Tag Archives: Benefits

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Indiana voucher program offers hope to low-income students

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From the Courier Press, news of the latest success for Republicans in their long war against public sector teacher unions.

Excerpt:

Kristy Wentworth of Evansville said she was never dissatisfied with public education, and her three children, who attended schools in the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp., were making good grades.

But when friends told her about Indiana’s new private school voucher program, she was intrigued.

After some discussion, Wentworth enrolled her children this year at Evansville Lutheran School, which is near her home. It didn’t take the single mother long to decide her choice was correct. Her children — who are in grades 7, 6 and 4 — are thriving at Evansville Lutheran. Wentworth noted the school’s small class sizes, and she marveled at the frequent communication she receives from her teachers.

“They come home from school excited, they leave for school excited. They can’t wait to get there,” Wentworth said. “(The school) encouraged them to sign up for Boy Scouts and volleyball, and on the first night they made the kids feel so welcome.”

Wentworth recently lost her job, and she said she couldn’t have afforded a private school without the voucher program, which proponents say helps overall educational achievement and closes achievement gaps along socioeconomic lines.

And these private schools help children to perform better in testing.

Can greater competition among schools help? That’s what state education officials are banking on. While scars from the lengthy spring debate over vouchers heal, they are encouraging local school districts to embrace the new environment.

Local nonpublic schools have courted voucher students. As of Friday, 114 were awarded to students in the EVSC district — the fourth highest number in the state.

Officials with the EVSC, meanwhile, point to recent academic progress, its network of community partnerships aimed at meeting students’ most fundamental needs and classroom innovations.

Delaware Elementary School, which is in the same neighborhood as Evansville Lutheran, has made strides in several areas in a short period of time, said Heather Ottilie, parent of a Delaware third-grader.

Delaware is in its second year as an EVSC “equity school.” Along with two other schools of similar socioeconomic demographics — McGary Middle School and Evans School — Delaware is free to have longer school days and longer school years and has more leeway in curriculum and rules. The three equity schools all showed gains on the spring ISTEP.

Ottilie said Delaware has placed heavy emphasis on independent reading. Other innovations include the use of netbook computers and iPod Touches in classrooms, world language instruction and new learning programs such as LEGO robotics, which emphasize problem-solving skills.

“I love it,” Ottilie said. “Everything is hands-on … the kids aren’t just doing worksheets.”

What is the conservative plan to help the poor? Is it wealth redistribution? Does that even work? Or is there a way to produce better results for the poor through free market capitalism? Those who advocate big government never bother to ask these questions. For those who take the time to study economics, the answer is clear – what works to reduce costs and raise quality is choice and competition.

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Must-see videos on education policy

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Should teachers be paid more money?

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From the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Mark Perry posts regarding the new AEI Education Outlook by University of Missouri economist Cory Koedel which shows Education to be by far the easiest course of study in most colleges. Mark finds additional evidence from Cornell University to back up Koedel’s claim. Education majors enter college with lower SAT scores than students majoring in other fields but leave college with higher GPAs.

[…]But, as a forthcoming paper that I have co-authored with Jason Richwine will show, the low standards applied in education degrees also complicate the task of determining whether public school teachers are fairly paid. Teachers claim to be underpaid because they receive lower average salaries than private sector workers with similar levels of education. (Our paper shows that, even if this is true, they more than make up the gap through generous benefits, but we’ll ignore that for now.) But note that the control variable here is the level of education — meaning, Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, and so on — and not the quality of education nor, more importantly, the ability or productivity of the worker.

[…]Put bluntly, public school teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores, major in the easiest undergraduate course of study, take Master’s degrees in education that have no appreciable impact on teaching quality, and then wonder why they’re not as well paid as someone who got a Master’s in chemical engineering. They shouldn’t.

Education is what you study when you can’t get into anything else, and you don’t learn anything in it. What we really need is to hire teachers with real degrees in math, science and business. There should not even be an education MAJOR.

Here’s a fun story about the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU).

