ON VALUES,

For our liberal  friends. Since so many of you seem to be interested in my blog I'd like to say something just to you. As you must know by now I am an ardent advocate for kids in public school. I'm involved because I love Helena and I want so much to love our schools. I want our schools to have excellent ratings and be the best for all students and parents. Teaching is a good government job but it's not going to last if you people continue down this road of forcing values into school that only you agree on.

In Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed a bill for 7,500 publicly financed scholarships, this number rises to 15,000 next year and has an unlimited cap after that. In Wisconsin Scott Walker has broken the union and even in Massachusetts bargaining rights have been taken away. In Washington state, on the street where my niece lives, there isn't one single family that will put their children in public school. In our own district here in Helena, as of last year's data ,we're losing 4 million dollars in ANB funding because of kids that have been taken out of our public schools. I'll keep you updated.

Why not just stop it while we still have public schools in Montana? You have the right to organize, recruit, have clubs and do anything you want to promote your values but , in America, you don't have the right to force those values on other peoples children in school. Our country is about evenly divided conservative versus liberal and is likely to stay that way for a long time. Even though I was raised in a very conservative time many of my classmates became hippies in the 60's. Your attempts to create a new society will not work. Societies don't work that way, there's too many variables. I was in Romania for two weeks in 1975. Children went to school with numbers on their sweaters and the parents had nothing to say about what they were taught. Eventually they machine gunned their dictator in the gutter. I'm not saying anything that violent would ever happen here but I am saying that your attempts to control values will not work.

America is a free country thank goodness and so it will remain. Values are taught at home in this country. What you really are accomplishing is destroying our public schools, from test scores to public confidence.