The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It’s an aphorism that’s become a cliche, and for good reason; it’s so applicable to so many things.

In the first seven parts of this series, I detailed a string of events that helped me on the way from being a public school proponent to a solid detractor.

But like jalapeno peppers in a burrito, the events were just the accents, the major mile markers along the way that tipped the hand of the underlying context. The refried beans…well, there were plenty of them, too.

The tipping point for me wasn’t the gruelling parent-teacher conference about my daughter’s “failure” to comply with her school’s demand for emotional transparency. It wasn’t even chasing my son down to the police station to find out if he was going to be charged with making a “terroristic threat”, and the Kafkaesque nightmare that followed.

The tipping point – the moment when I officially gave up on the public school system – was a meeting with my son’s fifth-grade teacher, a social worker, the assistant principal, and two or three special ed specialists.

For the umpteenth meeting, I heard the refrain I’d been hearing non-stop since Kindergarten; Zam’s a bright boy, but…

But. But he didn’t sit still when he was told to. But when the teacher said it was time for math, he kept reading. But when the system said zig, he zagged.

Not that he didn’t know the material; merely that he didn’t learn it according to a schedule set down in a curriculum planner’s office intended to be the least common denominator for teaching a class of 28 kids.

I lost it.

“So the problem”, I said, too depressed to really care about decorum, “is that school is a factory. The factory is designed to turn out thousands of identical sausages. Each of those sausages must be identically-shaped. If any of those sausages doesn’t fall into the assigned shape, fast enough, you take the sausage off the assembly line and call it “special” and and send it the subliminal, but really overt, message that he’s an abnormal bit of sausage. And you take that little bit of sausage aside so it doesn’t gum up the assembly line for all the other bits of sausage”.

Probably not a moment that the Saint Paul Public Schools are going to put on their brochure. I was exhausted and depressed…

…and realizing, bit by bit, that “school” has very little to do with teaching children.

(more…)

The Saint Paul School Board is going to debate, again, a resolution by a left-wing boutique pressure group to try to hamper military recruiters on Saint Paul school property.

A source close to the issue says

The superintendent [says] there may be protesters there from the left. While they got the opt out form expanded, they are angry they did not get the recruiter ban from cafeterias. I suspect there has been pressure on the board to reconsider that issue at tomorrow night’s meeting.

Proof that madness doesn’t necessarily reign supreme at the SPPS…:

I believe the superintendent is frustrated that [the school board is]  spending so much time on this issue and not on the issues of student achievement. I fully agree with her, and I know you do to.

And there’s a call to action, here:

I know this is short notice, but if any of you can come to them meeting by  6p.m. tomorrow to hear debate and be prepared to speak at 6:30 — if the left starts the attack at the podium. If they appear, do not sign up to speak until they have thrown the first punch. Otherwise they will have the last say …Let them speak first, then sign up. Or, ask if the sign up sheet is broken down by pro and con.If for some reason they don’t speak, and the debate seems to be controlled, then don’t inflame them. But…this time we will need to. Plus, we must force our differences with the left on this issue and drag them kicking and screaming back to the center.

I’m mostly healthy and rarin’ to go, this time.  I’ll be there. Think what you want about the military – but when it comes to giving opportunity to the working-class, minority and immigrant students that the district serves so very very badly, the military has the best record around. The “student” group – and the board members who are carrying their water, Tom Goldstein and Ann Carroll – are upper-middle-class, Highland Park/Crocus Hill/Mac-Groveland limo paleoliberals who care about people of color, immigrants and the poor – the people who are most likely to see the military as a path to opportunity – only as far as they provide them a political sinecure.  They need to be put back in their place.

So I’ll see you there.

I was originally going to write my big, earth-shattering conclusions in this installment of this series. 

But I find that I have both more to write than I thought, and some loose ends to tie up.

So today, let’s tie up loose ends.

(more…)

Matt Abe at Scholar’s Notebook notes a couple of GOP-sponsored bills that might just be a step in the right direction:

A pair of bills with bipartisan support (HF 2007 and SF 1768), including Senate authors Sen. David Hann (R-Eden Prairie) and Sen. Warren Limmer (R-Maple Grove) and a raft of DFL authors in the House, would withdraw Minnesota from the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Although such a move would also cause Minnesota to lose federal education funding, it would also allow the state’s schools to emerge from a variety of federal mandates, many of which are unfunded or underfunded, which would free up money currently being spent to comply with these mandates. The state would actually save money and regain more control over its schools by withdrawing from NCLB!

This is one of those areas where in the past I’ve bit my tongue around some of my fellow Republicans who’ve been interested in “education” issues; NCLB tries to put lipstick on a pig, trying to bring principles of accounting to providing “accountability” to education.  An admirable goal, perhaps, especially given the 13 billion we spend on education in Minnesota every year, but it only works if one picks the right measurements.  And standardized testing is not just the wrong measurement – but the current system, which essentially forces schools to “teach to the test”, is downright harmful to actually “educating” children. 

Abe continues:

Constitutionally, eduation is a state function that should be administered by the state and locally-elected school boards, not “regional” boards, the federal government, or the United Nations. The Legislature should pass this measure swiftly, and Governor Pawlenty should sign it into law this session. It would be a major victory for the local control of our schools.

And if there’s anything public schools need to survive, it’s more, not less, localism.

(Read the whole series)

 Let’s sum up what happened in the previous episode:

1. A child, “Nate”, had made up a story; that Zam, my son, was late for homeroom because he was in North Dakota, “getting a sniper rifle” to shoot a teacher.
2.  Zam was, in fact, standing beside me in the Assistant Principal’s office – not in North Dakota.  Unarmed.  Bemused.  And in huge trouble.
3. “Policy” required the Assistant Principal to treat this boy’s goofy story as if it were a full-blown attempt to murder a teacher – by Zam. 

The fun was just beginining.

(more…)

(Read the whole series)

Note: I have been changing the names of all Saint Paul Public Schools officials so far.  I’m adding real names to the story now.  The actions that took place as part of this story need to be attached to real school officials, who are agents of a system that needs to be held accountable.  For while “the system” – the Saint Paul Public School system and the compulsory education system as a whole – are the overarching problem, people are responsible for what they do, even if it’s the “policy” of the organization they serve.  But I have little idea where I stand, legally, on this. 

Truth is an absolute defense.

 It was February 7, 2006.

My journey – which had started in 1990 as a proponent and supporter of public education, the son of a teacher and grandson of two more – was about to turn a half circle, never to return.

My son Zam had a bunch of behavioral problems, mostly in the middle of grade school, mostly caused by acting out after his mother and I divorced.  Divorce is almost always a nasty whack in the head, and kids react differently.  And of course, like a lot of boys, Zam was not one to sit in a chair and raise his hand and march on cue.  As I noted in the last installment, Zam was a challenge for everyone. 

But by seventh grade, even though he still wasn’t much for sitting in his desk and doing what he was told to do when he was told to do it, his behavior was pretty good.  He was attending Ramsey Junior High, reputed to be one of St. Paul’s “better” junior high schools.

