I caught this in the paper – Hamline University’s president, Linda Hanson, declares that “Despite Emmer fiasco, Hamline embraces diversity“.

This should be interesting:

Given recent events involving former gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer and Hamline University, I would like to bring perspective to the university’s continuous identity with the core values of our founders, the early Methodists of Minnesota, who envisioned Hamline as a place to educate citizens for lives of civic responsibility and service in an environment of open inquiry, critical thinking, civil discourse and high ethical standards.

Those remain our core values, lived out every day in our classrooms, on our campus, and in the business and civic community.

With an asterisk.  Always, always the asterisk; “unless it’s a conservative”.

Regretfully, we acknowledge that our process in our dealings with Mr. Emmer did not rise to the standards that Hamline University upholds as an institution. We take responsibility for that and do not take our shortcoming lightly.

“We take responsibility for that?”

How?

In what way do you or your “university” take “responsibility” for what happened?

Go ahead – read the entire op-ed.  There is not one more mention of the Emmer flap.  (Emmer is mentioned in the context of a gubernatorial debate that Hamline hosted).

Here is the fact, President Hanson; your university hired (this seems to be clear; the deal was done, according to my sources) Tom Emmer, a conservative Republican and former GOP candidate for governor.

A pack of pristinely-liberal professors (according to some sources), including (according to some more sources) Professor David Schultz, your university’s answer to Larry Jacobs and contender for Jacobs’ throne  as “the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media”, came to your office and demanded that the school not besmirch its faculty – who, to this observer and collector of stories, seem to fit Alan Dershowitz’ description of “diversity” in the Harvard Law School faculty, “people in skirts or with different-colored skin who think exactly the same” – laid down the PC law on you.  You and your administration buckled to what was nothing more than a case of intellectual cleansing.

And so when you write, apparently with a straight face…:

This does not, however, define or change the foundation upon which Hamline was established and has thrived for 157 years: one of diversity, open debate and the expression of divergent points of view.

…I, and many of your students and alumni who’ve written me over the years, and people who are familiar with your school’s record for priggish, selective, and always PC-slathered intolerance, are perfectly justified to ask “Really?  How do you figure?

Or, perhaps better yet, “What record of open debate and divergent points of view?”

Like most communities, Hamline has tension when we are discussing matters that pertain to civil and human rights.

While challenging discourse always is welcomed and heard, Hamline has and always will stand firm on its core value — one that goes back to the very founding of the university: the value and respect for the dignity of every individual.

As Minnesota’s first university, Hamline has a long record of the responsible, civil and open exchange of ideas.

As president, I am confident we will continue our respected tradition of preparing students to be independent thinkers, prepared to make a contribution to their communities as engaged citizens and leaders.

I’m sorry, President Hanson.  Those are some nice-sounding words.

Your university’s record doesn’t support them any better than they supported the hiring of Tom Emmer.  Or the airing of any conservative view, anywhere on your blinkered, PC-addled campus.

“Taking responsibility” would be showing some accountability – showing how it is that conservatives aren’t idea non grata on your campus.

But I don’t suspect you can.

I’d invite President Hanson’s response, but I’m sure her faculty would pinch a loaf at the thought of their president communicating, not only with a conservative blogger, but a non-academic peasant whose only contribution to Hamline is not macing every piece of Hamline frat trash that’s puked on his lawn over the years).;

Hamline University – my neighbor which, when it’s not trying to turn all of Minnehaha Avenue into its own back alley is busily expunging itself of all students that transgress its administration’s razor-thin comfort zone – has gotten itself in the news by, depending on who you ask, either bailing out of discussion with Tom Emmer for a position at the Business School, or responded to a mob of liberal dogmatists on the faculty who took a break from their four-hour-a-week teaching schedules to voice their larynx-shredding outrage at the potential affront to their school’s pristinely-PC heritage.

I suspect that there’s a little – OK, a lot – of both involved. It’s entirely possible to square both accounts; that there’s a game of “telephone” involved as to exactly how close Emmer was to a position at Hamline, and exactly which position and where – that’s Hamline’s official position – with the likelihood that a bunch of Hamline’s relentlessly-PC academic hothouse flowers stormed the President’s office to protest the potentially inhuman working conditions involved in having a conservative in their zone.

So I thought – what better way to divine the gestalt of an institution than to look at their “product” – their classes?

The following is a quick look at Hamline’s course catalog, skimming through various departments.

BIOL 3056 – PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL GENETICS

Goals: To acquire an understanding of the genetic basis for non-progressive political thought.  This is a business-academic partnership with the New York Times.  (Cross-listed with PSYC3056, “Abnormal Political Psychology”

POLS 5152 – GETTING RESULTS FROM POLLING

(This is an intercollegiate class taught by Professor Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey Institute).

GRVN 1001 – INTRODUCTION TO GRIEVANCE STUDIES

Introductory-level students will learn the scientific, psychological, legal,moral, cultural, financial, social, semiotic and textual bases of the world’s grievances against male heteronormative society. Final project will relate reasons student was culturally constrained from completing any coursework.

LART 1075 – ESSENTIALS OF LIBERAL ARTS

Freshman-level survey of the history of liberal arts and liberal education, and the imperative for cultural and intellectual diversity, and why wingnuts, teabaggers and God-botherers don’t count.

EDUC 4039 – DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIA

A senior-level seminar focusing on tools and techniques to ensure the classroom – pre-K, high school or graduate school – is a friendly, diverse mix of people of different  races, genders, potential genders, affectional orientations, meta-affectional orientations, religions and worldviews, classes, meta-classes and pseudo-classes, ethnicities, grievance groups, grievance-based ethnicities, affectional-orientation-based religions, who are progressive.

RELG 2250 – PHILOSOPHY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Answering key philosophical questions of the Holocaust, including “Would a loving God allow a Holocaust to happen to non-Republicans?”

WOMN 5204 – CHALLENGES IN FEMINISM AND WOMYN’S STYDIES

This class explores the responses to “woMEN” like Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Michele Bachmann and Ann Coulter, and the inevitable conclusions that result.  Concurrent with lab course WOMN 5205,

BUSN 3205 – ETHICAL BUSINESS PRACTICES

This Business School course explores the methods of conducting a successful business without excising excessive “profit” from the people.  Cross-posted with GRVN 3205, “Principles Of Grievance-Based Accounting”

 

MARK4059 – CHALLENGES IN MARKETING

Senior Business School seminar on issues involved in marketing in an era of failing schools, diminished literacy, endless adolescence and nonexistent expectations. Must be taken concurrently with internship at the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, MN-PIRG or the DFL.

POLI 3969 – GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM WITH STYLE

Taught by visiting adjunct Professor Alita Messinger.  Explores techniques for making plutocrat activism look like grassroots activism.

JOUR 3103 – PHILOSOPHY OF JOURNALISM

Cross-posted with POLS 3103 “Currents In American Progressivism” and PSYC 3103, “Practicum in Skinnerian Behavioral Conditioning”.

 

Wait – that was 11 classes.

I guess it’s academic inflation. I’ll give the extra one to Emmer.

Heh..

Obama’s numbers are in freefall – against generic and real Republicans.

Worse – for him?  He’s falling in the demographics that put him in office.  Even students.

Which must have something to do with his ride to the rescue of all those student loan holders:

In keeping with his new campaign theme of “we can’t wait,” President Obama today will roll out a plan to put more money in the pockets of some of the nation’s 36 million student loan recipients.

Obama has broad latitude in this area – certainly broader than the first two parts of his western campaign trip, underwater mortgages and subsidies for hiring veterans – because one of his early legislative initiatives was to have the federal government take over the student lending business in America.

Students are apparently now “too big to fail”.

Obama argued for the measure in 2009 as a cost-savings initiative, saying that the old system of privately issued, government secured loans reduced the amount of available money for needy students and also prevented the feds from making the system more efficient.

And we all know nobody makes systems efficient like the feds.

Here’s the part that should give you pause (emphasis added)

But Obama is now seeking to use that new power to obtain a taxpayer-financed stimulus that Congress won’t approve. The idea is to cap student loan repayment rates at 10 percent of a debtor’s income that goes above the poverty line, and then limiting the life of a loan to 20 years.

And you know what that means?  Money thrown away:

Take this example: If Suzy Creamcheese gets into George Washington University and borrows from the government the requisite $212,000 to obtain an undergraduate degree, her repayment schedule will be based on what she earns. If Suzy opts to heed the president’s call for public service, and takes a job as a city social worker earning $25,000, her payments would be limited to $1,411 a year after the $10,890 of poverty-level income is subtracted from her total exposure.

Twenty years at that rate would have taxpayers recoup only $28,220 of their $212,000 loan to Suzy.

The president will also allow student debtors to refinance and consolidate loans on more favorable terms, further decreasing the payoff for taxpayers.

