Tag Archives: Homeschooling

Videos

NJ Gov. Christie smacks down reporter who accuses him of being “confrontational”

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This is a must-see I found at Hot Air.

He’s not my favorite Republican, but that is pretty funny.

And he supports school choice

Although New Jersey is dominated by teacher unions, the Republicans passed a school choice bill.

Excerpt:

A Senate committee approved legislation today creating scholarships for students to attend private schools during a raucous hearing held in front of the Statehouse Annex building.

Hundreds of demonstrators, mostly students from private and charter schools, gathered to rally for the bill. Supporters said it provides students a chance to leave failing public schools, while opponents said it undermines the public school system.

The bill (S1872) could fund $24 million in scholarships for up to 4,000 children the first year. After five years, up to 20,000 children would receive $120 million in scholarships, they said. More money would be set aside for grants to public schools. The funding would come from donations by corporations who would receive tax credits equal to their contributions.

[…]A similar bill has previously failed to gain traction in recent years. Now it has bipartisan backing in the Senate — it’s spearheaded by Lesniak and Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Union) — and Gov. Chris Christie’s support.

[…]African-American churches, led by Black Ministers Council Executive Director Rev. Reginald Jackson, held a press conference earlier this morning to support the legislation. He said people need to decide whether to support school institutions or the children.

“Why do we insist on supporting a failing system?” he said. “When are we going to decide our children are more important.”

The only people who don’t like school choice are unionized teachers who don’t want their customers (parents and children) to have a choice to fire them if they don’t perform. Would you like it if you could only buy one kind of shoe? Or one kind of gaming console? Then why do you put up with government-run monopolies when it comes to your children’s education? Let teachers who are good be paid more, and let teachers who are bad be paid less. That’s just common sense.

Must-see videos on education policy

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Commentary

Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s fight against the Washington, D.C. teacher unions

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I’ve always believed that the best way to learn about a topic is by understanding the topic as a fight between two opposing teams. And that’s how we’re going to learn about the Washington D.C. school system in this balanced post at the libertarian magazine Reason.(Not the usual conservative stuff I post 100% of the time)

Here’s the situation:

D.C. is a divided town. In the heart of the capital, the federal government hums along, churning out paperwork and disillusioned interns at a steady clip. But the rest of the city is in pretty miserable shape. The District of Columbia Public Schools rank below all 50 states in national math and reading tests, squatting at the bottom of the list for years at a time. More than 40 percent of D.C. students drop out altogether. Only 9 percent of the District’s high schoolers will finish college within five years of graduation. And all this failure doesn’t come cheap: The city spends $14,699 per pupil, more than all but two states and about $5,000 more than the national average. Yet as unlikely as it seems, D.C. may prove to be the last best hope for school reform in the United States.

But then, a reform-minded superintendent named Michelle Rhee appeared:

In July 2008, Rhee revealed her opening gambit with the teachers union: She offered the teachers a whole lot of money. Under her proposal, educators would have two choices. With the first option, teachers would get a $10,000 bonus—a bribe, really—and a 20 percent raise. Nothing else would change. Benefits, rights, and privileges would remain as they were. Under the second option, teachers would receive a $10,000 bonus, a 45 percent increase in base salary, and the possibility of total earnings up to $131,000 a year through bonuses tied to student performance. In exchange, they would have to forfeit their tenure protections.

But the teachers said no to her offer:

Teachers simply don’t believe that it should be possible for them to be fired—not by a principal, not by a superintendent, not by anyone. Unions and other opponents of the reformers prefer to stick with warmed-over solutions that have been failing for decades: smaller class sizes, more teacher pay, and more job security.

Then Rhee tried to tie teacher license renewals to performance, but the unions said no:

In 2008, after Rhee’s office released a statement about tying teacher licensing to student outcomes, the Washington Teachers Union (the dominant local union) sent an email message to its members stating, “This proposed regulation would not benefit DCPS teachers, as a teacher’s true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher’s right to renew his or her license.” The message went on to explain that it was “dangerous and discriminatory” to “require a candidate to demonstrate effectiveness to continue teaching in a District of Columbia Public School.”

