It was killed by Democrats in Congress, according to this report at BigGovernment.
This is big government at its finest hour. The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape."For the children," indeed.
Not an exhaustive list, but a good start. None of these offers actual college credits, so it's not a path to a degree, but to learning. Could be a supplement for enrolled students.
Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.
Maybe their teacher showed them "The Story of Stuff." Annie Leonard going on for twenty minutes about the awfulness of prosperity. She sounds ever so knowledgeable while getting everything wrong. The NY Times says
More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.If you can teach the children that industrial civilization is eeevil, and that the poor, weak government is the servant of the corporations (personification of government is shown shining the shoes of personification of corporations), that will make it much easier down the road to regulate, regulate, regulate. Freedom, it's a bad thing. People are so wasteful, so careless, they are trashing the planet.
It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.
The $18 million savings from canceling the Washington DC school voucher program will make a big difference. Not to the budget, but to the families.
Story at Hit & Run.
Related: The Children Are Our Future: They'll Be Paying All The Bills, After All
And see School Choice for the Few at the WSJ.
Update May 6: A small concession on the voucher program?
[T]he administration would keep paying for private-school vouchers for about 1,700 children receiving them in Washington, D.C., an administration official said. Obama is proposing $12.2 million for the 2010-11 school year and would like to continue the funding until the kids in the program graduate. He would not let new students into the program.So if this stands the program will be ended by attrition. This will serve to quiet the parents who currently have children in the program, while closing the door on everyone else.
I seem to recall Ronald Reagan calling for the elimination of the Federal Department of Education. That didn't happen. Presidents do not get to do everything that they would like to do. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's not so good. Maybe it evens out. Although in the case of the Department of Education, maybe not. We, in our capacity as "the government," keep throwing more and more money at education, without achieving much in the way of results.
There is a prominent educator to whom Obama owes much: William Ayers. His portrait:
A wealthy man, scion of wealth, who hates the country and the system which made him wealthy. He has not given it all to the poor, though. No, he lives pretty high. In Russia, or the USSR in earlier days, he would have been called a member of the nomenklatura.
"Guilty as sin, free as a bird." Feet on the flag, unrepentant terrorist. He is the penultimate step of the "long march through the institutions." Is his disciple, Obama, the ultimate step? Obama's opacity makes it impossible to say. We know more about "Joe the plumber" than we do about Obama. From Chicago Magazine, "No Regrets."
In comments on Wowsers are ever with us, below, blake said "Yeah, the city cares if you're armed, but they have an uncanny ability to detect education and stamp it out of existence." Dallas would appear to be taking a preventive approach. If children are not educated, then when they grow up, they'll have no education that needs stamping. A post by Tolewyn, "E" for effort, inspires a longer one by LawDog, Stop the planet! I want off! on Dallas's new "effort-based grading" system. Found in Jerry Pournelle's mail.
Update: Mickey Kaus, this morning, has Dems rally against unions! OK, teachers' unions. Still … The line in this that most strikingly resonates with the Dallas developments noted above is this:
One panelist--I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children's agenda meets the adult agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often."The adult agenda for many who work in the schools seems to be warehousing rather than educating.
Says Kay S. Hymowitz of the Gloucester teenagers' pregnancy pact.
So stop calling me, Planned Parenthood! These girls did plan to get pregnant. If them, how many more? It's not the technical issues that they are having trouble with.
Thanks to Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner.
Just another batch of things that caught my eye.
Drug war casualty: "Marie Walsh was the very picture of American suburban respectability. She and her husband, a company executive, lived in a £400,000 house in an affluent area near San Diego, California. But the 53-year-old had a secret that even her husband and three children did not know: she was really Susan Lefevre, a convicted drug dealer who had been on the run for 32 years after escaping from the Detroit House of Corrections."
Fierce comment threads at Althouse and Volokh on Ayers and Dohrn, and Barack Obama's relationship with them. The Althouse thread inspires a post by Blake: Terrorism and Indoctrination vs. Education, which gets some silly comments by yours truly.
Adopted Man Finds Biological Father on Death Row.
Bagpipe bands violate EU noise regulations and must be muted. (via)
PSA from Hungary intended to promote bicycling. Looks pretty persuasive to me.
How'd you like to walk (or cycle) across this footbridge? (via)
Strange But True photos at the L.A. Times.