Too bad the founding fathers said nothing about spending without representation…

John Anderson at Youth for Western Civilization notes that the U of M Duluth is spending lots and lots of taxpayer money enforcing political correctness:

At the end of September, while engaged in public campus outreach at University of Minnesota-Duluth, a conservative activist handing out Constitutions was both threatened by a self proclaimed Black Panther and harassed by the Director of the Office of Cultural Diversity, Susana Pelayo-Woodward. The Black Panthers are, in the grand scheme of things, small timers who rely on intimidation by street activists but don’t have much of any real influence on society. Susana Pelayo-Woodward is another matter, an administrator with an entire bureaucracy behind her. The question is what are Minnesota taxpayers getting out of this?

The piece answers that – read the whole, infuriating thing.

Of course you’re paying for it:

Overall, the Office of Cultural Diversity at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, a branch campus of the University of Minnesota with less than 10,000 undergraduates, has a budget of $656,770 for this year. $32,572 of this amount is taken from students in the form of mandatory student fees they must pay on top of tuition costs, and nearly all of the rest comes from Minnesota taxpayers.

Ms. Pelayo-Woodward makes over six figures, with benefits…to do what?

For the most part, the Office of Cultural Diversity is an employment program for aging leftist activists without marketable job skills like Susana Pelayo-Woodward. Salaries and benefits for full time staff make up two thirds of the budget, and much of the rest is comprised of travel reimbursements for staff, salaries for student employees, and ‘professional services’ from leftists which are not employed full time. Only $1000 is spent on student assistance, an amount marginally higher than the phone bill of $775.

Read the whole thing.

I’m of two minds about the closing of Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, the Muslim-centered charter school which went bankrupt over the summer.

The good news?  All the lefties who’ve been sniffing their derision about Katherine Kersten’s “lack of reporting experience” will have to eat their words (or would, if being a “progressive” didn’t mean never being held accountable in the media); as Scott Johnson notes, Kersten broke the story at a time when the Strib as a whole, along with the rest of the media, wouldn’t touch it.

Thanks to the work of Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune has owned this story. Yet it cannot have been a pleasant experience for her to have worked on the story while inside an organization that would sooner have served as TiZA’s public relations arm than investigator or whistleblower. In its pathetic editorial postmortem on TiZA, the Star Tribune jumped straight to the ACLU lawsuit without including in its chronology the fact that one of its own writers broke the story. By contrast, the ACLU Minnesota acknowledged Kersten’s role in uncovering the scandal from the outset of the lawsuit. Wouldn’t a genuine newspaper want to tout its key role in the events? Why is this story different from any other story

Isn’t that what “journalism” is supposed to be about?

Well, maybe once upon a time…

I know, I know.  Separation of church and state. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

The story of TIZA – the Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, an Islam-centered charter school that at its peak had schools in the north and south-east metro – was one that inspired passions in a lot of people.

The fact that it was a charter school at all brought in the “progressive” clans against it.

The fact that it “mixed church and state” naturally exercised the ACLU, which has had the school in court for years over the Establishment Clause lssues first reported by Katherine Kersten.  Scott Johnson at Power Line reports that the recent dump of legal papers from the case reveals…:

In one motion filed with the court, the Minnesota Department of Education disclosed a few of the items that TiZA had been hiding. Among the department’s discoveries in the litigation was the fact that TiZA had made multiple misrepresentations to the department. These misrepresentations included potential conflicts of interest between TiZA and its sectarian landlord, TiZA’s relationship and shared resources with its sectarian co-tenant, and the sectarian nature of TiZA’s curriculum. According to the department, these misrepresentations formed the basis for the department’s determination that TiZA was operating legally.

 

Of course, Kersten notes that even in carrying out the suit against TIZA, the ACLU revealed its own institutional bigotry:

Samuelson chuckled. In fact, “If this school had been Catholic, we would have sued them years ago.”

And the fact the school was aggressively Islamic in focus – although not, as far as we’ve seen, in an aggressively anti-American sense, but apparently enough so, as Kersten noted – angered conservatives.  Which, in turn, angered “progressives”, as Kersten also noted:

Rep. Mindy Greiling — then chair of the House K-12 Education Finance Committee — publicly called on the paper to fire me for “gross distortion of the facts.” TiZA is “a school to be emulated, not hated,” she told the Minnesota Independent.

Because if a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and nobody is there it hear it, it’s still apparently “hate”.

Lost in the tangle between immovable institutions and unstoppable advocates, of course, are the real losers in this story; the children.   And I don’t mean that in the “progressive’s”  “for the chilldren” caricature sense; I mean it in the sense that any human, especially a conservative, tries to protect the generation that is the future

Because whatever TIZA may have done to offend, well, everyone, it did one thing – teach kids – very well.

TIZA got the kind of results that many charter schools, and all urban public schools, should envy and try to emulate.  The student body was 80% low-income. 2/3 of them spoke English as a second language, Both of those are huge handicaps in the pbulic schools – but TIZA got math and reading test scores that clobbered most schools of all types, everywhere in the state (and nationwide).

Whatever you think about the different issues and parties involved, TIZA certainly seems to have something right.

The ACLU is following its brief in sueing the school for violating the separation clause, and Kersten was right to blow the story up years ago, and Scott Johnson did yeoman service in preventing the Strib from shoveling the story down the memory hole.

But let’s not pretend that there’s only one side to this story.  While TIZA may have skirted the Constitution, and as Scott noted may have benefited from an institutional Captain-Renault-ism on the part of the MN Department of Education, it was good at one thing – teaching low-income students, most of them not native speakers of English – how to do math and read.

In English, as well as Arabic.

.One of the reasons that the left’s various attempts to counter the Tea Party have all failed, and will continue to fail, is that when you look at these hamsters, they just don’t look like America.  They look like superannnuated hippies and adenoidal poli-sci students and Macalester professors and the like.

And now, they’re bringing the magic to the Twin Cities:

Minneapolis, MN. – After this Saturday’s open forum in Stevens Square Park, through a group consensus, we now stand firm in our plans to unite at the Hennepin County

Government Plaza. This plaza is the new focal point for the OccupyMN movement.

Previously our plans were to stand in solidarity with those that occupy Wall Street by rallying at the steps of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Stand Firm?”  “Stand in Solidarity?”

Hey, “protesters”; Jane Fonda called; she wants her 40-year-old florid rhetoric back.

The plan has changed to reclaim the Government Plaza as the “People’s Plaza”.

It is time to establish a new system that values people over profits. We are the 99% and we are moving to reclaim our mortgaged future.

They’re going to “reclaim” big government property…for big government?

The Minnesota Occupation Begins:

October 7th, 2011 at 9:00am

The People’s Plaza (Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! – Ed)

300 South 6th Street

Minneapolis, MN 55487-0999

(Hennepin County Government Center Plaza)

I was briefly tempted to go there and videotape the Cantina Band scene that must certainly ensue.

Then I remembered – I have a family to spend time with, and an actual life.

There’s a reason so many “progressives” are so very very upset that Katherine Kersten remains at the Strib writing columns.

It’s because while the likes of Lori Sturdevant and Jon Tevlin can be counted on, after all the “hard-boiled reporter” BS subsides, to pretty much say “Yep, Mr. Emperor, in the opinion of this ol’-fashioned gum-shoe reporter who really really knows stuff, that suit looks marvelous – and when Arne Carlson ran the GOP, they’d agree”.  Kersten doesn’t.

I’m trying to imagine any of the Strib‘s bullpen of legacy columnists even noticing the story of the Harvest Preparatory School, much less writing about it:

A north Minneapolis school at Olson Memorial Hwy. and Humboldt Avenue has demographics that seem a sure predictor of our state’s most intractable education problem. The student population there is 99 percent black and 91 percent poor, and about 70 percent of the children come from single-parent families.

Such “racial isolation” is widely considered a formula for defeat — a hallmark of the cavernous “achievement gap” that separates poor, minority students from their more affluent white peers. In recent decades, Minnesota has spent billions of dollars attempting to narrow the gap but has little to show for it.

That’s why the achievements of the school I just described should be shouted from the rooftops.

You’d think.

I’m guessing the Strib and the “hard-boiled journalists” in its columnists bullpen haven’t gotten permission from MN2020 to write about schools not approved by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.

In this year’s state math tests in grades three through eight, this school outperformed every metro-area school district, including Edina and Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

The complaint I hear most about Kersten – other than the fact that she’s unclean a conservative  – is that she doesn’t have a “background as a reporter”.

But all that “background” doesn’t seem to have taught any of the Strib’s stable of reliable DFL criers to dig behind the party line when it comes to education.  Kersten does:

Black males are among our state’s lowest-performing groups of students, but at Best Academy, 100 percent of eighth-grade boys scored proficient in reading. “Best Academy has the highest proportion of African-American boys of any institution in Minnesota,” says founder and director Eric Mahmoud. “The only institution that competes with us is the prison system.”

