This next bit worries me almost as much as last week’s story (about Minnesota’s “social studies standards” being turned into nothing more than lefty indoctrination).

The English language, as taught in our schools, is dying:

I was a teacher in the inner city between 1992 and 1996 and immediately realized that those unfortunate kids could not read anything, because nearly every sentence had at least one word they had never seen before. This went for magazine and newspaper articles as well as traditional English stuff. I was not shoving college chemistry texts or The Fall of the House of Usher at them. (Read Poe to a 16 year old today and you will get the glassiest stare imaginable; in Usher, there are 20-25 words in the first paragraph, as well as a round-about way of expression, that would totally defeat all but the brightest teen.)

Now, I”m not sure how many teenagers could follow Usher even 30 years ago.  Still, there’s no question; literacy is receding in our country:

They said they don’t like black and white films, and they didn’t, but I truly believe they didn’t like how much people talked. Watch a Bogart film and see how much of the action is moved by dialogue, sophisticated and adult dialogue, and compare the number and length of words to a contemporary film.

And it’s not just schools or pop culture:

Or, my personal favorite annoyance, my church sings all Contemporary Christian Music, what I call Sesame Street music. There are few words of more than one syllable. I

It’s one of the reasons I seek out churches whose hymnals include no music written after 1880.

 How does one reverse this? I spent a long time encouraging them to see the value of having more tools in their linguistic tool box, but when f*** is their primary adjective and adverb, when using “big” words is excoriated, and every “art” form they enjoy diminishes rather than exalts language, what could I do? Read to them, put lists of words they would never see again on the board, encourage expression with some complexity. Not generally fruitful options.

On the one hand, while it was an awful movie, I did like the Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes MTV-friendliy version of Romeo and Juliet if only because it demanded its audience keep up with Shakespearean vocabulary and pacing (which may be why it flopped, but work with me here).

On the other?  I despair of anything getting any better.  Our nation’s media, academia and too much of our ruling class benefit from dumb subjects.

A few years back, I reported on the “education” my daughter, Bun, got in a summer “Economics” class at a Saint Paul Public School.

Among the lessons she “learned” from the teacher:

• We’ve had five black presidents: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge were all afro-American.

• People are “disregarding their blackness” to “reap white benefits”: The teacher cited the “one drop rule” – people with “even a drop” of black blood, so says the teacher, are black – and disregard their “blackness” only for the swag, apparently.

• Minorities have “no rights”: the “teacher” didn’t elaborate.
•  The teacher told the class that the government “may have blown up” the levees in the poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans. He also said that White New Orleans put police on the bridge between Black and White New Orleans to send black refugees back to their deaths, as white people sat on the levees and watched the black people die. He apparently did an impersonation, in a “white trash” voice; “Hey, Bill, grab me a brewski; that n***er is trying to swim”. Because, says the teacher, “Black people as a rule can’t swim”.
• The class studied a packet from Ebony Magazine; the first one is called “A Child’s View/A Young Man’s View/An Elder’s View” of Obama; it was their considered opinion that most people who didn’t vote for Obama were motivated by race. The class is also supposed to write whether they do or don’t agree with Obama. According to Bun, it was intensely intimidating.
• “Hurricanes follow the path of the slave ships”, apparently as God’s punishment for slavery
•  “Sharks, to this day, folow the route of the slave ships”, as a matter of evolutionary adaptation.  According to the teacher, sharks “evolved” to live in the subtropical trade wind zone because of the centuries of slaves being tossed overboard from slave ships.

I used to think it was merely an incompetent, crank teacher (who happened to be Afro-American) abusing his position.

But after reading John Fonte at NRO reporting on Minnesota’s proposed new Social Studies standards for public schools, I’m starting to think Buns’ old teacher was merely ahead of the curve:

Nine years ago a group of history professors from the University of Minnesota sent a letter to the state’s education department. They complained that the history/social-studies standards for Minnesota presented American history too positively. The historians wanted early American history described in terms of “conquest,” “subjugation,” “exploitation,” “enslavement,” and “genocidal impact.” For these academics, the story of America primarily meant slavery for African Americans, genocide for American Indians, subjugation for women, xenophobia for immigrants, and exploitation for poor people.

And yesterday, the Department of Education held one of the pro-forma hearings that the bureaucracy always holds to give a rubber-stamp of “openness and transparency” before going ahead and doing what the DFL’s pet bureaucrats were going to do anyway.

Here – barring an unlikely ruling from an Adminstrative Law judge or, even less likely, a veto from Governor Dayton – is what Minnesota’s schools are going to be teaching your kids, if they go to a public school, according to Fonte’s piece:

For example History Standard 20 for the period 1870–1920 declares: “The student will understand that as the United States shifted from its agrarian roots into an industrial and global power, the rise of big business, urbanization, and immigration led to institutionalized racism, ethnic and class conflict, and new efforts at reform.” [italics added]

Less biased standards might suggest that “the student will understand” that the growth of business enterprise, urbanization, and immigration led to greater prosperity for most Americans, including African Americans who moved to large northern cities and Ellis Island newcomers who chose to become Americans. Further, the period 1870 to 1920 witnessed tremendous technological development and inventions for which Americans are famous: including great advances in medicine; the promotion of public health (including a clean water supply and indoor plumbing), the sewing machine, typewriter, phonograph, and electric light bulb.

So we’d like to think.

But “social studies” aren’t about history, or fact of any kind; the new standard are about indoctrination:

But, American achievements are downplayed while the overarching theme becomes “institutionalized racism.” Of course, this logically means that the major “institutions” of American liberal democracy — the courts, Congress, the presidency, state and local governments, businesses, churches, civic organizations — and the entire democratic system and its civil society are racist and therefore, clearly, illegitimate.

The stated purpose of the Minnesota 2012 standards is “to identity the academic knowledge and skills that prepare students for post-secondary education, work and civic life in the twenty-first century. . . . Students need deep knowledge of this information in order to make sense of their world.”

While the 2004 Standards specifically examined 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and terrorism, the 2012 Standards, incredibly, include no references to 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, the Gulf War of 1991, or terrorism itself. Nor is there any hint of a global conflict with terrorists described either as President Bush’s “War on Terror” or President Obama’s “War against violent extremists.” True, there are two tepid references to the “Arab Spring,” but this is hardly adequate to provide the “deep knowledge” needed for students “to make sense of their world.”

As I’ve observed for years, the last set of standards, from 2004, were bad enough; in my kids’ time in the public schools, all they really were taught was slavery and civil rights.

Read Fonte’s entire piece; it only gets worse.

And I’m afraid we’ve finally gotten to the time when our public school system in Minnesota isn’t merely expensive, incompetent and befuddled.  With these standards, our school system is the enemy.

Forget about the “the terrorists have won” jokes; even most of the dumbest people know you need to resist those who are trying to kill you.

But these standards?  They are the entire agglomerated intellectual and moral rot of the American left, wrapped up a cutesy “Raise Your Hand For Minnesota’s Kids!”-chanting package.

My dad and both my mom’s parents were teachers.  If there’s a family out there where American public education was the family business, it’s mine.

But the time has come where people who value what this country really means have to either abandon the public schools – all our kids, every single one of them – or get serious about fighting for them.

Me?  I”m torn.

