If you are a charter school parent, no matter what your politics, I urge you reprint this article and pass it around to your friends,

While Minnesota is proud of its education system, its great achilles heel is the inner city.  The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, have among the highest achievement gaps in the nation between white and black students – and pouring money into the districts isn’t changing anything.  Indeed, as the budget has skyrocketed, the situation’s gotten worse.

So for many parents in the Twin Cities, charter schools have been a lifeline – a place where their kids aren’t just numbers on a school district spreadsheet, where they have some input into how the school works.   The vast majority of parents in inner-city charter schools are, ironically, minorities.  Most are below the district income averages.

Mark Dayton wants to slash state funding to charter schools.

His budget plan (both of his tries at a budget plan, actually) will slash lease aid payments to charter schools.

This is a huge financial hit.

When people throw around figures like “it costs $11,000 a year to teach a student in this district”, remember that public districts can float bonds to build their school buildings, as well as get extra money from special local school tax levies.  Charter schools are forbidden by (a stupid) state law from spending their money on buying buildings.

The state allots a certain amount of “lease aid” to charter schools, which helps them rent space.

Dayton wants to slash this aid.

It may or may not affect well-heeled schools in tony suburbs.  But it will shred poor inner city charter schools.

So, all you black, Latino, H’mong, Native American, or Muslim parents who pulled your kids out of your wretched inner-city public schools?  Most of you, statistically, will vote for Mark Dayton.

You are voting for your kids’ ticket back to sub-mediocrity.  The ticket back to being treated like a number.  The ticket back to being written off, and treated like make-work programs for the teachers’ union, rather than future people with immense potential.

Mark Dayton cares more about feeding money to the union that helped cause your neighborhood schools’ collapse than he does about your kids and the path to education that you, the parents, have chosen.

Think about it.

Emmer’s proposes cutting $400 million or so from higher ed.

Listening to the left’s caterwauling, you’d think this was all coming out of student’s pocketbooks.

But Emmer also proposes shutting down one of our extra MNSCU schools.  Minnesota is overstocked with them; we could do without one of them.

And a note here – while the media has been carping about Emmer’s need for budget  “details”, the Dayton “plan” includes no details on higher education spending of any kind.   Horner’s plan calls for a tab of nearly three billion, plus abou$360 million in “investments”, minus something in “redesign”.  Government is fun for wonks, isn’t it?

Make no mistake about it – our K12 education system needs to be reformed on a level that goes way beyond spending.

But most of this state doesn’t know it yet.  K12 education is like social security; criticism has to be very limited if you want to get elected to office.  It’s sad but true.

Here’s Emmer’s proposal on the education budget:

Tom Emmer calls for holding K–12 education funding harmless in the next biennium. Tom Emmer is committed to ensure that this critical spending of the budget is not reduced.

Let’s make sure we remember that Dayton’s budget cranks up the spending – but most of that goes to paying “the shift”.  More on that below.

An Emmer administration will be focused on reprioritizing existing K–12 funding to address critical needs. Changes in priorities can be accomplished without undermining local school districts’. Additionally an Emmer administration will create urban school district empowerment zones and reduce state mandates by allowing school districts to have greater authority to operate their districts and reduce state mandates for all school districts.

The empowerment zone idea is a good one.

Also bear in mind that Emmer, unlike Dayton, is going to leave charter schools alone.  Inner city parents who have fled the district schools will still have a refuge while the state works on re-organizing urban schools.

As far as that shift goes:

An Emmer Administration will begin identifying a repayment schedule in FY2012-13 and plan to begin repaying the shift in FY2014–15. Enacting the Emmer Jobs Agenda and putting Minnesotans back to work, the economy will grow and repayment may be triggered more quickly.

In the meantime, it’s a bill we can pretty justifiably postpone for now.

Last week, Tom Emmer released his education plan.

The left’s been sputtering ever since.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Education in Minnesota, like most entitlement programs, is a “baseline” program.  It doesn’t start from zero every year; it starts with the previous years’ budget, and adds to it.  What what you add is where the political fun and games start.

P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic exposition of American government Parliament of Whores, explained baseline spending.  I’ll paraphrase.  Say there’s a state Human Service program to help provide treatment to deranged leftybloggers.  It gets $10,000,000 a year in 2010.  For the 2012 biennium, the DFL will claim that there will be a 10% hike in utilization, and the program will thus required$11 million dollars.  The Republicans can say that trying to make leftybloggers sane has diminishing returns, but raise appropriations for the program $500,000.  Both sides can say they’re raising program’s budget; the Dems can say the GOP is cutting the program; both are telling the truth, and both are lying.

———-

So too with the education budget.

Mark Dayton’s eduation budget, in his four-page “plan”, calls for a $15.6 billion educatino budget.

Emmer’s proposed  budget $13.8B – identical to the current budget (and actually a slight hike, since the 2008 budget inluded half a billion in federal stimulus money that, trust is, is wasted, gone forever, never coming back.

So that means $1.8 billion in new spending going to the classroom, right?

Wrong.

Dayton proposes to pay back “the shift” – money deferred to subsequent years in previous budget solutions – next year.  Minnesota’s education budget usually pays 90% of the annual allotment in the current year and defers 10% to the subsequent year; under the budget compromise, the deferral rose to 27%.   That means that Minnesota schools are floating 1.8 billion in various borrowing against future state payments.

Dayton wants to pay that back next year.

No, wait.  Let’s be accurate.

Dayton wants to crank your taxes up by $1.8 Billion dollars next year – $300 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – to cover the shift.

Now, in normal times, with the economy ticking along and revenue coming in in surplus lots, that’d make some sense – but in those kinds of times, there’d have been no need for a shift in the first place.

