Tag Archives: Public School

News

Is Mike Huckabee a Bible-believing Christian?

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Laura from Pursuing Holiness has concerns about Mike Huckabee. (H/T Foxfier)

She writes in part:

In defiance of libertarian laissez-faire, Huckabee has extended his Christian vision to include the poor. “If there are a certain number of kids from single-parent homes who aren’t going to school and don’t have health care, you can say that’s not government’s job,” Huckabee told me. “Well, sweet and fine! But you know what? If the kid’s sitting outside the door of the hospital choking with asthma, do I sit there and say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t think, philosophically, government should get involved’? I’d much rather the kid get help than I sit around and say I’m so pure in my ideology.”

I actually don’t think that Huckabee is even a real Republican or a real Christian. Not only is he a crappy tax-raising, amnesty-granting, big government socialist, but I don’t think he isn’t even a Bible-believing Christian.

Consider this in John 14:6:

6Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

And this in Acts 4:12:

12Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

Look what Huckster says:

Other members of the group politely admitted that they had no doubt that most Israelis, and anyone else who had not accepted Christ as Lord and Saviour, would be spending eternity in Hell. (“That is an issue,” a man named Randy Rebold told me apologetically.) Huckabee’s formulation is considerably more politic. “If somebody asked me, How do I get to Heaven, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is faith in Christ, because I believe the New Testament,” he said. “That’s the only map I got. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what? If it works, I’m not going to argue with you.”

That’s not Christianity. That’s relativism. He doesn’t even have the map he thinks he has.

News

Louisiana bill to deregulate public schools making progress

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Bobby and Supriya Jindal

Story here on NOLA.com.

Excerpt:

The House of Representatives signed off Thursday on the Senate’s revisions to a plan that would let public school officials apply for waivers of state education regulations, a measure that would let some campuses behave more like charter schools.

House Bill 1368 by Rep. Jane Smith, R-Bossier City, is one of Gov. Bobby Jindal‘s top K-12 education priorities for the session. The administration hails the measure as a fundamental shift in public education policy. But the version that Jindal will sign has considerably more limitations than what Smith introduced several months ago.

Local superintendents can apply for waivers of certain rules and regulations, but only with the approval of the local school board and a majority of the teachers on each campus affected by the waiver. The bill would not allow schools to waive certain requirements, such as school nutrition rules, a new teacher evaluation system that Jindal recently signed into law and limits on privatizing support workers. Teachers unions worked throughout the session for many of the concessions.

People ask me what it would take for me to believe in the project of marriage and parenting. I think two things have to happen. 1) Getting rid of feminist laws like no-fault divorce and the divorce courts. 2) Reforming education so that other people are not controlling what my children believe. Louisiana has some of the worst schools in the nation, so this is good news. Think of how good it would look for Jindal if he could bring up those test scores with some free market reforms.

News

Mitch Daniels thinks that government should cut spending

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Story about frugal Indiana governor Mitch Daniels at the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

Daniels is a font of statistics, but one comes to his lips more than any other. “Only 61 cents of every education dollar gets into the classroom in Indiana.” School funding increased every year under Daniels before the recession, and since the downturn, when most areas of state government have seen cuts of 25 percent or more, education has been reduced by only 2 percent. Yet the local school boards and their Democratic allies in the state legislature continue to complain. Daniels calls education funding “the bloody shirt” of Indiana politics: “It doesn’t take long before somebody starts waving it.” One of my favorite bits of Daniels video on YouTube shows him at a press conference defending a bill to end “social promotion” in the state’s grade schools. School districts were appalled that the bill would pass without “additional resources” to educate the kids who would be held back.

A reporter asked him about it.

“By the time a child has finished third grade, the state has spent $40,000 and the school district has had 720 days to teach that child to read,” he said, tight-lipped. “If that child can’t read by then, there is a fundamental failure in that district. And they’ll need to remedy it. The most unacceptable thing to do is to shove that child along to fourth grade into almost certain academic failure. That’s a cruel thing to do, it’s a wrong thing to do, and we’re going to put an end to it.”

The reporter pressed: But won’t the schools need more money?

Daniels’s eyes got wide.

“More than $40,000 to teach someone how to read? No. It won’t and it shouldn’t and any school district that can’t do it ought to face consequences.”

And this is actually normal behavior for him:

When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest.

Yes, let’s elect people like Mitch Daniels who like to cut costs instead of increasing spending – people with a record for caring about balancing the budget.

UPDATE: Or not! ECM pointed me out this “truce” comment that he made. It turns out that he is soft on social issues and probably a little soft on foreign policy issues as well! Thanks, ECM.