Jed Babbin gets the basic facts right…:

Politicians and media are preoccupied with the idea that gun control is the only answer to these murders and that nothing else is worth discussion. But the inconvenient facts include that the Oregon mall shooter used a stolen weapon. Adam Lanza, the Newtown murderer, used weapons stolen from his mother who had them legally and registered them under Connecticut law. He reportedly shot his way into a locked school. The time and political energy that’s being wasted on gun control could be put to better use. That’s our job, so let’s get to it.

He posts some proposals for making schools more secure.  He opposes arming teachers – and I can see many reasons for that, and we’ll come back to them.

One – getting more realistic about the extremely mentally ill, who make up all of our crop of school shooters – makes obvious sense.

The other – improving school security, without turning them, as Babbin says, “into armed camps” – is a little dodgier.

Babbin quotes a friend, a former SEAL who works as a security consultant, who advocates putting ballistic doors and mag locks on classrooms, issuing “ballistic blankets” (think “flak blankets”) and drilling the kids on their use, and teaching the staff to “buy time” for the police to arrive.  Which makes sense, from a purely security perspective; make the target harder.

The consultant advises against arming teachers: “It would probably cause more problems than keeping them unarmed.”   Maybe, maybe not – people in law enforcement and the military tend to think the rest of society are mindless sheeple, but I can see the argument.  There are problems.

Which brings us not only to the beef I have with Babbin’s thesis – which is a perfectly valid one – but what I think the real problem is.

Look at the issues facing school security:

• Schools are big, fat, juicy unarmed targets full of helpless victims.  Never more so than now; as school districts centralize more and more kids to “cut costs”, schools get bigger and bigger. You don’t need to be a terrorist or a nutcase to know that; how many times has Hollywood turned to the “evildoer at a school” plot?  Everyone knows; if you want to screw with a society where it really hurts, screw with the kids.
• As schools get bigger and bigger, the kids at the margin – the kids with emotional, behavioral and mental health issues – get pushed further and further to the fringe.  The emotionally-disturbed kids get more alienated; the mentally-ill kids get more siloed.  Teachers and administrators get more involved in the endless process of running a huge, institutional, “factory” school, and less in what’s ticking with each individual kid.
• Some of the kids on the fringes will act out on their adolescent hormonal aggression, and on the criminal behavior they currently pattern themselves after in our society, and commit stupid crimes of opportunity.  Which, if we did happen to arm teachers, would likely involve students jumping teachers and stealing guns.  It’s a fair point – in a school where students can form an in-school criminal underclass.
• Other kids on the fringe – after years of bullying in a huge, soulless school that already resembles a prison – will, like Columbine’s murderers or the kid at Cold Springs/Rokori, get their revenge in the way that seems most satisfying to their troubled minds; killing their schoolmates and destroy the thing that, in their warped little adolescent minds, left them so alienated.  Others, like the shooter at the Red Lake school or at Dunblane, Scotland, will hear voices telling them to find a school and start shooting.  Or, like Lanza, react to God only knows what – but through whatever motivation, find the biggest, fattest, least-defended target they can; a mall, a movie theater, or in too many cases, a school.

What do these all have in common?

The big, soulless, impersonal megaschool.  They’re everywhere; big cities are cramming thousands of kids into huge “campus” schools, like Columbine, where the staff can barely keep up with the paperwork, much less the states of mind of their individual kids.   Rural America is consolidating its schools into ever-bigger buildings, to save money (or, really, redirect more of it to administrative overburden).

There’ve been examinations of the psychological effects of cramming children into huge schools.  They’ve been shunted into the circular file by an education establishment that created the status quo.

But you didn’t see these kinds of shootings when schools were in the neighborhood, when staff knew their kids, and could tell when something needed attention.

Along with looking at what makes American schools so insecure, maybe it’s time to look at what makes so many people what to destroy them.

Minnesota’s Latino community voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama and, more importantly at the moment, for the DFL.

And; what did they get?

Minnesota’s achievement gap among Latino high school students is the worst in the US:

Minnesota has the largest Hispanic achievement gap with Latinos lagging 33 percent in graduation rate than their white counterparts. Only 51 percent of Latinos graduated from high school in the state (the worst Latino graduation rate of any state), whereas 84 percent of whites graduated from high school in the same state. Our nation’s capitol, the District of Columbia had the second biggest achievement gap, with 30 percent.

So here’s a question for all you Latino DFL voters; other than rhetoric, what’s your DFL vote getting you?

If this is what our “Higher Ed” dollars is buying, then the bubble can’t possibly burst soon enough.

Here’s his website.

I think we all have examples of professors who’ve outlived their usefulness, and on whom “academic freedom” is as much a waste as their public, endowment or student-paid salaries.

…let’s just say I find this premise utterly plausible.

Here’s the lefty playbook when it comes to exacting more tribute from the people:

1. Make a demand.  Say, a 30% in crease in the school district levy, amounting to an increase in taxes of almost $40 million a year for eight years.
2. Point out that if the voters don’t acquiesce to the demand, the thing that the taxpayers most value – in this case, 364 teachers.  That in a school district with 5,300 employees, only 58% of whom, a little over 3,000, ever set foot in a classroom.   That means you, the lefty, plan on laying off 12% of the district’s teachers – if the voters don’t give you what you want. (No administrator jobs are at risk, naturally)

It’s the way a petulant teenager acts when they don’t get their way.

It’s the choice Saint Paul Public Schools superintendent Valeria Silva has given the voters of Saint Paul.

And it’s worse than that.  Greg Copeland, chair of “Vote NO 30% Levy Tax Hike!”, writes:

“The St. Paul School Board majority, following the recommendation of the Superintendent, showed so little respect for St. Paul Voters that it chose to combine the expiring 2006 Levy Renewal with a 30% Levy Property Tax Hike in a single ballot question, rather than giving voters an open choice of two questions, as it easily could have done; one to renew and another on the proposed 30% levy property tax increase.”, said Copeland.

There are so many angles to this story.

Blackboard Fodder:  Teachers union members are among the most reliable Democrat voters out there.

But when every single bureaucracy that emjploys them uses this exact same tactic – using their jobs as bargaining chips, and never, ever touching the admin jobs that are the district’s greatest sacred cow – I have to wonder; don’t teachers ever get tired of it?

Do they all suffer from Stockholm Syndrome?

Mush, Sled Dogs!:  I’ve been a Saint Paul taxpayer for a quarter of an endless freaking century now.  Near as I can remember, the Saint Paul Public Schools have gotten every single levy increase they’ve ever asked for.   And yet the schools never get anything but worse.

The district is under the impression that the few remaining businesses and residents that actually pay taxes are like ATMs with no limit.

We are not.

In the immortal words of  Little Steven, “I’m getting tired of paying for sh*t I never get / Somebody promised justice, and they ain’t delivered yet”.

Subsidizing Failure:  And yet the schools get worse and worse.  The efflux of families, especially lower-income and immigrant families, to charter, parochial and suburban schools has ripped a minimum of 12% out of the district’s population (and many of the families are putting their money where their mouths are, and leaving the city).

And while some of the marquee schools – the ones that serve the white upper-middle class children of the more-connected government workers in Saint Anthony Park and Desnoyer and Highland are more or less adequate and make most of the right noises on command, the SPPS has among the worst achievement gaps in the US.

