… I finally filed a post…
Did you wonder if I’d fallen off the face of the Earth? Or were you too busy with more more worthwhile pursuits than perusing my pontifications? Let’s hope the latter. I also hope you’re having a fine Christmas season, and rest assured I will be opining to the limits of your endurance and likely beyond, once the new year is well under way.
In the meantime, this matter has come to my attention, as it no doubt has to yours. What do y’all think about it? Personally, I think what I’ve always thought: Does it really matter whether we were meeting the constitutional minimum, in terms of what South Carolina really needs to be doing to catch up with the rest of the nation? I mean, it’s shameful for a court to have to find the state to be deficient in any area by that lowly standard. But suppose the judge had found the state had met the "minimally adequate" standard in every area? Would that have been enough so that South Carolina would no longer be last where it should be first, and first where it should be last?
Of course not. Most every other state in the union has been doing much more than South Carolina’s minimum for generations.
What does "doing more" look like for South Carolina? Does it mean devoting more resources to make schools in Richland District 2, or Lexington 1, even better than they already are? No. It means the state stepping in to make sure that kids in Marion, Lee and Allendale counties have the same opportunity for a good education as do those growing up in Columbia’s suburbs and bedroom communities.
And what that means is that the main business of the upcoming legislative season should still be what it already needed to be before this ruling: Revamping the state’s entire system of taxing and spending so that fundamental needs are met in every corner of the state (not just those parts with good property tax bases), and raising the money in a manner that is fair, reliable and conducive to economic growth.
I look forward to seeing what y’all think about this once I have time to return to the blog on a regular basis — which, as I said, will be a couple of days or so into the new year.
Until then.
Related Posts
I have only had a cursory review of what came down in the court decision and the judge’s focus was on early childhood education. I would like to see a clear definition of that concept. Technically that could mean beginning from birth and if it did then that would get the state into a whole new area of education. Most educationally pro-active parents are equipping their babies with Fisher Price talking toys, puzzles, learning toys, etc. and they spend a lot of time with the children while they first begin to speak and comprehend. Little tykes from broken homes and semi-illiterate parents miss out on all of those initial learning activities. An Indian (from India) friend of mine has his 3 and 5 year olds speaking English and their native Indian dialect as one example of accelerated learning. So, my question would be to what extent is the judge proposing that “early” education needs improvement? Realistically, and tax wise, it probably means pre-K and K grades. So, my second question is does this amount to a further intrusion into the family responsibilities by the state? It raises a lot of questions, especially in regard to how this can be paid for, but my guess is tobacco and gasoline taxes will be a likely target for funding. I need to look at the entire court offering and read the pundit’s observations as I may be way off course with my thinking. Having just traveled for a week I am in catch up mode.
I never hide my dislike and distrust for TheState newspaper. I believe its’ editorial staff long ago left off any attempt to be, or even pretense of, impartiality and/or simple, straight reporting of “news.” The way the education debate in SC has been slanted and distorted in this newspapers’ pages is a case in point. Instead of assuming that people with the opposite point of view are well-meaning and have good and decent motives that deserve to be heard, editors at TheState marginalize and try to discredit them at every chance. The very idea that we might consider putting parents in charge is ridiculed and pooh-poohed when the editors insist on putting quatation marks around the very title of the bill in the state legislature. Brad, you and the crew seem to want to deny or forget that there are contexts for this debate about education. People in our state have incomes that are 80% of the national average, and yet your solutions ALWAYS involve increased taxes…when our taxes are already among the highest in the southeast. Also in context, you routinely report, two or three times a month as I remember it, that our politicians are generally unresponsive, unaswerable, self-aggrandizing and often corrupt when handling tax dollars we give them now, and yet you seem arrogantly to expect that SC taxpayers are supposed to just swallow hard and accept whatever tax increases you think are needed. The bottom line for me is this: You have NO credibility on this issue. None. I agree that we may need to overhaul the way money is allocated to poorer school districts, but in my mind no plan advanced or supported by TheState will be the right one. Sorry, but I see you the same way you see me. Fritz
The unfortunate reality about South Carolina is that our elected leaders rarely do anything without a metaphorical gun to their head – it took legislators going to jail to get ethics reform and 40,000 people on the Capitol Grounds to move the Confederate flag, to note but two examples.
Had the plaintiff school districts won a slam dunk decision – mandating better buildings, teacher salaries and early ed initiatives – we might have seen a strong response from the General Assembly. The “split the baby” nature of Judge Cooper’s decision worries me that we will see only a band-aid solution – a little extra money to First Steps, for example.