Excerpt:

Like many Illinois citizens, the CTU has seen reports that three out of four state high school graduates are not ready for college.  And the union’s response has been, well … the CTU hasn’t really said anything about it.

You see, the fact that students are leaving Illinois’ K-12 public education system totally unprepared for college, the workplace or life in general – that’s not really the CTU’s thing.

Instead, the union is “upset” and feeling very “disrespected” because the Chicago Board of Education doesn’t have the money to pay CTU members the four percent pay raise they were promised in their contract.

The union is also steaming over the fact that more than 1,500 teachers have been laid off, some of which have been placed on a “secret” do-not-hire list, CTU President Karen Lewis told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Pay, benefits, working conditions – these are the things that the teachers unions are willing to strike over. If only 23 percent of Illinois high school grads pass a college-readiness test, well, what do you expect them to do about it? Lewis is quick to point out that union teachers are just simple “workers,” doing the best they can with the kids they are given. (It’s mostly the parents’ fault, anyway.)

Sure, some trouble making education reformers may suggest that kids are doing badly on the tests because their school days have been frittered away on silly social justice lessons, but the fact that the CTU is being stiffed on its four percent pay raise only underscores the need for such a curriculum.

Teachers don’t like it when you expect them to earn their salaries. They just go on strike.

News

In the UK welfare state, single motherhood is passed from mother to daughter

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Robert Stacy McCain has the whole story.

Excerpt:

Say hello to Soya Keaveney, shown in a bikini photo she posed for at age 12, when the British girl was featured in a July 2008 magazine article:

Wearing a skimpy bikini and flaunting herself in an overtly sexual manner, Soya looks every bit the wannabe glamour model. . . .
Soya never goes out without putting on eyeliner and mascara, although once at school she’s often told to remove it by her teachers. Shockingly, she also frequently wears padded bras, short skirts, cropped tops, high heels and fishnet tights.

And now, the sequel:

A SCHOOLGIRL who posed aged 12 for controversial bikini pictures in a magazine is now pregnant at 15 — to the joy of her mum. . . .
Soya got pregnant by a 17-year-old boyfriend who is allowed by Janis to stay overnight at the family home.
Jobless single mum Janis, 48, said she was delighted because the council will now have to give her a bigger house. . . .
She added: “Our three-bedroom place was already overcrowded with her sisters Coco and Ritzy, her brother Tarot, Soya’s boyfriend Jake and one of her sister’s babies.
“Once the new baby comes the council will have to find us a place with four or five bedrooms. . . .
“I’m sure she’ll make a wonderful mum and will teach her children discipline like I have.”

So “mum” Janis, 48, has apparently never had a husband or a job, and lives with her four children, one of them already herself a mother and the other now pregnant by the 17-year-old boyfriend whom Janis permitted to spend the night in their 3-bedroom public housing apartment. All of this social pathology is subsidized by the British taxpayer!

But there’s more. I just posted about this single mother of ten children who is receiving £30,000-a-year in benefits.

Excerpt:

A mother-of-ten who nets more than £30,000-a-year in benefits has begged for charity donations to help raise her brood – because her state ‘wage’ is not enough.

Moira Pearce, 34, has insisted her weekly government handout of £600 is insufficient to feed and clothe her children and she needs donations to survive.

The single mum – whose kids are fathered by four ex-partners – has insisted her range of child and family allowance benefits do not meet her weekly outgoings.

Her annual payments funded by the public purse work out at a staggering £31,200-a-year – or £3,120 per child.

Ms Pearce – who lives with unemployed ex-boyfriend Mark Austin, 19, seven daughters and three sons – now wants extra help to save her from going under.

Recall another recent story I posted about that has yet another example of single motherhood by choice – subsidized by the feminist welfare state.

Excerpt:

She tells her children to do as she says and not as she does.

But the words of mother of 14 Joanne Watson – who receives more than £2,000 a month in state handouts – have fallen on deaf ears.

Her 15-year-old daughter Mariah is pregnant, the father has ‘left the scene’, and the youngster is about to start living off benefits.