The Saint Paul Public School District is a failed venture.  Since it is a wholly-owned arm of the St. Paul DFL, it is in every way a symptom of the failure of one-party rule in Saint Paul. If it were a business, it would go out of business.  If it were a regulated business, it would be shut down by the government.  If it were a charter school, the Department of Education would padlock it and MN2020 would wrinkle its organization nose and write a snarky “white paper” on what a crappy idea it was.

But Superintendent Silva and the School Board – loyal DFLers all – are doing what they do every time the levy comes up; holding guns to the teachers’ heads, and saying “pay up or the teachers get it”.

Call it “Valeria’s Choice”.

The people of Saint Paul need to send our worthless, incompetent school district a message; do a better job, or (heh) get out of the way and give the job to someone who can.

The last round of Education Minnesota (the state’s biggest teachers’ union) TV ads includes one with an older guy (I can’t find the video online – perhaps EdMinn knows we’re lurking?) saying – paraphrasing closely here:

I support education.  Even though my kids aren’t in school anymore.  Even if I don’t have a lot of money for other things…this state built a great education system because people sacrificed…!

That’s a pretty slinky bit of rhetoric, there.  Ingeniously manipulative.

Of course, the public school systems have never had more money – the Republicans have added plenty of money over the past two years, by the way, although with what result I can’t tell, and either can anyone else.  And we do no have a great education system, not anymore.  We have an adequate one, very good in some places, rotten to the core in others.

But what EdMinn is asking is for you, Joe Schlub Public, is to dig deep and sacrifice, for…

…for what?

For better schools?

The Teachers Union has very little to do with how your kids are actually educated.  That’s between you and your school board.  No, the teachers union pretty much exists to protect teachers from capricious firing and lousy work conditions (not a bad thing in and of itself) and keep adding to, or at least prevent subtraction from, the pay and benefits the unions have already exacted from the politicians they helped elect in the first  place.  They don’t write curricula.  They don’t set education policy (directly).

What the ad is really telling Minnesotans is “we need you to sacrifice – like, work until you’re 70 – so that we can keep retiring with near-full-pay at 50”.

So pony up, all you lazy private sector serfs!  Er, taxpayers!

As I started writing on Monday, I went to “Won’t Back Down” over the weekend.  I was literally too tired to finish the post on Sunday – and Monday and yesterday, things got just a little bit crazy.

As I noted at the time, I generally hate teacher movies.  I’m a teacher’s kid, grandkid, older brother and, for that matter, a former teacher, more or less, myself.

But more than either of those, school choice is a hot topic for me, since the Saint Paul Public Schools ranged between worthless and toxic to my children.  So while I’m not big into “heroic teacher” fable films, I’m more than ready for a movie about school choice.

Anyway – I saw the trailer for Won’t Back Down a few weeks back, and I thought I more or less figured it out.  The trailer featured…:

• The Magic Protected Classes:  you know the drill.  The wise old black matron is always the wisest person in the movie, except for Morgan Freeman.  Every single mother oozes dignity.  White middle-class people are impacted and defective.
• A Cartoonish Enemy:  a facetless, single-dimension kick toy for all that is wrong in the school in quextion.  Usually localized, usually beyond any of the locals’ control.
• A Sympathetic but challenging love interest: usually improbably virtuous.
• Some Cartoonish Side-Villains:  The husband, or ex-husband, or (white male) boss of any of the protagonists is usually fair game. .
• A Heart-Warming Denouement:  There is usually a triumphant final scene, usually in the school gym.

And all of these button-pushing cliches are present in heaping portion in Won’t Back Down.  And it’d be easy to write the movie off there.

And it’d be a huge mistake – because woven in and among the “Teacher Movie” cliches is a really excellent movie and, perhaps more importantly, a movie that makes a fairly honest accounting of a very complex issue.

This movie is complicated.   And that’s a good thing.

The Magic PC People

The movie’s marquee protagonist, an overextended but supernaturally cute single-mom bartender and car-saleswoman played by Maggie Gyllenhall, chews on the scenery like Phil Niekro attacking a can of Skoal.  Rebuffed by a clock-punching principal when trying to get a better teacher for her dyslexic daughter at her run-down failing school, I half expected to see the Spice Girls jump out and start dancing as she hammered out her big applause line (“You know those women who lift cars off their children? They’ve got nothing on me!”) like a steam press stamping out door panels.  Improbably, the only scene where Gyllenhall doesn’t feel like she’s trying to orate is the one where her character is, well, trying to orate – speaking at a rally of parents she and her plucky teaching compatriot managed to organize.  Suddenly, she’s subdued.  Go figure.

We’ve seen this character before – Julia Roberts played the same lady in “Erin Brockovich”, and did it a whole lot more believably.    Gyllenhall’s most effectve scene – when she and her daughter learn they’ve been passed over for a seat at a charter school – is the only one where she says absolutely nothing.   The camera lingers on the two as they stare, dazed, as the focus swirls about them in a brilliantly innovative bit of cinematography that, along with Gyllenhall’s silent face, says more than the script possibly could have.

Viola Davis, on the other hand, playing a teacher with a crumbling marriage and a creeping case of professional burnout, is brilliant.  Her part is tailor-made to be turned into a tired cliche.  Her marriage (to Lance Reddick) is failing fast, and in the movie’s first scenes, it’s hard to tell which of the burned-out teachers is going to be the movie’s real villain.  Davis – with a couple of Tony awards and an Oscar nomination under her belt – plays a role that is historically liable to drift into melodrama – but plays it with nuance and style, and all of the subtlety that Gyllenhall lacks.

The Enemy

The bad guy in “teacher movies” is usually a cartoon.  And that’s usually not the worst part.

“The Enemy” in teacher movies is generally one of two things; an administration motivated by some melodramatic, impersonal inertial brought about either by some personal perfidy (sort of the education versions of John Lithgow’s character in “Footloose”) or some generalized social ill that’s beyond anyone’s human control.  The antagonist is, thus, either an easily-dismissed cartoon or some pathology so big that no real person – only “the system” is to blame.

The enemy in Won’t Back Down is a little bit of both.  Gyllenhall’s daughter’s teacher is a bovine, burned-out waste, a woman punching the clock until her pension kicks in (who only seems like a caricature if you haven’t had kids in the public schools lately), who is protected by the teacher’s union.

Now, teachers’ unions have been up in arms over Won’t Back Down, which is just further evidence that many of ’em shouldn’t be teaching your kids without supervision.  The movie presented as balanced a picture of unions as I can recall in a recent move; no less than three major characters – the “Sympathetic But Challenging Love Interest”, the Greasy Unsympathetic White Guy who runs the union, and his organizer, filling the “Enemy With A Heart Of Gold” role (played by Holly Hunter) testify more or less eloquently on why we have unions and why they can be a very good thing.  I doubt I’ve ever seen a movie ever spell out the positive case for teachers unions, at least on an idealistic level.

The movie is fair, but it doesn’t chicken out; ideals notwithstanding, the unions fight dirty to try to keep the parents from taking over and converting the school to a non-union charter school.

As to side-villains?  That was a huge surprise; the dissolution of Viola Davis’ character’s marriage, in a lesser movie, would give it a cheesy side-villain.  It seems the movie is setting Reddick’s character – a black yuppie who builds model World War 2 fighter planes for a hobby – up to be that venal little distraction.  Again, it doesn’t take the easy way out.

The Big Finish

These movies always end with the big finish – the math meet, the writing context, the basketball game, the ultimate court hearing, whatever.  In this case, it’s the big Pittsburgh School Board meeting where the board votes on the proposal to (near as I can tell) pull the school out of the public system and become a self-governed charter school.

