.

And what does the political class do in the face of this overwhelming problem? They file a lawsuit to overturn the recently passed Arizona immigration law. They do not improve the safety of local law enforcement officials who are on hit lists. They obviously are losing the smuggling battle, given that the drug traffickers now have the capacity to build a true submarine smuggling operation. They allow American homes to be invaded thousands of times a year. And they offer a token force of less than 2,000 National Guard troops to guard an almost two thousand mile border, or one Guardsman per mile (assuming that the Guardsman works 24 hours a day - if the additional troops each work eight hours shifts, then each troop would guard three miles of border. Not every effective.)

Now remember the types of people in Washington that are supposed to solve these problems:

• One Congressman believes that islands in the ocean can tip over.
• A Congresswoman believes that the higher unemployment rises, the more jobs are created.
• The country's Attorney General files considers filing lawsuits over a state law even though he has not personally read it.

Pretty scary. Runaway drug addiction problems, porous and dangers borders, holes in the terrorism shield, and less than stellar brain power sitting in Congress and elsewhere in Washington. That is why Step 26 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. We need to commission a panel of smart Americans from multiple disciplines to do a thorough, ground up review of the illegal drug situation in this country and come up with a set of alternatives in order to remedy the current untenable situation. The political class has had the ball for forty two years and has not been able to solve the problem. The problem has now morphed into a tri-headed problem of illegal drugs, illegal immigration and terrorism. We cannot afford to wait another forty two years to act. With our luck, in forty two years the same ineffective politicians will still be in Congress.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com
/http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

Political Class Insanity, Stupidity, and Other Loose Ends - Part 2 ,Video Edition

Yesterday we talked about a load of instances and examples of the political class caught in acts of stupidity, insanity and other less-than-flattering situations. Today, I present the video version of more acts of insanity and stupidity. Sometimes it is more impactful to see the actual politicians making a fool of themselves and confirming once again, that we are ruled by people that are either too ignorant, too lazy, or too selfish to be effective in running this government and ensuring our liberty.

1) If I did this right, you should be able to click on the next link and see a YouTube video of Nancy Pelosi explaining some basic economic concepts. The problem is her understanding of basic economics is completely ludicrous; in a nutshell, she explains that the more unemployment you have, the more jobs are created. Therefore, in her world, we should encourage people not to have jobs because that will cause more jobs to be created.

http://wwyoutube.com/watch?v=oE-z38pXUAow.


2) The beauty of Nancy Pelosi is that she a politician that keeps on giving when it comes to blogs like this. In this YouTube video, she explains that unless an economic rescue package is passed quickly, 500 million Americans will continue to lose their jobs every week. Given that there are roughly 200 million American adults, this means that in Pelosi's world every American adult loses a job about two and a half times a week. Sounds reasonable, not!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52WLdiqojOs&feature=related


3) This video should be a Congressman from Georgia that is listening to testimony from a Navy admiral. They are discussing the island of Guam and the Congressman talks about how worried he is that the island might tip over. Yes, you read that right, A U.S. Congressman, one of about 600 people in Washington who control our taxes, our retirement, our health care, our lives honestly believes and is worried that Guam will tip over. Credit to the admiral who did not laugh in his face. If this is the kind of input General McChrystal was getting from the political class relative to Afghanistan, you start to understand why he did that Rolling Stone article.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg


4) This video should be from a debate at the county government level in Wisconsin where a county politician is discussing how Arizona is not a border state with Mexico. Yes, you read that right also. Another indictment of our failing public education system and the ignorance of the political class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsuLmRrfGD8


5) This is a video of Joe Biden doing some election campaigning, also in Wisconsin. In a stop at a frozen custard store, the Vice President is presented with a frozen custard and asks how much he owes. The owner of the store very politely says it is on the house and that if Biden would reduce his taxes he would call it even. Biden that goes off on the guy, calling him a smart ass and asking why the store owner never says anything nice. Totally inappropriate behavior for a so-called leader, berating a citizen for stating his views. And how did the Vice President know that this guy "never says anything nice." Biden had never met the guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzo1gCIty7A&feature=related