Bear in mind that the Smart Start program in North Carolina receives 8 times as much money as First Steps, even though it serves a population on three times as large.
I don’t have the competence to weigh in on this, so I won’t. But I’ll just relate one thing: I have an acquaintance who is a pastor in a small town in this state — I’ve been by to see him a couple of times. He has a small program in his church, taking in a few students every afternoon and helping them with their homework. He wanted to build a fence around the playground to keep the dogs out, so the kids could use the playground. All of this takes funding, and he needs it.
OK, this is a faith-based initiative, and a tiny drop in the bucket. But it is the kind that we need more of, along with other programs like it. I have the impression that a whole bunch of kids are being raised by grandparents and the TV set. Maybe somebody knows what will happen in the next generation when the grandparents are gone, but I fear that our whole society will start unraveling, if good people don’t do something.
Fritz-
Do you see anything wrong with raising SC cigarette taxes to at least the national average of 69.5 cents per pack from our paltry 7 cents(only NC pays less)?RI’s tax is $2.45.
Tobacco is the deadliest drug on this planet.
SC is often used as an illegal exporter for this drug.
“Put Parents in Charge”???? What perfect planet are you living on?
I may be wrong, but I have a suspicion that too many of my evangelical friends support “Put Parents in Charge” so they can retreat within their evangelical sub-culture, instead of engaging the world around them. I think we could learn a lot from the experience of East German Christians, who had no choice but to subject their kids to a tirade of communist propaganda every day in school. The churches had to respond in creative ways of resistance, e.g., catechism classes, etc.
One thing that is interesting about the judge’s decision is his finding that the state has failed in providing or not providing adequate education. The reality is the parents of these unprepared, ignored, and in some cases abused children are the ones who have failed. But, in the world of the nanny state, when the “state” fails, as the judge notes, then the solution will be to provide more power and funding for the state. All in all, I think the judge looked at how bad this whole situation really is, and instead of issuing a massive solution decision, he focused on this one aspect. Can we say he punted?
Herb, I am with you on the faith based initiatives. If people had to go through legitimate faith based organizations to get help for their kids, the entire family may end up actually gaining some benefit. Compare that to sending the kids into another form of state mandated pre-school warehouse.
Sadly, this court decision goes beyond the actual case and ends with a judge who decided that he would create new laws from his seat of power rather than interpreting the laws that are in front of him.
Judge Cooper found that the state was allocating enough money to provide proper schools at the K12 level. But, he decided that wasn’t enough. We must not only provide an opportunity, we must somehow make kids take advantage of it. Unfortunately, most people have not accepted yet that many kids are not going to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them. Poor kids start out life behind and that is sad. And while a legislative project to help these kids is a good idea, a judge shouldn’t create a pre-K system from his courthouse. Where does his power end if he can force this on the state?
Judges have been abusing power in the US for a while now (See Kelo vs. New London), and this appears to be happening in this case as well. If Judge Cooper thinks that we should have a larger pre-K system, he should run for governor. I am sure that the State would promote his campaign as strongly as they have Oscar Lovelace’s.
I think that this case ended with a win for the state, showing that they do adequately fund the schools. In the end though, we all lose, because rather than applying the law, once again the judiciary has decided to make up the law.
Herb,if your premise is that taxes are going to have to be raised to “adequately” fund education (whatever that means), then I reckon cigarette taxes are about as good as any to raise. I’m not a smoker, but as a sidebar, I frankly think anti-smoking zealots who want to raise tobacco taxes by a factor of 3-400 times are sheer hypocrites…they say they want to eliminate or reduce smoking thru tax policy and yet are completely ready to use tobacco tax dollars to fund their most sacred programs. Oh, and “just because Rhode Island does it” never sold me on ANY idea…let alone raising taxes. But I digress…I believe you’ve started with a faulty premise when you join Brad and the editorial staff and assume that more money will fix public education in South Carolina. As I said in my first post, I believe SC state government in general is a very poor steward of tax dollars it takes from its’ citizens (it is demonstrably wasteful and corrupt…TheState newspaper tells us this all the time), and I am in NO way convinced that more money will really help the public education bureaucracy in particular anyway. Again, as I said earlier, I do agree that we ought to change the way money is allocated to poorer districts, but that is totally different than saying the pot of money ought to be enlarged. I believe per-student expenditures oughtn’t go up another farthing, and that growth in the overall education budget ought to be strictly limited to that which is required to keep pace with new admissions. And schools with declining student populations ought to have shrinking budgets. Period. To your second “point” (I guess it’s a point…I don’t know what it means), I don’t live on a perfect planet. But what exactly would be wrong with actually putting parents in charge of making the decisions on how, where and by whom their children are educated? The hysterical reactions I see people like you and Brad display when this simple concept is calmly brought up just make you look silly and unbelievable, to me at least. When I see people bypass any rational discussion and resort immediately to arm-waving and name calling, it lets me know pretty clearly that they have something very ugly to hide or distract attention from. And so it goes. Fritz.