Great tits cope well with warming. Well, that's good news! (via)
ROFLcon. Sounds like fun. Over, though; it was held the last weekend in April. The blog includes a list of Sleeper Hits of the Internet, a bunch of (mostly) fun videos that you may have missed. And that seems to require a mention of ROFLMAO. "Do-doo-do-do-do."
One that makes sense, for a change.
My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.Read the whole thing. But remember, it's comedy, and a magazine article, not an actual commencement speech, and take the last point, number 6, with a grain of salt:
So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
6. Don't listen to your elders!since commencement speakers may indeed be charging for their services. The most satisfactory charge for some is sheer egoboo, of course. But there may be honors involved, or even large sums of cash.
After all, if the old person standing up here actually knew anything worth telling, he'd be charging you for it.
Nothin' for a week here, might as well put these up.
Wikipedia is apparently completely unreliable on climate issues. (via)
Ron Bailey reviews Expelled, the movie about "intelligent design" with Ben Stein. Hey, that rhymes! Considering the response that An Inconvenient Truth received, Stein should be in line (another rhyme! Oh, I'm cookin' here) for a Nobel Prize next year. Who needs real science, when the fake stuff is so much more fun? The movie's full title is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Does that mean,"Leave your intelligence in the lobby?" I know I'll have less respect for Ben Stein's intelligence in the future.
Update: Oh, look, a whole website devoted to Expelled, called Expelled Exposed. Thanks Charles. Glenn Reynolds has more on Ben Stein's view of science and scientists, and there's a wild comment thread going at The Volokh Conspiracy.
Another update: now there's a poem from lizard Winslow.
Yet another update: Much more discussion at Winds of Change.
And: John Derbyshire's merciless review: A Blood Libel on Our Civilization.
JFK and drugs. (via)
Professor Dutch's Top Ten No Sympathy Lines. (via)
If you search at Gateway Pundit for "Brrr," you'll get a lot of interesting posts on global whatever-it-is.
PrestoPundit has unearthed a paper by Barack Obama Senior, the father from whom the candidate received the dreams. It's called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." (via)
"Professional courtesy," my eye. You knew this was going on, but those who did it could deny it. Once some documents slip out, it's another story. Special license plates shield officials from traffic tickets. (via)
From CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, comes "the grid." Coming soon: superfast internet. (via)
The Investigative Project on Terrorism's CAIR series is complete. 10 installments.
The war on Sharpies. "We've purged every permanent marker there is in this building," says the proud elementary school principal. [sarcasm] So that's why they call them "magic" markers! [/sarcasm] (via)
Instapundit: Progress on resveratrol.
Andrea Harris: Global warming is responsible for everything.
Recommended by two of Jerry Pournelle's correspondents: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids.
Amy Alkon links to Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic on Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group. Alkon's comments may be better than the original Rauch piece.
Having a college education does not entitle you to anything. If you did it right, it makes you more capable of something. This Washington Post article, Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest, occasions some comment at Transterrestrial Musings and Althouse. Commenter M. Simon at Transterrestrial says, "I have one year of college and wound up as an aerospace engineer. How did that happen? The degree is not the ticket. You are the ticket."
The number of people going to college expanded enormously in the last century.
That's hard to read without gridlines. It's from PBS, based on the Statistical Abstract. Click to see it better. Per capita, more college graduates now than high school grads in 1940; more college grads now than high school and college grads put together for the first 160 years or so of this country's existence. This is the kind of quantitative change that is large enough to become a qualitative change. Or it would be, if high school were as tough now as it was then, and likewise college. A good education is still available; but so are diplomas and degrees for time served and tuition paid.
Or not.
Publishers need new textbooks to sell, even in fields that have not changed. Professors of education need to publish new theories and methods. Children just need to learn arithmetic.
Found a while back at Jerry Pournelle's place.
Update, Nov. 28: Michelle Malkin and her commenters have plenty to say on this. The comments are particularly good, and they are not partisan. This is really not a partisan issue at all.
The link dump of an old grump. Posts may be folded, spindled, or mutilated, ad lib.
Pseudonymous only for disambiguation. Thanks for that word, Wikipedia. I am not, in what we laughingly refer to as "real life," a character in a 1933 novel. There was no Internet in 1933, silly!
The list of Monckton vs. Gore articles.