I won’t spoil it – not that you can’t probably figure it out yourself – although I will point out (pursuant to the “Magic Protected Classes” part of the formula), that the wise black and elderly female Jewish vote does unite against the clenched WASP contingent in the final vote.  Which is pretty much de rigeur these days.

At any rate – the movie is not immune from the ravages of the Hollywood formula.  Somehow – more or less miraculously, I think – they managed include the better part of a pretty good, sometimes challenging movie in there.  It’s the first significant move I’ve seen to address school choice – and in between the odd bits of Hollywood, it did a decent job, without oversimplifying (at least in Hollywood terms, and the inevitable shorthand that has to go into fitting a topic as old as the hills, and which has been in the headlines for a couple of decades now, into two hours.

I went to “Won’t Back Down” over the weekend.

I’ll come back to that.

———-

A couple of bits of background before we get to the review:

I’m A Teacher’s Kid:  My dad and my mother’s parents were all teachers.  So’s my sister, more or less.  I’m not ignorant of what a teacher’s life is like.  Or was like, really, years ago and in a much smaller place beset by a level of common sense that’d be subject to Department of Justice litigation today.

I Hate “Teacher” Movies:  Almost always, anyway.  They always, always, inevitably seem to follow a template; plucky teacher dumped into failing school by uncaring system seems group of struggling, troubled or apathetic kids – usually minorities – and has an idea on how to each ’em.  Uncaring system tries to beat plucky teacher down.  Plucky teacher tries, but soon teeters on the brink of losing the fight – until some event gives them a blinding flash of epiphany, leading them to the solution that leaves the uncaring system nodding its head in sage belief and the struggling, troubled or apathetic kids changed forever, and the plucky teacher filled with that saintly glow of superhuman accomplishment.  The movies – whether Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, Mr. Hoilland’s Opus or any of a slew of others (heck, even School of Rock) – are all different and yet, it seems, all the same; they pound the problems of not just teaching kids, but of teaching scads of different kids, into a too-cheap-and-easy Hollywood resolution.

They make my skin crawl.   In part because – oh, one more thing…

I’ve Had My Own Battles With The School System:  We’ll come back to that one.

———-

I saw the trailer for Won’t Back Down, and I pretty much figured it out.  I thought I spotted the usually 21st Century Hollywood film story crutches:

• The Magic Protected Classes:  Whether the “Magic Negro” (coined by David Ehrenstein in the LATimes in 2007) – the preternaturally wise Afro-American plot premise perfected by Morgan Freeman – or the newer crutch, the Magic Single Mother, the trailers set off the warning sirens;  this was going to be a PC sacred cattle crossing.
• A Cartoonish Enemy:  Hollywood is left of center.  And so they’ve had to engage in some political gymnastics to go after that leftest-of-center institution, public education, over the years.  They way they’ve done this, traditionally, is to portray the parts of public education that are failing as isolated blocs of misery – usually as symptoms of urban decay.  The failed system is local; the overall idea never gets touched.
• Some Cartoonish Side-Villains:  One of the protagonists’ marriages fail.  When marriages fail in Hollywood movies, the non-protagonist’s motivations and reactions usually come off a little like the title character in the Dixie Chicks’ classic sociological examination “Goodbye Earl”.
• A Heart-Warming Denouement:  There is usually a triumphant final scene, usually in the school gym.

But this movie had one thing that no other movie in the genre had;  it was the trailer for the first movie I’ve seen to try to tackle School Choice as anything but a cartoon.

So how did it do?

More tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

President Obama plans to criticize Paul Ryan’s education budget plan.

The criticism would be more effective if the President could point to the superiority of the Democrat budget proposal on education. If the Democrats HAD a budget proposal.

At times, doing something can be worse than doing nothing. Setting the national budget isn’t one of those times, Mr. President.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Unless your interests are better served by letting things collapse and convincing the dumb people that it was Bush’s fault anyway.

The folks at the U of M-Duluth might be glad the whole “flood” thing happened.  It’ll draw attention away from their latest squandering of taxpayer money – to draw attention to white privilege:

The University of Minnesota – Duluth (UMD) is now sponsoring an ad-campaign designed to achieve “racial justice” by raising awareness of “white privilege.”

The project disseminates its message, that “society was setup for us [whites]” and as such is “unfair,” through an aggressive campaign of online videos, billboards, and lectures. The ads feature a number of Caucasians confessing their guilt for the supposed “privilege” that comes along with their fair features.

That’s right, UMD.  I’m “sorry” my anscestors were born in an ethnic group native to nations that subscribed to a worldview that exalted the individual and found no moral conundrum with the creation of individual wealth (outside of royalty).  I’m sorry – no scare quotes – that other societies on this planet didn’t have such a philosophy, and thus failed to thrive, and either exploited their own people or were unable to protect their people from being shanghaied and sold into slavery by their neighbors.

Beyond that?  Sorry that my culture fought the bloodiest war in its history to resolve – partially and imperfectly – the issue.

Sorry that, notwithstanding that racism is one of the maze of “We-isms” that every single human being on earth, from David Duke to Nina Totenberg, has, and that my culture has done more than any other significant cutlure on earth to try to overcome that natural human trait.

Please forgive me, asshole.

Campus Reform asks you…:

Call the school and voice your opinion at (218) 726-7106 or send an e-mail to chan@d.umn.edu. Tell them Campus Reform sent you.

The self-titled Un-Fair Campaign, is sponsored and supported by the University of Minnesota – Duluth, along with several liberal organizations including the NAACP, YWCA, and The League of Woman Voters.

And this is your tax dollar at work.

And it’s part of an ongoing pattern at UMD:

Documents obtained exclusively by Campus Reform this week, through a public records request, however, show that students on campus have expressed outrage over the administration’s support of the racially-charged campaign.

One student, whose identity was redacted in the documents released by UMD, e-mailed Chancellor Black expressing his discontent, writing that the Un-fair campaign “is in fact UNFAIR.”

The student proceeded to write: “It may be drawing awareness to factors that we might otherwise not pay attention to, but it’s creating a gap between people. It’s only making people more racist on both sides.”

Campus Reform contacted the school seeking further comment, but was unable to reach a spokesperson for comment by the time of publication.

Perhaps one white Duluthian had the right idea:

Berlin, the Lake Superior Zoo's polar bear, freed by the flood, but not for long enough to escape the madhouse that is Duluth.

The primary Democrat message this year seems to be to try to make every possible Democrat constituency feel like the most noble-possible victim.

We’ve got the “war on women”, “war on immigrants”, “war on over-charged college students”…

…and now, the “war” on those most-benighted victims in our society, teachers, according to this bit by Jeff Kolnick of the university formerly known as Mankato State U of M Marshall.

He tees it up with the story of his friend, a teacher, who is busy…

…surviv[ing] furlough days that cut short his pay as well as the education of his students to save money in tax-starved California.

There’s your first tip-off that our writer is approaching this first and foremost from the left; California is hardly tax-starved.  Cali is indeed a bounty of taxation – it’s why business is leaving the state as fast as it can move.

No. California isn’t tax-starved.  It’s spending-addled.

And after all this service to his community, instead of receiving praise and thanks he has a target on his back. Conservative forces in America have made public school teachers public enemy No. 1: If our schools are failing, blame the teachers. If our states are broke, it is the pensions of the greedy teachers. You name the problem and teachers are the cause.

