Virginia Libertarian

Wow, Neal goes on a great big rant today about people who should not be allowed to vote.  For the most part I agree with him.  I am of the opinion that there needs to be some criteria you need to pass (other than having survivied to be 18) in order to be allowed to vote.  My dad came up with one, that you get one vote for every $10,000 you pay in taxes per year.  Not sure I completely agree with that one, but it couldn’t be worse than what we have now.  Maybe have that be a cutoff, you don’t get to vote unless you pay $10,000 in taxes per year, but you only get one vote.  We have to have some way of keeping people from voting themselves the ability to steal other peoples stuff.

boortz.com: Nealz Nuze Today’s Nuze

If you squandered every opportunity for an education to end up an unemployable semi-literate loser, that’s your problem, not mine. If you’ve destroyed your health with cigarettes and fast food … then by what right do you demand that people who lived their lives more responsibly than you cover the cost of your medical care. You cry about your “right” to health care. You dare to claim a right to the services of another human being to correct problems you created for yourself? Further, if it is more important for you to spend your money on a cell phone, flat-screen televisions, the best new car, meals at expensive restaurants and fancy vacations than it is to spend your money on a health insurance policy .. then you should be on your own. Don’t beg the government to steal from someone else so that you don’t have to change your lifestyle.

And a word for you welfare brood mares out there. That’s right .. welfare brood mares .. it’s time for someone to call you out for what you are. Perhaps one of the greatest social wrongs a person can commit in this country is to have a child that you cannot afford to care for. Do you really think that it’s perfectly OK for you to get yourself knocked up, download your baby, and then tell the taxpayers “Hey, look what I did! Now you folks cough up the money I need to take care of this child.” Yeah .. that’s what America is all about .. and you’re going to be right there in November to vote for Hillary, aren’t you. In fact all of you are: the uneducated and unmotivated, the “I’m not responsible for my own health care” crowd, and the single moms. All of you want someone else to step in and take care of you after you’ve screwed up your own lives, and who better than Hillary, a woman more than ready to use the police power of government to reward you for your votes.

You do know, don’t you, that you have absolutely no constitutional right to cast a vote in this presidential election. No .. you probably don’t know that. That would mean you are educated, but you’re not. You were educated by the government … and the government sure isn’t going to disclose that inconvenient little fact to you. Somehow the media in this country has bought the politician’s about this “right to vote.” It’s not there. Doesn’t exist. And to save this country we need to figure out a way to get tens of millions the parasite class off the voter roles. Welfare? No vote. Illiterate? Stay home on election day. Begging for the government to be your lifetime nanny? Let the doers, the achievers cast the votes. Just stay away.

Historians have said that this country will start to slide when the people learn that they can vote largess for themselves out of the public treasury. Well, you’ve learned, and now you’re heading to the polls later this year to vote for government as an instrument of plunder .. plunder for you .. plunder to pay you for your votes. It’s all about you, your wants and needs. Look for the politician who promises to transfer the most wealth from the achievers to you … and that’s the politician who gets your vote. You don’t care even a little bit about the type of America you’ll leave generations to come … it’s all about you, right now, right here.

Don’t you have some soap operas you need to catch up to on election day?

wltx.com | Substitute Teacher Undresses in Front of Class

Macon, GA (WMAZ) - A substitute teacher was kicked out of a Macon area school Wednesday morning for partially undressing in front of students.

The teacher undressed in a fourth-grade classroom. Assistant school superintendent Sylvia McGee said the woman disrobed below the waist.

The principal, Dr. Ramon Johnson, says the substitute teacher was non-responsive to direct questions and was removed immediately from the campus.

In a letter sent home to parents, Johnson wrote, during the incident, the school was placed in a code-red lockdown.

Students and teachers were required to go to the nearest room, lock the doors, and cover the windows.

Ok, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to do this, but CODE RED lockdown for someone getting paritally undressed?!?!  WTF?!?

 Ok, if she was unresponsive and started going berserk I could see that, but this.  Some of these school policies are a bit ridiculous, like this one

Get Kids Vaccinated Or Else, Parents Told - washingtonpost.com

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but it’s got to get done,” Prince George’s State’s Attorney Glenn F. Ivey (D) said at a news conference in Upper Marlboro. “I’m willing to move forward with legal action.”

I hope at least some of the parents tell these idiots where to shove it.  This kind of bullying is just ridiculous.  It is not for the state to raise my children for me, and tell me what I have to have done to or for them.  You wait, the next thing they will try to make mandatory is the HPV vaccine.

Standarized Testing - Education - Schools - Test Scores - New York Times

In response to the [high-stakes] testing [now pervasive in the American educational system], kindergartens across the country have become more demanding: if kids must be performing on standardized tests in third grade, then they must be prepping for those tests in second and first grades, and even at the end of kindergarten, or so the thinking goes. The testing also means that states, like students, now get report cards, and they want their children to do well, both because they want them to be educated and because they want them to stack up favorably against their peers.

Is this really how we want our children educated, according what to some bureaucrat in Washington thinks your children should know? Do you really think that our children are getting the education that they need when the schools are simply teaching them to memorize the facts that they will need to know to pass the SOL tests? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my child to only be able to regurgitate whatever someone tells them is fact. I want my children to be able to think for themselves, to be able to examine an issue from all sides and to be able to formulate their own opinions on the matter. In short, I want to teach them how to think, not how to memorize. A computer can spit back facts about anything you store in it, children need to be able to think and evaluate and learn in order to live.