Which didn’t mean he ever caught a break.  One day, he found a pair of scissors on the sidewalk.  He brought them to school – and when he told a teacher, he got suspended for another “weapons violation”.  Note that the scissors were exactly the same as the ones used in the school’s Art Room, and indeed may have been originally taken from there!  No matter.  A second “weapons violation”, another three day holiday suspension.

It was policy.

And one day when another kid tackled him in the lunch room – even though every witness, including some teachers – said he didn’t hit back, he got suspended, too.  “He has a history of behavioral problems” said the various assistant principals. 

And what did they say?

“It’s policy!”

So he sat out his suspensions (which seems to be the only “punishment” in the school vocabulary these days; they “punish” behavior by making kids stay home.  Someone’s unclear on the concept, and I don’t think it’s just me…), learned his lessons, and basically endured.  I kinda admired him, in a way.

One chilly February morning, Joseph Heller reared his surrealistic head.

(more…)

(Read the whole series)

 In the last installment, we talked about my daughter Bun’s problems with…

 …well, no.  Let me stop right there.  Go back and read Part IV of this series.  The problems were not my daughters!  Oh, the creeping emotional trauma in her life was real enough.  But the schools’ response was too stupid for words. 

Still, the damage it did was real enough. 

And as difficult as her situation was, and as much damage as the schools’ one-size-fits-all mania for following academic “models” to the exclusion of common sense did to her, it was  piker compared to my son Zam’s journey.

(more…)

…what surprises me more:  that some teachers and schools in the UK are softpedalling teaching about the Holocaust and the Crusades to avoid offending Moslems…:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem – because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

[A British government study] found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class. …[another school] deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques.”

…or that any schools in the Western World teach any of this stuff in the first place.

I’m not aware of either of my kids being taught about the Crusades at all, or anything about the Holocaust at more than the  most cursory possible level. 

Well, not in school anyway.

The Strib editorial board came out against the cap on charter schools (which we’ve discussed here and here). 

The idea had me scratching my head; the Strib and the anti-charter Minnesota Federation of Teachers are co-bedfellows of the DFL, which is carrying the MFT’s water on this issue.

I figured there had to be a whammy in there somewhere.

Let’s look, shall we?

But limiting charters is not the best way to assure adequate state support for traditional public schools. The larger issue is funding public education programs well enough to allow both traditionals and charters to thrive.

Perhaps a more recent Senate action will make that possible. Although the full Senate adopted a low-ball $496 million increase for education a week ago, it is now debating an income tax increase that would pump in another $400 million.

Well, we could see that coming, right? 

We’ll come back to that.

Still, there are some senators itching to put the brakes on charter expansion, worried that the new schools are hurting regular public school enrollment. They point to a state finance report that identifies charters as one of the state’s fastest-growing expenses.

Which is, of course, rubbish.  Publicly-financed schools of all types – traditional or charter – get paid a certain amount of money for every day every child is in school.  Except that charter schools get a little less of it; charter schools don’t get their parent districts’ supplemental appropriation proceeds, for example.  So keeping a kid in a charter school for a given day – or year – costs the state the state’s taxpayers less than keeping the kid in a traditional public school.

It is true that growth has been rapid; the number of charter students has risen from 10,000 in 2001 to 23,700 today. But that growth has been driven by interest and demand.

Let me digress a moment here; that is a very curious turn of phrase.  Of course the growth is triggered by interest and demand! 

The big question – why is there such “interest” and “demand”?  

And why does the DFL feel the need to choke that “interest and demand” off? 

For 20 years, Minnesota has been a pioneer in offering public school choice, acknowledging that today’s students have a variety of learning styles and needs.

In fact, charters are just part of the menu of educational choices. Out of 800,000 public school students, more than 100,000 attend some type of alternative, contract or charter program — all under the public school umbrella.

Clearly, a significant number of students and families believe in school options.

Again – why do you suppose that is?

But given that it’s the Strib editorial board, I should accept good news where I find it.  For example, they put the numbers in context:

As for cost, stopping the expansion of charters is estimated to save the state about $6 million over two years out of a $13.5 billion education budget.

In other words, one-twentieth of one percent. 

Moratorium supporters do raise questions worth considering. Some school officials worry that programs have been set up just so organizers can go after state startup funds.

But then, there are laws against fraud.  No? 

 A handful of rural groups have said they’ll start charters to stave off much-needed district consolidations.

Let’s stop right there.

Consolidating rural districts is the dumbest thing this state has ever done for education.  In fact, consolidating smaller schools into big, factory-model schools is the dumbest thing this nation has ever done when it comes to schooling.  The simple fact is, rural schools do, statistically, a better job of teaching kids to read, write, do math, learn science and history than big, factory-model schools.  The smaller, in many cases, the better.

Consolidation has nothing to do with educating children, let alone educating them better.  It’s about making the system work better for the system’s sake.

And if the Strib editorial board believes – as they seem to – that an urban parent’s choice is worth protecting (thanks, Strib!), why not that of a parent in a small, rural town who is blanching at the thought of his kids being on a bus for over an hour each way, morning and night – for the dubious privilege of attending a big, prison-like, factory-model school that won’t do as good a job of educating them as the small, rural school they’re losing?  Which the proposed charter school will replicate? 

Indeed, the best way to “save” the public school system – I believe the only way to save it, if indeed “saving” is possible – is to deconsolidate schools, rural and urban.  Dismantle the huge, factory-model schools, with their need for Orwellian security and the chuzzlewitted addiction to “policy” and bureaucracy that do nothing but teach kids that authority is not only uncaring, but stupid (not that it’s not a valuable lesson).  Move the schools out into the neighborhoods.  Make them small – no more than the number of names the principal can remember, ideally.  Move them into the neighborhoods they serve.  Quit segregating by grade level; let older kids teach younger kids.  Live lean.  Focus on the mission – teaching reading, writing, math, science and history. 

Sort of like…well, charter schools.

[Rejection] should befall the charter moratorium when the Senate and House bills land in conference committee. The door should remain open to create innovative schools for Minnesota students.

Well, we ended up in the same place, anyway. 

(Read the whole series)

 There was a time I felt that the biggest problem with public (and much private) education was that it was a “one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching children.  I’ve learned over the years that that is a distant third, of course, but we’ll get to that.

Still, the fact that the goal of public (and most private) education is to jam all the pegs, whether round, triangular, star-shaped or square, into round holes has been a huge problem to my kids and I; realizing it was one of my way points on the journey from public school supporter to implacable enemy.

It goes without saying that divorce is among the most traumatic things that can happen to a child.  Mine were no exception.  Far from it. I won’t go into details of my divorce – what, indeed, would be the point? 

Suffice to say that for the kids, it was another story.

My son – well, I’ll save his story for another day.

(more…)

Lori Sturdevant observes the anniversary of Minnesota’s Special Education Act – the government effort that started the series of programs that currently…

…well, let’s get back to that.