Tom Emmer proposes to wait on paying the shift back to 2014, when, with a little luck, the economy will be doing better (which will itself be more likely if Emmer is in office), rather than saddling the taxpayer with it right now, at the depths of the Obama Recession.

Here’s where the DFL is trying to fool the people; the DFL’s spinbloggers are portraying he difference as a “$1.8 Billion Dollar Cut to education!”.

It’s a lie, of course.

The Emmer budget will keep the actual money to the classroom the same as in the current budget; the main difference is the shift.

“But what about inflation?”, the left countercaterwauls.  Simple; the biggest element in education’s inflation is union labor costs.

I think they can tighten the ol’ belt for a year or two like the rest of us.

What do you think?

Did you pull your kids out of the public school system and put ’em in a charter program?  Like I did?

Start looking for a new school.  If Mark Dayton gets elected and pushes his “budget plan” through, you’ll need to start looking for a new program for your kids.

That’s right – Dayton plans to kill off charter schools.

Oh, he can plausibly claim he’s not “killing” them; merely cutting a piece of their funding that the Star Tribune says is “prone to abuse”.

No, seriously; item 16 in the Dayton Budget proposal says “Reform Charter School Lease Aid Program to eliminate Star Tribune documented abuses. Est. Savings $20 million (out of biennial cost of $85 million).”

Of course, we talked about the validity of the Star Tribune’s “investigation” – Part 1 and Part 2 – and let’s just say it’s thin gruel on which to base policy.

Still, it’s a tiny amount of money in the great scheme of things – but it will pay off a big chit to the Teachers Union.

I wonder if Dayton’s focus-group testing bothered to ask all the African-American, Native American, Somali and Hispanic parents  – who’ve pulled their kids out of their failed public schools to give them a shred of hope, and are charter schools’ biggest proponents – what they think about this?  Not to mention parents like me…

Oh yeah – cuts in lease aid will affect the charters serving poor kids, with not-that-well-to-do parents, the most.  Charters in Stillwater and Eden Prairie with backers with more financial clout will figure out a way – bake sales or construction bonds or something.  But all you Afro-American parents who pulled your kids out of Central High to go to Skills for Tomorrow?

Get back in line and speak only when spoken to!

And I do most sincerely hope the Emmer Campaign is going to do a get-together with charter parents in the inner city before the election.  Have you looked at the percent of students at inner-city charters that are kids of color who are fleeing our wretched failure of a city public school system?

Without lease aid, charter schools will not be able to generate the revenue they need to survive.

Coming up at 1PM:  The Law is what Mark Dayton says it is!

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

I do believe Mark Dayton taught high school.

I believe it because it’d be grindingly stupid for a public figure to lie about something that is as relatively easy to run down (even given New York City’s sclerotic bureaucracy) as whether he actually taught.

And even if Mark Dayton were unaware of how nothing remotely public is secret from The Cloud – and it’s possible, since the last time he ran for office there were no blogs, and The Cloud and crowdsourcing were the stuff of futurists’ jabberings – he’s got people on his staff who, by all accounts, should.

So yeah, I suspect Dayton probably taught for a couple of years.  Because he put his teaching experience in his bio for a reason – to burnish his “I understand the plight of the commoners” cred, which might be suspect, given his plutocratic pedigree.

So yes; I’ll accept Dayton worked as a teacher.  But I’d be interested in knowing where.  And with whom.

Charlie Quimby has a quote from the director of the “Peace Corps”-like program for whom Dayton worked, right out of Yale in the late sixties.

Mark taught on the Lower East Side where my headquarters were located. He was one of the first to come into the program, along with a number of recent Yale graduates, and I knew him quite well. He did a very good job and the conditions were in some ways more demanding than the Peace Corps.

It is indeed contemptible that anyone would attempt to claim that Mark did not teach in the New York City public schools or deny his youthful idealism.

In other words, “shut up, madding peasants!”.

Still, we’re getting closer.  Dayton taught on “the Lower East Side”.  Quimby even intimates that he taught at a “PS65”, on the Lower East Side.

Well bully!  Now we’re getting closer!

But so far what we have is the word of a training program director, and a copy of his license that was apparently delivered to…the address of the training program.

Look – as I’ve said, I believe that Dayton taught.  And as the grandson, son and brother of teachers, I do truly want to “deny his youthful idealism”, heaven forfend.  Teaching is an important job; if he actually was a teacher, it improves my opinion of him ever so slightly (and, commensurately, if he is, heaven forfend, lying about it, it’ll certainly tank whatever respect I may have had for him, little as that may be).

So would it kill Dayton to simply say “I taught for two years at PS65; my principal was Lev Abramowiec”, or wherever?

Because what we have so far are…:

• Dismissive huffing from an educational “community organizer” who assures us that Dayton taught for his program, but doesn’t apparently go into details.  In the spirit of inquiry, I’ll ask anyone to stop me if I’m wrong.
• A copy of a teachers license delivered, apparently, to the address of the program above.  A teachers license proves that someone was deemed qualified to teach, and that they passed their student teaching evaluations, and a bunch of classes in pedagogy and psychology (“Theory of the Eraser 351”, my dad – who only taught for forty years so, plus a couple stints teaching teachers – called ’em).

Well, it proves that Mark Dayton could have been a teacher, all right.  It doesn’t actually put him in a classroom, but I’m sure that’s just a formality.

So would it kill the campaign to give us a school name?  A principal?

Quimby signs off by saying he really, really doesn’t like uppity peasants asking questions of their betters:

If you find something factual that refutes me [which would be difficult, since the only facts in the linked piece are the one-time existence of a lower-east-side school], please do get back to my readers in the comments. I’ll be in Turkey, where that nation has an election that may move it every closer to democratic rule.

Otherwise, it would be a good idea not to raise questions when you really don’t know the answers.