Mrs Watson, 40, is raising her giant brood alone after parting from her husband John, 46, three years ago, and breaking up with subsequent partner Craig le Sauvage, 35, last year.

Despite this, she has still managed to squirrel away enough cash for a £1,600 breast enhancement and a sunbed. She claims she has always encouraged her daughters to use contraception – but, inevitably, it seems they would rather follow the family tradition.

Mariah’s pregnancy comes after Mrs Watson’s oldest daughter Natasha, 22, got pregnant with her son Branford, now six, when she was 16. Her second eldest daughter Shanice, 19, also got pregnant at 16 with her 22-month-old son Marley.

Mariah says she has no concerns about becoming a teenage mother, as it seems the most natural thing in the world. Initially, she and her child will be supported by the taxpayer.

She is expected to move into a housing complex for single mothers and will receive supplementary benefit and child allowance for her baby.

The youngster, who is due to have a boy, said: ‘I’m not nervous. I’ve been around babies my whole life so I know what to expect and that I can handle it. The father isn’t involved and I don’t want him to be either. I’m really excited and think I will be a great mum.’

And studies show that this is being passed on from mother to daughter.

Excerpt:

Girls who grow up without their fathers are at more at risk of becoming pregnant while still teenagers, long-term studies in the US and New Zealand suggest.

Researchers say the absence of biological fathers from the home is the most significant factor for teenage pregnancy.

The link between a father’s absence and teenage girls having sex has long been noted, but many researchers have attributed it to factors associated with divorce such as poverty and family conflict. But the new findings suggest the link is more direct.

The study’s author, Bruce Ellis, said: “These findings may support social policies that encourage fathers to remain in families with their children.” This would not apply to families with high conflict or violence.

Dr Ellis, who teaches at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, said the findings warranted serious attention in Australia, which has the sixth highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world, according to an article published Medical Journal of Australia last month.

Dr Ellis worked with teams of scientists from the Christchurch School of Medicine and three US universities. Nearly 800 American and New Zealand girls were tracked from early in life to age 18.

The study revealed that the earlier a father left, the greater the risk of teenage pregnancy. Rates increased from about one in 20 in the US sample and one in 30 in the NZ sample for girls whose fathers were present, to one in three in the US and one in four in NZ for girls whose father left early in their life. Early absence was defined as the first five years of a girl’s life.

Girls who grew up in otherwise socially and economically privileged homes were not protected, Dr Ellis said.

When a woman grows up in a home where money is delivered by government check, she has no idea what men are for. She chooses men solely based on physical appearance, popularity, and peer approval, and she has no idea what love really looks like between men and women. That’s why they repeat the mistakes of their mothers. And it’s not a problem that can be solved by confiscating more money from working fathers and giving it to single mothers – even wealthy single mother homes are not immune. If men are not seen as protectors, providers and moral/spiritual leaders in the home they grow up in, then they will choose “bad boy” predatorial men as sexual partners, using shallow criteria to judge them – like the 180-second rule. This is exactly what feminism dictates, since feminism denies that men have the traditional sex roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. Young women growing up in single mother families have learned to resent men who make exclusive truth claims, especially about religion, and exclusive moral claims, too. They prefer the moral relativist men, who have postmodernist/universalist views of religion. The only difference in men that they know is strictly on physical appearance – what else are men supposed to do other that look good and be fun?

I think that this social trend is most reasonably blamed on Labor Party MP Harriet Harman, the most anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-father politician the UK has ever seen. Her militant feminist policies have taken money away from working fathers in intact marriages in order to redistribute it to women who choose to have premarital sex and then to get pregnant out of wedlock. This is now considered “normal” in the UK, and it’s because of Harriet Harman’s feminism-inspired push against traditional marriage, which she views as sexist. It is no surprise to anyone in the know that the fist generation of militant socialist feminists would raise the first generation of unmarried mothers. Single motherhood is the direct result of feminism – they want to replace men with government handouts.

Read more to find out more about how fatherlessness harms children, and leads to child poverty and child abuse. We have to stop this, and the only way to do that is to get informed and to persuade others. We can’t continue to hurt children like this.

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