Well, no.

Teachers, as individuals, aren’t the problem.

It’s the way they, their academy, and especially their public employees’  union and the government that, in California, that union pretty much controls have committed the state to pay for teachers and their (very very early) retirement first, and worry about balanced budgets second if at all, that are.

But Mr. Kolnick doesn’t seem to be interested in economics:

I am sick of it…

…conservative forces blame public school teachers for everything. A colleague of mine related a story to me about a person who blamed public school teachers for failing our students. The person complained that Minneapolis and St. Paul schools failed young people of color and he put the blame squarely on teachers and teacher-preparation programs.

Mr. Kolnick is listed as a history professor at the school formerly known as Marshall.  I bring that up because I’m trying to imagine what would happen if one of his students brought him a paper that started “A friend of mine says that The Jews were behind 9/11.  This paper will demand accountability from The Jews”.  I’m going to guess Kolnick’d send it back for a rewrite – right?

“Conservatives hate teachers because someone that my teacher friend placed as a conservative had an irrational complaint?”

Fed up with this garbage, my friend responded that his kids got a first-rate education in the Edina public schools with teachers who had union contracts and graduated from the same teacher-prep programs as the teachers in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts.

Let’s stop blaming the teachers and think about public education in terms of the evidence.

Yes, let’s indeed.

Because identical licensing notwithstanding, Minneapolis and Saint Paul graduate less than 3/5 of their students, and a minority of black, Latino and Native American students.  Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families – who may be personally conservative, but currently vote overwhelmingly DFL – are deserting the city schools, decamping for charter schools and, via open enrollment, the suburbs.

And these are districts that are at the front of the pack for per-student funding, year in, year out.

And I’d suggest that if Mr. Kolnick wants to wave the various teachers’ paper credentials and bureaucratic certifications in those parents’ faces, he not do it while standing on 50th Street or Afton Road, in front of those parent’s cars, as they head to Edina and Woodbury.

But Mr. Kolnick said we needed to make this argument about “evidence”.   What’s his?

The attack on teachers is not about educating our young people. It is about ending public education and collective bargaining. It is about taking public dollars from public institutions and turning them over to for-profit corporations.

So Mr. Kolnick’s “evidence” is a paragraph of Democrat cant about unions.

There is no “attack on teachers”, there is a reasonable questioning whether our society can survive by forcing most of us to work until we’re 75 so that teachers – to say nothing of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, special ed coordinators, and the other throngs of public employees that work in the system but never set foot in front of a classroom –  can retire at 55.

And since Mr. Kolnick asks; since when is collective bargaining “about education?”  For that matter, can you honestly say that the current public education system – not teachers, individually or as a group, but the institution, the entire educational/industrial complex – is “about education?”

In 1995, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post calling for the privatization of the public school system. Now almost 20 years later, we are on the verge of seeing his ideas become a reality…In December 2005, a little less than a year before he died, Friedman wrote of an opportunity to privatize public schools in New Orleans after the tragedy of Katrina. He called for a radical reform of schools because they failed the students. “New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government”.

OK.

So?

How is this, in and of itself, either wrong or, for that matter, an “attack on teachers?”

The sole purpose of public educational institutions is to educate. They may not be perfect, but they have only one goal.

And that’s at best a platitude, at worst a statement of complete ignorance.  Public schools have always had ulterior motives; “creating better citizens” (free of all those radical immigrant ideas) in the 1800s, or creating a society that reflects the goals of the educational academy today (diversity, multiculturalism)…

…and, above all, to serve as a big interest group and voting bloc, to gain and hold control of the government apparatus that feeds it.

Which is not a knock on teachers as individuals; lest Mr. Kolnick dive further into stereotype, my father, two grandparents and my sister are teachers.

But teachers as an institution demand that I work until I’m 75 so that they can retire at 55 – and vote relentlessly liberal to enforce it – and on the other hand work for a system that, for many of is, is an abject failure, whatever the individual teachers’ personal professional merits.

Do we really want to let corporations be responsible for teaching our young people? Come on, let’s get real.

“Come on, let’s get real”.

It’s always a treat to debate a classical Socratic logician.

Let me ask this:  if we presume a teacher is in fact capable, what difference does it make who pays them – a corporation, or a government body?

And if you can honestly answer that question in terms that aren’t foremost about defending the defined benefit pension, you’ll be doing better than Mr. Kolnick, so far.

Jeff Kolnick is an associate professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University.

Submitted without comment.

It’s been my theory for a few years now that there are things young “progressives” in liberal cesspools like Madison, Macalester and the U of M never really learn.

One of them is how to debate; since they all go straight from high school through their college years with no real challenges to their lefty preconceptions, they seem to have the debating skills of junior high kids.

Another?  How to take a hit gracefully.  When you have no concept of what it means not to be in power, you have no idea what even the most minimal adversity – losing a political campaign – feels like.

And you react like these icons of the progressive <i>id</i>:

I’ve met libs like “Thistle Petterson” in Saint Paul; so full of intellectual entitlement they can’t comprehend, much less live with, the notion that they don’t own the world politically.

I won’t say this video makes the whoooole thing worthwhile – but it is a nice mental after-dinner mint.

I’ve said it over and over – and every day of new evidence confirms it more; the DFL’s strategy seems to be “say whatever we want to (knowing that the media will never, ever contradict us in public, at least not in a way that the majority of voters will ever see or hear),  regardless of accuracy or truth, to sway the ill-informed, the ignorant, and the not-so-bright.  Because their votes (and whatever else we can jam through the polls) count just as much as the votes of the smart and informed people”.

Case in point:  Education Minnesota president t Tom Dooher’s statement to the media yesterday as the session drew to a close; I’ve added emphasis:

“The 2012 Legislature showed that Minnesotans will have a clear choice in November between leaders who truly value public education and those who view our classrooms as places for political games.

“The Republican majority introduced more than 20 bills targeting public education and educators this year. None of them responsibly addressed the most pressing needs of our students, including repaying the state’s $2 billion IOU to its schools, closing the achievement gap and developing a sustainable funding system for the future.

It’s a lie, of course.

The GOP did, in fact, propose and pass a bill that would have accelerated the repayment of the shift.   Governor Fauntelroy vetoed it.

This, really, shows several things:

The DFL’s campaign – say whatever it takes to win in November, truth be damned, is well underway.  The unions and Alliance for a Better Minnesota will soon be buying up millions in airtime to saturate this state with ads saying “The GOP hates kids”.  Mark my words.

Your children are the DFL’s pawns.  To the extent that the shift actually harms children (it really doesn’t; it inconveniences administrations), the DFL showed this session that they’d rather exploit them in November than pay for their education today.

This is what happens when you let “Right To Work” die in committee.  How wonderful would it have been to have every conservative, Republican member of EdMinn walk of the union out en masse at this hypocritical slander?   Or if the 42% of union members who do vote Republican tell their leadership “uh, not so fast” when the unions spend 95% of their dues on Democrats?

Apparently some genius in the majority caucus figured if they backed off on Right to Work, the unions would play fair this election.

This is politics in Minnesota today; one party does the best it can for a better Minnesota; the other does whatever it can to retain power, truth and ethics be damned.

Like most nerds, I read “xkcd” pretty religiously.

