Yesterday in an interview with Oprah Winfrey for her Christmas special, President Obama magnanimously gave himself a grade of a “solid B+” on his first eleven months in office.  Now that’s grading on a curve!  I once had a very good professor who opened the first class with his philosophy of grading.  He said:

“I don’t believe in grading on a curve.  I don’t subscribe to the theory that if everyone learns nothing, you all get A’s”

Amen, brother.  Now if you revisit President Obama’s statement, he must have really, really done badly, because grading his class of one student, he couldn’t even pull that “A”.  Let’s look at his achievements:

• A stimulus plan promised to hold the unemployment rate to 8%, and if not passed the unemployment rate would rise to 9%.  His team must have really screwed up that project because it caused the unemployment rate to rise 1.2% above the “do nothing” scenario, and we are $787 billion poorer to boot.
• Cap and Trade — the Climategate scandal gives credence to the hypothesis that pro cap and trade scientists were cooking the books to manufacture conclusions that supported their political agenda.  Rather than backing away from it as it if were a skunk at a garden party.  President Obama is embracing it and pushing forward.
• Health Care — President Obama is trying to have the federal government take over 1/6 of the U.S. economy, because in doing so they will lower costs and make sure everyone is covered.  Sensible market based ideas such as: tort reform, patient control over how patients money is spent, insurance available across state lines, etc., need not apply.  How likely is this to work? (see bullet #1 above). Because this hasn’t passed yet was one of the only reasons Obama didn’t give himself an “A”.
• Continuing to blame President Bush for his shortcomings sounds a lot like “my dog ate my homework,”
• Agreeing to try the 9/11 suspects in civilian court rather than in a military tribunal.  Although President Obama says they are guilty and will be executed (can you say mistrial?) how many of us are looking forward to a replay of the O.J. Simpson trial with the acquittal included?
• Meanwhile, Black Panther’s who stood outside a Philadelphia polling place brandishing clubs have their case dropped by the Obama administration, even though there was a default judgment against the men for not showing up in court to face the charges. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
• Yes, they’re Fat Cats but their MY Fat Cats:  After blasting bankers for being Fat Cats, why does Obama have so many Goldman Sachs alumni in his administration?  Mark Patterson, former Goldman lobbyist, Treasury Secretary Geithner’s chief of staff; Reuben Jeffrey III, undersecretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs; Neel Kaskari, assistant secretary of the treasury for financial stability, administering the TARP funds; Dianna Farrell, deputy director of National Economic Council.
• In the midst of all this mayhem, he finds time to go pitch Chicago for the 2016 Olympics.
• He is piling so much debt upon our children and grandchildren that they will probably have to work 3/4 of the year, just to pay their taxes.

How Bad is Bad?

What kind of calamity would we have to be in for Obama to give himself a “C” let alone an “F”?  So we know where Obama’s ego is, and it is doing well, thank you very much.  But the American people have their own report card and it shows that support for Obama has been on a downward straight line since his inauguration with his approval rating now in the mid to upper 40s, the lowest level in history for a president at the same point in his tenure.

Such a disconnect between Obama’s opinion of himself and the American people’s opinion is a serious problem.  It drives him to continue to pursue policies that Americans adamantly oppose (e.g., 61% oppose the Senate health care bill).  Most reasonable people would take such feedback and reassess their actions.  But if an employee is blind to his shortcomings, the only thing to do is show them the door.  The sooner, the better, folks because it’s not going to get any better.

If I asked you a simple question, what government organization works well, what would you say?  Let’s take a look at two government organizations and compare their effectiveness and motivation.

The Military

Whether you support our troops on the battlefield or want them to always stay home in their barracks, most Americans will say the military does a pretty good job.  Why? That is, why are they effective, not just why do people think so?  Well, they put a lot of investment in training and technology.  They seem to have solved the problem of integration, being based on merit rather than racial prejudice.  These are all important things, but I don’ t they get to the core of the issue.  The key question is, what happens if they don’t do their job?  They die…they die, the guy beside them dies, their buddies die, and depending on the size of the conflict, their families and country may eventually die.  With that kind of motivation, race is not even secondary.  If the guy next to me has got my back and I have his, I don’t care what color he or she is.  We do it right, we live;  we don’t, we die.