It makes you look like an ass.

Sometimes it surely does.

And sometimes it leads to other questions, which lead to bigger answers than you’d ever dreamed.

(more…)

My impression is that having a license to teach in a state means one has…:

• taken (and presumably passed) the state-mandated series of education courses from an accredited college or university education program
• practice-taught a state-required amount of time with a regular teacher
• Applied for and gotten the license.

What am I missing here?

My dad taught high school – writing, English and especially Speech – for close to forty years.  He taught in two districts – Rugby and Jamestown, ND.  It’s not hard to prove it; everyone in Jamestown either had dad, or their kids did, or their parents did.  There were not a few two-generation families of students in that town.

Of course, you could ask him about it.  He’ll probably tell you all you wanna hear.  He’s kinda proud of the work he did.  Justifiably so.

Any good teacher should be!

So yesterday, Sheila Kihne at Activist Next Door noted that her Freedom Of Information (FOI) request to the NYC School District came up with no record of a Mark B. Dayton having been employed there forty-odd years ago.

Now, it could be that the bureaucrats reponding to the FOI request did their perfunctory least to answer Sheila’s question.  It could be that someone typed “Mark V. Dayton” instead of “Mark B. Dayton” into a computer.  It could be, as a commenter on Sheila’s post noted, that the forty-year-old teacher records aren’t on the computer yet.  It could be that, being civil service employees in the most sclerotic bureaucracy east of Chicago, they really don’t give a rat’s ass.

But Mark Dayton could settle this right now; we know he’s not above settling the things he wants to settle – he just released his NY teaching license, which at least proves he went to college and got certified.  Yay!

That’s how easily he could shut down those who are asking the questions about his classroom time.  It’d take about five seconds.  Just tell the world – where did he teach, and when?

Because a teacher should be proud of the work they did.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers – their “local” of the teachers’ union – having spent a couple of decades fighting charter schools, is now setting up its own

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers is trying to become the first teachers union in the country to authorize charter schools.

The union hopes it can help create a network of “guild schools” run by unionized teachers and focused on professional development and effective teaching practices.

As we noted in my charter school series last summer, charter schools operate under some tight financial constraints – the kind of thing that would kill most public schools.  One of the ways they make it is by hiring non-union teachers.

So it’ll be interesting to see if  a “guild school”, with its higher costs and big union pension, can even survive – or if the union extracts some sort of concession from boards and the legislature.

Almost more interesting than the new charter market is the implied strife within the cozy public school racket between administrators and teachers:

“The education system has become very heavy and weighed down, and it sits on the backs of teachers,” said Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis union. The guild schools will “maybe have enough flexibility [for teachers] to do what they know is the right thing to be doing for kids right now.”

On Saturday, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it is giving the Minneapolis union a one-year, $150,000 “Innovation Fund” grant to help it pursue its goal…As an authorizer, the Minneapolis union couldn’t require schools to be unionized, but Nordgren said, “We’re hoping the teachers will be unionized, because we think a union of professionals makes a stronger school and a stronger profession.”

And from the Union brass?

Tom Dooher, president of Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union, acknowledges that unions are sometimes skeptical of charters, which in Minnesota have a mixed track record.

“We’re skeptical of poorly run schools, whether they’re charters or not,” Dooher said. “But the idea of having teachers in charge of the schools and running the policy is something that we think should be happening anyway. If [the Minneapolis union] believes they have the capacity to authorize and run one, more power to them. I think it will be good for kids in Minneapolis.”

“Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia, Winston”.

I’ll be following this…

We get it – the “elite” of the regional left has the victorian vapours that some “Tenthers” would suggest that local pre-emption of federal laws, to say nothing of secession, might be legitimate manifestations of popular revulsion at government overreach.

So – does DFLer Matt Entenza’s plan to “get rid of No Child Left Behind” – a federal program – mean that he is the moral equal of a slave-owner?

It gets hard to follow these people.

(Note:  I oppose NCLB too – but not the same reasons Entenza does.  The teachers unions hate NCLB because it holds them accountable for their failures; I oppose it because, among other things, it holds them accountable for the wrong things)

Some of the DFLers’ ads have said that Tom Emmer “supports No Child Left Behind”.

Really?

Seek shelter, DFL and your minions.  There’s a storm coming in.

Here’s a little more wisdom from my daughter’s State of Minnesota-certified, Minnesota Federation of Teachers accredited teacher:

Whitey <3 Meth!: Said the teacher, “If meth didn’t exist, there would be no drug law reform, because white peole do meth, and the goverment doesn’t want white people in jail”.  Didn’t they say the same thing about cocaine 25 years ago?

Dumb Cops: Speaking in a cornpone accent: “I don’t know, man, I”m just here to beat up black people”, even though, said the teacher, the cop has no ideas what the laws are.  Not to say cops are infallible – far from it – but a top-to-bottom racist conspiracy? Hm.

Slavery Altered The Physical World:  “Hurricanes follow the path of the slave ships”, apparently as God’s punishment for slavery.  Apparently hurricanes were mostly found in the North Sea before the 1400s as vengeance for the Vikings?  I dunno.

Slavery Altered Evolution: “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 (as opposed to, y’know, because the sub-tropics are crawling with aquatic life?)

Anyone but me thinking “Hey, good thing he’s not teaching them Intelligent Design?  Whew!”?

Bun’s teacher says that owning guns is perfectly hunky dory – and that if you shoot someone in self-defense on your property, you need to “drag them into your house; they can’t do anything to you then”.

Two weeks ago over on True North, Jeff Peil – who works at my radio station, AM1280 – wrote an article that cast a gimlet eye on “Girl’s State”, an annual mock government exercise sponsored (along with “Boys State” – perhaps two of the last non-coed educational exercises in America) by the American Legion and its Auxiliary.

