[Cincinatus' Wife]

This mantra has been getting louder and louder:

+++++Don't test the teachers! It's the poverty! Students can't learn because they are poor. SPEND MORE MONEY. It's for the children.++++

Leftists/Teachers Unions have shifted their inequality, social justice argument from WHITE vs BLACK to RICH vs POOR (so many poor whites and browns to add to the blacks in their never ending exploitation of minorities - nurturing their dependence so they can milk them for votes).

The Left does not care about blacks, they only care about their votes. Likewise, the Left does not care about the poor, they only care about their votes.

Redistribution is the hallmark and focus of the Obama Administration.

NOTE: All the broken-down, bankrupt, crime-ridden inner cities have been run into disrepair and despair by decades of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule.

[kearnyirish2]

“After all, if unions were the problem, then unionized public schools in wealthy areas and Finland would be failing.”

Do teachers in Finland attain “employment for life, without performance metrics”? In the US the teachers’ unions are half the problem; tenure is the other half.

[The Working Man]

I ran across a old contract for teachers here in Kentucky. There were many interesting things in it but one I found to be fascinating was the one where a teacher would not be paid if his/her students failed the exam given by the master of the school district as he made his rounds checking up on the one room school houses that dotted the countryside.

Oh yes, this is worthy of note... the real Amish here still run their own one-room school houses. There are two within five miles of my home here.

[EBH]

War values as applied to society. Mussolini understood this very well. A free society is too disorganized to control. So he imposed a warlike value on the Italian society to control the economy.

“Ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done like building roads, hospitals, houses. Domestic populations and institutions were required to do their part....

...William James spoke of the moral equivalent of war. He wanted all the benefits without the cost. Hence in recent times the left has looked at everything from environmentalism to global warming to public health and ‘diversity’ as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert driven unity,” Page 149, Liberal Fascism, David Horowitz.

Poverty is not something one makes war on. To say that it will take a war on XXXXX means they are making war on the American citizen, on society as a whole. This automatically means there are winners and losers, there allies and enemies, there is nothing uniting society in using these tactics to control society. They are self-destructive to the very people they claim to help. There is no moral equivalent to make war on your own citizens over anything. Even God does not make war on His Saints, that “war” is against evil.

The whole idea of a ‘war on XXXXX’ means a government that puts a gun to the head of the citizen, not cajoled, but forced into submission through assorted punishments, disgrace, and bullying tactics.

[Smokin' Joe]

We've had a "War on Poverty" for half a century now. It is time to strike those colors and withdraw from the field.

Never before has any nation had so many poor people, and we have the fattest, most pandered poor people on the planet.

We lost the war.

Similarly, we have thrown money by the truckload at the "education" problem, and solved just as much.

Poverty's miseries were an incentive to better one's self. Remove the stigma and pain from poverty, and there is no incentive to change.

A culture can only absorb so many engaged in omphaloskepsis while working the drive-up window before the normal flow of commerce grinds to a halt. Unfortunately, the blame will not fall where it belongs, and the conservators, generators, and purveyors of useless "knowledge" will ever claim it is because they are underfunded.

[muir_redwoods]

I agree. After fifteen years on the job teachers in Finland earn about $37,500. Pay US teachers the same. Problem solved.

[Makana]

Wait! LBJ declared a War on Poverty. He lost. How’s the War on Drugs going. They just surrendered in Colorado.

Seems the last thing we should have is a War on Teachers.

[kcvl]

David J. Sirota (born November 2, 1975) is an American liberal political commentator and radio host based in Denver. He is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, Democratic political spokesperson, and blogger.

In 1999, Sirota served as deputy campaign manager for Philadelphia mayoral candidate Dwight E. Evans, who is currently a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, representing the 203rd District (Philadelphia County). Sirota was fired after being linked to a bogus Web site apparently intended to hurt a rival candidate.

Sirota worked as spokesperson for the House Appropriations Committee. While a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research and advocacy group he created its Progress Report.

In 2003 Newsweek profiled Sirota as a "political operative" skilled at "hacking out a daily barrage of anti-Bush media clips, commentary, and snappy quotes" who made "guerrilla attacks on the Bush administration" and who was "well schooled in the art of Washington warfare.". According to the article, Sirota's main weapons were computer emails; Sirota was described as the "Internet child of the Clinton War Room generation." Former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta was quoted as ut Sirota: "I just saw he had an eye for critique and the instinct for the jugular

[Alberta's Child]

I can't really argue about the general sentiment of this article, except to the extent that it's used as an excuse to perpetuate and expand an expensive taxpayer-funded bureaucracy. I've said for a long time that this country needs better students, not better schools.