How have Mahmoud and his team worked this magic? Mahmoud is an electrical engineer by training. “At the factory I used to run, if we had a failure rate of 0.5 percent, we’d shut down the line until we figured out the problem,” he says. “In our education system, we’re failing with 40, 50, 60 percent of our African-American children, but we keep the system that turns out the same product, year after year.”

Wait – someone has actually addressed the “achievement gap” that seems to have so vexed the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Anoka-Hennepin, Duluth and other school boards, the Minnesota Department of Education, the waves of superstar superintendents who ride into and back out of town on waves of money and perks, the DFL Caucus in the Legislature, and Tom Dooher and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, who seem to have been too busy filming commercials to have looked into the issue themselves?

Why, it’s almost like a journalist is actually covering the issue!

Read the whole editorial for the Harvest Prep story – which must drive the relentlessly-feminist “educational academy” nuts, since it entirely confirms Christina Hoff-Summers’ research about how one goes about reaching in particular boys that the system has forgotten.

And ask yourself why it is that in a metro with three school megadistricts that are simultaneously academic and financial sinkholes, with achievement gaps (especially in Saint Paul) that trail even the rest of the nation’s shameful record, and that graduate a shamefully low share of minority students, and that is starving for some good news on education but is fed a constant diet of puffed-up faintly-painted teachers union spin on charter schools, that Kersten’s column is the only coverage that this, and other, charter school success stories have gotten in the Twin Cities news or opinion media?

…that pays liberal pundits to be gratuitously smug, patronizingand condescending?

In an editorial in the Fairbault Daily News, editor Jaci Smith goes all Mommy on us:

You can’t have it both ways.

Although Smith does, in fact, try to have it both ways.  We’ll get back to that later.

This was a lesson I learned early in life.

I coveted a friend’s toy and wanted her to let me play with it, yet I never wanted to share my favorite toy.

“You can’t have it both ways,” my mom used to tell me. “Either you play only with your own toys or you play with others’ shared toys and you share yours as well.”

A good lesson but apparently one that some state legislators haven’t learned.

Smith – like the rest of the peanut gallery of outstate editorial writers who seem to be longing to sit for a day in Lori Sturdevant’s seat – says Steve Drazkowski and Pat Garofalo, who’ve been warning voters that their school districts got increases, and urging them to vote down referenda to increase taxes yet more, should just shut up:

Garofalo and Drazkowski claim that the state boosted spending to school districts in the budget passed this summer and that the 133 districts statewide seeking levy increases (or the continuation of an existing one) are “double dipping.”

“Despite these very generous funding increases — paid for by you, the taxpayer — 133 school districts statewide are considering asking their local property taxpayers to pony up even more money — the largest number that would call for a vote in a decade,” Drazkowski wrote in a recent newsletter.

Smith says it’s a local thing,and state pols should just. Butt. Out.

Thankfully, Faribault’s GOP Sen. Mike Parry disagrees. He said in a recent interview with the Daily News that referendums are local issues, to be handled locally.

That’s true, as far as it goes.  But here, Editor Smith, er, tries to have it both ways.  Garofalo and Drazkowski are exercising their First Amendment rights to tell people the facts as they see them.  As Legislators, they have no control over how local districts run their affairs, or what local voters vote for.  But they have the same right to speak that anyone – me, Bud Froemking at the liquor store in Faribault, or Jaci Smith for that matter – has.  Both have the advantage of the bully pulpit of elected office – which doesn’t negate their right to speak…

…any more than that of the Teachers Unions and the other groups from outside Faribault that will be speaking, and no doubt ponying up money, to try to push the levy through.

So since Mommy Editor Smith has reminded us that we can’t have it both ways, I wonder which one she’ll pick?

Minnesota’s legislative auditor released a report yesterday that, as every local media outlet noted, “raised questions” about Minnesota’s burgeoning online school market:

Even as they surge in popularity, online schools in Minnesota are troubled by high dropout rates, poor math scores and inadequate state oversight.

That’s the conclusion of a state audit released on Monday that shows how the virtual schools, whose full-time enrollment has tripled in recent years, are faring.

Sounds dodgy, right?  It certainly did in the hands of much of the Twin Cities media, who just loooove a scandal.

Well, not necessarily. The auditor – the estimable James Nobles, perhaps the single most reliable source in Minnesota government – noted an honest caveat:

It’s unclear why many online students are falling short academically, said Legislative Auditor James Nobles, adding, “We need to find out, is there anything more we can do for these students?”

I’d like to raise the same question in followup that I raise whenever flaks for the Minnesota Federation of Teachers point out standardized test scores at charter schools; measuring individual schools, or schools as a group – especially schools like charters and online schools, which cater so heavily to students who for whatever reason don’t click in traditional sit-down factory-model schools – isn’t nearly as meaningful as measuring the response and performance of individual students over time, and aggregating the individual students’ net changes over time.

During the 2009-10 school year, Minnesota’s full-time online students finished only 63 percent of the courses they started. Just 16 percent of those in high school were proficient on state math tests, compared with 41 percent in the same grades at schools throughout Minnesota. And fully one-quarter of the 12th-graders dropped out by the end of the school year, vastly more than the 3 percent of all students who did so statewide.

And without some aggregate idea of where that mass of students started academically, and what brings them to online school in the first place,  none of the numbers means much.  The figure on senior dropouts is particularly puzzling; what would prompt a quarter of seniors to drop out?  I suspect it’s something a lot deeper than “online school”.

To be fair, the Strib article I’m quoting notes this:

Advocates of online learning point out that many students are already behind academically when they enroll. “The majority of the students that come to us were struggling in their previous school, and they’ve come to us as an alternative,” said John Huber, head of Insight School of Minnesota, an online high school guided by the Brooklyn Center School District.

But dimes’ll get you dollars that MN2020 cites this report as a reason to abolish online schools (as well as charters) and drag those kids back to the factory schools many of them are fleeing in the first place.

As we saw with the Sally Jo Sorenson bit over at Bluestem, apparently lefties have a hard time distinguishing between different levels of authority.

Sorenson confused “students” with “emplioyees”, “monks” and “inmates” in her piece.

And “Alex” at Minnesota Progressive Project (MPP) seems to conflate “free speech” with “seizing control”

The headlines write themselves.

At MPP, it might be better if they did.  But I digress.

The Mn GOP, led by Pat Garofalo (R, Big State Government), don’t want any more funding increases for local schools. The what is easy. We need to dig deeper, and ask why. Interfering with local school boards is the epitome of the heavy hand of state government sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong.

“Alec” is responding to the gangs of Republican commandos that have been bursting in to local school board meetings and holding them at gunpoint threatening to kill everyone unless they abandon their special levy drives.  Tony Sutton and Michael Brodkorb, festooned with bandoliers and carrying Dirty Harry revolvers, sneer and cackle like Snidely Whiplash as they demand the school boards lower their budgets or else…

…well no.  Of course not.  The GOP is doing what political parties – and unions, and PACs, and 527s, and groups of people, and individuals with blogs or standing on soapboxes on the street, for that matter – do; telling voters what the truth is (most of the schools boards got more from the state), and asking local property owners if they really  need another tax increase.

Have Minnesota Republicans given up on small, local government?

Well, no, “Alex”; we’re merely participating in it.

Democrats seem to find that threatening.

A lot.

Govenor Dayton, by all accounts, is considering issuing an adminstrative fiat that would unionize daycares.

Senator Roger Chamberlain writes:

As many of you know the governor is considering signing an executive order to unilaterally unionize thousands of private sector employees.

It is unwarranted and unnecessary. It will increase costs and kill jobs.

If you do not want this to happen, give him a call; encourage others who use daycare services or run a day care to do the same.

Here’s the Governor’s contact information.

If there’s one thing the budget impasse showed us, it’s that the Governor can take a hint, if it’s big and broad and unmistakeable enough.

Over at True North, Tom Steward covers the issue.

Kids graduating from college today are having a tough time of it, according to the researchers.  During this current recession, I’ve heard the stories – seniors bemoaning the fact that there just aren’t a lot of good companies with good jobs at the campus job fairs.

I had to laugh. At my little college in the middle of nowhere in 1985, in the middle of an epic farm depression, they didn’t even bother with job fairs; people came to campus to recruit nurses, and that was about it.

And when I left NoDak and moved to the big city, I met people whose experiences had been very, very different; people whose education…

…well, no – not “education” so much as schooling – had led them to expect some results.  It always puzzled me.  It still does.

I’m going through the reactions from “Millennals” to the current job market in Derek Thompson’s piece in the Atlantic about the anger the recent graduates are feeling toward their society, their background and their elders.

I happened on this young woman’s screed: 

“Serving people drinks was more rewarding than this full-time job, and it is killing me inside.”