Peil had gotten an email from a parent who was unimpressed by one of the products of the exercise:

 An irate parent forwarded me a handout his 16-year-old daughter received this past weekend at a “Girls State” retreat sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary.

Juniors in high school are invited to attend these Girls State retreats…While most of this seems relatively non-controversial, this year’s Girls State has ruffled a lot of feathers.  This year it was held at Bethel College from Sunday, June 13th – Saturday, June 19th.  During the course of the week, the daughter of my “irate” friend sent his father several emails decrying how left-wing the event was.  The father dismissed these, thinking he had simply trained his daughter well how to identify leftist propaganda.  Little did he realize that his daughter would come home with written proof of the left-wing agenda the group promotes.

Here is an exerpt – read Peil’s piece for the entire list:

Rules for Girls State – 2010

1. Never do housework.  No man ever made love to a woman because the house was spotless.

2. Don’t imagine you can change a man – unless he’s in diapers.

3. What do you do if your boyfriend walks out? You shut the door.

And more, in the same post-Sex-in-the-City vein.

Peil:

Now while something like this might be relatively non-controversial for women looking to boost their self-esteem and feminine comraderie, this was not a group of women.  This was a group of 16-year-old girls.  More importantly, these girls often attend this to have a resume padder for college applications.  The highly selective event offers young women an exposure to civics that not every high school girl gets, and thus makes the applicant stand out.  I ask you – what does this have to do with civics?

With all due respect to my colleague Peil – without whose talents as a salesman the Northern Alliance would not be on the air – I wonder if he’s watched Congress, or even most of the advertisements coming from Madison Avenue, lately?

No, there’s more to it than that.

———-

It was about thirty years ago last week that I and about a dozen other guys from Jamestown trekked off to Fargo on a Sunday to take part in Boy’s State.  Of the dozen from Jamestown, I think I was picked last – everyone above me had other plans.  So I squeaked in.

It was…different.  The presenting reason was about civics, of course – but I couldn’t help but thinking that the American Legion had an underlying motive; show us a little of the military life, too.    We were organized into eight “Counties”, which were about platoon-sized (and split into a couple of squad-sized “cities”), and led by a “counselor” who happened also to be an NDSU ROTC candidate.  These “counties” marched around in double file; we woke to reveille every morning, were shown how to make hospital corners on our dorm beds, had our rooms inspected by a couple of humorless highway patrolmen; minor transgressions rated pushups or minor hazing; being caught with “contraband” – booze, usually, although the list included drugs, porn and smokes – meant being sent immediately home to face the wrath of the local Legion chapter that had, we were reminded, paid our way (which, in a small town, was powerful deterrent; I think I heard of one kid being tossed).   We assembled at night for “taps” and to retire the colors, and had “lights out” at 10:30PM.

It was a whirlwind of activity; we divided up into two parties, the “Federalists” and “Nationalists”, by luck of the draw; I was a Fed.  We held a county caucus (mandatory) right after dinner Sunday.  I spoke; apparently that was all it took to get elected County party chair, which sent me to a 10PM meeting with the other seven chairs; they apparently liked my style, because by the end of my first evening I was the Chairman of the North Dakota Federalist Party.

Score.

The best part?  I would get to spend my first couple of days exempt from marching around with my platoon county.  I had early – 7AM – meetings every day with other party people; I had to get going early, and I’d gotten half an hours’ work done by the time the rest of my platoon county had gotten to breakfast.

But I also had to run the State Convention the next day.  It involved four hours of standing at a podium trying to conquer Robert’s Rules of Order on the fly.  And after that?  An all-night session of writing a party platform and designing a campaign for the state executive office races…

…the next day. 

Now, it’ll come as little surprise that I wrote most of the platform.  It SHOULD surprise you that it was so far to the left it would have made Paul Wellstone blanche with horror.  And boy, was I cynical; much of the platform was blatant pandering.  It was so far to the left that my “enemy”, the Nationalist Party chair, when he came to my college four years later to recruit for the Campus Republicans, recognized me and asked “so are you still super-liberal?”  I was a conservative by this point.

But between that and the campaign I designed – featuring a REALLY tight stage production that, yes, did in fact reflect my training in broadcast production values – we did in fact win the governor’s office and nine of the twelve executive offices. 

I went on to win an election to the Legislature, and then House Minority leader – all by Wednesday of that busy, crazy week.

And the House met for several sessions.  And by about Friday of that week of waking up at 6AM and going to sleep maybe at midnight (good behavior got us some later “lights outs”), some of the debate got a little blue, by PG-rated North Dakota 1980’s standards.

Friday afternooon,  someone – a Nationalist, naturally – introduced a resolution calling for the legalization of prostitution in Pisek, North Dakota, in the interest of helping spur economic activity in the depressed little city. 

It got debated for close to two hours, and I recall – and then got sent back from the Senate, before going (as I recall) on to get vetoed by the governor; the override survived. 

It was by far the most-debated bill in the session.  It was probably something none of us told our parents or our Legion sponsors about.   It was, of course, the inevitable result of putting a couple of hundred seventeen-year-old boys, punchy from long days and unfamiliar places and lousy food and constant immersion among strangers and strange jobs and strange rituals, into a room together.

And it was probably the most thorough education in how a bicameral legislature works that any of us have ever had.

———-

One of the Girls’ Staters posted a link to Peil’s article on a Facebook page, and True North got some feedback.

When I read the initial article, I was a little nervous; had the American Legion Auxiliary knuckled under to political correctness?