And last Monday’s panel was one of the funniest ever – “Every Major’s Terrible”.  Go ahead, sing it to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General” (or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, if that’s what you know).  Click on it to go to the original site, if my print is too small.

I love it.

Of course, cartoonist Randall Munroe is not only a brilliant cartoonist (I mean, the guy gives a stick figure more personality than a page full of Ken Weiner’s R-Crumb-derivative visual overemoting does) – but he’s a math snob.  HIs strip constantly and positively ooozes contempt for humanities and liberal arts majors.

Which is fine – everyone brings their prejudices to the table.  And as we creep up toward the inevitable deflation of the education bubble, Munroe’s particular peccadillo is hardly rare; you see it in blogs and hear it on talk shows constantly; “it makes no sense to go deeply into debt to get an arts/humanities/social sciences degree that will never earn you a living.”

The response to that statement, really, is a series of questions:

“Does it ever make sense to go into debt for any degree?”  Sure, potentially; it depends on how much debt, and what the return on that investment actually is.  $50K in debt for a biomedical engineering degree that will have the student earning six figures not too long after graduation?  Go for it.

How about $50K for a BA in Music or $10K for a degree in Computer Science, or $100K to go through eight years of school for a PhD in Folklore?  Seems stupid, doesn’t it?

Well, it really depends on two more questions:  What is “Education”, and what is “Return on Investment”?

Let’s look at both of ’em.

What is “Education”?  Munroe has the same conceit most academics have; your degree defines you.

Back in college, I had a friend – a business major – who used to sneer at my English major (without, by the way, any intention of becoming an English teacher or professor).  “Hah, Berg”, he used to say.  “I’ll be making big money right out of college, and you’ll be working in a bowling alley”.

He wasn’t much of a “friend”, come to think of it.

25 years on?  He’s a customer service manager for a health insurance company – which is, to be fair, something for which a BA in Business is perfectly adequate preparation.  Not sure how happy he is .  I design software – something for which a BA in English was no preparation whatsoever?

In and of itself, no.  But in my degree – and my related minors in German and History – I started polishing up my ability to think – to look at a problem and tear it down into logical components.  Which was a no-brainer when it came to being a reporter and producer.  And which paved my way to taking those skills and break down the problem of switching into technical writing, and then User Experience work.

I’m not the only one, of course.  The person with the $100K in debt for a PhD in Folklore?  That person was one of my mentors in my current career.  He doesn’t do much work in folklore, but he has pretty much paid off those student loans with a bunch left over – so if “money” and “respect in a non-academic field” are valid measures, this guy has blown the lid off the gauge.

The guy with the music degree? Computer programmer, very talented, self-taught in the field, paid very well, and enjoys the hell out of his career.

So if you view “Education” as “preparation for a job”, then there are definitely better degrees than Arts and Humanities.  If you view it as “learning how to think”, then your answer may be different…

….and lead you to a different question altogether; “are there cheaper ways to learn to “think” than accruing $30-100K in debt”?    I was lucky enough to get out of college without significant debt.  My kids won’t be so lucky.  Should they treat education as a trade school?

That – not “should I major in English or Computer Science” – is the tough question.

Well, that and…

How Do You Define “Return On Investment” – Now, I’m a little biased.  My “investment”, at least financially, paid for itself at my first job, financially.

How about the computer science major with the fairly minuscule debt who left college directly into an upper-middle-class income?

Well, he was pretty miserable.  Hated it.  Loved the money, of course, but hated the field.  Made good money, but was bored out of his mind.  Made up for it by getting into a relationship that led to a marriage that is now (just between you and I) pretty miserable and expensive.  His education returned a pretty fair financial investment, but almost nothing in terms of the whole “who I am and what I really think I should do in this world” bit, which is a question whose interest, over the years, adds up just as surely as interest on student loans or bills that pile up because you don’t have the education to get a better job.

None of which is to say, of course, that this world doesn’t have blissfully happy electrical engineers, or anthropology majors walking around with six figures in debt and prescriptions for prozac besides.

But the most important questions about education today, as we near the peak of the education bubble, really are…:

1. Does it make you a better person, as an individual, a provider for yourself and any future family, and member of our society?
2. Does it do it at a cost that will, for years, drag you down as an individual, a provider and member of society?
3. What balance works for you?

Which is a hell of a question to ask people when they’re 18 years old.

I will, of course, be humming “Every Major’s Terrible” all day.

The Strib has a bright idea about dealing with the Student Loan Crisis.

Joe Doakes from Como Park has a brighter one:

Instead of subsidizing the interest rate on student loans, just give ‘em the money outright. Typical Star Tribune solution.

Left unspoken is the fact the federal government took over student loans as part of Obamacare. Yes, the interest on student loans that is killing our young people’s futures was intentionally factored in to help maintain the illusion that Obamacare wasn’t a budget-buster. That’s also why student loans remain non-dischargeable in bankruptcy . . . the government needs that money to pay for Obamacare.

Also left unspoken are the obvious free-market alternative – let interest rates float to the market level and thereby help students decide on the real cost of college – along with the pernicious effect of “free money” causing skyrocketing education costs.

This is Liberal thinking at its worst – a bad idea supposed to be fixed by another bad idea. Positive feedback loop, anyone?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Now, I can see the Strib taking two approaches here:

1. Taking a step back and realizing the wisdom of the market’s – and Joe’s – idea, and…
2. Doubling down on socialism – accompanied by a smarmy Steve Sack cartoon ridiculing the notion of the market in education.

Any bets?

Charter School parents:  brace yourselves.  The teachers unions and their minions in academia and the non-profit world are getting ready for another onslaught against your kids’ lifeboats.

MPR runs R a report saying charter schools are “charter schools more segregated, underperforming” compared to the factory schools:

The Twin Cities area’s 30,000 charter school students score 7.5 percentage points lower on math testing and 4.4 percent lower on reading tests than students at traditional public schools, according to the report from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty.

“If you look at the total group, they’re underperforming the public schools significantly and a lot of the ones who are serving the poorest kids are not only doing very badly, but not lasting very long,” said Myron Orfield, the institute’s director.

For starters – the presence of Myron Orfield means the report is a political, not legal or academic, effort.

But I’ll ask them the same questions I do every single time these sorts of “studies” come up:  did the “study” control for the fact that so many students, especially in high school come to charter schools after failing, and being utterly failed, at the traditional factory schools?

Did it compare their performance at their traditional and charter schools?

Diid the “study” attempt to show aggregate change of individual students over time as they transitioned from public to charter schools?

Eugene Piccolo of the MInnesota Association of Charter Schools agrees:

Pioccolo would like to see more emphasis on studying the progress individual students make as they navigate their way through a charter school education.

Here’s the other bit where these “studies” confuse cause and effect:

The U of M’s report also shows charter schools are becoming more segregated.

“There’s a continual rapid growth of charter schools and the single-race white charter schools are growing fast but they’re all continuing to grow very fast,” Orfield said.

That’s just inflammatory stupidity.

There is no such thing as a “single-race white charter school”.  Oh, a charter school in Glenwood will likely be mostly white, but the real growth is in the mostly-minority charter schools in the inner city; the vast majority of charter schools students in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are black, Asian, Latino or Native American.

And since people have to make an effort to go to a charter school – they aren’t assigned by the school district – it’s not a matter of anyone’s official discrimination; it’s because the parents are disgusted with the fourth rate education they get from Myron Orfiield’s buddies in the educational-industrial complex.