Sturdevant – as reliable a flak for the “no new taxes are too extreme!” lobby in the DFL (and those parts of the Minnesota Republican Party that were indistinguishable from the DFL for most of 40 years) starts by talking with former governor Al Quie:

He’s the only surviving member of the eight-legislator interim study commission appointed in 1955 “to make a complete study and investigate the problem of handicapped children.”I was a green, wet-behind-the-ears, eager-to-learn state senator,” Quie recalled last week. But the 31-year-old farmer from Dennison had caught the attention of a fellow member of the governing board of the Lutheran Welfare Society and the chairman of the state Senate Welfare Committee, Sen. Elmer L. Andersen.

That’s right. The panel that put Minnesota out front in the education of exceptional children (they soon learned not to say “handicapped,” Quie said) included two future governors. Elmer also recruited his brother-in-law, Sen. Stanley Holmquist, a school superintendent and a future Senate majority leader. This enterprise was loaded with talent.

Yaaaaaay, government!

Because of the efforts of the “best and brightest” of a generation of Minnesota politicians, the problem was solved! Right?

Well, of course not. While exceptional kids remain largely exceptional, Special Education has become yet another political cudgel:

Quie remembers no partisan fight over the program’s cost (this was before the “no new taxes” era.)

It was also long before the era of “everything a kid does that doesn’t fit in with a school, teacher or administrator’s idea of what a kid needs to do to fit in with the program is a ‘handicap'”.

Today, special ed helps kids with genuine handicaps. It also is a dumping ground for every child that doesn’t behave exactly as he or she is “supposed to”. Special ed classes teach kids with real problems and issues; they also are a place where kids that are handicapped by their inability to sit in a chair for six hours in a hot, airless room, march in straight lines, or raise their hands and ask permission for a drink or to go to the bathroom.

And because they’re in those “special classes” to teach them to conform and comply with that model, the school district gets more money. Lots of it. How big a vortex?

Find yourself a parent with a “Special Needs” child with a mild “Educational Behavioral Disorder” (EBD); ask them what sort of “assistance” they’re getting from the district. Then, ask them how easy it is to get the “assistance” to stop.

Hint; you can’t. If the school district were truly burdened by having kids with mild problems sitting in “special” classes, they’d be eager to cycle kids with small, manageable problems back out of special ed, to free up the funding. Right?

If special ed funding were a zero-sum situation, sure. But it’s not. Every kid that gets designated “special ed” triggers an entitlement of money, and that entitlement remains as long as that child is considered “special”. There is no incentive for the school district to get the kid out of special ed. Ever.

It’s a cash cow. And a political cudgel:

Amazing what 50 years of inflation does, isn’t it? It’s almost as amazing as what has happened to school district budgets since Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature removed inflation from the special-ed funding formula in 2003.

The state’s share of special-education funding now averages about 40 percent, and it’s dropping. The feds pay another 14 percent — despite their long-ignored promise to pay 40 percent. That means that in virtually every Minnesota school district, funds intended to reduce class sizes, buy materials or pay for extracurricular programs are now being used for special ed.

Keep that trend going, and special education will be doomed to political trouble in the state of its birth. Already, said Senate E-12 funding chairman LeRoy Stumpf, school superintendents tell him they are reluctant to disclose how much they are spending on special ed, for fear of a citizen backlash.

Perhaps – if you removed the sentimental syrup that Sturdevant pours over the story, with her reminiscences of politicans’ salad days and the “golden age” of Minnesota politics, where DFLers and Republicans united to act like DFLers – we could start talking about the grounds for that backlash. Special Ed is both a dumping ground for kids who don’t conform and comply to demands of an educational model that could hardly be designed worse for many kids, and a bottomless source of extra funding when applied, as a permanent, open-ended entitlement – to kids who are only “special” because they don’t color inside the lines, figuratively speaking.

Perhaps it’s time for that backlash to happen.

Couldn’t make it to last night’s Saint Paul School Board meeting.

Swiftee could, though (I’m adding my own emphasis here).

 Board member Tom Goldstein spoke at length about his objections to the presence of military recruiters on school property; he barely made an effort to conceal his contempt for the two US Navy Master Chief Petty officers present.

He said that he was of a mind to make their job as hard as possible and went on at length about his objections to the war in Iraq. He also said that he “didn’t care if the war was not a school board issue”.

The district’s tanking test scores and dismal graduation rates bear him out on that fact.

Board member Tom Conlon, as ever the lone voice of sanity, pointed out that the board’s time would be better spent pursuing an improvement in the districts academic achievement

For starters, thank goodness for Tom Conlon; Swiftee’s right.  If you follow the Saint Paul School Board long enough, you start to think that Tom is the only one in the bunch whose head isn’t swaddled in tinfoil.

But let’s look into this issue.

A small, vocal, and (because the board is so very hard-left) very well-connected group of students, parents and advocates in Saint Paul – almost universally white, upper-middle-class, and DFL – are voicing their distaste for the military.  Their own kids are safe, of course – Saint Paul allows parents to sign an opt-out form that forbids recruiters from talking to their children. 

But they want to make sure that no children are exposed to [what they regard as] the big, bad, evil US military.

These same people are leading a push to keep the services’ Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs out of the schools.   These programs – whose enrollment is heavily if not mosty minority, in Saint Paul – teach discipline, self-respect (as opposed to self-esteem – a distinction that few in the SPPS seem to recognize), and organization; they also provide an entree into college-level ROTC programs, which may be the best chance for many of these kids to afford college.  In exchange for five years in the military, these kids – many from the sort of straitened circumstances that the programs’ detractors merely drive past on the way to their yoga classes – can get a college education, and more importantly a good start in adult life.

But there are uniforms involved, so the granola-chomping, Whole-Foods-shopping, Highland-Park-dwelling detractors wrinkle their noses, and call their pet school board members to complain.

This battle is a class struggle, all right.  It pits the patrician inner-city DFL against the people in this city that regard military service as an honor, or a gateway to opportunity, or one’s privilege as an American citizen.

Ironic, isn’t it?  The Democrat “Farmer Labor” party stands, yet again, against the values of the farmers and the workers?

As no public comment was allowed at the meeting yesterday, I will be on the lookout for the next meeting on this subject.  Suffice to say I will not miss the next one.

My daughter’s charter school – like many urban charter schools – is run by rabid Democrats.

This doesn’t faze me. In picking a school, I care as little about the teachers’ personal politics as I do about their taste in music. Institutional politics is another thing altogether – but the institution’s politics, while institutional (and ergo a tad left of center for my taste), aren’t a major issue. My kids’ charter schools both deliver the best education my kids – especially my daughter – have ever had. That’s what counts.

Of course, as DFL/Teachers’ Union shill Nick Coleman crowed the other day, the DFL-dominated legislature (nothing but a group of markers for the state’s educational establishment), tired of the competition from charter schools, wants to cap the number of these highly-successful operations.

The Senate voted on the cap bill. And a funny thing happened.

I got this letter, forwarded from my daughter’s advisor, from the state charter school organization:

If your Senator is listed below as voting to lift the Cap on Charter Schools, please write a “thank you” letter to the individual. Also, please make sure to thank all of the six democrats who showed their support of charters by voting against the cap.

