News – Politics – Opinion – Podcasts
Tomorrow there is a hearing (10am – LOB 301) for HB 330. HB 330 would allow any county delegation in New Hampshire to adopt a ‘County Income tax’ to be administered by the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration (DRA). HB330 sells its tax as money that would go toward paying for education (public education at government run schools) and who could possibly dare to be against dumping more money into government run education?
/steve raises his hand
and declare War on American Society as it now stands? And Hunter Dan (aka IWKAGGP aka Dan William, a Govt school music teacher) decided to leave the same comment on my Head Start post and on Steve’s The Left’s War on Education:
So I guess four weeks is the right span of time for the Grok’s 24/7 defense of the 2nd amendment. Now that Lanza’s massacre of our most precious commodity – our children – is past us, it’s time to restart our all-out assault on the nation’s great equalizer.
Right – Head Start has proven to be a failure of an educational program, but with $180 Billion spent since its inception, it has probably turned out to be a GREAT patronage employment scheme. Steve catches the Left in its own detrius – if it was REALLY for the children, teachers would be all over anything and receptive of anything that actually yielded better educational results for the children (regardless of it being private or public organization, regardless of who does the teaching (union or not), regardless of who owns the building, et al). Instead, any attempt in searching out better methods than the status quo are quickly demonized. It’s as if the Teachers Unions believe that they are absolutely entitled to all the K-12 education money (and Hunter Dan’s comments enforce this). So Dan, in defending the status quo model, must absolutely believe in the Occupy Oakland Teachers (and their demi-God and Obama’s BFF and former SDS / Weatherman / killer / American Society hater, “educator” Bill Ayers (emphasis mine, reformmated):
At least the teachers of Occupy Oakland are finally being honest about their political agenda. They’re openly calling for an all-out abolition of capitalism.
The Occupy Oakland Education Committee – comprised of public school teachers from the Oakland, California school district – has renamed its publication “ClassRoom Struggle” and its platform TEACH, which stands for “Transform Education, Abolish Capitalism and Heal.”
Finally the radical teachers have acknowledged what we’ve been saying all along: they want to end capitalism and replace it with a socialist economy, quite possibly enforced by a totalitarian form of government.
Dems misrepresent the education tax credit program. I attended a candidates’ night last evening in Northfield and listened carefully to the Democratic candidates for state representative and senate. They all opposed the new education tax-credit program (and, oddly, spoke out against voucher programs as well, which aren’t even available to NH parents). The reason the … Read more
This is a letter I wrote to the Nashua Telegraph. Their version was edited. Here is the original.
When President Obama touts “education reform” as one of his accomplishments, most people do not realize that he is referring to the new Common Core State Standards being implemented nationwide, including in New Hampshire.
Governor Lynch and the New Hampshire Board of Education brought this Trojan horse to our public schools.
Common Core was supposed to raise academic standards. However, they are not world class standards but a race to mediocrity.
Under Common Core, by the end of eighth grade students will be two years behind their international counterparts in math. High school graduates will achieve only a seventh-grade reading level.
New Hampshire, Tear Down This Firewall
Mike Johnson
mnosnhoj@comcast.net
10/21/12
You have a choice, New Hampshire, an important choice, a life-style choice.
Like our motto says, you can “Live Free or Die,” a free self-reliant citizen of New Hampshire, proud of yourself and proud of your state and your country. Or you can “Live Dependent and Die,” withering away as a slave of the Nanny State, subject to the government and an apologist for yourself, your state, and your country.
It is your option, but recognize that it may be your last choice. The United States of America is dangerously close to the point where a majority of the voters are vassals of the state, reduced to relying on the largesse of the government for their livelihood, and economically forced to vote for the continuance of the Nanny State. As Mark Steyn puts it, “This election represents the last exit ramp before the death spiral.”
Disagree? Consider Obama’s record:
The debates between Maggie Hassan, Democrat, and Ovide Lamontaigne, Republican, remind me that the success of our children is at stake in this election. Democrat allegiance to Unions and the Educational Establishment lock children into failing public schools.
Today’s Democrat solution to educational problems has been providing increasingly poorer results for decades, just spend more money. That fits Einstein’s definition of insanity, “doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” More money is not the solution, it just raises the cost of poor results.
…and why we desperately need competition and alternatives.