Oops…my rant immediately above should have been addressed to Bill. Sorry Herb. Fritz
Bill-
It’s ignorant say tobacco is the “deadliest drug on the planet.” There are a several thousand deceased souls lost to the cocaine/crack cocaine trade in the US and South America. Your hyperbole is just too great not to point out.
Brad and All,
It’s wrong to think that South Carolina’s economic woes are mostly caused by a poor educational system, although the educational system is very important. Quite the opposite is true however; the global free market system militates against everything that we are trying to accomplish, including the development of a first rate educational system.
Since SC was a poor state to begin with, Globalization has been especially damaging to denizens of our fine state. On the one hand, we have been losing manufacturing jobs to cheap overseas labor for decades, while on the other hand changes in taxation in conjunction with pro free market policies have shifted and concentrated wealth into the hands of fewer entities outside of the state. Also, more and more people from Mexico and South America are immigrating to SC and are lowering the wages of SC workers. The outsourcing of professional jobs to India is beginning to have an adverse effect on the economy also. With the advent of totally open markets and borders, we’re inheriting global style wealth inequality and global style poverty. Instead of the US pulling up the rest of the world up, the rest of the world is dragging us down- all at the behest of our own politicians and so-called leaders who have been pushing this failed ideology and practice to our own demise. There are a set of economic policies that we could implement that benefit both American workers and all other countries, but our leaders are narrow and obdurate, and they refuse to admit that their policies have been wrong for decades.
In the US, we’ve gone from a comparatively egalitarian and prosperous society (in the economic sense) to a unfair and lopsided economy. From a society with a high rate of savings, to a society mired in debt. From respectable lending practices, to legal loan sharking. From a society where communities were well planned and thought out, to an ugly hodgepodge of strip malls and fly by night retail outlets. From a situation where one person could fund an entire family, to a quandary where two people have to work long hours and/or multiple jobs just to make ends meet. From a society where local government made decisions about how communities were arranged, to a society where private homeowners’ associations call the shots. From a society where local civic groups had the influence to effect public policy, to a society where the Chamber of Commerce and business associations promote privatization. From a society where people actually had time to know their neighbors, to a transient, amorphous society where shifting economic necessity forces families to move from place to place. From a society with a progressive taxation system and social safety net, to regressive tax system that has raised property taxes on ordinary citizens, and that has shifted more and more of the burden on the poor in the form of sales taxes with a pathetic social safety net. From a society where educational opportunity was prevalent, to a society where educational opportunity is increasingly limited to the wealthier classes.
Over the past thirty-five years, the only improvement that I’ve seen has been the implementation of civil rights for all people. Otherwise, it has been totally down hill.
Education throughout history has always been allotted to the upper economic classes and to aristocracies. People need much leisure time to read and acquire knowledge in order to become adequately educated, and societies historically will educate just enough people to make their system run efficiently. I don’t care what civilized society we care to talk about, it has always been the same.
There has always been a wealthy elite that composes the top two or three percent of a population and this group historically has been well educated, often by private tutors or elite schools.
A professional middle class comprises the next twenty or so percent of a society’s population, and these people historically have also been well educated. The professional middle class is the buffer between the wealthy and everyone else, and they organize the affairs of their respective societies. In capitalist countries, the professional middle class organizes the divisions of labor, and the return on capital investment for the wealthy.
The next class is composed of technicians and artisans, and they comprise about twenty percent of the population after the professional middle class. They are allowed to acquire enough education to perform their jobs. After that, the working classes and the poor comprise the bottom sixty percent of a population. Taken altogether, they own about five percent of their societies’ wealth. Traditionally the bottom forty percent of a population owns a negligible amount of their society’s wealth. For example, in the US today, the bottom forty percent owns about 0.3% of the nation’s wealth.
Over the ages, these classes have had various names, but they are basically the same from age to age, from society to society. Slave holding societies had an additional slave class to make up the bottom rungs, but the before mentioned classes developed even with slavery present.