Emily Schirvar of Stillwater emailed to say not to worry:

In the first place, to accuse the Girls State as upholding “leftist” values is nothing short of ridiculous. As an attendee this year, I can attest that the American Legion Auxiliary’s focus tended more towards the right; I am proud to say, however, that the values we learned there were above and beyond party lines. We learned, among other things, to respect our nation’s flag as a sign of national unity and pride–ignoring our own biases to demonstrate an interest in and vision for the country we all share.

Well, that hasn’t changed…

Additionally, the “proof” mentioned in Peil’s blog is nothing more than misplaced evidence: these “rules” were meant to be a type of comic relief. With very full days, beginning at 7 a.m. and continuing as late as 10:30 p.m., laughs were a way to wind down, and relax for a moment; it would be ridiculous to attach ulterior motives.

And the “rules?”

Had the “irate” daughter been paying attention at the assemblies, she would have realized that not only were the “rules” designed as jokes–not to be taken seriously–but the other rule “verbally read by the group administrator” was not meant to be included at all. Receiving the list from a friend, the administrator simply forgot to proofread. Her embarrassment was sufficient, in my opinion, to forgive that mistake–one that the group rectified by not including it in the Moccasin.

Another participant, who asked not to be identified, supported this:

The list was passed on to our administrator from a friend and she didn’t proof-read the list before hand. The administrator apologized profusely and was quite embarasssed. This is why the “rule” did not make it into the list, the administrator in no way wanted that to be advertised by Girls State or the American Legion.

It is unfortunate that the young woman missed out on one of the most important lessons of Girls State: that our actions have consequences, good or bad, and in order to change the world, we must first arm ourselves with knowledge. Perhaps, had she considered this, she would have had a better experience at Girls State.

Another participant – let’s call her “Participant B” – added:

The girls were not given an option as to which party they belonged to, which provided new insight to those who were in a party that may not have shared the same views as them. Never did the Girls State program endorse one party or promote a certain party’s point of view. The guest speakers’ political views varied. In fact, one guest said she was so right-wing, “she made Rush Limbaugh look liberal.”

As far as the “Rules for Girls State” go, I cannot understand how any of those jokes could be considered part of the “left-wing agenda.” You would be hard-pressed to find a Democrat who believes we should build malls on the moon or that a man’s mind is “too little to be let out alone.” I ask YOU, Jeff Piel: What do any of those “rules” (which are nothing more than jokes) have to do with a left-wing agenda?

Well, there  is a certain amount of anti-male baggage with the part of feminism that’s tied itself to the left in America – and if our nation’s high school juniors are unaware of this, it’s either very good news or very bad news – but I suspect that if the American Legion Auxiliary ever becomes a hotbed of this train of thought, our nation will have much bigger problems to deal with.

 Schirvar challenges bloggers:

…I have heard about the “evils” of bloggers who neglect to do their fair share of research before acting as “experts” on a topic. It is disappointing, then, to find such a clear example of this occurrence. Although no one asks bloggers to be completely without slant, it would have been more honorable had Peil at least tried to find out about the other side of the story. Far from “leftist propaganda”, as he calls it, the week-long event was an intensive look into how government works–at times the Girls State citizens were asked to put aside their prejudices for the sake of the experiment, and many (myself included) would say that this unique look into new ideas helped each one of us grow as individuals.

 “Participant B”:

I’m sad to disappoint you, Jeff Piel, but the American Legion’s Girls State 2010 was entirely non-partisan and completely worthwhile.

On the one hand, it’s not the biggest controversy True North has gotten into.  On the other hand, the generation that’s going to be taking things over in thirty years or so is kinda vital.

Thanks for all the response!

Bun’s “history” teacher was out most of the day today, but the substitute wasn’t much of an improvement.

The first order of business was watching a movie, Right America (Feeling Wronged), made by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra, about people who didn’t vote for Obama.   Calling the movie “heavy-handed” and “one-sided” would be a little like calling Nick Coleman “unctuous”; it focuses (like certain leftybloggers) on a thin film of outragous-to-the-point-of-cartoon-y racists:  even the  Huffington Post panned  it.

The teacher added after the movie that most people in the documentary were provincial “country folk” who had never seen a black person, and were motivated by racism.

The teacher handed out a “worksheet” on John Hanson – he was black, don’t you know? – and got a quiz on the other five “black” presidents and why they concealed their “blackness”.

And there was a “worksheet” – I’ll get that out over weekend.

Bun’s in summer school getting caught up on some various credits.

One of her classes is history.   She’s relating to me that her history teacher has some unique views on American history, recent and past.

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

Value Judgments:  White students are worth the least of any students in the public school system; while he was apparently vague on the overall hierarchy, he said that Ethiopian and Somali students are “worth more”, in terms of getting funding.

People are “disregarding their blackness” to “reap white benefits”: The teacher has 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:  He didn’t elaborate.

Katrinariffic:  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”.

Obama Yoot:  They’re doing 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.  Bun say she’s feeling just a tad intimidated.

Obviously he’s a conservative, huh?

I’ll be doing a daily log.

Imagine how much  better criminal justice would be if prosecutors and judges worked with defense attorneys to speed up the judicial system?

Or if accountants and auditors were on the same team?

Or if the President, Congress and the Supreme Court spent less time checking and balancing each other, and more time working on ways to help each other increase their power?

Well, no.  They are all terrible ideas.  The whole point of having adversarial systems built into government is to ensure there’s accountability, or at the very least a speed bump in the way of unlimited power on the part of CEOs, Presidents, Governors, Congresses…

That’s why of all of Jesse Ventura’s mind-dissolvingly stupid ideas in his time-warpingly stupid administration, the dumbest of all was his constant lobotomized yapping for a unicameral legislature, so government could “get stuff done”.  Of course, keeping government from getting “stuff done” with impunity is one of the great virtues of both the bicameral legislature and the two-party system.