In high school, I worked two jobs, took college coursework, participated in ten student organizations, held prominent leadership positions and earned a 4.0 GPA. I was rewarded with a scholarship to a top twenty university and had the whole world ahead of me. In college, I studied Business. I was active in campus groups, had multiple internships and held a 3.9 GPA. After seeing many of my older friends obtaining great jobs with signing bonuses and benefits, I decided to graduate 3 Semesters early. This was May 2008.

Society does have a way of telling kids “play the paper chase – especially if you play it well enough to get into a “great school’ – and the rest takes care of itself”.  There’s a big part of our society – educational classists, I call thim – that seem to think of life as an equation; (Tier of school * Grade Point Average = Worth as a person).

And our society does impart a mythology onto a “good education” – which is less about “education” than getting inducted into a gold-plated alumni directory. And if the alumni are out of work…well, you know how that works, right?

After graduation, I began applying for my dream jobs. I started to get some responses, and then the economy tanked. I tried to follow-up with those who had expressed interest. No response. I extended my search to other cities and states and could not even get a phone interview. I then began searching for less than ideal positions. Not a call back to even be a Secretary. So, I became a bartender.

OK, so I’m sorry the young lady didn’t get her “dream job”.  26 years after graduation, I’m still waiting on mine.

But that’s not the real issue here:

Eventually, I took an unpaid internship in a field I never imagined working in.

And is that a bad thing?

There I was, Miss 4.0 Honors Student, working for free with freshmen and sophomores in college.

I’m not sure if the writer thinks being a “4.0 honors student” was supposed to make her too good for having to scramble, think creatively, and maybe even swerve outside her field for a while, and maybe even permanently – skills I suspect she never learned on her way to her “honors”.

But even if she didn’t mean it that way, you don’t have to look too far to find young people who do think this.  In fact, it’s the mantra that our public education system chants; a college education, in and of itself, opens doors for you.

Notwithstanding the fact that degree inflation has made a BA worth about what a high school diploma was in 1940, the fact is that while the diploma may be an entry-level requirement, it’s still up to you to actually make someone want to open the door – if they have the option of opening one for you.  Which, often as not these days, they don’t.

Then one day, I got a call. The company I had interned for had recommended me for a position with another firm…Only this job was nothing that I would have ever wanted to do. I am still here to this day, only because I know how difficult it will be to find another. I continuously read articles about unemployed recent graduates and lend a sympathetic ear to my job seeking friends. I feel as if I am wasting my life, sitting here at this desk, doing trivial work and browsing news articles all day.

Not sure what the young lady expected – and, obviously, what she studied in the first place.  School, and especially the entertainment media, show graduation as an abrupt swerve from endless parties into a life of doing exactly what you studied and wanted to do.

That’s more the exception than the rule.  But nobody tells kids that – or that a degree isn’t a vaccine against the reality that all of us non-honors-graduates live in.

When people tell me that I am lucky for having a job, I want to cry. How can this mundane existence actually be envied?! I do have a roof over my head and health insurance, but my optimism about the work world has been severely damaged. I did not work this hard in order to obtain this outcome.

And if that’s the reason one “works hard” on academics, at least academics outside sciences and engineering, then one was very badly advised.  Any “4.0 honors education” that doesn’t teach you that life, to say nothing of the world of work, is a marathon rather than a sprint, is a waste of time and money.

Any “Education” that doesn’t teach you that you learn more, and benefit more in the long run, from adversity than from success, is just schooling – and apparently inadequate schooling at that.

Serving people drinks was more rewarding than what I do at my full-time job, and it is killing me inside.

Any “Education” that you don’t leave knowing that the challenge in life isn’t just to get a good start, but to persevere and try to thrive during the curve balls that life willinevitably throw you was no education at all.

It is terrible that so many of our nation’s top youth are going through the same struggles.

No.  It’s not “terrible”.  It’s life.

It’s time for the traditional feeding frenzy at the Capitol, as well as at legislators’ offices statewide.

It goes a little something like this:

1. School districts represntatives swarm the various legislators, trying to convince them that…
2. they’re going to have to put students down if they don’t get more money than the legislature is offering, and threatening to…
3. jack up property tax levies to make up the difference.

Of course, it’s a little dodgier this year – for all the DFL’s apocalyptic yammering, the legislature actually is spending more money on eduation this year; in some districts, lots more money.

And yet some of those districts are still acting like they’re getting foreclosed.

We’ll be highlighting some of the more absurd entreaties in coming weeks.  Stay tuned.

I’d have never thought so at the time – but one of the best things that ever happened to me was getting fired from my first radio job when I was 17.

I’d have never thought so at the time.  My first radio job was – not to be overdramatic- the first great love of my life.  It gave me some things that I – a gawky, uncoordinated, athletically-inept, greasy-haired acne-ridden nerd – needed badly; an identity that I really liked, an area where I excelled, something that nobody else in my school did at all, much less did well.

After a year or so, the station was bought by a couple of slick twentysomethings who’d been knocking around the business for a while, including some time in the major markets. They wanted to make the station like a big-market station in a small town. High school kids working weekends weren’t part of the plan.  So I got whacked.

It was a kick in the teeth.  I was just another high school kid again.

And in that, there were some great lessons. I learned…:

• Loyalty Is Earned – But Almost Never: My father, in almost forty years of teaching, taught for exactly two school districts.  After we moved to Jamestown, in 1964 or ’65 or so, I think he had exactly two classrooms, to say nothing of jobs.  Many of my generation’s fathers were similar; they worked in one career, usually one job for one or two employers.  I learned a good ten years before the rest of the economy that loyalty to an employer was a chump’s bargain; you, the employee, were an asset, not a person.  You needed to look out for yourself, because your employer wasn’t going to do it for you.
• What Have You Done For Us Lately? I learned when I tried to get back into radio a year or so later that not only didn’t the world owe you a living, but in fact you owed it to yourself to know how to earn one.  Life wasn’t just about having a skill – it was about keeping it up to date, and making sure you could “sell” your skill to new employers (or clients), perhaps in new flavors of your career, or even in entirely new careers.  You had to be your own marketer.
• Schooling Is Not Education: Not long after I got whacked, I went to Jamestown College.  And then four years later I went out into the world, where nobody had heard of Jamestown College.  And while I’d been under no illusions that I’d be able to wave a diploma in anyone’s face to open a door, I ran into plenty of kids who did – and I had to out-perform them in the great competition to actually get  a job.  And I usually did. Because while my diploma from an obscure little school didn’t open any doors, the things I learned – who I was, what I wanted, how I thought, and how to solve a problem – did.
• Mobility Is Life: KQDJ wouldn’t be the first radio job I’d get fired from (never, ever for cause, by the way). Finally, 12 years later, in August of 1992 when K-63 went dark and no decent radio jobs awaited anywhere, I had to take my skills – knowing how to tell stories whose subjects I didn’t start out understanding, in ways that the listener could understand – and find a career that paid.  It led me to Technical Writing, and thence to User Experience.  Your job description and your paper credentials do not sum you or your capabilities up – indeed, if you let them, you can lose big.

Well, apparently the Atlantic, for starters. Yesterday they released this piece by Derek Thompson about the anger of “Millennial” graduates and their job-hunting travails.

And as a parent of a college kid and a son who’s still figuring it all out, and has had to re-figure it all out a few times in the past 20-odd years himself, part of me wants to give the kids a fatherly hug and a little encouragement…

…and part of me wants to slap them upside the head.

And so – partly for the benefit of any other kids who are feeling the same way, and partly for the benefit of my own kids, I’m going to do a little bit of both, and respond to the four “Millennials” who, as Thompson wrote…:

…responded with beautiful, heart-wrenching accounts of the job search that we have published in four parts: The Unemployed Speak and Advice from Employers, Longer Voices of the Jobless, and What It’s Like to Be Jobless in Your 20s.

There were several bits from unemployed twentysomethings.  I’ll feature one of them today:

“I want to blame the universities and grown-ups who should have known better. Instead, like my me-first generation, I blame myself.”

Subject line: MAD AS HELL

I’m only 23 and it’s been barely over a year since I graduated from university. Yet already the work environment and the consequences of the “real world” have warped and degraded me.

Not to bag on the kid excessively, but dude – what did  you expect the adult world  to be, anyway?

All I have are feelings of disillusionment and betrayal.

“Betrayal” implies trust.  Who – outside of yourself – did you trust when setting out into the world?

 I work full-time at a temp position that under-utilizes me. I make sure not to finish work to quickly, for fear it doing so will only shorten my employment. Before that I worked in retail. Before long, I may end up back there.

Perhaps that’s one of the advantages of coming from a place – the rural Midwest – where nobody really expects much of you, or an unranked obscure little college that imparts no academic mythology on you to change your mind on the subject – but on the one hand, that’s life, and on the other, if you approach it right, none of it’s wasted.  In my various travails, I worked as a temp, and some awful temp jobs at that – but it was where I learned to use a PC, back before everyone learned it at birth.  Just saying – if you use that time at a miserable job to takeaway the parts you need, it’s not wasted.