Whenever a society has any form of capital investment with monetary exchanges, the same shaped long term wealth distribution has to develop (I can prove it) among property owners, and corresponding economic and educational classes appear based on the distribution of wealth. Progressive taxation can flatten the distribution out and make it fairer, but we have been doing exactly the opposite for some time now. Hence, in egalitarian society, educational attainment is spread more evenly throughout the society. In the US today, it’s becoming ever more difficult to fund secondary education because of government cutbacks in grants. The educational system, just as every other aspect of American life, is becoming privatized.
When we say that improved education will improve the living standards of SC citizens, we really talking about the so-called meritocracy that was installed in the US after WWII in conjunction with the GI Bill. The meritocracy determines who is allowed to compete at a particular level within capitalism based on psychometric testing, and supposed objective criteria and standards. What we have really been talking about doing is raising the performance of SC students to allow them to do better on the SAT to get better slots within the meritocracy in order to get better paying jobs. The problem with this argument is that the good paying jobs are going overseas faster than we could ever hope to improve educational attainment. India already has a giant, computer savvy, college educated workforce that works for relatively paltry wages. Another problem with this view is that education, by its natural dependence on economic class, rewards people already within higher economic classes. Educational criteria are extremely prejudicial and are based on race and class. Different economic groups approach and solve problems differently, use different vocabularies, and often have different outlooks on life. Much educational differentiation occurs among the classes because people from different classes use different cognitions to solve problems.
The dominant cognition for those in power is empiricist and inductive in nature, and has been since after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the inception and subsequent adoption of John Locke’s philosophy by American revolutionaries.
At this point, I would like to enumerate the following ideas, which admittedly are a radical departure from those that have been implemented in recent memory.
1. We need a new cognition theory that takes the psychology of different groups of people into account concerning government. Locke’s ideas about cognitions are outmoded in modernity, and I know of at least one suitable substitute from a former local professor of political science at USC, and long time resident of Columbia (Bill Kreml). Locke’s ideas worked OK when there was a limited amount of information to work with, and when communication was slow. Today, we have a plethora of information in a fast paced society. It’s not good enough to build ad hoc systems and then through induction and empiricism to go back and tweak and fix what we have created. We need a cognition theory that uses the innate ideas and talents of all segments of society, and Professor Kreml’s ideas in my opinion fit the bill.
2. We need a system of tariffs to protect American workers and American companies that are committed to hiring American workers. Tariffs should be set so not to exclude foreign products and services, but to equalize wages and government subsidies of foreign goods and services.
3. We need to focus on creating good divisions of labor rather than just focusing capital investment. Divisions of labor should be short term in nature and determined democratically. We need to focus on synthetic cognitions rather than analytic cognitions when creating divisions of labor.
4. We need to eliminate all sales taxes and income taxes for the bottom 95% of the population and replace then with a progressive wealth/income tax for the top 5%. Eliminate capital gains taxes for productive capital, while increasing capital gains taxes on unproductive capital (i.e., company real estate holdings). The bottom 95% would receive tax credits in equal measure.
5. Replace the current pathetic minimum wage with a living wage.
6. Poor states should receive no strings attached federal grants for education.
7. We need to revamp our medical system by providing national health insurance for all.
8. We need to stop the privatization of retirement by eliminating 401Ks and by replacing them with federal government pensions.
9. Practically everything that HR departments do in corporations should be taken over by the federal government. The federal government should administer vacation, sick days, and holidays. No one should ever lose his vacation or insurance by switching jobs. Retirement pensions would be automatically portable too.
10. We need to set wealth inequality maximums back to 1960s levels. In the sixties, the top 1% owned about 20% of the national wealth rather than close to 40% of the national wealth as it is today. CEO pay vs. average worker pay was about thirty times back in the sixties vs. about 450 times today.
11. We need to go to a thirty-five hour workweek. Productivity has shot through the roof over the past few decades, yet average Americans have not benefited from it in terms of pay or time off. It takes time to be involved in the community and to be involved in education. Americans are overworked. We need to double standard vacation time and the number of holidays so that people can become involved with their families and communities again.
It is poor logic to assume that “adequate school funding” is a self-sufficient answer to SC’s economic problems. I’ve lived and worked in 9 different states, including SC, and only Louisiana had a more negative attitude toward progress in general, including educational system adequacy. The State doesn’t help when it ballyhoos Steve Spurrier’s prospects for 2006 as a major story for the upcoming year. The political culure in this state focuses on electoral politics, which are always “win-lose”, rather than the politics of governing, which should be “win-win”. What SC needs is political and business leadership that will focus intensely on doing things that will move the entire state forward, not just grab an advantage for the next election.
