WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

I was at the debate for Superintendent of PUBLIC INSTRUCTION last night. Our current Superintendent, Democrat Denise Juneau,and her challenger Republican Sandy Welch, talked about school funding as if the money belonged to the state or the state bureaucracy, or money to be coveted and controlled and spent by the "alphabet soup"- all the school funding lobbyists, MTSBA (Montana school boards association), MASBA (Montana Association of State Business Associates),MREA (Montana Rural Educators Association),MEAFT ( Montana Education Association and Federation of Teachers)- I'm sure I missed someone- all these organizations think school funding belongs to THEM!!What happened to the kids this money is for? This money is not for jobs- it's for INSTRUCTION!! It does not belong to the state or any other organization, it belongs to the PUBLIC for the INSTRUCTION OF THEIR STUDENTS!! OPI is NOT the office of public schools Denise!! OPI is the office of public INSTRUCTION!!

Even our Republican candidate said that vouchers would be a "Free for all"- seriously? People controlling their own money for their own students is a "Free for all"? Maybe the operative word here is FREE- FREE from bureaucrats, FREE from unions and associations, FREE from power players. FREE as in FREEDOM. Think of the money that would be saved and the waste that would not happen. Money direct to schools of the parents CHOICE. Competition and accountability that would be driven by parent choice without going through the hands of thousands of programs and red tape from Washington.Can you explain to me why FREEDOM is a bad idea?

The polite way of saying someone lied is to say they were mendacious- well then, our Montana Superintendent of Public INSTRUCTION (not public schools!!),Denise Juneau, is being mendacious when she slanders all charter schools saying they are all failures. She didn't do the research and she didn't care- her idea of school choice is public school Montessori and the public school Project for Alternative Learning where they spend their days playing Mahjong!! Even one of her "alphabet soup" organizations CSSC (Council of State School Chiefs)admits that the KIPP Academies- charter schools across the nation- are the highest academic achieving schools out there. This is according to Christopher Lohse from that organization speaking to the HEF (Helena Education Foundation).Thank goodness for the internet- just being "mendacious" doesn't cut it anymore Denise- we are paying attention!!

The answer to my question in the title of this blog is that the money belongs to YOU and if you have children in school- the children belong to YOU also.YOU need to tell the EXPERTS (expert at spending your money and raking a little- or more likely- a lot off for themselves) that this public money is YOUR money and it is for YOUR children's education and YOU will decide what education YOU think is best for YOUR child. Thanks for your help guys but this game is over- we'll take our money and you can go home and do whatever it is you do when you're not chasing money.

THE SOCIALIST ADDICTION

We all know what a gambling addiction is. The person just keeps playing thinking that THIS TIME they will be a winner!! I've been involved in education my whole life and what I have seen from the socialist left takeover of our schools is TOTAL FAILURE, but they won't give up. The Socialists have been trying to improve our schools with their socialist vision long before they got their Federal Department of Education in 1979. Our schools which were improving steadily in the fifties and sixties HAVE SHOWN NO IMPROVEMENT IN ACADEMIC SCORES SINCE THE SEVENTIES.Total failure.You mean Head Start doesn't work? EXACTLY. You mean we've spent billions of dollars from the federal government and it didn't improve our schools?!! EXACTLY.Now the people who can't run schools want to run lives.The school lunch program was going to improve schools. The Head Start program was going to improve schools. Goals 2000 was going to improve schools. Full day kindergarten and after school programs was going to improve schools. All of this has been a total failure and now they have a new idea with even more socialism!

The new idea is COMMUNITY CENTERS. These are already operating in places like South Park, Pennsylvania. Schools are kept open from 3:30 to 5:30, or later, students receive help with their homework and "dinner is provided". Why go home? Just bring in a cot and they're good for tomorrow.The South Park school has received an award as a "National Champion"! Socialists are so good at giving awards to themselves!Whatever happened to the idea that families that eat dinner together keep kids off drugs, as the old ads used to say?

The socialists that have destroyed our culture and our schools, now want to double down. They can't run a school but now they want to run everyone's family. They want to add meals and mental health care to their bag of failures. The country is broke but these people think they can continue on like this. Just get "entitlement" spending under control and all will be solved! NO, it's not just entitlement spending. It's socialists that want to run families.If you eliminated the whole department of education no one would miss it except the people that work there- that would save us billions! Public schools might have a chance to succeed if our socialist friends and their FEDERAL BENEFACTORS would be given their pink slip.