All involved in increasing the age of kindergartners — parents, legislatures and some teachers — say they have the best interests of children in mind. “If I had just one goal with this piece of legislation it would be to not humiliate a child,” Dale Folwell, the Republican North Carolina state representative who sponsored the birthday-cutoff bill, told me. “Our kids are younger when they’re taking the SAT, and they’re applying to the same colleges as the kids from Florida and Georgia.” Fair enough — governors and state legislators have competitive impulses, too. Still, the question remains: Is it better for children to start kindergarten later? And even if it’s better for a given child, is it good for children in general? Time out of school may not be a gift to all kids. For some it may be a burden, a financial stress on their parents and a chance, before they ever reach a classroom, to fall even further behind.

Despite what they all say, their goal is not necessarily in the interest of the children, their interest is in how the school performs on the SOL tests. Some kids may do better going into kindergarten later than others, and that should be something that the parents decide, not decided by an arbitrary cutoff date.

So parents wait an extra year in the hope that when their children enter school their age or maturity will shield them from social and emotional hurt. Elizabeth Levett Fortier, a kindergarten teacher in the George Peabody Elementary School in San Francisco, notices the impact on her incoming students. “I’ve had children come into my classroom, and they’ve never even lost at Candy Land.”

Is this how you want your child to grow up, unable to cope with losing or failure? Children need to learn how to lose gracefully, and that they can’t win or succeed at everything they attempt. We as parents should not be shielding our children from anything that could hurt their feelings, that is doing them a disservice, because they will not know how to deal with it later in life. You see this same kind of thing with parents that go nutso with disinfectants. They buy the Chlorox wipes, the anti-bacterial soaps, they don’t want their children to touch anything dirty. How is a child’s immune system supposed to be able to develop to handle these things when they aren’t exposed to them?

[Jane Andersen] used to encourage parents to send their children to kindergarten as soon as they were eligible, but she is now a strong proponent of older kindergartners, after teaching one child with a birthday just a few days before the cutoff. “She was always a step behind. It wasn’t effort and it wasn’t ability. She worked hard, her mom worked with her and she still was behind.” Andersen followed the girl’s progress through second grade (after that, she moved to a different school) and noticed that she didn’t catch up. Other teachers at Glen Arden Elementary and elsewhere have noticed a similar phenomenon: not always, but too often, the little ones stay behind.

This is yet another symptom of our public schools, everyone in the class is given the same treatment, the same goals, and the same testing to determine if they are reaching those goals.

That the social skills and exploration of one’s immediate world have been squeezed out of kindergarten is less the result of a pedagogical shift than of the accountability movement and the literal-minded reverse-engineering process it has brought to the schools. Curriculum planners no longer ask, What does a 5-year-old need? Instead they ask, If a student is to pass reading and math tests in third grade, what does that student need to be doing in the prior grades?

This is exactly backwards, as the author of the article has stated, the schools are setting their goals by working backward from what the SOL tests expect the students to have learned.

In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, “Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children’s capacities to cope with the increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten.”

This is a function of our having government funded public education.   Do you think that parents would put up with their school failing their children to this degree if they were writing the check for tuition every month instead of getting “free” public education (where the costs are hidden in your state or local taxes)?

City Considers Plan to Let Outsiders Run Schools - New York Times

In what would be the biggest change yet to the way New York City’s school system is administered, officials are considering plans to hire private groups at taxpayer expense to manage scores of public schools.

Finally, more people are starting to realize that government running our schools is a Bad Thing™. Why anyone would think this was a good idea in the first place is beyond me. Why would we think that government can run our schools better than they can run anything else? And given that schools are developing our most important resources, our children, why do we leave that to the government bureacracy?

Randi Weingarten, the teachers’ union president, urged the administration to make its discussions more public. “I have been concerned about the sub rosa debate on whether to privatize the management of the school system for quite a while,” she said. “On an issue that is this transcendent there has to be a real public debate.”

What Ms. Weingarten is mad about is that she’s not getting the opportunity to get teachers union up in arms to feed FUD to the parents about this. This is really not something that the teachers union should have any say in. Given that the fed has taken the responsibility of running our schools from us, how they choose to manage those schools is up to them, not the teachers union. I’m not saying it should be up to them, but this move toward privatizing management of the schools, so that people can actually be held accountable for how their schools do can’t be a bad thing.

“Can you imagine these people picking what they want to do in instruction?” said a veteran education official who asked not to be identified, fearing retribution for not supporting the chancellor’s agenda. “They don’t know what they are doing.”The educator added: “This is a way to crush public education. This is not a way to improve a school system.”

Yes, and that is exactly what is needed, to crush public education. We do not need a public school system, and we got on quite well before there was one. We’ll get along even better after it is gone.

And, just because you knew it had to come, here is the one step back:

[Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.] wants to amend the Constitution to make public schooling a child’s “right”, by way of a student bill of rights that gives citizenship to young people

Now, I am all for the bestowal of citizenship on young people, they are as much a part of our society as anyone else, but public schooling is not a “right” that needs to be given to anyone. The constitution is set up to limit what the government can do, not to give out “rights”. When we start thinking that way, that our rights are given to us by government, not restricted by it, that way lies disaster.