The K-12 Teacher

K-12 education comes under fire in this country, and rightly so, for failing to produce an educated workforce.  In New York, for example we spend over $14,000 per student, per year on education, far above the national average of around $9,000.  Are students in New York 50% smarter than the country in general?  Hardly.  Is the nation as a whole turning out well educated students?  Sadly, no.

Our K-12 public schools are a government run monopoly.  So what happens to a K-12 teacher if they fail to do their job?  If they have been in the job long enough to get tenure, nothing.  They will get a raise like everyone else.  So what motivates them to turn out outstanding students?  I’ll wait.

Let me be clear that I don’t want to lump all teachers together.  They are many teachers who, by having what  I suppose is a strong moral streak,  do a great job because they want to teach.  Okay, so let’s look at the teaching profession where there is a group that does their best because they get satisfaction from doing a good job.  Now, some studies come out that say the way to improve results is smaller classroom size.  The teachers’ unions get behind it and eventually push it through.  So what does that mean?  If you cut the size of the class in half, you double the number of classes.  If you double the number of classes, you have to double the number of teachers and thus have to go deeper into the labor pool to find them.  Before you took this step, we can probably assume that all the self-motivated teachers were already on the job.  So the additional teachers are motivated by what?

Co -conspirators

That brings us back to the teachers’ unions.  When government’s come under pressure to cut educational expenses, the airwaves are soon flooded with the heart wrenching commercials pleading to restore the funding “for the children’s sake.”  What you don’t hear is the trailer that says, “This commercial paid for by the PTA,” or “This commercial paid for by the Association of Concerned Parents.”  No, what you typically hear is, “This commercial paid for by the X Teacher’s union, Joe Blow, President.”

Who do the unions really represent…really? The students? or the teachers?  They want the funds restored so that their membership is not hurt and their dues are not curtailed.  If their true concern was for the students, why not support school vouchers and charter schools?  They fight the former with a vengeance and the latter, if it is not union organized.

Let’s Not Pick on K-12 Education

Let’s look at other government areas.  Government is the only area where union membership is growing.  How many people relish going to their Department of Motor Vehicles?  How efficient is the Post Office?  Amtrak?  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a bonus compensation plan, which is a step in the right direction unless it leads to cooking the books and making extremely risky loans that lead to the near collapse of our economy.  How can we get this under control?

Controlling the Uncontrollable

Our government is trying to install a massive health care program that will cost a trillion dollars.  At the same time, tens of billions of dollars are stolen from Medicare every year and they can’t stop it.  Early this year, the Obama Administration passed a $787 billion stimulus package, spent $18 million to build a website to track it, and put Joe Biden in the role of watch dog.  How is that working out?  A recent report from ABC News, of all places, found that credit for creating jobs was given on the web site to Congressional Districts that do not exist.  A $1,000 grant was purported to have created 50 jobs.  The New York Times investigated and found that the $1,000 went to purchase a lawn mower.  It took from the time of the founding of the Republic until about the mid 1990s to accumulate $6 trillion in debt.  It has doubled since then, and it is projected to go from $12 trillion to $14 trillion by next year!

It cannot be controlled.  It is impossible to control.  The only solution is to cut the federal government down to size.  Take out the Constitution and read what the true functions of government are supposed to be.  The military, absolutely;  the Post Office, yes it’s in there; coin money; establish patents and copyrights; establish the courts; control the District of Columbia; regulate interstate commerce; make treaties; give the State of the Union address.  That pretty much sums it up and everything else should be left to the states and local government or the people.