The socialists see the federal cuts coming so they are trying to find a place to hide in your local school budgets.BE AWARE AND DON'T LET THEM IN. Local communities can not afford to be the family for everyone (even if that possibly could work) any more than the Federal Government can afford this largesse. The only way to stop the gambling addiction is to remove the person from the machine and take the money away. Remove these addicted socialists from our schools and let parents, families, and educators begin the long recovery process of restoring our schools to effectiveness that we had before these addicted people took over.

THE CASINO

"Government is the great fiction,through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."- Frederic Bastiat

What drives your vote? Or put another way- how do you choose whom to vote for?You may not believe this if you are young- but we used to vote for the person we thought would be the best leader for our country. It wasn't about our economic interests. It wasn't about who would bring home the bacon for our district or if we could keep the grants rolling in. The above quote was from a Frenchman who lived in the 1800's.His France had become a socialist cesspool, and now, America has joined.Is this what you want our country to be? We are on the path to ruin.When the money is gone- and we are just about there- what will be left is the control. You can think about "social justice" as the "good of all" that the soviets set up in the soviet block countries. It doesn't end pretty.When we walk into a casino we are hoping someone else will lose and we will WIN- is the government a basket of goodies to be handed out, and are we all just hoping to "get ours"? Every time I go to a city council meeting the people in line pleading for their money make my stomach turn.Is this what government is about-handing out money?!!! Our leftist friends have turned our once great nation that was handed down to us from our forefathers into a casino.

In order to vote in your nations best interests you would need to know what those were, and you would need to love what those were. Is Common Core going to teach our children to love their country? Will they be taught why this country is great and worth saving? Worth fighting for? Will they give a rip about anything besides the lies from the environmental movement (which will be taught to them as truth), the civil rights movement, and "social justice" i.e. "the good of all". Will the children even have the knowledge and understandings to know they are being used and lied to?

Common Core is supposedly going to teach "deeper meaning" and "analytic thinking skills". Here's one of the MANY problems with that- these children are being taught they can perform "deeply analytic cognitive thinking skills" without reading the whole text and without knowledge! As I've discussed on this blog before, and as every teacher who will admit it knows ( as well as anyone with common sense) young children are not in a cognitive place ( think brain maturity) to do higher level deeply analytic cognitive thinking.Some students in high school can ask some good questions- even small children can ask a good question- but they are not in a place to do higher level deeply analytic critical thinking- especially about things they have not read or studied in depth.These students are being set up to think they have deep understandings that they do not have. They are being set up to be propagandized and used.Foundational learning comes first, then maturity, then research and in depth reading, then analytic thinking.What will the future of America be with individuals who don't know anything and have no loyalties to our country as it was founded, but think they are cognitive deep thinking analytic thinkers?

Perhaps these individuals, who are self centered and over indulged,will grow up thinking they know everything and buying into every new propaganda item out there, while having no foundational principles, and voting as if they were in a casino- what's in it for me?

The new Common Core standards have no scope and sequence ( the plan we supposedly didn't have when the Federal Government took over our schools). So, as one great science teacher from our school district put it, the students will learn a little of this and a little of that ( he told me that, and then hung up and retired in disgust.)High school students will learn 70% non-fictional material in English class. That leaves out learning fictional literature in an historical sequence.What will this non-fictional material be? Martin Luther's LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL, without the historical facts and framework to make sense of it,Lincoln's THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, without having studied the civil war,slavery,the new republican party and all the deep historical background to this address,and "perhaps" one of the Federalist Papers- again without having the rigorous historical background and understanding of our founding fathers to know what this is about.Since they are not taught in any historical sequence there will be no foundation or connection that makes any sense.

Young children will be taught grammar without a scope and sequence. Scope and sequence are important because foundational knowledge builds on itself, and each new step allows the student to connect with what he learned before. For example, a student should first learn what a good sentence is before learning how to construct and punctuate a compound sentence.A student should know how to write a sentence before writing a paragraph and so on.Common Core learning is just like the casino, roll the dice and see what you get. No connection, no purpose, no meaning,no organization, just a little of this and a little of that. Make up your values as you go along.