Of course, the Minnesota DFL has never understood this.  Their primary frame of historical reference is the period nationally between 1933 and 1980, and in Minnesota until about 2003;

This is a good thing; it means everyone’s working to hold everyone accountable.

Which may explain a lot why Doug Grow thinks this is a good idea:

The relationship between Mary Cathryn Ricker and Valeria Silva stands in sharp contrast to the common education confrontations that have dogged public education in Minnesota in recent years.

Ricker, head of the St. Paul teachers union, and Silva, the St. Paul school district’s superintendent, meet often and banter easily.

“Mary Cathryn asked me to attend a workshop (sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers),” recalled Silva.

“It was on a weekend,” Ricker said.

“I told her I’d go, but if I’m going on a weekend, it proves I must love you,” Silva said.

The two women laughed.

An alliance between the union and the superintendent’s office is no easy thing to maintain. Silva admits that even some members of her high-ranking staff are leery of how quick the superintendent is to pick up the phone and call Ricker.

Well, I’m glad someone at 360 Colborn is doing their job…

And Ricker suspects that at least some teachers are uncomfortable with a union leader who spends considerable time at district headquarters.

Which may be the most depressing commentary on the mentality in public education today that I’ve ever heard.

Silva is distressed by the public attitudes toward teachers — and the teaching profession. It’s hard enough, she said, to attract people into the profession, given the relatively meager starting paying, compared with other professions. But after years of bashing, fewer and fewer people even believe the profession deserves respect.

“Any other culture,” Silva said, “a teacher is greatly valued. That’s been lost here.”

Ms. Silva: get back to me about this episode, which your district has been trying to ignore for five years.   Until you have an answer that wouldn’t insult my dog’s intelligence, I won’t value your “profession”.

Maybe Mary Rickert will ask on my behalf?

Matt Entenza, running a weak third in the DFL primary race, promised to release a “bold” “education” “plan”:

DFL gubernatorial candidate Matt Entenza Thursday will release a “a bold education plan,” his campaign said Wednesday.

He’ll talk about the plan on campaign stops in Duluth, St. Paul and Rochester.

Entenza, who is vying in a DFL primary, took a hit at Republican candidate Tom Emmer in making his Wednesday announcement.

“During his tour Entenza will highlight a basic premise: to make Minnesota great again, we need to make our schools great again. It is a concept that Tom Emmer has failed to grasp,” the campaign release said.

The swat at Emmer is the left’s latest meme, trying to drag Emmer into talking specifics so the left and media (pardon the redundancy), as we discussed yesterday.  

Of course, you won’t see Mark Dayton or Margaret Anderson-Kelliher releasing “plans”.  Entenza, trailing very badly in the race, has nothing to lose.

Except that when he says it’s going to be a “bold” plan, set your expectations accordingly.  Entenza was the founder of MN2020, a think tank that has, among other things, been effusive in supporting the Teachers Unions, and  in reinforcing our wretched status quo at the expense of any new, better ideas.

So I believe it’s a safe bet that Matt Entenza’s education plan will be “bold” only in the brazenness of its support for the status quo and demands that we peasants fall in line.

 If you’ve read anything about education in the past 20 years, you’ve heard that the school systems are crushingly short of science and math teachers.

If you’ve had kids in the public school system, you’ll know that the system is even shorter of good math, science and technology teachers. 

It’s not a wonder, of course; people with degrees in math, hard science and technology have a lot of opporunities in the private sector, right out of school.  And as a career wends its way, the disparity gets starker; while a career in science or technology offers boundless opportunity for advancement and even entrepreneurship, a career in public education offers decades of unionized, union-style plodding up a public service pay scale, in a system where no matter how hard you work or how good you are, you will always have less money, seniority or recognition than some ticket puncher who gave up on teaching a decade ago, but is five years away from her pension.

But for all that, there are people, especially people in Math and Science, who spend a decade or two in the field and want a change of pace, or develop an altruistic streak, or become alarmed at the lack of math and science preparation they’re seeing in their own school-age kids; people with ample skills, the real world experience that impresses smart kids, and enough zeal for educating kids that they opt to leave a well-paid field in mid-career to teach! 

And it’s with an aim toward alleviating that shortage that the Emmer Campaign is pushing alternative licensure – to allow these highly motivated people, the ones that have the chops to convince a school board to hire them, to get into the classroom without having to repeat two years of college to get a state license…

…that in the end ensures nothing about a teacher’s competence, but shows that they’ve sat through classes on pedagogy and child psychology.

But to listen to the left’s chanting points industry, you’d think what Emmer and the conservatives mean by “alternative licensing” is bringing in unqualified teachers from Guatemala and putting them in the classroom.

This particular chanting point is such a gross torture of context that it qualifies as an outright lie. It actively disinforms the public.

Remember – every single  burned-out teacher currently punching their ticket in a Minnesota school until retirement is “certified”.  The state’s minority achievement gap – which, in the Metro, is among the worst in the nation – was accomplished by “certified” teachers.  But our math and science classes remain catastrophically short of qualified instructors.

What is more important – maintaining a bureaucratic status quo, or getting our state’s kids the education they need?

To Education Minnesota and the DFL, the answer is painfully obvious.

Pawlenty and Obama, together against the teachers’ unions?

Matt Abe writes:

The Pawlenty administration and education reform advocates are finding themselves supporting some of the significant aspects of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, while many Democrats and the teachers unions, strong supporters of candidate Obama in 2008, oppose them, including:

• Alternative teacher licensure – allowing non-traditional candidates like mid-career professionals alternative paths to becoming licensed teachers
• Pay for performance – linking teacher pay to student performance, even more than Minnesota’s current, optional Q Comp program

Conservatives generally and the Pawlenty administration in particular have been advocating for these types of reforms since at least the late 1990s. From the nation’s first charter school laws to replacing the process-oriented Profile of Learning with knowledge-based academic standards, to Q Comp, Minnesota has often led the way in education reform, rather than let itself be dragged by Washington, D.C. educrats to improving its public school system.

