Tag Archives: Child

Commentary

Does legalized abortion reduce crime rates?

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One of the reasons given by pro-choice people for legalized abortion is that it reduces crime rates. But does it really reduce crime rates?

Let’s take a look at a two-part series by economist John Lott, writing for Fox News.

Here is the first article.

Excerpt:

Academic studies have found that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion.

In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5 percent of all births from 1965 to 1969 to more than 16 percent two decades later (1985 to 1989).

Here is the second article.

Excerpt:

What happened to all these children raised by single women? No matter how much they want their children, single parents tend to devote less attention to them than married couples do. Single parents are less likely than married parents to read to their children or take them on excursions, and more likely to feel angry at their children or to feel that they are burdensome. Children raised out of wedlock have more social and developmental problems than children of married couples by almost any measure — from grades to school expulsion to disease. Unsurprisingly, children from unmarried families are also more likely to become criminals.

This material is exposited more fully in Lott’s book “Freedomnomics“, which is one of my favorite books. I bought it for 3 of my friends as part of their Christmas present bundle, including Andrew and Jen, the smartest married couple in the world!

About the author

John R. Lott, Jr. is a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Maryland. Lott has held positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. Lott has published over 100 articles in academic journals. He is the author of six books including: “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws”, “The Bias Against Guns”, and most recently “Freedomnomics.” Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Chicago Tribune. He has appeared on such television programs as the ABC and NBC National Evening News broadcasts, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and the Today Show. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1984.

News

Friday night funny: Bill Cosby

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Bill Cosby

These are my favorite Bill Cosby routines! I hope you like them!

Dentists:

Natural child birth, part 1 of 2:

Natural child birth, part 2 of 2:

Brain damage:

Grandparents:

Breakfast:

Happy Friday!

Commentary

NEA General Counsel explains the real goals of teacher unions: MONEY and POWER

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Story here at the Heritage Foundation.

NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin tells the world the top priority of the largest teacher union in the USA.

Are they concerned with providing a quality education for our children?

Here is the video:

And the transcript:

Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas; it is not because of the merit of our positions; it is not because we care about children; and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.

The NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of million of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them; the union that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.

This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing drop rate rates, improving teacher quality, and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary these are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, or collective bargaining.

That is simply too high a price to pay.

The Heritage Foundation notes that union dues are not voluntarily in many parts of the USA.

First of all, there is little that is voluntary about the millions in dues paid to the NEA every year. The NEA is strongest in states without right to work laws, and if you want to teach in a public school that is under an NEA contract in those jurisdictions (like California and New York), you must pay dues to the NEA. It is the law. There is nothing voluntary about it. Second, that is tax payer money he’s talking about, which is exactly what is so corrupting about public sector unions: the government is lobbying itself for its own expansion.

And what happens when you value the rights of incompetent teachers ahead of the rights of parents and children?

And what are “employee rights” and “due process,” you might ask? Well, those are what require New York City to pay 700 union teachers $65 million a year to do nothing. Same thing in Los Angeles, where 165 union teachers collect a total of $10 million a year from tax payers for doing nothing.

It is very important to note that he gets a standing ovation from the teachers present at the convention. These are the people who teach your children. Or rather, these are the people who want to indoctrinate your children to accept their values, and to be paid by you for doing it.

ECM also sent me this article from Betsy’s Page via Granite Grok.

Excerpt:

Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low-income families, had earned the city’s highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.

Botel says a union official replied: “That’s not our problem.”

Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.

They don’t care about your children’s education or career.