Children benefit when parents can get a voucher so the parents can choose a better school, and especially when they can choose charter schools or even private schools or even homeschooling – anything is better than public schools. But the unions don’t want parents to be able to use a voucher to choose a competitor. Unions want children to remain in failing schools so that the union members will not loose their jobs.

The article continues:

In pre-Rhee D.C. the single glimmer of hope for many families was the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships Program. Funded by a separate congressional appropriation of $14 million, it offered vouchers to kids in failing schools, allowing them to attend private school instead of their assigned public school. The program took no money from the city budget and was hugely popular with parents and kids; since 2004 more than 7,200 students had applied for a limited number of slots. Last year 1,700 kids were accepted. Next year there will be none. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama had promised to let scientific results determine his education policy. In office, however, he let political influence kill the program even as initial studies were showing positive gains by students and high parental satisfaction. The National Education Association, which is consistently one of the biggest single donors to U.S. political campaigns, pressured the Democratic Congress to eliminate funding for vouchers in 2009. Obama promptly signed the death sentence into law.

The fight over vouchers and charter schools—both of which serve as workarounds to the ossified hiring/firing rules of public schools—is playing out all around the country, with teachers unions usually coming out on the winning side.

[…]Teachers unions contribute more than $60 million a year to political campaigns, topping contributor lists at the state and federal levels, and nearly all of the money goes to Democrats. That investment buys the continuation of the status quo plus some platitudes about class size and teacher pay from every prominent Democrat. Reformers have virtually no presence on Capitol Hill.

On the one side, there is the courageous, no-nonsense superintendent Michelle Rhee, parents and children. And on the other side, there is the Washington D.C. education bureaucracy, teacher unions and the Democrat party. The unions are winning. Do parents care to understand what is stopping their own children from succeeding?

The shocking thing in all of this is that Rhee is a Democrat, and hardly a conservative. She’s no hero of mine, but at least we share the same enemies on this issue.

Must-see videos on education policy

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Mentoring

The Wintery Knight’s greatest fears about the future

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I was asked recently to explain some of the big fears I have about the future, and I wrote a horrible paranoid screed that probably has scared her away from me for good. So, I thought I would re-write it in a more organized and sensible way.

So, I basically don’t have too many fears about the future as a single guy. I have economic fears about the future, but since I’m a good saver and having been saving all these years, I’m not worried about taking care of me because I’ve got the money to do that. And I don’t think things will get too bad before I die. Basically my fears for myself alone are because young people are being neglected by their working parents, and indoctrinated in the public schools.

Things that public schools teach:

  • taught Darwinism
  • taught sex education
  • taught that capitalism is evil
  • taught global warming alarmism
  • taught anti-Christian views
  • taught religious pluralism
  • taught moral relativism
  • taught postmodernism/skepticism
  • taught that Western civilization is evil
  • taught that America is evil
  • taught that war is never justified
  • taught that traditional marriage is wrong

…not to mention all things they don’t learn that put Christianity, America, capitalism, business, marriage and Western civilization in a positive light. I worry about how they will act and vote and demand entitlements from government to “equalize” their life outcomes after they make self-destructive decisions based on what they learned in school. And many of them are growing up without fathers which brings a whole host of other problems. But I am not too worried about this because I can always pick up and move somewhere else if things get really bad here.

But these fears pale in comparison to my fears about what might happen if I took on marriage and parenting. That’s when things could really go downhill fast, and all the chastity and money in the world won’t save me.