True, as far as it goes but, um, hello? Teaching moment here?

How about telling your largely-Volvo-driving, Whole Foods-shopping, Al-Gore-worshipping membership that maybe, just maybe, the DFL hates what you we all stand for, and ask them to cross their party lines and thank the Republicans who stood up for our cause?

SENATORS WHO VOTED TO LIFT THE CAP ON CHARTER SCHOOLS:

Republicans:

• Day, Dick
• Dille, Steve
• Fischbach, Michelle L.
• Frederickson, Dennis R.
• Gerlach, Chris
• Gimse, Joe
• Hann, David W.
• Ingebrigtsen, Bill G.
• Johnson, Debbie J.
• Jungbauer, Michael J.
• Koch, Amy T.
• Koering, Paul, E.
• Limmer, Warren
• Michel, Geoff
• Neuville, Thomas M.
• Olson, Gen
• Ortman, Julianne E.
• Pariseau, Pat
• Robling, Claire A.
• Rosen, Julie A.
• Senjem, David H.
• Vandeveer, Ray
• Wergin, Betsy L.Democrats:
• Cohen, Richard J.
• Erickson Ropes, Sharon L.
• Metzen, James P.
• Rest, Ann H.
• Scheid, Linda
• Torres Ray, Patricia

If your Senator is listed below as voting for the Cap on Charter Schools, please write a letter of disappointment in the vote to your Senator.

ACTION REQUEST –

SENATORS WHO VOTED TO KEEP THE CAP ON CHARTER SCHOOLS:

Democrats:

• Anderson, Ellen R.
• Olseen, Rick E.
• Bakk, Thomas M.
• Olson, Mary A.
• Berglin, Linda
• Pappas, Sandra L.
• Betzold, Don
• Pogemiller, Lawrence J.
• Bonoff, Terri E.
• Prettner Solon, Yvonne
• Carlson, Jim
• Rummel, Sandy
• Chaudhary, Satveer S.
• Saltzman, Kathy L.
• Clark, Tarryl
• Saxhaug, Tom
• Dibble, D. Scott
• Sheran, Kathy
• Doll, John
• Sieben, Katie
• Kubly, Gary W.
• Skoe, Rod
• Langseth, Keith
• Skogen, Dan
• Larson, Dan
• Sparks, Dan
• Latz, Ron
• Stumpf, LeRoy A.
• Lourey, Tony
• Tomassoni, David J.
• Lynch, Ann
• Vickerman, Jim
• Marty, John
• Wiger, Charles W.
• Moua, Mee

Catch that?

Except for six DFLers – of whose motivations I’m unsure, but for whose actions I’m thankful – the DFL voted a straight ticket to…

…to what?

To protect the Teacher’s Union’s monopoly on education. To constrict school choice. To tell those parents and groups who, dissatisfied with the results we’re getting from the public system (and unable to either homeschool or put our kids in private schools), decide to find a better option “like it or lump it”.

The rationalizations I’ve heard for this “cap” are ludicrous; “We want more oversight on charter schools?” Show me a public school that would survive if it had to balance its own books!

Here y’go, fellow charter school supporters. Your party (and I’m comfortable in saying that most of you, at both of my kids’ schools, are DFLers at the very least) has screwed you us.

What are you going to do about it?

I wrote this letter to my senator, Ellen Anderson (DFL, District 66), about her deeply-misguided vote on capping Charter Schools:

Senator Anderson,

I’m Mitch Berg.   I’m a constituent of yours.  And while I’m not only a Republican, a talk show host (at AM1280), a conservative blogger (www.shotinthedark.info) and a member of Concealed Carry Reform Now, I’ll have you know that you are (but for Randy Kelly and Norm Coleman) the only DFLer I’ve voted for in the past 20 years (once, and based entirely on your constituent service record; while I agree with you on nearly nothing, you are indeed excellent at that).

However, I need to talk about your vote on capping Charter Schools.  Since you have spent so much of your political career as an advocate for children, I urge you to reconsider your very intensely misguided vote.

I pulled both of my children out of the Saint Paul Public Schools last year; with my daughter, they were merely incompetent.  With my son, I’d call the situation more akin to child abuse. 

I enrolled them both in charter schools.  Freed from the absurd, Helleresque approach of the public schools, both have blossomed – my daughter’s GPA zoomed from 1.2 to 3.4 in one semester. 

I’m like a shocking number of parents who, disgusted by the institutional inertia of the public schools (many of them immigrants and minorities, for whom good education is a pathway out of poverty) have seceded from the public schools FOR OUR CHILDREN’S EDUCATIONAL, INTELLECTUAL SURVIVAL.

I would *like* you to reconsider and renounce your vote on this subject.  Absent that fantasy, I’d like to know your rationale for this vote. 

I think I do, actually – you, like most of the DFL, are utterly beholden to the teacher’s union.  Your assistant said it might have had something to do with “oversight”, which is absurd, since nearly no public school would survive according the standards that charters must meet!

At any rate, I look forward to hearing from you and/or your staff.

Mitchell Berg
Minnehaha at Pascal. 

I’ll keep you posted.

Getting an education for my children has been a beastly, awful business. The only break I’ve had in recent years has been getting my kids out of the St. Paul Public school system… …no. Let me rephrase that. The only break my kids and I have caught has been getting them the hell out of the sinking morass that is the Saint Paul Public Schools.

In the case of my daughter, I’d say the district, her various administrations, most of her teachers were merely incompetent; in the case of my son, it’s more akin to “child abuse”. I’ve written about this in my “Losing My (State) Religion” series, of which three more installments are coming soon.

(Note to all my friends and relatives in the education business – yes, I know you all do your best.  Yes, I know you don’t see things quite the way I do.  I’m not impugning your motivations, efforts or ethics. I know the vast majority of public school teachers really do do their best.  But I think the current system’s basic assumptions are largely wrong.  Beyond that?  Yes, my experience this past few years has been that awful). 

Charter schools were the lifeline – the way out of the cesspool that the public school system has become. Without charter schools – with private schools not a financial option, and homeschooling not personally available – I doubt I’d ever have come up with a way to get either of my kids through school.

For my part, I’ll leave Saint Paul before I put my kids back in that miserable, pathetic system. The best thing I can say about Saint Paul is that “it’s better than Minneapolis“.

And that doesn’t help a lot.

With that out of the way, let’s address Nick Coleman’s column from Friday.

If there remains a “sacred cow” in public education — an issue that can’t be criticized or challenged — it is not teacher unions, the failings of inner-city schools or the empty achievements of the No Child Left Behind Act. All those topics and more have been debated vigorously in the discussion over education.

No, the last sacred cow is the charter-school movement and the notion that charter schools will reform the schools and that no limit should be placed on their number, despite mounting evidence that they, too, are beset by problems.

Allow me to set aside, for a moment, my celebrated sense of manners.
Nick. You doddering old duffer. What the hell are you talking about?

Every time a charter school folds for any reason, your paper gives it breathless coverage.
Your newspaper has been fighting against charter schools from the very beginning of the movement.