Much of my rage is reserved for a predatory system of higher education and the failures of a generation that came before. I’m angry that a “state” university costs as much as it does. That many, if not most of the students who attend, treat the experience like a 4-year version of MTV’s Spring Break. Massive grade inflation means one less standard deviation between myself and those who don’t try. Lax entrance standards means that even in smaller classes, half of the students do as little as possible, have nothing to contribute, and see learning as a necessary evil, if even that.

And now we’re onto something.  The education bubble is a real thing, gobbling up immense capital, while spitting out a lot of students who have failed to learn the most important lesson one can learn from a degree (that’s not intended as a direct entree to a career, like engineering or nursing or computer science or whatever) – how to think, to analyze and solve a problem that one isn’t innately equipped to solve, and how to know what one is really about.

Then there’s the baby boomer generation. Guardians of the state, they have left it dysfunctional. Watchdogs of the economy, they have let it burn.

Well, yeah, but…no.  We’ll come back to that later in this series.

But most of my anger is reserved for myself. I pursued a “Liberal Arts Degree” in communications rather than a B.S. in engineering or computer science. I spent all four years at a state university rather than the first two at a community college. I worked in the summer instead of getting an internship. I worked harder at my classes than making contacts and networking with professionals. Not everyone is suffering in this economy, and if I were going to college for the first time this fall I’d know how to prepare. But I didn’t at the time and now I’m left to face the consequences.

And while the kid in question has picked up the odd bit of wisdom here, he missed out on something that, perhaps, only comes with experience; life is not a crap game where you cast your die at graduation.  It’s an endless (well, not endless, but you know what I mean) game of hold’em, where the terms and parameters of the game change, sometimes radically, in the middle of the game – and then you’re on to the next hand.  And if you’re smart, you don’t let a bad opening hand spook you.

That higher education today doesn’t make sure kids know that – and equip them to deal with it – is one of the great failures of our system.

More on Monday.

Unions in Milwaukee protest “Scott Walker”…

…and, at least as much, the presence of a “Choice School” – a school that accepts refugees from Milwaukee’s dysfunctional school system.  The unions have determined that these schools are a threat – sort of like cancer considers chemotherapy a “threat”.

And the protests? Well, here  you go.

Compare the behavior of the protesters with that of the students and the school staff.  I love the guy with the moldy red beard at about 1:48 and again at 2:40 – “why are you in our neighborhood?”

The only logical conclusion?  Looking at the overwhelmingly black students, and the almost-completely middle-class white protesters, it’s clear that the only reason to oppose “Choice Schools” is racism.

Yesterday was one of my kids’ first day at college.  Not gonna say who, or where – nutters are everywhere out there, and some of them are safely tucked into offices at institutes of higher education.  Why tie weights around my kids’ ankles?

And yes, I do feel too young for this, although I know it’s not true.

But all I can say is “Whew.  Finally”.

I’ve not spared much in relating my disgust with the Saint Paul Public School system.  As I noted a few years back, one of the best days of my life was when my kids got pulled out of the SPPS and put into charter schools. I’m not the only one; one out of eight Saint Paul parents has yanked their kids out of the SPPS and high-tailed it to parochial, charter, suburban (via the state’s open enrollment statute) or home schools.

But now, today, knowing my kids are beyond the claws of that wretched, dysfunctional, addled, mediocrity-worshipping, politically-correct, racist-via-low-expectations school system, I feel a lot better about life in general.

This isn’t to bag on the people I do know who are conscientious, diligent employees of the SPPS, who genuinely do care about students and are good teachers and dedicated staffers.

But I have to ask them – why do you share a district with people like this?  With a district that chooses every day between thick-necked adherence to idiotic policy and the welfare of children, and is constantly found wanting?

Anyway – it’s a happy day.

One more to go!

“Begging the Question” means “using your conclusion as evidence of your conclusion”.

I’m sure classical logic doesn’t recognize the concept of “begging the answer” – using the status quo as a defense of the status quo.

But this Dana Goldstein piece in Salon against Michele Bachmann and her fellow education reformers might just change all that.

Michele Bachmann’s…growing popularity among the Republican base also signals…a sea change in the party’s education agenda. It’s safe to say that the political era of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind is now officially over, even as the law’s testing mandates continue to reverberate in classrooms across the country.

The sooner, the better.

As recently as a decade ago, Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Boehner embraced bipartisan, standards-and-accountability education reform as a pro-business venture, a way to make American workers and firms more competitive in the global marketplace. Now we are seeing the GOP acquiesce to the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann, in which public schools are regarded not as engines for economic growth or academic achievement, but as potential moral corrupters of the nation’s youth.

As we’ll see below, I think Goldstein is lumping too many eggs into the “Christian Conservative!” basket.

As our public schools continue to flounder, more and more of us have had experiences that have exposed to them that public schools just aren’t like they were when we parents were kids.   Maybe it was a series of teachers like this one; maybe it was a long trail of eye-opening episodes with the celebration of hide-bound bureaucracy, or relentless kow-towing to political correctness that our school systems have become at the expense of actual education.

It’s why over an eighth of Saint Paul parents, and even more than that in Minneapolis, have deserted the public schools, for suburban schools (via Minnesota’s open enrollment law), charter schools and parochial and private schools.  The vast majority of these people are black, hispanic and Asian.

I don’t suspect they were all motivated by Michele Bachmann.

(Aside:  Goldstein refers to MNCD2 Congressman John Kline as “the moderate [! – Ed.]  chairman of the House education and workforce committee“.  Factor that into your analysis accordingly)   

Goldstein recounts Bachmann’s political origin story – homeschooling her kids, helping found a charter school, running for the Stillwater School Board and thence to the State Senate…:

As her political career advanced, the overarching theme of Bachmann’s education activism was that government attempts to improve schools threatened the prerogatives of the Christian family and represented a dangerous move toward a socialized, planned economy. In 2001, she charged that the 1994 federal School to Work Opportunities Act, which provided funding for low-income teenagers to do on-the-job apprenticeships with local companies, would turn students into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.” As a state senator in 2002, Bachmann produced a bizarre film called Guinea Pigs II, which compared Minnesota’s Profile of Learning curriculum standards—instituted in 1998 by Republican Gov. Arne Carlson—to Nazism and communism. As Tim Murphy of Mother Jones wrote of Bachmann last week, “She was Tea Party before the Tea party was cool. In 2002, with a Republican president in the White House and the Tea Party a full seven years away, she cited the 9th and 10th amendments while railing against No Child Left Behind as an unconstitutional abuse of power.”

Leave aside the bizarre fact that Goldstein thinks John Kline is a moderate, but that Bachmann should have cozied up to Arne Carlson because he was a “Republican”; she was right.  Oh, the rhetoric was a little lot overheated – but there is no rational case to be made that the US Department of Education does, or has ever, contributed positively to education.

Bachmann wasn’t the only Christian conservative local politician making these anti-education reform arguments in the 1990s. Rather, from the beginning of her activist career, she was part of a national “parental rights” movement organized by groups such as Focus on the Family and the Homeschool Legal Defense Fund. Like Bachmann, Sarah Palin was a foot soldier in this movement. According to an account local political activist Phillip Munger gave Salon, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin promoted a group of Christian right school board candidates.

So Goldstein’s goal seems to be clear; tie the “education reform” movement to “crazy”, “scary” conservative women.

But look at the people who are leaving the school systems.  In the inner cities, the refugees are largely Black, Hispanic and Asian – not, the last I checked, Bachmann or Palin’s key constituents.

Goldstein is trying to make her premise fit the facts she’s chosen to focus on – that there is a big, scary, crazy Christianist movement out there, working to derail public education – while white conservatives are just the tip of the iceberg of dissatisfaction, even revulsion, with the current school system.

And when the two finally connect?

Well, I suspect that’s what Goldstein is trying to prevent.

The American left today is a complex network of conspiracy theorists.

For example, there are the “Truthers” – people who believe that George W. Bush set up 9/11.  There are also “Triggers” – those who believe that Sarah, not Bristol, Palin begat little Trig.   There are many others – check ’em out.

The latest addition:  “Grovers”.  The “Grover” believes that the wheels of the GOP are being spun by Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Freedom.

In a move that should prompt deja vu on the part of Minnesotans who pay attnetion (admittedly mostly conservatives),

Brian Rosenberg is the president of Macalester College in Saint Paul.  The place makes fewer bones that most post-secondary schools about the fact that its mission is to train “progressives”; according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, it’s got the “progressive”-friendly, anti-dissent speech code to match (FIRE gave Mac a “Red” rating for atrocious commitment to free speech).

And if you’re a parent who’s spending, or pondering spending, over $100,000 to send a kid to Mac, you might want to read Rosenberg’s Strib op-ed, and ask yourself “is this the level of commitment to intellectual honesty, to say nothing of rigor, that my kid can expect at Mac?”

