Extreme Wisdom

Here’s why.

The first one is funny and enlightening…

The second one is even better…

Check out my recent appearance on WPWR’s (Channel 50) “Perspective” program yesterday (Sunday). The discussion was around a voucher bill, along with other issues confronting education.

Of course, with three people defending the existing system, and only one person (me) describing it accurately as failing, it’s not like we don’t have our work cut out for us. You may be interested in the other guests, as they make their conventional case for dumping more money into a failed system. If not, my stint starts at the 11:22 mark.

As always, constructive critiques are welcome. Being more used to radio, I have to work on my TV persona.

The Latest News On School Reform and School Vouchers: My50CHICAGO.com

It’s a testament to the slow witted nature of the Republicans that they haven’t found a way to run this ad across the country. It makes the case for cuts so clearly that only the most partisan person could deny its truth.

Let the sheer magnitude of the problem do the heavy lifting.

Next up, let’s give Paul Ryan the “Profiles in Political Courage” award for tackling Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I don’t know how this all turns out, but I must say that it’s good to see Republican telling the truth.

Read this article to understand how this cancer has metastasized into our entire body politic.

When they ask you how you can use such harsh rhetoric, tell them that “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,”

Farewell, My Lovely
How public pensions killed progressive California

As 72-year-old Jerry Brown enters his second governorship, he has an agenda to match that power, with visions even greater than those that haunted his two-term administration of the 1970s and ’80s: building 20,000 megawatts of renewable power, laying a new high-speed rail network that will connect the state’s major cities, forging a statewide infrastructure for alternative energy, hiring thousands of green employees. The new governor’s environmental agenda is ambitious, untenably expensive, and indelibly popular with voters and lawmakers.

Yet when Brown looks out on Democrat-controlled California, he seems less like Caesar at the Rubicon than Wojciech Jaruzelski at the Gdansk Shipyard. Brown is champion of a workers’ party with monopoly control, yet all his plans are being derailed by a labor movement nobody can harness.

At press time, California was being governed under a state of economic “emergency” declared by Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in light of a staggering $28 billion budget shortfall expected in the next 18 months.

It gets worse. Medium-term unfunded liabilities for government employee pensions are pegged by the Legislative Analyst’s Office at $136 billion—and that’s a lowball figure. Legislative analyst Mac Taylor acknowledges in his current fiscal outlook report that the estimate leaves out billions in funding shortfalls at the pension funds for public school teachers and University of California employees. In the next 10 years, taxpayers will most likely be on the hook for somewhere between $325 billion and $500 billion. (Over the past five years, state revenues averaged $94.5 billion per year.)

How did this happen?

It happened because too many people were asleep at the switch, believing we could spend lavishly on a corrupt and lazy class of greedy public employees who bought the politicians they were bargaining with.

It’s time for the Big Haircut. Cut their pensions and health benefits or fire them an hire new people under new rules. It’s that simple.

As we watch the shake out of the education reforms on the table across the nation, and as we watch the outcome of Scott Walker’s entirely justified “assault” on greedy public sector workers who refuse to pay a dime toward their pensions or health care…

Just remember that this tiny blog accurately predicted the financial conflagration unions have visited upon this nation, as well as the justified public backlash.

Pigs get fat, Hogs get slaughtered.

Slaughter the Hogs.

A Glimpse into the Socialist Mind

I posted this about three years ago (Jan 2008). Given the situation in Illinois, particularly with education waste and featherbedding, I think it bears re-posting. Think about the nature of the people educating your kids.
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Elaine Johnson seems like a regular everday citizen. She may be a little out of the ordinary in that she also started a very good local blog in Downers Grove. It’s amazing. You take a little time to look into things, and slowly but surely you start to notice just how things actually work - particularly with school boards.

No need for silence on the school board

Voters were told the board’s responsibility is to put children first and to hire the superintendent. The board acts as a single unit, not as a congregation of individuals motivated by personal agendas - a concept further underscored when incumbents of District 58 and Community High School District 99 ran together as a single slate.

“School boards don’t have a lot of power other than hiring the superintendent,” says Jim Russell of the Illinois Association of School Boards, the voluntary organization that counts 98 percent of the state’s school boards as members.

Indeed, the Illinois School Code highlights the board’s role in hiring, directing and evaluating the superintendent and states that members have no legal authority as individuals.

But it also allows boards to “exercise all other powers not inconsistent with this act that may be requisite for the proper maintenance, operation and development of any school or schools under the jurisdiction of the board.”

The question is: Why don’t they? Why don’t our school board members interpret their duties in the broadest possible terms, initiating policy and holding administrators accountable as other elected officials do? Why do they accept a role that is in large part ceremonial and supportive?

The answer may lie at least in part with the Illinois Association of School Boards, which tries, as Russell says, to “create a philosophy or culture” among its members. My husband, who ran unsuccessfully for the District 58 board last spring, received a packet of IASB handouts explaining the role and duties of a school board member.

Further training encourages individual members to “submit themselves to the overall board,” Russell says. “You have a voice, yes. You are supposed to represent the public, yes. But the board works as a unit. We don’t discourage members from speaking or asking questions … but the district and the community have to hear a single voice.”

This excellent article highlight a singular truth that I have been trying to beat into the heads of people across the political spectrum. School Boards and “districts” are merely facades that provide the appearance of local control. In fact, there is next to no local control at all.

The article also highlights the dark nature of the IASB in particular and school administration in general. By Mr. Russell’s own words, he exposes “Adminstration” for the anti-democratic, anti-free speech, and essentially fascist mindset that they promote.

!!!! “We don’t discourage members from speaking or asking questions … but the district and the community have to hear a single voice.” !!!!

The first part of the above sentence is an outright lie. Members are discouraged from speaking all the time. As some one who follows the antics of school boards and the oily adminstrative class closely, I can attest to the aggressive tactics used by these protectors of financial malfeasance and legalized money laundering.

The second part of the above sentence is even worse than the outright lie, for it reeks of the of enforced conformity and political correctness that have become a cancer on our culture. Any board member who steps out of line is first politely asked to fall in line. If this fails, the gloves come off, and the “education mafia” goes into full attack mode.

Here is a simple fact that most parents and citizens don’t want to process. They practice a dangerous brand of denial regarding their schools. The fact is this. If there is “harmony” on your school board, then corruption is going unnoticed. The legalized money-laundering that now has metastasized to so many districts that the only politically “healthy” districts are the ones where there is “disharmony.”

I’d be happy to hear of any exceptions.

Please wake up people. Re-read the quote by Mr. Russell of the IASB. Please understand the dark, dangerous, and vile nature of his ideology. It is fundamentally anti-freedom, anti-democratic, and anti-American. These are the people that are picking the curriculum for your kids. Mr. Russell’s views and the curriculum are far more in lockstep than you are permitting yourself to see.