Charter schools have never been a sacred cow. To some of us, they’re a ray of hope. To some of you, they’re a punching bag on which you vent your impotent frustrations – like observing the failure of the second-most-lavishly-funded district in the state and bellowing “our schools are burning!”.

Clear on that?

That last sacred cow just got gored. And high time, too.

The Minnesota Senate’s education spending package includes a long-overdue proposal to limit the number of charter schools in Minnesota to 150, a cap that could mean no more charter schools would be approved after 19 schools slated to open next fall or next year are added to the existing 131.

A cap may be gaining traction: Despite protests from charter-school supporters, an attempt to remove the cap from the education bill was defeated by voice vote in a Finance Committee subdivision Wednesday.

Let’s try to be clear on our terms here. Charter schools are booming – else why would they be slated to grow a full 15% next year? The better ones have long waiting lists, because parents – especially inner city minorities, sick of the fourth-rate education their children receive in their benighted inner city schools – are taking their kids there in droves.

Minneapolis’ public school system has lost 25% of its enrollment in recent years – lost to charter schools, private schools and open enrollment. Groups are starting new charter schools at a pace that just keeps accelerating – so clearly the concept of the charter
school is what’s “gaining traction”.

There is no traction, at least on the streets of the Twin Cities.

No, Nick, what’s happened is that the DFL-controlled committee structure in the legislature is doing what their major benefactor – the Minnesota Federation of Teachers – tells them to.

Let’s not confuse the two. It tends to mislead your readers.

Logically, a cap makes sense. It wouldn’t mean charter schools couldn’t grow or accept more students; it would only mean that 150 charter schools are enough.

And…why?

Up next – one of Coleman’s patentied “Flurries of Obfuscation”.

The need for a cap is clear: Charter schools, authorized by the 1991 Legislature (and limited, at first, to eight schools) have wildly outgrown their original intent,

Rubbish. There was nothing about their “original intent” that said “let’s succeed in the marketplace of ideas, and then stop cold!”

suffer from a lack of rigorous financial controls (several have gone bankrupt, others have been robbed by their managers),

Question: How do you think any public school would fare by that standard, if they weren’t treated the same as welfare and the military in terms of funding?

Fact: Charter schools get much less than their fair share of state funding per-student. And yet the likes of Coleman are forced to deploy weasel words to say they…:

…have not significantly outperformed traditional public schools

In other words, for less money, and under the constant harassment they did perform better!

Oh, and it all depends on who you ask. For my daughter? Try “going from a 1.2 to a 3.+ GPA” almost immediately, while doing much more rigorous work under vastly more committed teachers.

Significant outperformance? You be the judge – unless you are Nick Coleman, and are the stooge of the teacher’s union, and have had your judgement written for you.

…(according to the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, 44 percent of the state’s charter schools did not make adequate progress last year, including the school where Minneapolis City Council member and public school critic Don Samuels sends his children).

Leaving the ofay ad hominem against Samuels (who committed the unpardonable sin, for an inner-city African-American politician of crossing the DFL/Teacher’s Union (pardon the redundancy) – so what? “Significant progress” at what?

Whatever the MACS says, answer this, Nick Coleman – why do all of us dumb parents keep yanking the kids the hell out of public schools and putting them in charter schools? Because we’re stupid?

Look at my kids’ results in charter schools, and then explain that to me.

“There are too many of them that suffer from really bad management, financial improprieties or sweetheart deals” involving charter-school sponsors who contract for services to their schools, says Charles Kyte, executive director of the MinnesotaAssociation of School Administrators.

Did you catch that?

Coleman quoted from an official from an “association” who has always opposed charter schools, and who justifiably sees charters as a threat to their livelihood!

This part got me angry – not only Mr. Kyte’s statement itself, but the assumptions that Coleman operates under:

Kyte spent 20 years as a public school superintendent in Northfield and Eden Valley-Watkins, and helped get a charter school off the ground. He does not oppose charter schools in principle. But he says charter schools are costing public school systems millions in education funding and that they are increasingly drifting towards micro-experiments in neo-segregation that turn the old notion of a meltingpot on its head, with schools aimed at Hmong children or Muslims or smaller subcategories, such as a school for Somali girls.

“We have all these laws to try to integrate society, and now we’re creating all these segregated little pots,” says Kyte.

Did you catch that?

After twenty years of pushing “multiculturalism” and hammering on “diversity” – at the expense of teaching children the skills they need to actually become part of the “melting pot” that so many in public education so despise! – parents are taking matters into their own hands.
If the public schools can’t handle the job of helping immigrants and minorities assimilate into the larger society – and they clearly are failing miserably, as you can tell any time you visit a large, factory-model high school, like my daughter’s former school, St. Paul Central, where kids seem to gather in the halls in ethnically-homogenous groups – then why should parents not look for a solution that does both jobs better?

“The advocates of charter schools are relentless, and we’re going to have 500 in five years, if we don’t pause.”

So?

And why are they – we – relentless? Because of the full-court press on the part of the establishment (of which Nick Coleman is a smug, barbering part) to destroy what is, for some of us, the first good thing that’s happened to our kids’ edutation.

I think the word he’s looking for is “motivated”.

The “experiment” is out of control and having the opposite effect of what was intended: Instead of reforming public schools, it is damaging them.

And so Coleman wants…what?

To call off the experiment, which is highlighting the irredeemable weaknesses of the public school system?

Nick Coleman; always right there, with the real solution; tell the emperor his clothes are fabulous!

It’s the same old story:

• Boy unfurls giggly, pseudo-provocative sign at a school event.
• Principal suspends boy.
• Boy and his lawyers spend six years pursuing the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Let’s join them, shall we?

[Joseph] Frederick filed suit, saying his First Amendment rights were infringed. A federal appeals court in San Francisco agreed, concluding the school could not show Frederick had disrupted the schools educational mission by showing a banner off campus.

Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr argued for the principal that a school “must be able to fashion its educational mission” without undue hindsight from the courts.

Now, let’s get this straight; the “incident” happened six years ago, and the kid won (albeit at the Ninth Circuit, which is sort of like a group of Phyllis Kahns in robes) – and the school district took it to the Supremes?

That brought swift skepticism from some justices.

“There was no classroom here,” said Kennedy.

“This was education outside a classroom,” replied Starr of the torch relay observation.

“What did it disrupt on the sidewalk?” asked Souter of Fredericks banner.

“The educational mission of the school,” was Starrs answer.

“The school can make any rule that it wants on any subject restrictive of speech, and if anyone violates it, its disruptive?” asked Souter.

Ding ding ding. Give a cigar to David Souter.

Welcome to life in a public school – where a parent, in addition to chauffeur, short order cook, taskmaster and sales manager, needs to be a lawyer to boot.

Justice Samuel Alito, alone among his conservative bench mates, appeared sharply critical of the schools position

“I find that a very, very disturbing argument,” he said, “because schools have and they can define their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students, under the banner of getting rid of speech thats inconsistent with educational missions.”

I’m tempted to get my daughter to make a sign – “Christians 4 Reagan” – and see what happens.

