Education Spending

We all know the key to a student successfully graduating from high school is a 2-parent home. But given the current state of affairs, that's going to be a tough one to accomplish.

As much as Democrats, many teachers, & definitely teachers' unions may dislike President Bush for No Child Left Behind, they can't justly criticize him for underfunding education. According to the numbers I've seen, under the Bush administration, education spending has increased by around 40%. That's significant.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), Doug Ross has done a little cost benefit/regression on spending vs. standardized test scores and found that--surprise, surprise--there is no correlation.

Don't get me wrong. I have many teacher-friends. I appreciate good teachers. But I despise teachers' unions and their opposition to choice in education and other initiatives that, though unfriendly to the bad teachers, would actually benefit good teachers and most assuredly, students.

You see, I've got this crazy idea in my head that education ought to be about the students and not guaranteeing tenure to people who have no business teaching anyone or anything.

Increased choice in education--vouchers, corporate scholarships, charter schools, etc.--isn't about helping the middle class students from 2-parent homes. It's about helping the poorer students whose dad isn't in the picture and whose mom is working 2 jobs just to keep the family off the street.

Education reform, left to the unions, will be about more money and less accountability. This set-up benefits neither the students nor the good teachers--it serves only to maintain the power and control of unions and the jobs of bad teachers.


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Tracking Obama's Flips & Flops

While getting our daily One Cosmos fix yesterday (something we hope you all do too), we came across a link to a fantastic post by Doug Ross, chronicling the many positions of one Barack Obama, Guitar Hero*.

Provided for you here are the topics on which he has shifted--in many instances mightily--and a link to Doug's post.

• The Surge
• Gay Marriage
• FISA
• NAFTA
• Campaign Finance
• DC Handgun Ban
• School Vouchers
• Guantanamo bay
• Illegal Immigration
• Marijuana
• Abortion
• Iraq
• Death Penalty
• Faith-Based Initiatives
• The Flag Lapel Pin
• Reverend Jeremiah Wright
• Welfare Reform
• The Cuba Embargo
• Single-Payer Healthcare
• Special Interest Contributions
• Divided Jerusalem
• Meeting With Iran's Leaders w/o Precondition
• Palestinian Election
• The Threat Posed By Iran
• Patriot Act
• Gays In The Military
• Coal
• Wiretapping
  

Good hud that's a lot of different positions on a lot of different topics.

Be sure and click through to Doug's post to see the cited evidence of all of Obama's many shifting positions. This is evidence of what we wrote Monday, when we called attention to One Cosmos' and Rush's analysis of Obama--to wit, the difficulty leftist-liberals have in identifying and sticking to core principles.

When someone is at their core multiplicitous (new word) and relativist, they cannot, as One Cosmos pointed out, return to first principles a la Ronald Reagan.

Good thing the MSM has been keeping track of all these things or Obama would come off as some sort of Rock Star or something.


*Over-the-top performance, no real skill or experience.


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