Because Rosenberg exhibits the great trifecta of modern “progressive” “thought”in an op-ed in yesterdays’ Strib:

• Crushing  Illogic: we’ll see plenty of that below.
• The exploitation of ignorance.
• The belief that government is our society’s most important enterprise

These lead liberals to some bizarre conclusions.

He’s got a thesis = and if you follow Minnesota politics, it’ll all sound very familiar:

The most powerful figure in today’s Republican Party is not John Boehner or Mitch McConnell. It is not Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. It is not even Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin.

It is, of course, Grover Norquist, the man with The Pledge.

Sound familiar, Minnesotans?  It’s like David Strom and the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge .

Norquist, who has never held elected office…

Isn’t it funny how liberals toss that out when it suits them?

Martin Luther King never held elective office.  Either did Keith Olbermann, James Carville or Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, and each of them is every bit as involved in setting policy as is Norquist is – where “involvement” means “using their God-given right to tell legislators what they expect of them”.

Remember my first point?  Crushing Illogic?   Rosenberg indulges in the strawman first:

…is the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group whose pledge not to raise taxes under any circumstances has now been signed by hundreds of Republican candidates and officials at both state and national levels.

And they do mean “any circumstances.” Enormous budget deficits? No. A country at war? Nope. Famine and plague? Sorry.

It’s not just a strawman, it’s a dumb one.  We’re at war – but it’s not a war for our very existence, like World War 2 or the Civil War.  And we’re not suffering famine.

Indeed, our country’s only plague is government that regards spending as a greater “right” than the peoples’ right to keep the money they earn.  That’s the plague that Norquist is trying to  address.

If the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, get back to us.

Our grandmothers kidnapped and threatened with death until and unless we raise taxes, as Norquist was asked recently by Stephen Colbert? Well, answered the unflappable Norquist, we always have our memories and our photographs.

(Colbert was being characteristically satiric. There appeared to be nothing satiric about the response.)

There’s point two, “playing on ignorance”.  A shocking number of self-described liberals believe that “The Daily Show” is a news show; it’s not a stretch to think they think the same of Colbert.

Norquist isn’t one of them.

I want to set aside for now the political and economic wisdom of raising or not raising taxes and focus instead on an even more fundamental question: How prudent is it to take an irrevocable pledge about how to govern before one begins the actual work of governing?

Again with the strawman.

If pledges were “irrevocable”, then Alcoholics Anonymous could make Step One “I pledge to quit drinking”, and dispense with steps two through twelve.

The politicians aren’t making the pledge to Grover Norquist.  They are making it to the voters.

Just as George H. W. Bush did, famously pledging “Read my lips!  No new taxes!”.  He broke the pledge.  It helped cost him the 1992 election.

Conservatives remember this.

How wise is it to remove from the legislative toolbox one of the most important tools before one knows what particular challenges one will face?

The “toolbox” is a dumb analogy.  Taxation isn’t government’s tool.  It’s government saying “I’m going to take your tool”.

A better analogy?  The credit card. It can be an important and useful tool in running a home – unless the homeowner starts believing it’s the credit card company’s obligation to support her spending no matter what.

Credit card companies don’t do that.  Why should we?

Up next?  Rosenberg shows – for those who might have doubted it – that he’s from Planet Academia:

How many employers in any industry would hire someone into a leadership position who declared, prior to beginning work, that he or she would under no circumstances employ a commonly used strategy or compromise with those with whom he or she disagreed?

Would a retailer hire a manager who asserted that he would never under any circumstances raise prices?

Would a manufacturer hire a vice president who insisted that under no conditions would layoffs be permissible?

No, no and no – but all of those analogies are wrong.

Nobody would hire a leader who promised to run the business according to a spending target.  And that’s exactly what the “progressives” have done to the state and federal government; make spending the measure of “good government”.

It’s why the DFL scolds us every year about “budget deficits” that are, in fact, based on nothing but bureaucratic spending targets; it’s the same at the national level, only moreso.

Even the most basic primers on leadership note that the ability to listen, the ability to learn and the willingness to compromise are among the essential characteristics of any successful leader.

True.  But Rosenberg missed the most important lesson in those “primers”; a leader leads people toward a goal.

Oh, liberals get it when it’s their goals – desired outcomes for their constituents, and above all that government itself remain fat and happy – and their leaders.

Norquist is asking that the main goal for would-be leaders that seek conservative votes,  at at a time when the greatest scourge facing our nation is an inability to continue long-term government entitlement spending, be to stop spending so much.

It’s a worthy goal.

Because conservatives don’t believe that keeping government fat and happy is the main goal of life – or, for that matter, of government.

Which brings us to the bizarre conclusion:

Many of these newcomers to public office appear also to believe that the mere fact of being elected constitutes a “mandate” for how they should subsequently act — as if the business of governing ended rather than began with being chosen for office.

That would make sense if we elected people to be bureaucrats – to follow pre-set, tested procedures to do a job whose parameters everyone already agrees on.

We don’t agree on those parameters, though.  Which is why we have elections – as an alternative to fighting a civil war over how that job is supposed to be done.

This is a new, peculiar, and destructive way to think about representative government. It ultimately would lead to the elimination of representative government altogether and, instead, to public ballot initiatives on every issue large and small. And we know how well that is working in California.

If Rosenberg were an undergrad writing an English or history paper, and he used such a broad, unsupported conclusion for his thesis, a teacher worthy of them name would knock him down a couple of letter grades and send it back for a rewrite.

Minnesota was once a place known for the exceptional ability of its leaders to place the common good above polarizing ideology.

No.  Minnesota was once a one-party state.  It had two “parties”, of course – but intellectually, there really was only one party.

Life changes.  Wear a helmet, Rosenberg.

Americans for Tax Reform asks every candidate for elected office on the state or federal level to make a written commitment to their constituents to “oppose and vote against all tax increases.”

Every member of Congress, upon taking office, is asked to swear an oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”

Here is my simple question: Which “pledge” takes precedence?

That Rosenberg thinks “making government live within its means” is not “part of the duties of the office” shows us where part of Minneosta’s problem is.

It’s been one of my longest-standing beeves with the education system (among many) that schools have morphed into taking a pseudo-judicial approach to handling disciplinary problems, which faithfully replicates the judicial system’s hidebound, hoary proceduralism, as well as its disregard for people as individuals.

Which makes sense in a judicial system.  Not so much in education.

Nekima Levy-Pounds writing at Learnmore MN notes the ways that the education system has been turned into the minor league for the corrections system:

Teachers, administrators, and parents are often unaware of the critical role that school policies play in determining whether a child is on his or her way to college or prison. In Minnesota, children as young as 10 years old may be incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility for violating the law…Disturbingly, roughly 25% of referrals to the juvenile justice system are made by schools. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, African American children are over-represented amongst those in the juvenile justice system. This carries with it a whole host of consequences, including high rates of trauma experienced by children in detention, a greater likelihood of adult criminality and difficulty reintegrating back into society after being released from detention.

Worse?  The school system invokes the criminal and judicial systems for the dumbest things.  Not just this sort of thing; the urban school systems refer “habitual truants” to the judicial system.

Although some may feel that if you “do the crime, you should do the time,” the lines between childish antics and criminality are often blurred when it comes to conduct that occurs on school premises. For example, when I was a student in school, a school fight would likely result in suspension or in extreme cases, expulsion. Now, when a school fight occurs, the youths involved in the fight may be referred to the school resource officer, who in turn may take the youths to the juvenile detention center (JDC).

Ditto. When I was in school, being a teenage idiot got you a stern talking, and sometimes a pounding, from the assistant principal, Mr. Luttschwager, a 6’6 inch former Marine, and maybe a date with Mr. Buchholtz, a former Marine fighter pilot, who talked all kinds of sense into a kid’s head, without necessarily putting a blot on their record that would dog them for the rest of his life.

Today?

Once a child is taken to the JDC, he or she may spend one or more nights locked in secure detention. The child will then have to appear before a judge, be appointed legal counsel and make grown-up decisions; with or without the involvement of a parent throughout the process. Although many believe that a child’s juvenile record disappears when the child turns 18, this is not often the case, as some juvenile records remain accessible until a child’s 28th birthday. As such, employers and landlords are frequently unwilling to hire someone with a juvenile history. Once this occurs, the child will more likely dive deeper into the criminal justice system and have little hope for breaking the cycle of incarceration.

And it is amazingly easy for a school to turn a matter of teenage hormones and bobbleheadery into a legal matter.

And it needs to stop:

In order to dismantle the school to prison pipeline in Minnesota, we must ensure that the JDC is reserved for only those youths who need to be there. Schools must become more selective about making referrals to the system and find creative and less damaging ways to address misbehavior on the part of students.

