Five Free Things to Improve Our Schools

Waiting for Superman is the new documentary about the failure of American public schools. Once the envy of the world, the American education system has declined to an embarrassing ranking of 26th. The documentary examines many things, but from what I have read places the blame mostly on teacher unions. I disagree. They are part of the problem, but down on the list. More money isn't the answer either. We have continually thrown money at the problem with per pupil spending rising exponentially, while test scores plummet. The answer is someplace else.

Here are five things that would improve learning in the schools, and none of them cost a dime.

1) BAN CELL PHONES IN THE CLASSROOM. How did we survive without them for all those years? Parental pressure keeps schools from requiring cell phones to be checked at the door. But simply banning their use in the classroom doesn't work. Teachers spend a good part of their teaching time looking under desks and behind books as students continue to text away rather than pay attention to the teacher, not to mention the teacher's time in enforcing the rules.

2) UNIFORMS. Leave the butt cracks and bouncing boobs for the malt shop. Schools with uniforms routinely outperform schools without uniforms. Today's students can't respect education if they can't respect themselves enough to leave the gangsta rap droopy drawers in the drawer back home. And just so you know, "dress codes" work for about the first three days of school.

3) HIRE TEACHERS, NOT COACHES. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the beginning of the slide in American education occurred about the same time as men moved into the primary education field in a big way. School hiring should be based on what teachers can teach and how well they can teach it...not what they can coach. How many social studies teachers have been hired because they can coach wrestling? Coaching staff should be handled independently of the teaching staff.

4) END MAINSTREAMING. Another example where courts have interfered in the education process. While some challenged students actually benefit from mainstreaming, many of them do not. The purpose is to make the parents feel better. Teachers are using an inordinate amount of time at the expense of the other students taking care of mainstream issues. All students should be placed in a learning environment best suited to individual needs within reason. Challenged students should be placed where they can actually learn something, no matter how disconcerting it is to Mom and Dad.

5) LIMIT ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF. Bureaucracies beget more bureaucracy. Schools are no exceptions. Lately there has been a piling on. Administrative personnel tend to get bigger raises at the expense of teaching staff....over and over and over again. No teacher should be laid off in order to provide an administrator with a 5-10% raise, not in this day and age. The cost of administrative staffs should be limited to a certain percentage of a school system's budget, and no raises should be given to these folks at all if teachers are being laid off.

Add increased discipline to the mix; allow teachers to once again flunk students; prohibit administrators from unilaterally changing grades; expel students who either physically or verbally abuse teachers….you will see the school systems shape up real fast.

But you and I know none of the above will ever happen. Meanwhile, let's just blame the teachers.

Where Do You Go To Get Your Reputation Back?

Wikipedia defines Yellow Journalism as follows:

“Yellow journalism or the yellow press is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension "Yellow Journalism" is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion .”

The latest local political scandal involving the Cafaro family and certain public officials has once again garnered yellow journalistic headlines in the local paper. What are these folks doing?

My position is clear. No matter how inflammatory the indictment or bill of particulars, these are allegations, not statements of fact. Just because somebody said it happened doesn't make it so. The Vindicator knows that. Buzz words like conspiracy and bribery and perjury make for great headlines and may even sell a paper or two. But at the end of the day, this is a criminal proceeding in which both sides of the issue will be heard by a jury. Until that time, all of the parties are presumed to innocent until proven guilty. That isn’t a platitude. It is the bulwark of our criminal justice system. The Vindicator should tone it down a bit, especially under these circumstances.

Nobody wants corrupt public officials. But there is something more going on here. This isn’t open the fee drawer in a judge’s desk or look the other way while the mobsters are blowing up another car or taking bribes to allow trafficking in drugs. This looks more like politics bleeding into the criminal justice system. “We don't want Cafaro controlling Mahoning County” is not a legal argument. It’s a political argument.

Criminalization of political behavior is a dangerous game. Remember Scooter Libby? The government went on a multi-year witch hunt to find out who leaked that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. Turns out the special prosecutor knew the answer almost from the beginning. Instead of stopping the investigation, the special prosecutor wasted millions upon millions of the taxpayers’ money harassing Bush appointees for political purposes; convicting Scooter Libby for perjury in an irrelevant interview a year after the Special Prosecutor should have ceased the investigation. Is that kind of justice you want?

Or Blago up in Illinois. Now there was an open and shut case. Dude, he walked!!! So much for all of the hype! It was political behavior. It might be unseemly and dirty, but the Feds couldn’t get the jury to agree it was illegal.

I don’t know how this is going to turn out. Almost all of these folks had stellar reputations in the community prior to these alleged "crimes." It may be everything the prosecution says it is, or it may turn out to be a political vendetta. I have read a portion of the indictments and the pleadings. In my opinion, this is much ado about nothing. Lot's of smoke, but not much fire. I might be proven wrong; but what if I’m right?

If it turns out these folks are innocent, where do they go to get their reputations back?

Where Have All The Homeless Gone?

Where have all the homeless gone? Remember during the Bush years the continual cacophony of homeless noise on CNN and the rest of the “mainstream” media? The unemployment was at 4.5%, but the media talked about “jobless prosperity” and how many homeless there were in the country. Story after story of people looking for shelter told us the Bush and the Republicans were deaf to the cries of the poor and needy.