We should jettison all the rest and cut this government down to size and get out of debt.  Department of Labor–gone;  Department of Health and Human Services–gone; Department ment of Housing and Urban Development–gone; Department of Transportation–gone; Department of Energy–gone; Depatrment of Education–gone; Department of Veterans Affairs–gone, rolled into the Department of Defense;  Department of Homeland Security–gone, rolled into the Department of Defense; Department of the Interior–gone; Department of Agriculture–gone.

The amount of money saved would be enormous.  Selling all the real estate and buildings would bring in more money.  We could then cut taxes to jump start the economy and run a surplus to cut the debt.  The next step would be to make it illegal for unions to organize government workers without a referendum approved by all the voters.  Side benefits would be less campaign money because there would be less government to influence.  Government would be more accountable to the people because it would be closer to the people, that is, at the state level or local level.  We can do this proactively, or wait until the government is bankrupt and we have to sell off the parts to the Chinese.

But while state legislatures for decades have passed laws — and provided millions of dollars — to cap the size of classes, some academic researchers and education leaders say that small reductions in the number of students in a room often have little effect on their performance.  — New York Times, Feb. 22, 2009

Well shut my mouth!  School taxes have been growing at an extraordinary rate and at the same time a high school graduate comes in for a job interview who cannot even put together a comprehensible sentence.  We created a federal Department of Education that since it’s inception has spent over $1.3 trillion dollars, with improvements in education that are marginal at best.

What happened?

This has not been an effort to improve education.  If you cut the size of the class in half, you have to double the number of teachers.  This has been a jobs program for the teachers’ union and the Democrats have wholly supported it because the teacher’s unions are in the Democratic camp.  Once again we have our government conspiring to empower themselves at the expense of the American people.

When I went to K-12 school, my classroom was typically 28-33 students.  My friends who went to Catholic school had some classes that numbered 50 students in a class.  I learned, they learned.  You would think that cutting class sizes in half would double academic performance or better.  If not, why on earth would you do it?  Why would you spend twice as much on teachers, since compensation is typically 80% of a school’s budget, if you were only going to get a 10% improvement in performance?  If that is the extent of the return, you would probably look elsewhere such as in techniques or methods.

The Collapse of Discipline and the Supremacy of Self Esteem

I submit the reason for the lack of educational performance is lack of discipline.  If a teacher can’t control their classroom, no one learns.  The marginal improvement in performance with reduced class size is not because they are a significantly better learning environment, but because you have reduced the teacher’s span of control.  Why can a class of 50 students in Catholic School still learn?  Because when the nun snapped her finger, everyone came to attention.  Everyone wore uniforms.  Everyone paid tuition.  If you got out of line, the nuns would put you back in line, pronto.  If the nuns weren’t able to put you back in line, either your parents would or you would get bounced out of school. With a 50% drop out rate in the City of New York, John Cardinal O’Connor asked the mayor of New York to give him the bottom 10% of the students in the New York City school system and he would educate them.  The mayor declined.

The other half of the problem is the focus on making sure everyone always feels good about themselves.  When my daughter was three years old she got a trophy for playing soccer, not for outstanding performance, but just for playing.  The trophy was almost as tall as she was.  I asked, “What do they get if they actually achieve something?  A car?”.  I played Little League baseball because I loved baseball.  When I got a paper certificate it was for making the All Star team or the World Series.

Today, in a relatively affluent school district I see about a dozen yellow jacketed security guards when I go to my children’s school.  We never had security guards at our school and I grew up in a less affluent district.  “Well, you can never tell, you know, with Columbine and everything.”  People talk about Columbine and say it’s because of those kids had access to guns.  Well kids have had access to guns since the Mayflower.  Why did it take until 1999 for Columbine to occur?  I believe it is because we are raising a generation of kids with eggshell egos.  If you tap them they crack.  That’s probably what happened to Klebold and Harris.  They didn’t know how to take a hit to the ego and bounce back.  They probably were never told, “Sorry, kid, you want the trophy you actually have to achieve something.”  Life’s little failures build character.  As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”  But if mommy and daddy are always jumping in to make sure little Johnny never has a bad day, look out.