Unfortunately, the educational academy is being run according to two motivations that conflict directly with the idea of common sense;

• the academic academy, feminized as it’s become, regards adolescent male behavior of any type as a pathology, and…
• the teachers’ unions have done their best to change education from an intellectual job into an industrial one, with procedures and repeatable process and with policies to cover areas where thought might otherwise be required.

I’m not actually sure that the public education can be saved, anymore.

…what they’re really saying is “let’s accept everything I believe as a given, and ignore anything you bring to the table”.

Laura Gilbert’s plea for a “realistic conversation” bout 21st century education (in the MinnPost) is a case study:

Problem #1: America needs post-secondary degrees. According to policymakers, America’s future depends on our ability to increase the percent of Americans with quality post-secondary credentials from the current 39% to 60% in the next decade.

Well, it’s an interesting theory.

Now, seventy years ago a high school diploma was a big deal; during World War II, the average GI had an eighth grade education, and something under a third of Americans went to school through 12th grade.  The percentage of college diplomas was in the single digits; a college sheepskin pretty well meant you were officer or management material.

“But Mitch, the challenge back then – at least the economic one – was different; it was met by brick-and-mortar-and-steel industries that built things.  Our current economy is about information”.

I know –  my day job is in IT.  I get that.

But it’s Economics 101; as the supply of something increases relative to the demand, the value will drop.  In the sixty years after World War II, as it became expected that everyone should get a high school diploma and that college was the preferred post-secondary track, the value of the diploma decreased.  Same with higher education; the BA in English or History or Business Administration  that used to guarantee a job as a teacher or a salesman or a management trainee or an administrator or something, because it was proof that you packed some sort of intellectual gear, now doesn’t guarantee a job selling shoes at Thom McAn, because the supply of English/History/Business degrees is so out of whack with the demand for jobs for generalists.   And the supply of specialists – marketing majors, registered nurses,  aerospace engineers, physical therapists and what have you – is dependant on the need for the specialty.

We’ll come back to that.

Unless we do so, our ability to compete in a global knowledge economy could be severely compromised as early as 2020.  Statistics support this claim.

Ms. Gilbert doesn’t favor us with those statistics, but “Education is good” doesn’t seem like an especially arguable premise.

But what does “Education” mean? Does it mean “learning how to learn, and developing the intellectual,l social, cultural and technical tools to be not only a valuable worker, but a capable member of society?  One who can not only do a job, but contribute to the growth of the society, the culture, the economy and the human race?”  Or does it mean “owner of a suitably punched ticket?”

Because the latter – that’s not education.  That’s schooling.

And confusing the two is the road to ruin.

Remember – seventy years ago a high school dipoloma meant that one had a degree of education, as well as schooling.  And as the supply of diplomas rose, its value dropped – and, in the past thirty years or so, so has its content.  College freshmen today are phenomenally likely to need remedial help in writing, math, and history, as the public school system becomes less an educational system and more of  a rote process.

What Ms. Gilbert seems to be calling for is a similar devaluation of the college degree.

Problem #2: Higher education needs funding. Ironically, historic cuts in state higher ed funding threaten quality and, in some cases, survival of public colleges and universities: 50% of funding cut in Pennsylvania, $500 million in California, $400 million in Minnesota, the list goes on.

Which is – I’ll be charitable – a lazy view. There is phenomenal amount of money in higher education.  Again with the economics 101; as the supply of money available to spend on a fixed amount of a good or service – say, a seat at a college – increases, the price rises.  The price of a college education has zoomed far ahead of inflation – but in perfect sync with the amount of  private and especially public money available to pay for the goods and services.  People are talking about a higher education bubble, as the costs involved in supporting the system far outstrip the system’s ability to pay for it at its current inflated level.

But Ms. Gilbert seems to be pushing the imperative to support the status quo – the devaluation of education by the subsidy of mass schooling, damn the cost both in terms of up-front “tuition” costs as well as the rot that comes from the inflation.

This month, students across America took to the streets to protest higher ed budget cuts. Without state funds, students fear access to education will be limited to the economically-advantaged. Without students, universities fear mass layoffs and an immeasurable loss of talent as professors abandon the classroom. And without graduates, corporations wonder where they will find skilled workers. History and statistics support these claims.

History and statistics support these claims – if they are viewed with blinders to filter out all but the stated issue.

The fact is, if corporations are willing to pay for a skill, someone will step up to supply it.  America has been turning out a dearth of engineers and scientists for decades – so a generation of Indian and Chinese technocrats have made “The Indian Engineer” a new stereotype.  We produce a surfeit of registered nurses – so we are importing RNs from the Philippines and Mexico.  We produce a shortage of science and math teachers – so states are adopting alternative teacher licensure to make use of surplus math and science talent from other fields.

The market finds a way to get what it needs.

And decades of subsidy of education have supplied, to be blunt, a huge surplus of things the market doesn’t need; people with schooling, but not enough education to either get hired as a specialist or to find a niche as a generalist.  Macalester College turns out waves of anthropology majors that will never track a lost tribe; the U of M turns out psychology majors that will spend years working in call centers; Jamestown College in Jamestown, ND gave a BA in English to a guy that had to figure out a way to squeedge that into a gig in IT – something that was no part of his schooling (but was, fortunately, part of his – my – formal and informal education, thank God).

If corporations need educated workers to order to remain competitive in the near future, and if policymakers want more educated workers in order for America to hold (or regain) our global rank as a highly-educated economic force, then cuts to education must be stopped, right? Well, maybe; particularly at proposed reduction levels.

Actually, I’ll propose – modestly, and again – that we not only disconnect the idea of “education” and “schooling”, but the idea that throwing money into the huge education pool does anything but bid up the cost of those goods and services.   After decades of performing brain surgery with hammers, Ms. Gilbert is proposing we use a bigger hammer.

But, maybe there is a third consideration…

Problem #3: There does not appear to be a central conversation about higher education across all parties; an objective, future-looking dialogue that starts with where we are, and moves toward where we need to be. How else can rational decisions be made about where to cut and where to reinvent so we can still achieve the long-term vision for America? Passionate, brilliant, forward-thinking pundits exist in each camp. Imagine if these renaissance thinkers came together to celebrate higher education’s remarkable past while designing and championing the future.

You want a conversation about higher education?  OK.  Here’s some ideas I want to see at the table:

1. Stop confusing “improving education” with “counting the number of diplomas issued. Our colleges are cranking out BAs with wild abandon.  They’re just not the BAs that the market needs.   Let market forces decide what kind of “education” people get.  We have more Women’s Studies, psychology, majors than the market can possibly absorb, but it is incredibly difficult to find American tool and die makers, electrical engineers, and – oddly enough – competent English teachers.  And no – I’m not discounting the value of a humanities degree; I’m the English major, remember?  There is a value to pure education for its own sake – but there is little reason to subsidize it just to buff up the nation’s degree count.
2. Stop confusing “education” with “schooling”.  Thirty years ago, America fretted over “Why Johnny Can’t Read”.  Johnny went to Normandale, is now 45, and he’s a manager at Target, and his kids are thinking about applying to get into Metro State, and they don’t know what the Bill of Rights or a dangling participle or molecular valences are, because their public high schools are so dumbed down that there was never any reason to know any of those things. Americans have diplomas and degrees coming out their ears; too many of them are still not educated, and given the state of our public education system, it’s only going to get worse.
3. The Planned Economy didn’t work for the USSR; why would education be any different?  Coming up with an artificial output goal for, say, the number of degrees – call it a “Five Year Plan”, maybe – makes no more sense than setting arbitrary figures for the amount of cabbage did.
4. Make the high school diploma worth something again: I advocate voucherizing the whole mess.
5. Stop stigmatizing the non-college track: I have a BA.  I’m glad I do.  But too often when I talk education, especially with teachers and former professional students, talk of students going to technical or vocational school, or anything but the four-year Bachelor’s Degree track, is treated as a defeat.  It’s just not true; there are plenty of people in this world who are happier fixing things, programming things, buildling things than they’d be sitting at a desk, or in a classroom, or operating in the abstract.  It’s not a defeat; treating it like it is devalues something of great value.
6. Stop leaving half the students on the table: It’s politically incorrect to say it, but it’s a fact; boys and girls – eventually, men and women – are different.   Girls develop verbal and social skills very early; boys, on the other hand, develop better three-dimensional visualization skills.  Those skills carry forward in life; girls – women – traditionally tend to gravitate toward careers and skills involving communications and socialization (education, social work, even management) while boys stereotypically gravitate toward more tangible things, from auto mechanics to aeronautical engineering.  But over the past thirty years, elementary and secondary education has become feminized, meaning that being a boy has become devalued.  And that devaluation is moving upward into the college years now; soon,l women will make up 60% of all degrees, and it’s not slowing down at all.  Does Ms. Gilbert think culling half the population from “Education” is a good idea?
7. Let’s learn from the recent past. Government made it a goal to make sure Americans were jammed into houses; the government poured money, in the form of credit, into the housing market.  The market, predictably, responded by taking the money, in the form of higher prices and “values”.  The government kept inflating the bubble until it became unsustainable; it exploded, and we’re still picking shrapnel out of our asses.  Would it have been better to slowly withdraw some of the artificial subsidy and let it deflate slowly?  Check your latest appraisal and get back to me before you demand taxpayers keep pumping money into the education bubble just for the sake of a nebulous goal that, as we discussed above, may not solve the problem it’s supposedly aimed at.