Let me leave aside my well-established cynicism about the public schools’ “educational mission” (and I do suspect that an awful lot of kids learned much more about American civics and government through this case than they ever did in class. Indeed, if my daughter’s last public school history teacher is any indication, they’d probably learn more American history watching soap operas. But I digress). And don’t bother that the “war on drugs” is a quagmire in a way that Vietnam never was and Iraq never will be, which has killed more Americans than both wars put together, for a moment.

The answer, on the part of the school (an arm of government) in response to this frankly dumb, sophomoric provocation is not to throw yet another draconian, anti-“educational” rule at it (although it’s more than likely the kid learned more in ten days out of school than he’d have learned sitting on his butt in a classroom). The answer to “bad” speech – or “dumb” speech, like this kid’s doltish sign, is to explain to him and the other students why this is dumb, wrong and sophomoric.

There are so many ways to do this; have the students talk about what is sophomoric versus useful speech; learn a bit of logic, and critical thinking; expose them to humor predating John Stewart, maybe.

Of course, if public schools taught critical thinking (to other than kids on the debate team), they’d grow up into parents that questioned whether jamming kids into huge schools run on an assembly-line model – possibly the system least conducive to actually learning things ever devised – is a good idea.

And then all hell would break loose.

Katherine Kersten takes on the U of M’s doltish decision to give Algore a PhD in…something.

Rad the whole thing.  But I liked the decision – “what degree?”

Early on, the doctorate in science had an edge. But the recently released summary of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change changed all that. It made clear that a centerpiece of Gore’s sky-is-falling claim — ocean levels rising 20 feet as a near term prospect — is wildly off base. The panel projects that by 2100, sea level will rise a mere 7 to 23 inches.

So how about an honorary doctorate of laws, based on Gore’s efforts on behalf of the Kyoto global warming treaty? Unfortunately, skeptics might point out that Gore couldn’t even talk Bill Clinton into submitting the treaty to Congress, after the Senate voted 95-0 for a resolution discouraging it, and that compliance has been poor among countries that did sign the treaty.

Humane letters? Naw, that’s not for real men like Al.

Which degree will it be? The Daily article contains a clue. It quoted Ingrid Scantlebury, a precocious U of M freshman not yet caught up in the Gore glow. According to the Daily, Scantlebury “agrees with Gore’s work but doesn’t feel the university should award him a degree for it. ‘It’s mainly a publicity thing,’ she said.”

You guessed it — Gore’s going to get a special honorary doctorate in marketing.

I think “Creative Writing” or “American Fiction” would do, too…

…no matter how crappy school is, kids should not do this:

A school administrator got a blast of pepper spray in the face Wednesday when trying to intervene in a fight brewing between two students in the Rosemount High School cafeteria, said Principal Greg Clausen.

The altercation took place about 11:20 a.m. in a cafeteria/student center filled with more than 400 students, and the pepper-spray-wielding student continued to spray the chemical after being grabbed by the administrator. Officials decided to end the school day early at 12:45 p.m.

Clausen said that he didnt believe it was possible for students to eat in the cafeteria. “It was amazing how big an area that pepper spray permeates,” he said.

Yes, pepper spray is nasty stuff.

On the one hand, I’m encouraged; the entire school district (presumably) didn’t “go into lockdown”, which schools in the metro will do these days if a student writes “gunnysack” (there’s a “Gun” in there!).

On the other hand, five’ll get you ten the Rosemount Schools will adopt a “Zero Tolerance for Spray” policy; soon, if  a kid brings a Binaca to school, they’ll call the “liaison officer” and lock the place down…

I’ll be on BlogTalkRadio at 6:30 AM…

…talking about Nick Coleman and education. Join me at 646 652 2923.
If you’re a reader of Twin Cities conservative blogs, Coleman is a regular kicktoy. If you’re from out of state, you’re in for a treat.

Light the lights!  Pop the popcorn! 

Nick Coleman is writing dreck again!

Last Saturday’s column attacks Minneapolis Fifth Ward alderman Don Samuels for his remarks – they should “Burn North High School Down”, says Don – and tries to connect Samuels with a big, bad, Republican (natch) movement that is trying, apparently, to light our kids on fire. 

Or something.

Coleman:

Don Samuels has apologized for his words, but not his views. And he isn’t likely to. For the Fifth Ward City Council member from Minneapolis who suggested burning down North High School is not just one man with an opinion.

He is a stalking horse for a movement that wants to torch public schools. It has gotten frighteningly close to its goal.

Let’s use Coleman’s “arson” metaphor for a moment.  Indeed, let’s take it to its logical conclusion. 

Arsonists usually light fires for a reason.  Some, true, do it for the sheer jollies of watching something burn.  But much arson – especially the burning of things of value, has a more, er, pragmatic motive; insurance fraud, revenge, something, some reason for lighting that thing on fire.

Coleman can’t possibly assume that Samuels, and the movement of big, bad, cigar-chomping whiteys for whom he is a “stalking horse”, want to “torch” the school just for kicks.  Can he?

The Center of the American Experiment, a local conservative think tank, is renewing the push for school vouchers, and it tapped Samuels to endorse its position paper. In his foreword to the recent publication, Samuels again displays a flair for the dramatic, writing that he wonders “how many future murderers are in the first grade classes of the four elementary schools within a mile of my home?”

Officer, arrest those first-graders!

All well and good for Coleman – a child of immense power and privilege, who lives in St. Paul’s tony, Wellstone-worshipping Mac-Groveland enclave, the son of a powerful poltician, brother of St. Paul’s mayor, stepson of a high-power newspaper publisher – to yip at the observation of Samuels, a man who lives in the neighborhood and sees firsthand the failure of the public school system, not just to prevent those first graders about whom Coleman giggles from murdering, but indeed to teach them anything of value at all. 

But if you take Samuels seriously, it is not just his language that is lousy. It is his policies.

Samuels has become the darling of a coalition of mostly conservative, mostly suburban groups involved in a coordinated assault on “government monopoly schools.” These groups are pushing hard in Minnesota for expanded tax-credit or tuition vouchers to allow public dollars to be spent on private schools. It isn’t just people in the North High neighborhood who should worry about that.

This paragraph is notable not just for what it has wrong, but for the questions it completely begs.  “Mostly conservative?”  You mean some liberals are breaking ranks?  “Mostly suburban?”  What, you mean urban people are starting to turn on their beloved schools?  (Stay tuned). 

And again, what possible motivation could there be for this “coordinated assault?”  The sheer joy of coordinating assaults?

Some groups pushing for vouchers have fought to outlaw gay marriage or to keep children from receiving sex education or learning about evolution. They have a right to send their kids to religious schools. They don’t have a right — Article XIII of the State Constitution bars public funding for “sectarian” schools — to subsidize such schools with tax dollars.

Fortunately for Coleman, the State Constitution allows strawmen in arguments.  I, however, do not.  It matters not an iota if “some” groups don’t believe in evolution or gay marriage or sex education; “some” groups that fought in the American Revolution owned slaves; “some” groups that defeated the Nazis were murderous Communists; “some” groups that buy the Strib are Republicans.  Do any of those facts invalidated the rightness of  America, World War II or the Strib, in and of themselves?