I’m going to guess that if November goes badly, Obama will reverse course.

But right now?  It’s a start.

A DFL legislator would very much like to give school districts the power to raise taxes without voter approval:

“In any other year, I would be horrified by the idea,” said Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville. “But I will consider this as a short-term solution. Education funding should be from the state. But schools need a lifeline right now.”

Greiling, who chairs the House K-12 Education Finance Division, introduced a bill last week that would allow school districts to levy up to $200 per pupil from local taxpayers without voter approval.

The bill is one of three that gives districts more taxing authority. They are scheduled to go in front of Greiling’s committee this week.

Great idea, DFL.  People are hurting, unemployment is booming – shake ’em down for more!

Not every DFLer has lost his mind:

“I’m very hesitant to do that. When property taxes have gone up $3.6 billion since 2003, we don’t need to be raising more property taxes,” said Rep. Paul Marquart, DFL-Dilworth, chairman of the House Property and Local Sales Tax Division.

About three-quarters of school funding — close to $7 billion annually — comes from the state.

The rest comes from property taxes. School districts across the state levied about $2.3 billion for taxes payable in 2010.

That 2.3 billion, by the way, is money that charter schools don’t get; whenever any DFL/MFT/MN2020 flaks tell you “charter schools cost more than public schools”, ask ’em why they’re leaving out a quarter of the budget.

At any rate, here’s the DFL’s message to you; “our institutions can’t operate within a budget, like the rest of you have to, so we’re going to take what we need.  We’ll let you know when we’ve decided what that is. Buh-bye”.

In all of the world, there can be no less valuable measure of competence or ability to succeed at ones’ job than a “Teaching Certificate”.

Now, I’m not bagging on teachers.  My dad, my sister, and two of my grandparents are or were teachers.  I taught, myself, for a while.

But what does a “Teaching License” mean?

It means that a teacher has taken a number of prescribed classes in an “Education” program – the kind of thing my father, who was not only the world’s best teacher for almost 40 years, but also taught education courses to would-be teachers full and part-time for many years – derisively called “Theory of the Eraser 352”.  They’ve also spent some time practice-teaching in a classroom.  And that’s about it.

I thought about this a few years back, when a friend and former manager of mine decided to chuck it all, leave the IT business, take his degree in math, and become a high school math teacher.  Now, the guy was a natural teacher; in a just world (or if he’s wanted to teach at a private school), he would have been hired off the street.

But no.  He, with his degree in math from a rigorous program, had to sit through a couple of years of classes on arcane pedagogy methods – “Theory of the Eraser” – and basically repeat two years of college  (in the least rigorous, most hot-air-puffed department on his or any campus).  When we last spoke, he was about to start practice-teaching – and was already sounding a little burned out with the system.

Why could he not just take his degree, and his years of experience and passion for the subject, and start teaching?

For the same reason you can not start a barber shop or a law firm or a nail salon or an electrical repair company without a license; because the people who already have the licenses want to regulate the supply of practicioners, to keep the supply of the service down and the prices up.

A few weeks ago, the Legislature saw a bill that would have allowed for “alternative licensure” of teachers – basically allowing people with significant real-world experience and who wanted to try their hands at teaching to get a fast-track to licensure.

Kevin Dahle – who squiggled into office in a special election two years ago over Ray Cox in SD25 – is part of the DFL push to squash the idea:

This past Tuesday, the Education committee in the Minnesota Senate passed an alternative Teacher licensure bill. I voted against that bill.

At a time when discussions have focused on increased rigor, teacher quality, and closing the achievement gap, fast tracking teacher licensure doesn’t see make sense.

Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it does.  It would help if Senator Dahle would provide some actual evidence either way.

All we get, though, is non-sequitur:

Senate File 2757 would allow person with a BA who has passed reading, writing, and math exams and a 5 week preparation course to be in charge of a classroom.

How can an individual, who has not adequately demonstrated proven success in an actual classroom setting experience, do a better job in closing the achievement gap?

In and of itself?  They probably can’t.

Of course, that would be a problem – if teachers with alternative licenses walked into classrooms and started teaching kids and drawing paychecks sight-unseen.  Now, I’m no school board member, but I’m going to guess that there might be some sort of evaluation process before a district hires a new teacher.

But why is this even an issue?  After all, we’ve all seen the headlines; districts are laying off teachers!  Even Senator Dahle notes it (empasis added):

Hundreds of laid off teachers and recent college graduates from 4 year teacher preparation programs are already looking for work. There are sufficient high quality experienced teachers for most subjects.

“Most subjects”.

It’s true.  There’s a glut of out of work teachers in many areas.

But the state is critically short of teachers in science and math.  We are begging for English as a Second Language teachers.  Heck, they can’t find male teachers to work in elementary schools – between the hostile feminism that runs the education academy and the thanklessness of being a union teacher, the number is plummeting even as our urban social collapse presents a dire need for male role models in our schools, a time that can make or break boys at a critical juncture in their lives.

Alternative licensure is a way to get people who are motivated to teach, especially math and science – people like my former manager – into the classroom, fast.  Because that’s where they’re needed.

The current system allows for flexibility. There are certain organizations such as “Teach for America” that already have programs in place in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Brooklyn Center having been granted waivers by the Board of Teaching. That program could continue.

Which is great – and T4A has been a notably successful program in many ways.  But it focuses on putting new college grads into classrooms.  It can not supply people with years of real-world experience in their fields and a motivation to teach.  That’s what altertnative licensure is for.