This from today’s Wall Street Journal (bless those WSJ editorial pages!) where the owner of an employment agency writes in to explain that there are “jobs going begging” because applicants lack extraordinarily basic skills that public schools have failed to inculcate.
Those “skills”? Well, it’s almost ridiculous to use that label, since they’re so fundamental to being a self-responsible, functioning adult…but here they are anyway:
Maggie “Louisville Slugger” Hassan has a banner ad running over at the Concord Monitor with the pull quote…’I’ll Stand up to anyone who wants to cut Education.’
This is a dirty lie.
Any effort to expand education outside that narrow corridor of Democrat political influence will be blocked. Any existing programs that support education without government directed taxpayer dollars should expect to be cut given the chance.
But Maggie Hassan will stand up…to anyone who tries to educate their kids without public schools staffed by members of the Teachers unions (or outside of pricey private schools for the “fiscally gifted,” that are beyond the reach of all but the very wealthy). Hassan will stand up to defend statist, top-down, government managed, public education. She’ll stand up to spend more of your taxpayer dollars on the inefficient state university system. And like most Democrats she will do anything and everything in her power to protect that government monopoly by cutting into or cutting off any competition.
There is a lovely new candidate survey being mailed out to New Hampshire candidates from the Concord Monitor. While most of the questions are loaded to demarcate the right left divide in state politics–have to make sure we know who the “TEA Party Extremists” are–one question in particular stood out.
“Do you support last year’s 50% cut in university Funding…”
Ray Buckley, Chairman of the New Hampshire Democrat Party is quoted as having actually said this. (DiStaso – Granite Status)
“The people of New Hampshire are more concerned with Bill O’Brien’s behavior acting as the House speaker, his state budget that has New Hampshire in the red, and his policies that have caused a loss of jobs and the cost of education skyrocket.
There is not one thing in this statement that is true. Not one.
The letter below by Tony Boutin makes some excellent points about government actions and education in particular. It appeared in the June 22, 2012, Laconia Daily Sun, http://issuu.com/dailysun/docs/lds6-22-12
While I agree with the author that politicians claim good intentions for all government actions driven by their policies, some politicians never seem to learn that the consequences of their policies rarely achieve their promised intentions and often provide bad results. Thus, one has to wonder whether the claimed good intentions actually are the reasons for those policies. Or, is the purpose of those policies something else such as political power driven by the growth of government and government union political contributions (mostly to democrats), or the ease of getting votes by promising free stuff or benevolent sounding programs to voters who are ignorant of past failures? Don
To the editor,
Education letters to The Daily Sun
have become popular since Kent Warner’s
offer of $50 for a catchy slogan.
I want to thank Kent for turning the
spotlight to it. Obama will surely be
trying to BUY professors, students and
their parents by promising increased
helicopter-style spending despite the
fact we are 17-trillion dollars in debt
and we recently got slapped in the
head with a credit downgrade.
I was forwarded a copy of the candidate survey sent out to New Hampshire Legislative Candidates from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT-NH). It is twenty-five questions whose focus can be summed up in two words: Money and Power. The entire survey is dedicated to asking whether you will do anything to curb public union … Read more
In 2008, I was not the most thrilled to have John McCain to be the Republican nominee, at least until I was able to say “Yeah, I voted for Sarah Palin and the old white guy”. At that time, however, I had a bad premonition about what an Obama Presidency would bring (yeah, I pretty much had it right as the future-now-history shows). This time, it is Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee and once again, it’s back to “drag that candidate over the line” as the excitement for me for his candidacy just isn’t there. It is back to the “vote against the other guy”, for if Obama is given a second term, the America that the Founders envisioned with respect to limited government and an emphasis on individual freedom may well be never seen again.
However, this from a speech that Romney gave today gave me a little smile:
First, I will expand parental choice in an unprecedented way. Too many of our kids are trapped in schools that are failing or simply don’t meet their needs. And for too long, we’ve merely talked about the virtues of school choice.
As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school. For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted. And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it.
Damn. There is one hell of a row going on at the excellent RLCNH email discussion list over the proposed state constitutional amendment regarding education—CACR12—which, one way or another, will put the responsibility
for implementing and funding a “state system” of education in the hands of the state legislature, not the towns (where it has traditionally and historically resided).
More importantly, the battle is heating up amongst the best, smartest, and most activist political players in the state, i.e. the movement conservatives, the libertarians, the Tea Partiers, the Constitutionalists, the libertarian-conservatives, and others.