Again, Coleman fails to note these groups’ motivations (although he gets close, painfully close, without probably knowing it).  But he does revert to the “the law says so, and the law is always right” argument, which is the last refuge the the befuddled.

But we’re going to close in and deal with those motivations.  Oh, yes we are.

Nevertheless, the crusade is on. And Samuels is its hero.

Other black leaders are being lobbied to convert to the vouchers cause. One, NAACP President Duane Reed, says he recently refused requests to testify on behalf of a vouchers/tax credit bill in the Legislature. He says the request came from a group affiliated with the Libertarian Party, whose platform praises tax credits and charter schools as “interim measures” that will help kill the public schools.

“This is not about Don Samuels,” Reed said at Thursday night’s public meeting at North High with Samuels. “This is about … tax credits. Which is just a code word for vouchers. This is just teeing up a sensational issue.”How many black leaders support vouchers?” he said to me later, proceeding to tick off a long list of black groups, starting with the NAACP, that oppose them. “Now Don Samuels all of a sudden is an expert, and he is going to speak for us? I don’t think so.”

The old “I know stuff” argument; an oldie but a goodie for Coleman. 

The simple fact is, this is one area where every  parent, every taxpayer, every citizen is an expert.  We all know what is best for our children.  We don’t need a school adminstrator, a superintendant, a teacher to tell us, much less a “community leader” who is more beholden to parties and special interests than to you and I, whatever our race.

Pretty radical notion, huh?

Slowly but surely, we’re going to back into the motivation for this “arson” that Coleman keeps bargling about.  He won’t know it, but he’ll do it. 

Just watch.

Charter schools, funded with public funds, were supposed to help produce new teaching methodologies and education strategies. Other states limit their number. New York has a limit of 100. Iowa has a limit of 10. Minnesota has no limit. Today, we have 131 charter schools, with 23,600 students. At least 19 more charter schools are on the way.

How much is too much?

How much water is too much? 

It depends, doesn’t it?  How thirsty are you?  How much do you have?  What is the rationale for any limits?

Because in New York and Iowa, the “rationale” for the limits has nothing to do with education, but is rather that “the establishment wants them”.  Charter schools – despite some well-publicized failures – have been a huge success in Minnesota.  They have been the first step, for many poor parents (the ones that can’t afford the private schools that Coleman grew up in), in getting control of their kids’ education, getting the respect that the public system denies parents.  For many of them – myself included –  it’s been a Godsend. 

And why would the establishment care?

Well, that’d speak to that “motivation for arson” thing we were talking about above.

No, we’re not there yet.  But we will get there.

First, we have the boogymen:

The largest sponsor of charter schools, Friends of Ascension, has ties to former state Republican chairman Bill Cooper, who has served on the group’s board of directors. Friends of Ascension has 16 schools with 2,800 students (12 percent of charter school enrollment). Nor is Cooper the only former Republican Party chair to have found a keen interest in the inner city.

Cooper has “found a keen interest” in the inner city, which presumably is manifested in him driving vans around North Minneapolis, kidnapping kids, and enrolling them in the FOA schools?

Former GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner and his wife are the founders of KidsFirst Scholarships, which award privately funded vouchers [emphasis mine] to children (650 this year) to attend private schools. Those scholarships are funded by grants from right-wing billionaires such as Ted Forstmann and the late John Walton of the Walton Family Foundation.

A “privately funded voucher” is the same as a “chaste pregnancy”.  Nick!  It’s called a scholarship, numbnuts!

But it’s OK – because in reporting Eibensteiner’s serial breakins around North Minneapolis to force families to accept their “private vouchers”, we are almost there – the motivation for these men’s attempt to torch “our” schools!

Critics such as the liberal People for the American Way point out an obvious motivation: By handing out private vouchers in the inner city, conservatives hope to create political momentum for state vouchers that will damage public schools.

Not to mention the teaching of evolutionary science.

But those inner-city parents, beholden to the DFL as they are (because Minneapolis, especially the North Side, are DFL territory like no other place in the state), and committed to their childrens’ education, are resisting Big Bad Bill Cooper’s entreaties, and tearing up Ron Eibensteiner’s checks and throwing them in his face.

Right?

Wrong:

The fire has been set. Public schools have lost thousands of students to charter schools and open enrollment

DING DING DING DING DING!

Public schools have lost thousands of students – enough to force the Minneapolis Public Schools to consider closing branches, enough to set the district into a frenzy of “reform”…

…well, no.  No reforms are in on the way.  No increased focus on reading, match, science and history.  No reassessment of an education model that is an untrammelled failure that can not be solved with more money, any more than money can slow your fall from an airplane, of a system that devalues parents, assaults their values (and not just about gay marriage, evolution and sex ed, although public education’s attack on families’ faith is real and constant), marginalizes them at every turn (lip service aside).

No.  They don’t want to deal with “root causes” – a failed model, a sclerotic system, a dysfunctional bureaucracy that starts in each and every school and extends to Washington.  They just want more money.  Oh, yeah – and to find a way to shut off the escape valve that so many parents are using.

This is not just an intramural squabble in the black community. All supporters of public education should be worried. It is not just North High that is under assault; it is the very idea of public education.

Public education has only itself to blame for the “assault” – the only “assault” in history, by the way, entirely effected by retreat, and carried out by people fleeing the fight.  The system is huge, arrogant, and does something that is utterly incongruous with human nature; tries to pound every shape of peg into a square, institutional, one-size-fits-all hole. 

As an inner-city politician with friends in high places, Samuels didn’t set the schools ablaze. He just fanned the flames. But his friends are dancing around the bonfire.

No.  They are reacting pragmatically.  And inner city parents are taking them up on it, in droves – political alignments not only aside, but rendered irrelevant by a higher cause, the children themselves.

And if Nick Coleman, sitting in his snug, smug Mac-Groveland house things those inner-city parents are “dancing” rather than coldly pragmatic and acting in their childrens’ interest (and preservation), then it doesn’t take a high school graduate – literate or not – to see who the vacuous patrician is.

The Strib can’t even hear the sound of a putatively conservative administration going out of its way to act like a DFL administration!

In this morning’s editorial, they arf and gargle about a federal education budget that differs from a liberal budget only in terms of the people on the “Sponsor” line:

To hear Bush administration officials tell it, their $56 billion proposed education budget for 2008 makes bold investments that “strategically” meet student needs.On what planet? Details of Bushs education package show that it takes baby steps forward while continuing a much larger slide in the other direction.

Where “forward” means “spending”, and where “slide” means…well, not exactly “not spending”, merely “not increasing the increase as fast as the other areas”.

Constructively, the president finally recognizes the need to increase funding for college Pell Grants, his signature No Child Left Behind NCLB and Title I programs for disadvantaged kids. But even those advances come at the cost of decreases in other areas.

Also, they are virtually worthless at the little business of educating children.