And I’d suspect Senator Dahle knows that.

But why would Senator Dahle not mention the bill’s true purpose?  Why would he not note how ungermane it was to refer to the many laid-off teachers who don’t have science of math degrees?

Why do you suppose?

Elected to the Minnesota Senate in January 2008. I have taught Civics, Economics, Political Science, A.P. Government and Social Psychology for 26 years. Served as President of the Northfield Education Association (for 10 years), served on the Council of Local Presidents for Education Minnesota, member of the Northfield Arts Guild, Northfield Historical Society, member of the United Methodist Church, worked with Citizens for Quality Education, active in several campaigns at local, state, and national level.

No big surprise, is it?

I saw this news last week…:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

…and thought “oh, great”.

Not that I don’t think some balance is in order.  After having kids and stepkids in one school or another for the past twenty years, there’s no question that the public education system is biased to the left, especially in whatever pass for “humanities” in the public schools.  History education in particular is a joke; I’ve spoken, exasperated, about this in the past; my kids have gone years where all they studies were slavery and civil rights.  Important, sure.  Episodes with big impact on many of the kids’ lives?  Absolutely.  The only things, practically, worth studying?  Hardly.

And on the occasions where other parts of history and current events were studied?  Yeah, pretty much “America last”; the few kids who are even exposed to the ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” seem, for some reason completely unknown to me – to come out of school with the idea that “conservatism is about the right to own slaves and the freedom to let old people freeze”.  Nothing new there.

So the idea of “balance” seems, on the surface, to be an improvement.

The problem is, I don’t want either side – any side, really – writing the history books “favorably” to themselves.  I’m not one of those people who ever thought teaching kids the dates and places and events was such a bad thing; tell kids what happened, and show them what other commentators – not textbook writers – have written about the events, and let them make up their own minds.

“But Mitch!  Kids are stupid! They don’t have what it takes to process all that information!”  So do you think they’re processing the pre-digested stuff that’s slanted one way or the other?  Hell, most history teachers haven’t processed most of what history actually means.

The big question with this Texas fracas is “how good an idea is it for committees of politicians, most of them pretty ignorant themselves, to be determining what goes into textbooks and curricula?”

Speaking of schools – the head of the Detroit Public School board, which graduates less than a third of its students, albeit at exquisite expense – writes like an illiterate:

The school board is led by Otis Mathis, who wrote a mass email last August:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?

And here’s the beginning of an email to supporters a few days ago that started with this:

If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

Remember when MN2020’s John Fitzgerald said that the big advantage public systems had over charter schools was that you could elect the school board?

Some punch lines write themselves.

After years of critiquing the public schools, I’ve seen any number of rationalizations from their defenders in education (who, in Minnesota, largely control the DFL party) and the media (who, in Minnesota, are largely in bed with the DFL) and the crop of “think tanks” that routinely mix people from the media, DFL and education.  Kids spend too much time playing videogames; parents don’t support teachers; unallotment; “diversion” of funds to charter schools.

I’ve seen bad teachers blamed – but rarely in left-leaning publications like  Newsweek, and never in an article that notes that a sitting Democrat administration is participating in the blaming:

Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.

It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools.

And the union:

Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones. But here is the rub. Although many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)

Of course, grades aren’t necessarily an indicator of that innate ability to teach – and while teachers (especially in small, rural districts and many troubled urban ones) don’t make spectacular money, the pay and benefits are pretty excellent in much of the profession.

I maintain that money isn’t the hitch – and the stats seem to bear that out.  We’ll come back to that.

The unions are a problem – a huge one – but not the only one:

At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure. It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability.

The unions have done one thing that’s immensely more damaging to education than insulate their membership; they have turned education into a 12 year procedural assembly line, bolting bits of knowledge onto students subject entirely to union-directed work rules that treat students like cars or coffee makers.

The article goes through some of the changes that are burbling up through the system – largely outside of the union system and the mainstream academic academy; Teach for America, Knowledge is Power, and charter schools, all of which are highly successful, and thus targets of intense counterpropaganda from the establishment.

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out. Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers’ unions have long and bitterly resisted. Under a new Louisiana law, New Orleans can track which ed schools produce the best teachers, forcing long-needed changes in ed-school curricula. (The school system of Detroit is just as broken as New Orleans’s was before the storm—but stuck with largely the same administrators, the same unions, and the same number of kids, and it has been unable to make any progress.)

The big bellwether?  The Obama Administration is actually on board with the dissatisfaction:

The teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (3.2 million members) and the American Federation of Teachers (1.4 million members) are major players in the Democratic Party at the national and local levels. So it is extremely significant—a sign of the changing times—that the Obama administration has taken them on. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is dangling money as an incentive for state legislatures to weaken the grip of the teachers’ unions…

And that’s starting to weaken the force of the unions’ Thin Plaid Line:

One of the unions, the AFT under Randi Weingarten, seems to realize that sheer obstructionism won’t work. “One of the most hopeful things I’ve seen is that the union people don’t want to spend so much time defending the not-so-good teachers anymore. I think the pressure of accountability is paying off,” says Haycock of the Education Trust. “They know they will be held responsible if they are defending teachers who aren’t any good.”

The danger, of course, is that while the current Educational-Industrial Complex – unions, academia and politicians – are a self-serving monster that gets terrible results, it’s not stupid.  We’ve been through these reform drives before.  Remember the Reagan-era initiative to get more, better teachers into the profession?  Remember the Bush-era demands for accountability?  All were either successfully resisted by the Educational-Industrial Complex and the Thin Plaid Line, or absorbed, neutralized, neutered.

While the Administration’s actions, and the success of non-traditional systems like charter schools and New Orleans’ system provide hope, we’re going to need something along the lines of the Tea Parties to save our educational system.