Jake-
Tobacco kills more than 430,000 U.S. citizens each year-more than alcohol, cocaine, heroin, homicide, suicide, car accidents, fire, and AIDS combined.
Bill –
Tobacco hasn’t killed anyone to date. No one has ever been attacked by a man-eating tobacco plant.
Now maybe you’re thinking, but Jake, what about heart disease and cancer, aren’t they caused by smoking tobacco? And the answer is no scientific study has found that tobacco is a cause of cancer. Now, there is a correlation between smoking tobacco and increased risk of heart disease and cancer, but correlation and causation are two very, very different things.
Huh? Yea, like no one has ever been killed in a car accident; there just happens to be a correlation between dying and being in traffic accidents. What kind of hairsplitting tactics is this?
Courtesy of Cut-The-Knot.com
Following is an excerpt from:
A.K.Dewdney
200% of Nothing
Testing the Waters
In early February 1990, thousands of cases of Perrier water were pulled from store shelves all across North America when it was reported that a quantity of benzene had accidentally gotten into a batch of the famous water in the French bottling plant. Benzene is a known carcinogen. Newspapers were somewhat vague about the risks involved, but the fact that some stores were removing Perrier from their shelves as a precaution became the main story, and what amounted to a public ban on the water ensued.
What would be the actual risk to health of drinking benzene-laced water? How do medical authorities calculate risk from a carcinogen? First, they formulate an idealized model that involves a person of a certain weight who inhales or ingests a certain amount of the carcinogen-carrying substance on a daily basis over a fixed period of time. From this risk model, to which a specific risk or probability of developing cancer is attached, authorities extrapolate by scaling in various ways. For example, a real person who has twice the weight of the idealized model person may be assigned only half the dose since there is twice as much tissue to take up the toxin. Scaling up or down from the model dosage will also alter the risk. Someone who ingests half the dose of the substance that the model does will have a reduced probability of developing cancer over the same period of time.
For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides cancer risk figures based on a 70-kilogram (154-pound) person consuming a carcinogen for 70 years. Putting its figures together, the EPA calculates that the risk of drinking a 12 parts per billion (ppb) concentration of benzene in drinking water at the rate of two liters a day amounts to a lifetime risk of 1 in 100,000 of developing cancer.
In other words, if you weighed about 154 pounds and drank two liters of water every day at this level of benzene concentration, the probability that you would contract cancer as a direct result sometime during the rest of your life would be about 0.00001. The Perrier that found its way to North American shelves had an estimated concentration of 15 ppb, a little more than the 12 ppb used in the model. This represents an increase of 25 percent. Scaling up the probability by the same amount produces 0.000013, certainly more than the actual lifetime risk of a 154-pound person drinking two liters of tainted water every day. This represents the risk in the long run. As economist John Maynard Keynes once remarked, ‘in the long run we are all dead.’ Abuse detectives are just the sort of people who would scoff at such a small probability. Just to be on the safe side, of course, they might work out the short-run probability, say, for a year. The resulting risk figure would still be many times greater than the risk from drinking tainted water for a few weeks.
To calculate the risk of drinking the water for a year, you have to work backwards (see Chapter 12). If the dedicated drinker faces a risk of .000013 over a 70-year period, he or she obviously faces a much reduced probability over a one-year period: about 0.0000002 as it turns out. The six zeros mean that someone who drinks 2 x 365 = 730 liters of the deadly water over a year runs about the same chance of developing cancer sooner or later in his or her life as a direct result of drinking the water as he or she has of winning a 6-49 lottery after buying just three tickets. Someone who drinks the mild benzene cocktail for just a few weeks faces an even smaller lifetime risk, infinitesimal in fact.
If you think that weighing cancer risks against lottery chances amounts to comparing apples and oranges, you’d be right. But there’s nothing wrong with comparing a very small apple with a very large one, especially if it helps to put things into perspective. So why not compare the risk of ultimately contracting cancer after drinking benzenated water for a year with the overall risk of developing cancer in any event? According to my trusty 1992 Houghton-Mifflin Almanac, the death rate from all forms of cancer in the year 1990 was 202.1 per 100,000. This figure can be translated directly into a probability simply by dividing the 202.1 by 100,000. The risk of someone dying from cancer in the year 1990 was, therefore, about .002. Suppose, for the moment, that this annual risk does not change much from one year to the next. Over a 70-year period, however, the total risk escalates, just as it did in the breast cancer example (see Chapter 2), into something larger, in this case, about .13. If this represents the probability of someone developing cancer sometime during a 70-year period, how much more should he or she worry when the risk of drinking the bad water is added to the overall lifetime risk? The figures speak for themselves:
Worry drinking untainted water: 0.1200000
Worry drinking tainted water: 0.1200002
The media, of course, rarely delve into risk for fear of discovering something that is less than astonishing. Anyway, they have other ways of dramatizing things. Enter the simple word swap. Raising a risk by 100 percent is not at all the same thing as raising a risk to 100 percent.