While Cherie Pierson Yecke was one of my favorite guests in the history of the NARN, and one of the sharpest people in the education bureaucracy, I’ll break with her and my fellow Republicans; No Child Left Behind is a joke, a farce, a disaster whose dimensions we can’t begin to imagine.

Not that the intentions – making schools more “Accountable” for the money we spend on them – aren’t honorable. But the educational-industrial complex is not honorable, it’s an organism programmed to survive and thrive at all costs. So the “Accountability” imperative has mutated, within the organism, into a focus on “teaching the test” that is leaving our kids as one of two things; kids adept at taking and scoring well on tests, who are well-drilled on the subjects of the tests and not much more (sort of like a circus trick dog who knows nothing about fetching birds or leading a blind person around), or kids shunted into “special ed” programs where those who don’t test well aren’t counted as heavily.

Pell Grants? Admirable in concept, dismal in execution. The presence of all that federal money has inflated the cost of a college education far out of reach (barring government aid, either in grants, loans or low-cost government institutions) of all but the wealthiest students. When my grandfather went to college in the thirties, a year at a four-year private school cost about a fifth of an average American’s annual income. When my father attended the same school twenty years later, it had inflated just a bit (as he related it to me, once upon a time), to about $500 a year, in an era when the average American made around $4-5000 a year. At the same college, 25 years later, I spent $4,000 a year (when the average income was in the low twenties). Today, when the average American earns in the low forties, a year at a public university is up around $10K, while most private schools are easily in the mid-teens.

This, as the value of that degree has plummeted.

Macalester College tries to square its relentlessly liberal image with its students’ growing sanctimony fatigue after some Mac students were found throwing a party with racist overtones:

Macalester is just the latest in a string of colleges nationwide to investigate student parties and incidents this year that have involved racial overtones.

Officials are checking to see exactly what happened at the party, and Macalester will have a campuswide discussion on issues of stereotyping on Tuesday.

“We hope to take the teachable moment and engage our campus community a little bit more deeply,” said Jim Hoppe, Macalesters associate dean of students. “We hope we can start a deeper dialogue on … why these types of activities hurt people and why they get the kind of response they do.”

I’m pretty un-PC; I’ve always figured tact and manners were enough in this world.  While the professionally-indignant crowd has done this nation – especially this nation’s colleges and universities – immense damage in the past 25 years, I’ve never seen much humor in intentionally picking at other peoples’ emotional scabs.  And so even I cocked an eyebrow at what the kid involved were alleged to have done – some wore “costumes depicting negative stereotypes of race, religion and gender”, according to Mac’s president.

Of course, Macalester does more than cock its eyebrows at this sort of thing:

“Several of the attendees allegedly wore costumes depicting negative stereotypes of race, religion and gender,” [Mac prez Brian Rosenberg] wrote. “It is important to understand that the college condemns and will not tolerate activities of this type. It is deeply disappointing that Macalester students would be so insensitive and demonstrate such a lack of understanding of the colleges values and mission.”

Earlier this school year, two other very selective colleges — Trinity College in Connecticut and Whitman College in Washington state — had parties where students showed up in racially offensive costumes or blackface.

“PC for thee, but not for me”, apparently. 

I have to wonder – if a school adopts a relentlessly PC attitude about society’s seemier historical aspects, and drives all non-“PC” thought  underground (as, indeed, Mac has – they have a notable-repressive speech code), does it have to find some way to get out?

Because maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see so much of this at less-PC schools…

This article about the battle against speeding in st. Paul and other cities.

Concerned about speeding motorists on St. Paul’s Raymond Avenue, members of a St. Anthony Park neighborhood task force …were putting the final touches on the request [for help with curbing speeding] when they got word that a woman and her two children had been hit by a car while crossing Raymond near an elementary school.

The accident…sent the woman to the hospital.

 Sounds dangerous.  And near a school, no less!

So what’s the official response from the school itself – and the principal, who’s charged with seeing to her students’ safety?

Andrea Dahms, the principal at St. Anthony Park Elementary, so mistrusted drivers on that stretch that two years ago she removed the school’s student crossing guard at Raymond and Gordon Avenues. That’s the same intersection where the woman and her children were recently injured.

That’s right – stop warning people on the dangerous street to watch for kids, because it’s too dangerous?

And these are the people that are educating the kids?

With much ado, the Governor is pushing a new education bill.

Like most all such bills, it’s another take on rearranging the deck chairs on the Lusitania. It’s the same tired mix of money, “accountability” and perks to the teachers union, with no addressing of the real problem;

Matt from North Star Liberty writes:

Rather than throwing more money at the schools or meddling in curriculum and finance decisions at Minnesota’s 339 “independent” school districts, the governor should take a fresh look at his own early childhood education initiative. According to the governor’s office, “the Governor’s early childhood scholarship program will provide each at-risk student up to $4000 to attend a certified kindergarten readiness program of the family’s choice.”

Hello, vouchers!

By allowing the money to follow the child, rather than the school, the state of Minnesota would put the kids first, as opposed to putting schools first.

That, in the end – whether you call it “vouchers” or “money following the child” – is the only thing that will save the notion of “public education”.

Finally, as the chief protector of his state’s sovereignty, Governor Pawlenty should wield the Tenth Amendment to leave the federal No Child Left Behind Act behind.

Exactly. Intended to enforce “accountability” on the part of schools, NCLB has made things worse – taken a mediocre system and added bureaucracy and, worse, an imperative for the teachers and their unions to game a system to preserve their own system. Protestations aside, public schools “teach to the test” in every way that matters – meaning they’re “educating” a generation of kids to hit the lowest common denominator.

I don’t think this governor is the one that’s going to pee on the real third rail of Minnesota politics – the state’s greatest sacred cow, the myth of our “great school system”.

More’s the pity.

Arizona State student Ryan Visconti proves that there is hope for the future.

Visconti – a senior at the school – is pushing back over a “diversity exercise” in which students were assigned ethnic, affectional and social backgrounds, and subjected to society’s supposed stereotypes.

Visconti said the students who designed the roleplay overlooked their own stereotypes, such as the notion that white men don’t have to work for wealth because society gives them a free ride. Or the idea that Christian churches are filled with bigots, and people who support traditional family values such as heterosexual marriage are hateful and narrow-minded.

“They were basically saying that if you don’t feel the same way, you’re wrong,” Visconti said. “It got to the point that if you weren’t a minority or gay, you were supposed to feel guilty and that everything was given to you in life.”

To start the role-play, participants were handed coded index cards that indicated their race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Participants were then told to visit different “life stations” and create their “perfect life.”

The stations included booths for housing, banking, church, jail, transportation and employment.

At each stop, Visconti said he was given scripted responses based on his gay Hispanic identity. He was told he could be a landscaper and live in a ghetto apartment or be unemployed and homeless. Meanwhile, students assigned white identities were encouraged to be business executives.

Of course, the “training” starts well before college.  I’ve had a longstanding program with my kids; I pay ’em a buck for every example of liberal indoctrination they bring home from school.  These sorts of stereotypes are all over schools well into the elementary grades.

It’s equally interesting to read the comments from the “tolerant” people at the end of the article…