These “studies” are worthless for purposes of assessing education – they don’t pretend to do anything more than tie average test scores to buildings.

What they are is the opening shots in the DFL/media/union (pardon the redundancy) effort to try to roll back school choice.

So if you’re a black, asian, latino or native parent in the Twin Cities – why the hell do you keep voting DFL?   All they want to do is stuff your kids back into their public schools and shut them, and you, up.

They and their minions are a gun pointed at your kids’ futures.

 Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network goes on the road – to the Restoring Excellence in Education forum at Saint Cloud State!

Ed and I will be there from 1-3, with a variety of guests talking about how, exactly, we fix our system of education.

And of course, don’t forget…:

• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream) .
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Ed and I are #2 – Brad is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

If you’re in Saint Cloud tomorrow, join Ed and me as we broadcast from the Restoring Excellence in Education forum at Saint Cloud State.

And if you can’t make it to St. Cloud – well, that’s why we’re broadcasting live!

More tomorrow.

The NARN will be occupying St. Cloud State this Saturday from 1-3PM for the Restoring Excellence In Education forum.

The forum will deal with the need for, and avenuies of, reform for primary/secondary and higher education.

Ed and I will join our friend, former radio colleague, talk show host, professor and state Rep. King Banaian and an array of other great guests on the subject “Why is the education system broken, and how do we fix it?”

It’s a hot topic for most of us.

Hope to see you there.  If not, tune in!

Democrats and the DFL have been trying to kill off charter schools ever since the idea hatched in Minnesota in the late eighties.

This effort has taken so many forms:

• The DFL placed bizarre restrictions on charter schools’ ability to bond for buildings, forcing them to either lease cheap commercial space or let bonds at pricy, junky rates.
• Attempted to slash the lease aid that charter schools do get..
• Attempts, even as the number of families fleeing the inner cities’ wretched, failing public schools explode, to cap the number of charter schools (opposed on a straight ticket by the GOP.
• Pelt charter schools with yappy harassment.

Now, as part of trying to balance the budget, the GOP in the Legislature “borrowed” money “from the schools” – i.e., pushed back state payments to the schools. Which is an inconvenience to public schools – and a brutal smack to many charter schools.

It was too much for on charter – General John Vessey School in Inver Grove Heights, which closed after Christmas break.  I’m familiar with Vessey – whose model was to bring a military-style education focusing on discipline, hard work and self-respect (as opposed to self-esteem) to students, some of whom commuted from Monticello and Taylor’s Falls to attend.  The school will be sorely missed.

But the closure prompted one “Alec”, writin at the Minnesota Progressive Project, to have an attack of unjustified self-righteousness:

The obvious and inevitable result happened again as Vessey Leadership Academy Secondary School closed its doors unexpectedly over the winter break.

As a Charter that leased their facilities, Vessey has no collateral to secure a loan. A loan they needed because the state was withholding 40% of their funds.

Wow. That sounds like a great argument to allow charter school boards the same financial flexibility that district boards have to bond for buildings?  And most of the other restrictions on charters?

No worries – if “Alec” suggested that at a DFL meeting, he’d have his giblets removed and stuffed into his chest cavity.

Which is a shame – for the DFL.  Because charter schools’ biggest proponents are the thousands of traditional DFL constituents –  latino, asian and especially afro-American families – in the cities.  It’s an un-tapped opportunity for the GOP.

Anyway, “Alec”, great to see you’re suddenly a “charter school supporter”. It’d be about the first positive thing anyone on MPP has ever said about charter schools…

…presuming you have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.

We’ll see,  huh?

Matthew Torgerson – who claims to be a lawyer, I think – claims that “15% of Minnesota GOP legislators have a college degree”.

Here’s one of several tweets on the subject:

Now, Torgerson, like many DFLers, confuses “education” with “schooling” – but beyond that, he’s utterly wrong.

Here are the notes on legislators’ education, taken from the Senate and House bio pages, broken down by district, chamber, party, legislator and level of education.