Some are….
In my opinion, public education has gone down a path of disaster in many ways – too many teaching methodologies that are not much more than somebody’s fad idea instead of being verifiably certified effective, teachers who believe their mission is to indoctrinate students with “a worldview” instead of teaching subject basics well, and unions that want you to simply believe that higher salaries and perks are an instant panacea to what they’ve been doing the last 30 years.
So, DO watch this of a high school student asking other students some simple, basic American Civics and geography questions. Watch the utter cluelessness (with the exception of one young lady) and the blank stares of these high schoolers when the mic is offered in their general direction.
(H/T: The Blaze)
Well prepared and taught by their teachers, eh? The problem for parents and taxpayers is…
Quite a bit of the Town Hall was taken up by questions (some pre-written and some from the floor):
Videos after the jump:
Still trying to play catch up here: Intro Ceremonies and Question 1, Questions 2 & 3, and Questions 4 & 5. Now, Questions 6 and 7!
Question 6 (which was asked by a young girl): you are going to abolish 3 Departments including the Department of Education; how are you going to replace them? I believe the underlying “gotcha” question was “and how will I get a decent education if the Feds are not involved?” (an adult formulated question, I presume):
Question 7: How will lowering corporate taxes bring back jobs to the US where many corporations already don’t pay [income] taxes?
Hot off the presses, it is the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire’s 2012 inaugural RLCNH Report. It’s a big one this time—here’s a quick overview of all the bills covered:
Yet another instance of spending time writing somewhere else instead of writing here, so, am double purposing yet again. This thread from FB was from Sept (yeah, catching up as always) when Obama wanted to spend $25 Billion (more of what we don’t have) to rehab up to 35,000. Once again the question must be asked (yes, edited to be more bloggish):
Why is it the Federal Govt’s job to “rehab 35,000 schools”?
If the local communities have so bungled their OWN infrastructure so badly, why is it that the rest of us have responsibility to fund it just because Obama says so? Where’s the accountability in that?
And the last part of that is couched in those terms because education has generally been a local activity and not a federal one. Here in NH, it IS local – every year for the last six years, I have reviewed my town’s school budget as part of my hamlet’s Budget Committee (which actually prepares the budgets that all of the town’s voters vote up or down). As part of doing that, I have learned the hardware that tax monies get sucked out of the local scene, filter through the DC bureaucracy, get strings attached, and then a relatively small percentage comes back to the folks that forked it out in the first place. You can be sure that this “free money” as everyone else is kowtowing to get (under the rubric of blatant greed of “if we don’t take it, someone else will” – just like kindergarteners who are afraid they won’t get their Twinkie snack).
Well, it seemed to one commenter that the right answer was “Sure!”; after all “because nobody else wants to do it”? In other words, if the locals decide to do nothing, then his implicit answer is the Feds must do it by default. My retort was:
You think the Feds should because the locals won’t? Shouldn’t the Feds be smart enough not to fall for that Tom Sawyer fence whitewash trick?
Yes, I started to get a bit hot under the collar as I have with others – it seems with folks like the commenter, their expectation is that the Feds are supposed to right all ills – when the locals are judged to have not done the job, it has to be made right by spending other folks money. Wrong answer, as it penalizes those communities that ARE doing the right things.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, almost 27% of children in America already have access to the school of their choice. As recently as 2007 (the most recent year of available data from the National Center for Education Statistics), 16% of students attended a public school other than the assigned school in their district, 9% went to faith-oriented private schools while the remaining 3% went to private secular schools. The numbers listed above do not include the 3% that are home-schooled, an additional form of school choice.
Clearly, parents want to be involved in the selection of the school for their children. In fact, there is a growing percentage of families that choose to relocate to a new neighborhood or town so their child can attend a particular school. If parents are willing to pick up and move for a better school, then clearly our system of rigid geographic school districts is failing and a new system based on school choice needs to be implemented.
As student test results indicate, parents, on the average, do a better job of making educational choices for their children than bureaucracies do, which is yet another reason the expansion of school choice. The real question is, “Can we afford to let more children have school choice?” or “Can a system be put in place to still support the public schools while allowing parents to have this choice?” Actually, a well implemented school choice program saves the state money, without down shifting the cost to the local school districts.
According to the New Hampshire Department of Education,