Low Cost Way to Improve Education

1. Ditch the smaller class sizes.  The marginal improvement is not worth the cost.  Hire fewer teachers and lower school taxes.
2. Re-institute discipline in classes.  Teachers shouldn’t be afraid of students.  Have the student’s wear uniforms, if the half-naked girls, and the boys walking with their pants around their knees are a distraction.
3. Stop pampering the students.  To get a prize you actually have to achieve something.  That way you won’t have a mental breakdown the first time someone says no to you.
4. You are not entitled to a “B” grade for showing up.  The teachers don’t give out grades, the student earn them.
5. Close the Department of Education and put $1.3 trillion back into the economy in the form of lower taxes

We tried it their way for almost thirty years.  Why not give this approach a try for 30 years.  Oh, wait, we did try this for 360 years and it worked before we lurched off toward focusing on keeping Democrats in power rather than educating our children.

An interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times Nicholas Kristof nicely sums up what many conservatives have known all along that leaving aside that conservatives want to push grandma in her wheelchair down the stairs, keep children from getting a good education, and are generally racists to boot, when it comes to being charitable, conservatives are far more generous that those compassionate caring liberals.

Many studies have been done on the subject and a number of them by liberals, who started out with the objective of proving how cold and uncaring conservatives are, only to find the opposite is true.  Liberals are generous as long as it’s not with their own money.  They insist on using the overwhelming power of the state to steal your money (increasing taxes) and give it to special interest groups in return for votes and by extension, power.  Do I seem too cynical?

Let’s take education.  The Department of Education was started in 1980 at the end of the Carter Administration.  From 1980 to 2008 Congress appropriated $1.06 trillion dollars to the Department of Education.  What have we gotten for our “investment” as liberals like to call expenditures?  The statistics are hard to come by but I found a comparison of math scores of fourth and eight graders between 1995 and 2007, about half the time the Department of Education has been in operation.  In that period test scores improved about 2% in fourth grade and 4% in eight grade.  If someone came to you in 1980 and said I’ve got a great deal for you, if you give me a trillion dollars, I’ll improve test scores 2-4% over twelve years, would you buy it?  Imagine where we would be today, if we kept that trillion dollars in the hands of taxpayers to use as they saw fit?

If all that money didn’t improve test scores, what did it do?  What about employment?  Again, it was a challenge finding a comparable period, but I did come up with information for the period 1999 to 2007.  From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the class Education, Training and Library occupations grew 50.8%.  The mantra that we have been hearing, “for the children” mostly trumpeted by the teacher’s unions has been for smaller class sizes.  That sounds good but what does it really mean?  If you have smaller class sizes, you have to have more teachers.  If you have more teachers you have more teacher’s union members. If you have more teacher’s union members you have more contributions to the Democratic party, more votes for Democrats and in turn more education spending to continue the cycle.  The students are marginally better educated, the taxpayers get hosed, and on the local level property taxes go through the roof.

How about “Buck-A-Day” Biden?  I call him that because that is the average amount that this devout Catholic has given to charity over the past ten years.  But pay more in taxes?  He says that’s your patriotic duty!  The government needs more money.  Times are tough.

The problem I have with many government programs is that once passed into laws, rules have to be written on how to execute them and the rules have to be followed explicitly or the lawsuits follow.  That means that there will be cases of deserving people, who for one of the rules does not qualify.  That also means that there will be cases of undeserving people, who because of the rules qualify for benefits even though they don’t need them.

If liberals followed Mr. Kristof’s lead, in his attempt to shame them into giving more, maybe we could have government take less.  That would allow us all to give more, and do it a lot more effectively.  Or how about this for a novel approach.  Before we implement any government social program, the first 10% of funding has to be raised privately, through charitable donations.  If the liberals, who largely favor these kinds of programs can raise the cash, perhaps the program is worthy.  If not, perhaps we could be spared another Department of Education bleeding $1 trillion from the economy when most school decisions are made locally anyway.