Over the past weekend, I talked to an assistant principal of a local elementary school and a couple of teachers. Would you believe that NONE of them were even aware that an education related court decision had been rendered? If the lack of awareness in my small sampling is any indication of how uninvolved the educators are with current events, then that tells me something about why our schools are so “inadequate” to begin with. To be fair, I guess many people just tune out over the holidays to just about everything.
Jake, politicians have been playing with statistics in the same way with global warming trends and predictions. Anything to get the agenda propagandized that the United Nations and government in general needs much more control of our lives so “global warming” can be mitigated.
We’re not talking about 1 carcinogen in cigarette smoke. We’re talking about 50 different ones, and radiation on top of those. And in relation to the column in the State this morning, I belong to those who suspicion that, apart from the lobbying influence of Big Tobacco, the government doesn’t mind if a lot of people die younger, so as to reduce the number of retirees on Social Security. We should be doing more to protect our young people, who naturally like to take risks — its in their blood. Instead, we should be mentoring and taking them to disaster areas and overseas to places where they can take helpful risks. I’m no JFK fan, but the Peace Corps had some good aspects. Now I am beginning to ramble again!
How much tax money will it require to offset the single-parent or zero-parent homes into which most of our educational problems are born?
What will that money buy?
How do you know it will work?
Since I’m new, we may have done this already. But I’d like to see us discuss the issue of civil rights vs. government right to know. Aside from the “spying” issue, I am seeing one example after another of the high-handed tactics of the INS. I have a friend who was harassed, and his Canadian friend insulted, for an extended time period at the Canadian border — and it started because my friend had a Central Asian visa in his passport. Aid workers are evidently the scum of the earth — if you are in the military, they at least put ribbons on their cars and (sometimes) buy your lunch at MacDonalds. Doesn’t the INS have anything else to do but to harass honest citizens? And foreign grandmothers who want to come and visit somebody? Europeans are getting fed up even trying to come to the U. S. for a vacation. You can go to just about any border in the world and not be treated the way the INS sometimes treats people.
Herb, I and many others resent being picked over by security staff at the borders and airports. No doubt some of the people doing this job are inclined to personal nastiness. Consider what happens to them however if one terrorist gets cleared on their watch and it is later found out. Most of the gate checks are being filmed for later review. Also consider that these people are under strict orders to NOT profile Muslims and Arabs. So, yes, the 70 year old granny from Germany gets the 3rd degree but Mohammed from Germany can get a free pass. We can all thank the politically correct Norman Mineta for most of that and the ACLU and all of our left wingers in the Congress who give these policies their support. As for the aid workers, I have seen quite a few of the American hater type aid workers heading to Iraq and consorting with the insurgents there. I am sure you have seen the same reports on that. The bottom line is we are in a world war that many Americans don’t even acknowledge let alone support. However, those same apathetic or anti-war types would be at the front of the blame game line if there is a terrorist attack on US soil. Regarding invasion of privacy in our own state, the new seatbelt law qualifies for that. I give the governor credit for refusing to sign it. Watch the complaining begin when the local yokel sheriffs start setting up seat belt checkpoints. Big new revenue source and of course the race card will be called out on that. Complete waste of time. So school kids ride around in buses with NO seat belts but I will be fined if I or any riders dont have one on. I always use mine by the way and make everyone buckle but now we have begun to legislate against stupidity and give the police a new reason to stick their nose in your front window. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Brad,
I agree with Lee’s cogent post. As a school board member for Marion School District One I have seen how hard the teachers work and how much they care for their students. The problem in our schools today is primarily lack of parenting, not classroom instruction.
I do agree that more fairly allocating funds to poor districts like ours will help (and standardizing teachers salaries-we lose many teachers to other districts because they can make thousands more-a teacher should make the same amount no matter where she teaches in the state, with perhaps a cost of living adjustment for certain districts with higher costs of living).