Of course, those stories only surfaced during the administrations of Bush the elder and the Bush the younger. There were no homeless under Bill Clinton, and there are definitely no homeless under Barack Obama. It’s a miracle.

The truth is far more disturbing. Poverty in the United States is on the rise. The poverty rate is currently 15%, up from 13.5% last year. That means 1 in 7 Americans are living in poverty, and experts claim that, truth be told, it is actually approaching 1 in 6.

Approximately 3.5 million Americans will be homeless at least sometime during this year, if not more. Approximately 1.6 million of these folks will be housed in a public shelter. On any given day, there are approximately 650,000 American living in a temporary shelter. The rest will end up in a car or on the street, or take refuge in the home of a relative. The chronically homeless number about 110,000 and is on the rise.

A little under ½ of the homeless suffer from a disability, from mental disease to HIV. Each night there are approximately 107,000 veterans using a public shelter. Of families located in shelters, 240,000 are single mothers. Other categories include those suffering from domestic violence, and young adults barely 18 years of age bounced out of the foster care system (Statistics taken from Poverty.org / Who Is Homeless in America by Josie Raymond /July 6, 2010).

Yet to watch the evening news, you would think that they have simply been absorbed in the aura of Obama’s wonderfulness. They don’t exist unless they are reported by the media, and the media has chosen not to report them.

In my research for this article, what surprised me was the coldness of the statistics that were being reported by various government agencies. Rather than examining the causes of homelessness, the numbers were couched in terms of 6000 people being served. The measure of success at the various agencies was not geared in developing policies to end homelessness, but rather to signing people up for government programs.

Here is the bad news. The government can try, but it will NEVER “program” folks out of poverty. There isn’t enough money in the world to do that. Best case scenario, any government program will be temporary (as it should be). Worst case scenario, those signing up for the program instead sign up for a life style of continual poverty and hopelessness. When success is measured in “numbers served” rather than numbers moved off the roles to successful lives, those in the system become just that…a number served. No help. No improvement. No success. Just a number to justify more money to the agency!

Obama has made homelessness a priority, whatever that means. But the increasing poverty numbers and homeless don’t do anything to help his presidency. He prefers to keep them hid. What he has proposed is an expansion of the Bush homeless policy. Bush concentrated on housing for the chronically homeless and veterans. Obama is keeping the Bush strategy intact and expanding on it with the goal to “end homelessness by 2020.”

Good luck with that, because the Washington Post reported that while the Obama proposals are strong on platitudes, they are short on funding. There is a reason for that…like I said…there is not enough money in the world to take care of the problem.

In the meantime, if you see a homeless story on TV news show, let me know. I bet the next time you see a homeless story on any network other than Fox, there will be a Republican president. They will just kind of pop up from nowhere.

In Afghanistan, What Does Win Mean?

I am very uncomfortable about the Afghan war. In this political season when domestic issues are at the helm of the debate, Afghanistan is looming in the background. If the mainstream press catches on to what is going on over there, I predict it will move to the forefront of the political debate in the next presidential election.

More than 575 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since Barack Obama was sworn in as President. 323 of those casualties occurred this year alone. The total number of American/British/Australian casualty’s exceeds 2200 since the beginning of the war. The death trend lines are on the way up.

President Obama said that Iraq was the wrong war. The right war was in Afghanistan. He has a point. Afghanistan was the launching point for the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda in collaboration with the Taliban Afghan government. We should retaliate against the country that invaded us…and that would be Afghanistan. The first American military charge of the 21st Century was a cavalry charge in the Northern provinces.

But beyond the logic of attaching those who attacked you…what does one do with Afghanistan? It is one of the poorest nations in the world. Its chief export is opium. It has a medieval religion…even the moderates are archaic! It does have substantial natural resource deposits, but they are located in difficult places to mine.

To quote the Looks Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag from the Vietnam protest days: “Well, it’s one, two three, what are we fightin’ for?” I wish the government would explain what the ultimate goal is in Afghanistan. How does one define “win” in Afghanistan?

We have routed the Taliban from Kabul, the capital. The balance of the country is nominally under control of the national government, but in reality is under the control of a bunch of tribes and warlords. These guys are friendly to whomever pays them the most, or the party who scares them the most.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are scattered in the mountains, some of which are in Afghanistan, and others in Pakistan in a wasteland region out of control of the Pakistani government. This is guerilla warfare being fought by zealots funded by Iran. How does an occupying force “win” such a war? I don’t think it can be won in the traditional sense. Even a nation building approach is questionable as the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt.

President Bush was faced with three rogue nations after 9/11: Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Bush and Obama have at least achieved a degree of victory in Iraq. Iran seems to be off the table when it comes to military action. And in Afghanistan, we appear to be gearing up for a war of attrition against an enemy that cannot be defined or segregated into any specific boundary or territory. That is scary. Afghanistan is not called the graveyard of empires for nothing. Its most recent casualty was the Soviet Union, which bankrupted itself into oblivion.

Add to the mix Obama’s extreme left wing ideological bent…I think he owes the American public a concise and pithy explanation of American goals in this war. If it were George Bush sitting in the White House, I guarantee you would see body counts on the nightly news…night after night after night.

So Mr. Obama, what does “win” mean in Afghanistan?