Dist	Chamber	Name	Party 	BA
1	Sen 	Stumpf	D	MPA
1	A	Fabian	R	BA
1	B	Kiel	R	 -
2	Sen 	Skoe	D	BA
2	A	Eken	D	BA
2	B	Hancock	R	BA
3	Sen 	Saxhaug	D	BA
3	A	Anzelc	D	BS
3	B	Mcelfatrick	R	RN
4	Sen 	Carlson	R	BS
4	A	Persell	D	MA?
4	B	Howes	R	 -
5	Sen 	Tomassoni	D	BS
5	A	Rukavina	D	BA
5	B	Melin	D	JD
6	Sen 	Bakk	D	BA
6	A	Dill	D	 -
6	B	Murphy	D	BA
7	Sen 	Reinert	D	MS
7	A	Huntley	D	PhD
7	B	Gauthier	D	MS
8	Sen 	Loury	D	BA
8	A	Hilty	D	MA
8	B	Craford	R	BA
9	Sen 	Langseth	D	 -
9	A	Lanning	R	MS
9	B	Marquart	D	MS
10	Sen 	Hoffman, 	R	RN
10	A	Nornes	R	Cert?
10	B	Murdock	R	 -
11	Sen 	Ingebrigtsen	R	AA
11	A	Westrom	R	JD
11	B	Franson	R	BA
12	Sen 	Gazelka	R	BS
12	A	Ward	D	MA
12	B	LeMieur	R	 -
13	Sen 	Gimse	R	 -
13	A	Anderson	R	BA
13	B	Vogel	R	 -
14	Sen 	Fischbach	R	JD
14	A	O'Driscoll	R	BS
14	B	Hosch	D	MA
15	Sen 	Pederson J	R	MBA
15	A	Gottwalt	R	BA
15	B	Banaian	R	PhD
16	Sen 	Brown	R	BA
16	A	Erickson	R	BA
16	B	Kiffmeyer	R	RN
17	Sen 	Nienow	R	 -
17	A	Daudt	R	 -
17	B	Barrett	R	BS
18	Sen 	Newman	R	 -
18	A	Shimanski	R	AS
18	B	Urdahl	R	BS
19	Sen 	Koch	R	BS
19	A	Anderson	R	BS
19	B	McDonald	R	AA
20	Sen 	Kubly	D	MD
20	A	Falk	D	BS
20	B	Koenen	D	AA
21	Sen 	Dahms	R	BS
21	A	Swedzinski	R	BS
21	B	Torkelson	R	BA
22	Sen 	Magnus	R	BS
22	A	Schomacker	R	MPS
22	B	Hamilton	R	 -
23	Sen 	Sheran	D	MS
23	A	Morrow	D	JD
23	B	Brynaert	D	MA
24	Sen 	Rosen	R	BS
24	A	Gunther	R	BS
24	B	Cornish	R	 -
25	Sen 	DeKruif	R	  -
25	A	Gruenhagen	R	ChFC, CLU
25	B	Woodard	R	MBA
26	Sen 	Parry	R	 -
26	A	Kath	D	MS
26	B	Fritz	D	LPN
27	Sen 	Sparks	D	BS
27	A	Murray	R	MBA
27	B	Poppe	D	MS
28	Sen 	Howes	R	BS
28	A	Kelly	R	BS
28	B	Drazkowski	R	M.Ed
29	Sen 	Senjem	R	MA
29	A	Quam	R	MS
30	B	Norton	D	BS
30	Sen 	Nelson	R	ME
30	A	Liebling	D	MS
30	B	Benson	R	MNA
31	Sen 	Miller	R	AAS
31	A	Pelowski	D	MS
31	B	Davids	R	BS
32	Sen 	Limmer	R	BA
32	A	Peppin	R	MBA
32	B	Zellers	R	BS
33	Sen 	Olson	R	BS
33	A	Smith	R	JD
33	B	Doepke	R	BA
34	Sen 	Ortman	R	JD
34	A	Leidiger	R	MA
34	B	Hoppe	R	BA
35	Sen 	Robling	R	 -
35	A	Beard	R	BA
35	B	Buesgens	R	BS
36	Sen 	Thompson	R	JD
36	A	Holberg	R	BA
36	B	Garofalo	R	BS
37	Sen 	Gerlach	R	MBA
37	A	Mack	R	BA
37	B	Bills	R	MA
38	Sen 	Daley	R	MBA
38	A	Anderson	R	BS
38	B	Wardkiw	R	JD
39	Sen 	Metzen	D	BA
39	A	Hansen	D	MS
39	B	Atkins	D	JD
40	Sen 	Hall	R	BA
40	A	Myhra	R	BA
40	B	Lenczewski	D	BA
41	Sen 	Michel	R	JD
41	A	Downey	R	MIS
41	B	Mazorol	R	JD
42	Sen 	Hann	R	BA
42	A	Stensrud	R	BA
42	B	Loon	R	BA
43	Sen 	Bonoff	D	BA
43	A	Anderson	R	BA
43	B	Benson	D	MA
44	Sen 	Latz	D	JD
44	A	Simon	D	JD
44	B	Winkler	D	JD
45	Sen 	Rest	D	MBA
45	A	Pederson	D	BS
45	B	Carlson	D	BS
46	Sen 	Eaton	D	RN
46	A	Nelson	D	 -
46	B	Hilstrom	D	JD
47	Sen 	Kruse	R	BA
47	A	Dittrich	D	BS
47	B	Hortman	D	JD
48	Sen 	Jungbauer	R	BA
48	A	Hackbarth	R	 -
48	B	Abeler	R	Doc Chiropractic
49	Sen 	Benson	R	MBA
49	A	Scott	R	Cert
49	B	Peterson	R	 -
50	Sen 	Goodwin	D	BA
50	A	Laine	D	MA
50	B	Knuth	D	MS
51	Sen 	Wolf	R	BA
51	A	Sanders	R	BA
51	B	Tillberry	D	MA
52	Sen 	Vandeveer	R	BS
52	A	Dettmer	R	MA
52	B	Dean	R	BA
53	Sen 	Chamberlain	R	BS
53	A	Runbeck	R	BA
53	B	McFarlane	R	AA
54	Sen 	Marty	D	BA
54	A	Greiling	D	MA
54	B	Scalze	D	 -
55	Sen 	Wiger	D	JD
55	A	Lillie	D	BS
55	B	Slawik	D	MPA
56	Sen 	Lillie	R	MPA
56	A	Lohmer	R	 -
56	B	Kieffer	R	BS
57	Sen 	Sieben	D	BS
57	A	Kriesel	R	 -
57	B	McNamara	R	BS
58	Sen 	Higgins	D	BS
58	A	Mullery	D	JD
58	B	Champioin	D	JD
59	Sen 		D
59	A	Loeffler	D	BA
59	B	Kahn	D	MPA
60	Sen 	Dibble	D	BA?
60	A	Greene	D	MBA
60	B	Hornstein	D	MA
61	Sen 	Hayden	D	BA
61	A	Clark	D	MPA
61	B	Hayden	D	BA
62	Sen 	Torres Ray	D	MPA
62	A	Davnie	D	M Ed
62	B	Wagenius	D	JD
63	Sen 	Kelash	D	MPA
63	A	Thissen	D	JD
63	B	Slocum	D	BA
64	Sen 	Cohen	D	JD
64	A	Murphy	D	MA
64	B	Paymar	D	MA
65	Sen 	Pappas	D	MPA
65	A	Moran	D	BS
65	B	Mariani	D	BA
66	Sen 	McGuire	D	MPA
66	A	Lesch	D	JD
66	B	Hausman	D	MA
67	Sen 	Harrington	D	MA
67	A	Mahoney	D	 -
67	B	Johnson	D	MA

Note that of 109 Republicans in the House and Senate, 91 have some sort of post-high school education,from certificates or RNs or AAs up through JDs and PhDs.  28 Republicans have graduate degrees – MA, MS, MEd, MBA, PhD, and so on – alone, to say nothing of the 51 BA and BS, plus a variety of RN (which may or may not be four-year degrees), AA, AS and certifications.

And of 18 who don’t list post-high-school education, 14 are listed as business owners – the rest are farmers or tradespeople…

…and, most importantly, all of them convinced a majoirty of the people in their district that they should be in the Legislature,which is the only “credential” that means jack.

We’ll see if Torgerson changes his “story”.

UPDATE:  Torgerson apparently believes 74 GOP legislators are lying about having degrees on the legislative bio pages.  He’s sticking his (koff koff) “story”.

UPDATE 2:  He’s now saying he spoke in “gest”, which is I think a way of saying “jest”.

At Hamline’s campus newspaper, Pravda On Snelling, student writer Zachary Knudson notes that notwithstanding the fact that his paper had reported that Tom Emmer had been hired, he had not.   It was an un-offer, Winston.  It never happened.

OK, the paper is actually called The Oracle, but you get the picture.

Anyway, Knudson’s piece tidies up some of the narrative loose ends of the Emmer flap – and leaves a huge, red, “McCarthyite” siren blazing.  Knudson quotes Professor David “Tailgunner Dave” Schultz:

Schultz said that after staff began hearing about the possibility of Emmer joining the Hamline faculty, e-mails were drafted by some staff members to be sent to administration outlining their concerns over the hiring of Emmer.

Schultz said that the faculty was concerned for two major reasons, including whether the political positions Emmer holds were incompatible with the university’s mission, specifically his stance on same-sex marriage.

“Two major reasons?”  What was the other?

As to same-sex marriage?  For starters, Emmer’s position on the issue is in line with that of well over half of Minnesotans, including, I suspect, a majority of Democrat voters.  Is it Hamline’s position that only people who believe in the overthrow of traditional marriage may teach at Hamline?

Given that same sex marriage is one of those “Things White People Like” – blacks and latinos are much more traditionally-minded on marriage than us crackers are – does that mean that the University must screen double-dog hard to get only politically pure black and latino faculty? Or do black and latino faculty get a pass on this issue?  How about the “students of color” – do they get a pass, or are they at Hamline to be re-educated?

And here’s the clinker; Emmer didn’t talk about gay marriage during the governor’s race.  Not at all.  Indeed, one of the reasons I supported him was because of an appearance on the NARN at the State Fair in 2009; when someone from the audience asked him what he thought about gay marriage, Emmer responded instantly “I don’t care – this race is about jobs and spending”. Only the DFL ” Alliance For A “Better” Minnesota” focused on gay marriage during the race; Emmer stayed focused on the economy.  And he may have left a lot of pro-tradtional marriage swing voters on the table – maybe enough to cost the election.

So what we have here is Hamline University essentially admitting that they have a McCarthyite screening process for political correctness; a faculty veto on faculty that represent, in fact, any kind of ideological diversity.