But there is no amount of money that can repair the disintegration of the family. Many students in our district enter K-4 or K-5 already so far behind they will never catch up and the most important single factor holding them back is lack of a stable two parent family. If a child spends his pre-school years in a single parent home he has been handicapped in a way that is very difficult to overcome. My hat goes off to the single parents who are doing their best to make it work but we all know that two parents paddling in the same direction will take a child farther than one.
This issue (the disintegration of the family, particularly in the black community) seems to be the elephant in the living room. So much else depends on reversing the trend. According to my reading the national rate of single parent families has doubled from in the 20 percent range in the 1980s to over forty percent now. In Marion County the rate is 50% and in some communities the rate tops 70%.
Why are we not focused on this issue? Is is something that people feel is inevitable or simply too overwhelming to address comprehensively?
Good post, Paul. I’ll go back to my own insert about involving the (black) churches; I think that is where we can set in, but they will have to be the ones who spearhead it. They will (and do) need help, though. The pastor I am thinking of is highly motivated, but the job is immense
And a P. S. The mosque is already doing this, for example on Monticello Road here in Columbia. I’m not sure if the churches are learning from their example, or not.
Charlotte voters just rejected a $423,000,000 bond issue (not counting interest costs) when they found out that the schools had tens of millions of unspent money from the last bonds.
The educrats don’t want taxpayers to become accustomed to debt-free operation, so they look for ways to waste money, borrow more, and enrich the bondholders and bankers doing the deals.
Paul, You hit the nail right on the head but you will never see the State publish (in print) what you just wrote. We all know that one of the reasons, if not the main reason, that this problem cannot be solved is that if someone acknowledges the true problem, then you will be attacked by the race-baiters. As a result, we as a society peck away at symptoms of the problem, while politely ignoring the cultural dysfunction inherent in many black families. Keep in mind there is a major political party, called Democrats, who give lip service to fixing the problem, but in reality it is in the Democrats interest to have a huge voting block living on the welfare plantation. These are the liberal feel gooders who send their kids to nearly all white private schools, or to near all white public schools, while decrying the racism of everyone else. Reference Al Gore, the Clintons, the Kerrys, and the list is endless. No doubt there are GOPers who follow that same pattern, but the GOP isnt running around trying to perpetuate the black is victim mentality that traps them in the lowest echelons of society.
To Herb, your mention of church is poison to the secularists. Eliminate by phasing out government handout welfare and direct it through the churches, and the minority families, and poor white families, would have a much higher chance of success surrounded by a strong local support system of a church.
So, unfortunately the elephant in the room will remain politely ignored by the judges, the politicians, and the State paper, while we ask the educators to tickle around the real problem.
The family is disintigrating for many reasons, one of which is the attack by the entertainment media, which owns the news outlets.
In 2001,
* 27.6% of whites were born out of wedlock
* 42.5% of Hispanics were born out of wedlock, many of them “anchor babies” delivered in border hospitals by illegal immigrants in order to acquire access to US welfare benefits.
* 68% of blacks were born out of wedlock.
Lee,
I disagree with your dim view of the “educrats.” Although I’m sure there is plenty of self-serving behavior in every school district, I am continually impressed by the selflessness of the teachers and administrators I encounter. Most truly seem well motivated and don’t like paying taxes any more than the rest of us.
Thanks for the statistics on out-of-wedlock births-where did you get them?
Dave,
I appreciate your post. I’m not sure if your criticism of the State is valid. Racial issues receive significant space in the State’s editorial page. Bill Cosby’s comments critical of black families also received much attention.
I think one way to avoid charges of racism when discussing the single parent issue is simply not to invoke race. The is a national problem that involves all races. And I believe the essential problem is poverty rather than race anyway.
The key is to target those at risk (ie the poor) and help them make the right choices (ie stay in school, get married before having children, etc). “Life Choices 101” should be a top priority for both the schools and the churches. I would be interested to know if there is such a cirriculum and if it has been sucessfully utilized.
Brad,
How do you respond to Dave’s complaint that the State is too timid about identifying single-parent families as a major source of society’s woes.
Also, it seems to me that on this and other issues our focus should be on trying to come up with viable solutions/interventions rather than simply debating.
It’s the other way around-free market policies in conjunction with a legacy of racism along with extant racism (although it is much subtler today) combined with small to nonexistent net worths ab initio, have pretty much polished-off many black people’s prospects. A lot of working class white and poor people are being flushed down the tubes too. That’s what we get for insisting on using a system that we know creates and fosters poverty. We give rich people huge tax breaks, yet we raise property taxes and sales taxes on everyone else! Race matters-if we were all one race, then you could bet that we would have national health insurance, as does Western Europe. It’s just the truth.