So let’s talk.

The K12 Education  bill is moving forward. The usual suspects are upset.  Bureaucrats are the big losers :

“Have we really made the decision that desegregation and integration isn’t a laudable goal for our schools?” said Sen. John Harrington, DFL-St. Paul.

The DFLbots are upset that the budget slashes “integration” funding for the urban school districts:

The Republican-supported education bill takes a new approach to the state’s racial achievement gap by moving money from integration aid for several large districts in favor of financial incentives for any district that can improve student literacy. It passed on a 36-25 party-line vote, but is far from the finish line.

Naturally, any progress is likely to be stymied by Dayton:

Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton has indicated he will not sign any budget bills until he and Republican legislative leaders strike an overall deal on a budget framework that erases a projected $5 billion shortfall.

“Frameworks”.

“Framework”, absent any sign of worthwhile ideals to fill the framework, is one of those weasel words, like “I’m a process person”, used to cover/stall/delay/obfuscate.  It’s a sign that your opponent is has a pair of threes with a six kicker.  It shows their tank is not full of premium.

His education commissioner said the governor doesn’t support the Senate bill, while Democratic critics said ending integration aid in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth would gut racial desegregation efforts and penalize poor and minority students the most.

I would like to challenge any DFLer to show any tangible benefit from “integration” and “desegregation” money.

Like this money here:

Much of the House crime debate focused on a 65 percent funding cut to the state Department of Human Rights, which investigates discrimination complaints in housing, education, public services and employment.

And which is redundant with city, county and federal offices that do exactly the same thing.  Since the Twin Cities have refused to cut their offices to consolidate these services, it’s time someone gave some ground.

Over the weekend, the MN House GOP released its new K12 Funding bill.  Tom Scheck at MPR reports:

The bill, released Saturday afternoon, makes a slight reduction in expected growth for K12 schools, but increases the amount of money in the state’s per pupil formula.

“The debate in education this year isn’t going to be about how much we spend,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington as he compared his bill to Gov. Mark Dayton’s budget plan. “The debate instead will be what we fund and what reforms we make to the system.”

And that’s going to make metro DFLers squeeeeeeaaaaal…

Garofalo finds the extra funding in the per pupil formula by cutting the state aid schools rely on for integration.

And that particular bit got the metro DFLers into high dudgeon.  “It’s pro-segregation”, in many varieties, coursed across Twitter yesterday.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Have you been in a metro-area school lately?  They’re integrated.  And as the bill’s sponsor Pat Garofalo notes, we’ve been spending money on “integration” for a long, long time – and the more we spend, the worse the black-white “achievement gap” grows.   There is some evidence that integration itself exacerbates the achievement gap – which is not an argument for segregation (since if I don’t disclaim it, some lefty will claim it for me);

It also caps state special education funding at current levels, leading many Democrats to allege that it would force local school districts to raise property taxes to meet federal requirements.

To be fair to the DFLers, that’s their answer to everything from financial meltdown to rainy days.

Alternate – and, in this case, correct – solution: push back on the definition of “special ed”.  These days, it covers the things that most of associate with “special education” – teaching kinds with serious physical, mental and emotional handicaps.  It has also grown to cover a lot of politically-correct expediencies;  “special ed” has become a part of the Gender Ghetto in public schools, the place to which teachers shunt kids who zig when they’re told to zag.

And make no mistake – school districts love special ed.  Because while teaching the seriously handicapped is an expensive (and justified) job, school districts also looove shunting kids with “insta-Shrink” diagnoses like ADHD – usually boys – into “special ed”; it jacks up the funding, while barely adjusting the amount of “Services”.  In the worst case, it is a covert funding stream for school districts – one that stigmatizes the inconvenient (usually boys).

Special Ed could use a serious reform.  If this bill starts the discussion, then it’s a big win for everyone.

The DFL’s big response to  this – to pretty much everything the GOP has come up with this session – is that it’s a “war on the city”.   They’re doing it because they’re scared; a lot of their base flaked away in 2010, and there are signs it’s not stopping.

Regardless, Democrats say the bill unfairly targets inner-city schools and schools treating the state’s hardest to teach students.

“If you’re a needy student, you’re a loser in this bill,” said Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville.

It’s untrue, of course; if you’re a needy, inner-city student, you’ve gotten the short end of the stick for a generation.  That’s why you, the inner city parent, have been fleeing the public schools – for parochial, charter, and suburban schools – by the thousands.

The bill would also create a pilot program for low income students in poor performing schools to enroll in private schools at state expense. Greiling says the so-called voucher system would allow the state’s private schools to pick and choose which students to accept leaving the public schools to teach the state’s most challenging students. She says the bill is too aggressive.

“It’s not just rearranging the deck chairs,” Greiling said. “The whole hulk of the ship is tipped over and shaken out and spewed out in a different way. We have a whole new ship and that new ship is taking from school districts that have the greatest needs and spreading it around to other districts, small schools and charter schools.”

Republicans argue the voucher proposal is a pilot program for schools in St. Paul, Minneapolis and Duluth and is aimed at helping close the state’s achievement gap. The bill would also dedicate more money for charter schools and smaller rural schools.

And the DFL is petrified with fear over this; they know that, given an alternative, the parents that care about their kids will take advantage of any lifeboat they can find.

And yes, it will leave inner-city schools with the biggest challenges – the kids whose parents just aren’t paying attention.

The bill – read it’s right here – will help students who need the help.

But it’ll reduce the subsidy the DFL has always given to failing schools, and the union that  made ’em that way.

And that’s gotta scare the crap out of the DFL

For all the barbering over math and science education in this country, we at least have this going for us; kids who really really want a good education in science can find it, eventually, somewhere.  And at least people at all levels are concerned about it.

Social studies, though?  There’s little to no sense of crisis about our kids’ knowledge of our history, culture and government.

There should be.

It’s easy to caricature social studies education.  I’ve remarked – mostly seriously – that in my 20 years of having kids in Saint Paul schools the only things they learned about were slavery and civil rights.  It ‘s not entirely accurate – I remember my stepson having to write papers about the Constitution and Leningrad (different papers, naturally) in ninth grade. But as to my two younger ones?  The “social studies” class Bun took last summer (told here, here,here and here) was only the most caricaturish example.

The bad news?  That was the good news.

More bad news? It’s going to get worse.

Karen Effrem, writing at True North, notes that the state is considering watering the state’s social studies standards down still further:

Tragically, the new draft revision of the social studies standards for Minnesota’s public school students will not help to reverse any of these damaging trends.

In fact, the draft is a giant step backwards. Even a cursory perusal shows that the politically correct, liberal, leftist elites are having a field day. They are not just revising and tweaking, as the less than ideal legislation passed in 2003 allowed, but this is a wholesale leftist revision that should be opposed with great vigor.

How bad is it?

Very, very bad:

The Declaration of Independence that first listed the principles of our republic such as God given unalienable rights and self-evident truth and that served as the cornerstone inspiration for our Constitution, is only mentioned twice and then, not after the fifth grade.

· The draft removes the phrases found in the current standards that are found in the Declaration, such as, “unalienable rights” and “self-evident truth” These were kept in the current standards after much struggle and wrangling with then DFL Senate Education Committee Chairman, Steve Kelley, who infamously said (at 31:09) during that contentious process:

I am not sure it is accurate, legally or historically to call the Declaration of Independence a founding document.

Kelley could have been your governor…

It seems as though there is an effort to make sure that students do not understand that our rights are inherent and God-given and not from government.

Ding ding ding.

It’s in government’s interest for The People to believe it’s the source of all things good.

· Use of the word “liberty” has been decreased from 18 incidents in the current standards to only one in the draft. No longer will it be required that students be taught the meaning and importance of the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as some of our unalienable rights. There is no discussion in the standards about the sacrifices so many have made to preserve that liberty. In fact, words like “valor,” “sacrifice,” and “defense” are not used at all.

In other words, the “America Bad!” mien that kids overwhelmingly get today is going to kick in its turbocharger.

· Similarly, use of the word “freedom” has decreased from 13 times in the current standards to 4 times in the draft, all in relation to only racial freedom and equality. There is no discussion of any other kind of freedom discussed in our Constitution or Bill of Rights, such as religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc. which are inherent and unalienable, as described in the Declaration of Independence.

Read the whole, depressing, infuriating thing.

And think really hard about calling your legislator.  If it’s one of the smart ones.

The ones that learned their social studies before 1998 or so.