6) This is Attorney General Eric Holder testifying before Congress relative to the Arizona immigration law. the Congressman asks Holder if he foresees the Justice department taking any legal action against the law (which they recently did). Holder dances around the issue, at which point the Congressman asks Holder, under oath, if he had actually read the ten page law. Holder admits that he had not read the law. The obvious question: how can the Attorney General, the strongest law enforcement official in the land, decide whether a law is Constitutional if he has not read it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rH1FEcbi4A&feature=related


7) Lest you think all of our public officials are like these above, I did find one person in Washington who seems to be sane. Elizabeth Warren is the Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel which is responsible for monitoring the government bailout of banks and government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This video is her first report of the commission and it is not pretty. She reviews how 480 government agencies fell down on the job when it came to anticipating the financial meltdown of 2008. She denounces the wasteful spending and ineffective ways that bailout money was doled out. She is smart, articulate, and courageous. I say courageous because she is one of the few Washington people I have ever seen that called it like it is and did not try to spin the bad results. She saw BS and she called it BS. It is such a shame that there are not 435 people like her sitting in Congress and more in the administration and not those that think islands can tip over, unemployment causes job creation, is disrespectful to others' opinions, and I bet I she can find Arizona, a border state, on the map. With the exception of Ms. Warren, everyone else nn this video post just proved that Step 39 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is critical: term limits for all and for politicians, a good night after one term in Congress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_yUGNmTkmE

Political Class Insanity, Stupidity And Other Loose Ends

As I have said many times before, the advantage of writing a blog like this is because all branches of the American political class never cease to amaze with their insanity, stupidity, ineffective programs, wasteful spending, and immoral behavior. Today's post is just a quick hitter of different examples of some of the above as we tie up some lose ends and small incidents that would not justify a full post:

• In the area of loose ends, recall yesterday that we reviewed how ineffective Obama's National Commission On Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is likely to be. Within that discussion, we showed how easy it was to reduce Federal spending by about $208 billion a year without hardly trying. One other opportunity to cut $50 billion a year from our defense budget without sacrificing our national security comes from the July issue of Reason magazine. An article by Veronique de Rugy points out that a March report from the General Accountability Office compiled a long list of financial management abuses and shortcomings at the Department of Defense. The report estimated that over $50 billion a year could be saved by that department if we dropped a few non-needed weapons systems and by reforming the Pentagon's supply chain, information technologies, and human resources practices. Thus, while the Commission wants to reduce Federal government spending by $240 billion a year, each year until 2015, we have already given them the first year's objective, the $208 billion we found yesterday and this $50 billion or more that the GAO has found for us.
• In the area of stupidity, the state of Illinois has stood out again. The Illinois state government is facing a significant budget shortfall of billions of dollars, such much so that earlier this year the state stopped paying its bills to those companies that had done work for them. In one example of how bad it got, one company that provided bullets to the state for law enforcement insisted on being paid up front for their bullets, not trusting the credit worthiness of the state. In the midst of all this financial trouble, the Associated Press reported today that the governor has given 35 members of his staff salary raises averaging 11.4%. Budget Director David Vaught got a 20% raise to $144,000 and Deputy Budget Director Gladyse Taylor received a 10.4% raise to $110,000 and the governors' spokeswoman received a 25% raise. These raises come as the governor reduces spending in education and health care services in order to try and close the state's budget shortfall. Needless to say, many inside and out side of government are outraged at the raises in these hard economic times of high unemployment. And it is not as if the ones receiving the raises were at the poverty line, they were already being paid significantly higher than the average household earning level in the country.
• In the area of insanity, our old friend Attorney General Eric Holder pops back on the radar. Your remember Mr. Holder, this is the same gentleman who testified in front of Congress that he might sue Arizona over the illegal immigration law that the state passed, only to admit under oath that he had not even read the law he was going to sue over. By the way, the law is less than twenty pages long, it would not have taken him much time to read it. In recent testimony he gave to Congress, he got into a tiff with Congressman Lamar Smith. Rather than repeat the entire exchange, the abridged version between the two revolved around the fact that Holder absolutely refused to acknowledge that radical Islam could be an underlying cause of current day terrorism, Holder would not even speak the words "radical Islam." Never mind that the Time Square bomber, at at his District Court hearing where he pleaded guilty, stated that he "considered myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier." The Fort Hood shooter, that killed 12 American soldiers, shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the shooting while carrying a home made business which identified himself as SoA - Soldier of Allah. The Christmas Day underwear bomber trained in terrorist camps in Somalia under a radical American Islam cleric. Despite all of these examples, the Obama administration insists on playing word games and not recognizing that radical Islam is the source of almost all of the terrorism in the world, Refusing to acknowledge the source means that you do not understand the underlying root cause, which usually means you do not understand how to combat the problem. Utter insanity.
• More insanity - in order to cover millions of uninsured Americans with health care insurance, whether they want it or not, the Obama administration forced through a horrible piece of legislation through the back door of the Senate that will not solve the problem of rising health care costs in the country. This is becoming clear in any number of ways, the most recent of which was laid out in the August issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. According to the article, insurance costs for those currently covered by existing health plans are likely to see the costs of those plans go up 2-5% incrementally more than they would have if the legislation had not passed. And this is before all of the components of the law even start to take effect. Thus, in order to provide health care for about 40 million Americans, we have substantially raised the cost of health care for 260 million Americans. Insanity.
• More stupidity - The August issue of Reason magazine had an article by Tim Cavanaugh that reviewed the history and status of the California High Speed Rail Authority. According to a recent audit:

1. The authority had paid out at least $4 million for services in which it had not evidence or invoices proving that the work paid had actually been performed.
2. Out of 22 invoices that were reviewed, 20 were paid without any supporting documentation.
3. The Authority spent $46,000 for it's Program Manager's use without any written documentation.
4. The Authority has not done any detailed plans or studies on how many people would actually use the Authority's proposed high speed rail line or how much revenue would likely occur if the line was built.
5. The contractor working on the Los Angeles to Anaheim portion of the high speed line completed 81% of the work but incurred 230% of the budgeted dollars.
6. A state agency reported earlier in 2010 that the Authority build-out plan had no timeline, no specifics and likely violated state law.
7. So far, since 1996, the Authority has spent $250 million and has yet to build even one foot of track.
8. Despite this incompetence, the Obama administration has allocated $2.25 billion of taxpayer money to California for high speed rail, putting all of us on the hook for their bumbling. More stupidity, this time at the state level.

• And one more loose end. According to a blurb in the July 8, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, President Obama's popularity in the Muslim world continues to slip. Remember, one of the main reasons for electing the President, was how he would improve our nation's image throughout the world, especially in the Muslim world. Much like his other promises that have gone unfulfilled (e.g. we are still militarily in Iraq, we still have not closed Guantanamo, the President has hired many lobbyists for his administration even though he said he would not, he has not reduced the number of earmarks as promised, etc.), his ability to improve our image in the eyes of Muslims has also fallen flat. The Pew Global Attitudes Project has poll results that show the percent of Muslims who say they have confidence in Obama has fallen from 33% to 23% in Turkey, from 41% to 31% in Egypt, and from 13% to 8% in Pakistan.

If these acts of stupidity and insanity are not enough for you, wait until tomorrow where we will provide you at least five YouTube instances of even more of the same. After tomorrow, I hope you are as eager as I am for November to arrive in order to start dumping all incumbents out of office. It cannot happen soon enough.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:http:

//www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/