Maybe it's time someone pointed out that the U.S. government actually implemented one of the most comprehensive measures to improve student performance through a reduction of poverty. It was called Roe v. Wade, and its primary purpose was to make America smarter and wealthier by eliminating a large portion of the population that would otherwise have grown up on the left side of most socio-economic bell curves.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

American public school students from wealthy districts generate some of the best test scores in the world. This proves that the education system’s problems are not universal — the crisis is isolated primarily in the parts of the system that operate in high poverty very high Democrat areas.

Specifically, it is "isolated primarily” to places where parental support for disciplined learning by the children is in short supply.

You want to see evidence of a crisis in education? Well, a “crisis” is a point of danger and opportunity. And here is one:

khanacademy.org

For the teachers’ union, it is danger; I showed that site to a math teacher, and she walked away from my computer saying that suddenly her job didn’t seem as secure as it had the moment before.

For any parent, any child, and any adult who feels a need to learn, that site is an opportunity. And of course, that’s just one site. If one man can build a site like that, someone else can try to do it better - and just as free. But Salman Khan is one sharp cookie, and a man who oozes empathy for the student. So anyone who does better will have to be pretty good themselves.

The idea that geometrically increasing funding from the government is sine qua non for the education of our children, to the extent that it ever was actually based in facts and logic, is now as musty, archaic and stodgy, as the conceit that we needed boards dominated by unions to determine whether to build diesel-electric or steam locomotives.

Yes, I found an old socialist tract that argued exactly that! And laughed, not at the controversy that once raged over the replacement of the steam locomotive, but at the notion that that was even an important question at a point in time in which aviation was about to supplant long-distance rail passenger service - and computers were about to supplant aviation as the frontier of technology!

The lesson is obvious -technologically speaking, unions are inherently reactionary.

[Recompennation]

Of corse this includes our teachers at main street media.
Boy Matt Laugher has that Homer Simpson look going with the beard thang.

[DoodleDawg]

You can pour all the money in the world into the school system, you can ban every teachers union in the country, and it won’t solve a thing. If there is no support for education at home then for much of the class you’re wasting your money. And that is what is missing. For all too many homes - at all ends of the economic spectrum - parents have abrogated their responsibility for their children’s education and dumped it solely on the teachers. They don’t take any interest in their work, they don’t get to know the teachers, they just show no interest and expect miracles. My dad would work a double shift at the Ford plant and still sit down and read to me when I was little or help me with my homework when I was older. He and my mom never, ever missed a parent-teacher conference. At the dinner table the first topic of conversation was always how my day at school went. They constantly reinforced how important education was. Now in some communities education is viewed with suspect. That’s the problem, far more than unions or funding or curriculum.

[TN4Liberty]

Conservatives who blame teachers for the problems in education are falling for the tactics of the left. Teachers do their jobs. They are forced to do their jobs in a way that is conducive to achieving the goals of the left. Unions are a problem. Central control of education in DC is a problem. Politicization of curriculum is a problem. Lack of parenting is a problem. All of these are far greater problems than teachers. If you want to fix education, abolish the Department of Eduction, eliminate all DC funding for local education, and let communities run it. Many teachers want to do their job well, given the opportunity, and I hate seeing conservatives disparage teachers, the least powerful of the entities in the education system. Many teachers can be our allies.

[SC_Pete]

The War on Poverty has already created flash mobs, urban unemployment, disinvestment, gangs, drug wars, abortion on demand, homelessness, and racial division.

America is becoming Detroit because of the War on Poverty. We don’t need more of it.

[from occupied ga]

We need a war on poverty, not teachers

We've HAD a war on poverty for the last 50 years. Trillions of dollars have been squandered on paying people to be poor, and "poverty"* is still with us to the same extent or greater than it was before

*If you define poverty as haveing three flat screen TVs, a car (or two), your food, healthcare, housing and edjumacation for yo chillin provided.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If America were serious about fixing the troubled parts of its education system, then we would be having a fundamentally different conversation.

We wouldn’t be talking about budget austerity — we would be talking about raising public revenues to fund special tutoring, childcare, basic health programs and other so-called wraparound services at low-income schools.

We wouldn’t only be looking to make sure that schools in high-poverty districts finally receive the same amount of public money as schools in wealthy neighborhoods — we would make sure high-poverty districts actually receive more funds than rich districts because combating poverty is such a resource-intensive endeavor.

Gross misdiagnosis, fool’s errand recommendation.

The rich school isn’t rich because it has money, the rich school is rich because it has the backing of the parents of the students. The poor school is poor first because the parents of its students didn’t do well in school, and the don’t expect and demand that their children do well in school, either. Low expectations will stultify the progress of almost anyone.

The more you try to rob Peter to pay for Paul’s education, the more Paul learns that robbing Peter is the path to success - and the more Paul learns not to be like Peter.