Below I’ll summarize some of the biggest problems:

  • The biggest fear I have about marriage is that my wife will be pressured to abandon the idea that marriage and parenting is about self-sacrificial love of her husband and children in order to please God. That could mean ignoring or not meeting my needs as a man for things like sex and approval. It could also mean just giving up on the children and refusing to protect their worldviews from the outside world, e.g. – the public schools, Hollywood, etc. Maybe she will just become totally disinterested in the threats posed to the children by these enemies? Or undermine my efforts to teach the children theology, apologetics and morality?
  • I am also concerned about increasing encroachment by the state into the education of children. I hear stories about homeschooling being outlawed, about parents not being able to opt children out of anti-Christian educational programs, about children as young as five being put on hate registries for being politically incorrect, and homeschooled children being placed in government-run schools for believing that Christianity is true. My fear is that this trend could get worse to the point where children are seized by the government because they are being taught Biblical Christianity in the home.
  • What if government spends so much money that they end up increasing inflation and raising taxes such that my wife has to go to work, or that I lose my job due to economic decline? Without money, it is almost impossible for us to protect the children from all of the anti-Christian influences we would face. If we took government money or relied on government services (e.g. – health care) then we might even have to comply with government regulations and conditions that would be antithetical to our plans.
  • I am also afraid that I will be charged by something like the Canadian Human Rights Commissions for expressing traditional Christian views in public. In Canada, there is no such thing as free speech. If you cause someone to feel badly with your speech, you will be placed on trial for several years, pay about $100,000 in legal fees, and then you will be convicted, forced to apologize, force to deny your Christian faith in public, and prohibited from speaking freely in any public forum including on web sites or e-mail.
  • I am concerned that government programs that push feminism, no-fault divorce and generally paint men as irresponsible and aggressive could turn my wife against me and cause her to divorce me for the money. I read a lot about divorce courts, fake charges of domestic violence, etc. And I think there is a concerted effort to paint men as being unreliable, aggressive and harmful to children. What if my wife began to believe all of these myths and felt that she could do a better job parenting the children without me? The children would be harmed, I would be penniless and I might never see my children again.
  • Finally, I am worried that she will become less tolerant about my desires to be romantic and chivalrous and just sort of check out of the marriage emotionally. That she will not give me things to do, or dragons to slay, trophies to collect, etc. That she won’t speak to me for long periods of time, or write to me, spend time alone with me. I worry that she will instead become interested in her own interests and causes and forget that I need a romantic relationship with her! I’ll die if I can’t express myself romantically.

So I hope this explains to all a little bit about why I am skeptical about marriage, even if I met a perfect person to marry. I would like to see a lot more work being done by the church to focus on things like fiscal conservatism, small government and politics. As it stands, I am not hearing very much that is re-assuring me that potential Christian wives are as aware about these issues as I am, or that they are prepared to fight them.

When I talk to Christian women, they are usually not aware of any of these concerns, and in fact are quite secular and leftist in their voting. This is very disconcerting to me because it seems like they are not applying their state Christian beliefs to their future plans for marriage and parenting. Instead, they are happily voting for bigger and bigger government and they are oblivious to how this undermines Christian marriage and family.

When I ask them what they have read about these issues, they are usually reading Christian self-help books, devotional literature, theology-lite (Phillip Yancey), emergent church, social justice stuff from the religious left, sensational Dan Brown fiction that undermines the Bible’s authority and makes women appear to be the victims or men, or end-times fiction. Many read things like “Blue Like Jazz” or other mystical craziness. Are there any women out there who read Thomas Sowell and Wayne Grudem and William Lane Craig and Stephen C. Meyer and Craig Evans and Stephen Baskerville and Jennifer Roback Morse? Or even Lee Strobel and C.S. Lewis, for starters?

I think some of these problems might go away if I married someone with the foreign policy views of Marsha Blackburn, the fiscal conservatism of Michele Bachmann, and the social conservatism of Jennifer Roback Morse. But one woman cannot remake the whole world. One woman can’t get taxes lowered, secure school choice, protect religious liberty, and get the government out of the marriage and away from the children.

And it’s not just that there are problems today – it’s tomorrow, too. I am quite surprised at how passionately young people advocate for ideas that undermine their own liberty, prosperity and security. The very things needed to make Christian marriage and Christian parenting work. Can one woman fix the irrationality of the young people who are voting today? I don’t think that one woman can fix everything.

Well, Michele Bachmann can fix everything if we would just vote her in as President, like I want. If we put Michele in charge of the world, then I’ll get married.

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