“Worse still, the wealth of African-American households is actually in decline, according to a new Pew Charitable Trusts study. Despite the recent recession, white household wealth has increased by 17 percent since 1996, to $88,651. Black household wealth dropped by 16 percent, to $5,988. Latino household wealth increased by 14 percent, but only to $7,932, not even 10 percent of white household wealth.”
“If the minimum wage tracked the rise in CEO pay, it would be $15.76, not its current $5.15. If the salary of the average production worker kept pace with the rises in CEO pay since 1990, workers would be making $75,388 a year instead of $26,899.”
Source
My wife and I are very active in a faith-based ministry, which we believe does much good work year in and year out. That being said, faith-based charities are unequal to many of the challenges people face today. Case in point: Health care. A member of our local congregation with rheumatoid arthritis has run up costs of over $ 100K in the last two years. That’s just one family out of 160. Multiply that a few times over and most faith-based charities can’t handle it.
Steve, there are obviously some things that faith-based ministries can’t do. That is why I support some kind of national major-medical policy, though I admit I don’t know how you fool-proof it from politicians’ entitlement-padding vote-garnering tendencies. As far as faith-based ministries, they need to be encouraged. The problem is often that everybody thinks what they do is just a drop in the bucket. But a lot of drops can make a lot of water, to state the obvious.
I agree with Mark on the CEO pay and minimum-wage thing, except for teenagers. Pardon my crassness, but I don’t see why teenagers need $15 an hour in order to fill their SUV with gas in order to drive their lazy rear-ends to school. I still walk to a lot of places myself, which can be pretty scary here in Lexington. Nobody walks anywhere anymore.
Why should worker pay “track CEO pay”?
Only the really top CEOs make outrageous incomes. Most CEOs are running small corporations and making less money than the average school superintendant, who only has to figure out how to spend money.
Speaking of that, I coined the word “educrats” about 20 years ago to describe self-serving politicians who had chosen the education industry to burrow in and suck dry. They put themselve ahead of the students and parents. So don’t bring up hard-working teachers and custodial workers in defense of incompetent, greedy, dishonest administrators.
The figures for bastardy came from hospital records, as compiled by the Columbia University School of Sociology.
TAX THE CHURCHES!
Speaking of school administrators, it appears that the news of Richland 2 Superintendent Steve Heffner’s recent raise approved by the school board didn’t get much press. Mr. Heffner now will be compensated with a salary of $145,000 plus a 12% annuity plus a $700 month car allowance.
This for a school district that is tied for 14th in the state using 2005 Report Card data with an overall GOOD rating and an improvement rating of BELOW AVERAGE.
http://www.myscschools.com/reportcard/2005/data/Ratings_Indices_2005_Districts.xls
Wow! Accountability is REALLY doing its job in rewarding performance. You jokers who think more testing has any impact on actual school performance need to find a good intervention program.
Here’s the text from the Richland Two website announcing Mr. Heffner’s continued glorification:
Following an outstanding annual evaluation, the board publicly expressed its continued strong approval of Superintendent Steve Hefner and wished to extend his employment contract. In light of recent changes in state law, Dr. Hefner informed the board that he has decided to withdraw from the State Teacher Employment Retention Incentive (TERI) program. The law requires an employee to resign in order to exit the TERI program. For this reason, the board voted unanimously to accept Dr. Hefner’s resignation effective November 28, 2005. The board then immediately voted unanimously to issue Dr. Hefner a new eight-year contract at an annual salary of $145,500 and a 12.5 percent annual annuity, beginning November 30, 2005, and ending June 30, 2013.
A little off the subject, but I like this list of economic values that Wheaton College prof Bruce Howard gives, which, as he states, “transcend pure economic individualism”:
1. People are more important than things
2. Treat others as you want to be treated.
3. Truth matters at all levels.
4. Leave things a little better than you found them.
5. People are looking for a cause to live for that is larger than themselves.
6. Let freedom ring (in the best companies, people don’t feel like slaves. They feel that they can have influence.)
7. Community counts.
8. Good laws will outlive good men.
9. Value vocation. (Decide who you want to be and let that drive what you do.)
10. Life is a mix of duty and delight.
11. Choice has consequence.
12. Keep the core when all else is changing. (People will be better positioned to accept change when they know something isn’t changing fundamentally.”)