I remember when Princess Di hit the news in the early eighties. I had small children and wasn't involved much but she sure seemed like an airhead to me. I recognized the European model of giggling girls that weren't expected to do much but get married. Not all Europeans are like that, but they obviously had a system that sent some on to higher learning and others to languish in the world of giggles and People Magazine.America was never like that. Everyone was educated fully and was expected to have opinions and to make sense with them.You didn't have to go to college- you were taught American History in high school. I'm afraid that in this new Common Core world with Career Pathways, the days of Americans really knowing things, is going away, and the voting world of the CASINO- WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME? will be our new future.Common Core is the European- Chinese model- and just think what the government of China is.

GOVERNMENT CORPORATE GREED

What do corporations do? They make money. Our brethren on the left hate corporations because they MAKE TOO MUCH MONEY- THEY SHOULD SHARE IT. What do non-profit corporations do? They make money. How do corporations make money? They grow their business. How do non-profit corporations make their money? They grow their business. There are a few differences though. For profit companies have to invest their own money- non-profit corporations spend your money. For profit corporations PAY TAXES. Non-profit corporations DO NOT PAY TAXES.


Perhaps there is someone reading this that is naive enough to think that non-profit corporations do not want to grow their business. I remember when habitat for humanity was a little volunteer organization to help elderly people repair their homes,now they compete unfairly with the construction industry so much in California that there have been articles about the corruption. I remember when Head Start was an early childhood program for the poor. Now your income can be four hundred percent over poverty- who knows how much that is- but it's a lot since poverty is over twenty thousand a year. Head Start in Helena has grown from one small school to serving 336 children in Helena, and they want to serve more. Their mission is BIRTH to eight years old!! They have moved into our public schools and they are not paying rent. That means that the tax payers are footing the bill, probably without their knowledge, and without the rule of law. Monies legislated for K-12 education, monies from families property taxes and state income taxes, are now going to the non-profit corporation Head Start.Some non-profit corporations are now trying to find a home in our school district budgets so they don't have to depend on grants. It will be so convenient just to be permanently into the school district budget and get an income stream from the unwary tax payers.



Here's the kicker," BUT NON-PROFITS HELP PEOPLE!!" Gee- do drug companies help people- maybe save lives and relieve pain? Do oil companies allow you to drive your car- maybe opened the world to people to travel and get where they need to go? Does the construction industry build homes that keep us warm in the winter and give us a place to sleep and raise our families? I could go on all day about this, but you get the idea- for profit companies give us jobs, built the nation, and have brought us every modern convenience and life saving mechanism out there. Has government contributed to research? Sure, but they didn't build anything. The point is, non-profit corporations may help people ,but so do for profit corporations that pay taxes.


"But non-profit corporations don't make a profit!" Sure they do- it's called SALARY AND BENEFITS!! Many non-profit CEO's make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Their lobbyists in washington line up at the trough to keep this money pot going.Though not all non-profits are bad, and many do helpful things, the whole system has become corrupted to the point that, in many cases, they are doing more harm than good.


How are they doing harm? Where shall I start? How about truth in advertising? Do you really think 350,000 kids in Chicago were going to starve because the teachers went on strike and the schools were closed? It was on the news- they HAD to serve breakfast and lunch at the schools even though there was NO SCHOOL because otherwise the children would STARVE!! This is nonsense- not true. There is WELFARE, there is FOOD STAMPS, there is FOOD SHARE. Kids aren't starving, but the non-profit food service corporation was going to continue to make money even if the teachers were on strike.Food service in school is another non-profit corporation that started with just lunch for the poor and now serves kids of all incomes and serves breakfast,lunch, snacks, and in some cases dinner! They've started summer programs now too.For profit companies advertise- and they may fudge the truth a bit- but they do not become politically corrupt incestuous lies that destroy the public dialogue,culture and character.


How about the cost? Our Helena Superintendent told me that though he really didn't know exactly what one of the non-profit corporations in our schools did entirely- Youth Connections- they were"passionate about meeting the needs of children". I informed him that we all have needs. Yes, taxpayers that are old and living on a fixed income and want to stay in their homes have needs. Young families trying to pay their bills and having to deal with a mortgage that goes up all the time have needs. Maybe families can't meet the needs of their own children because of the exorbitant multiple taxes they have to pay. What about their needs? Do their needs count? What about the countries debt and national security? Can a nation SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT DEFEND ITSELF IF IT WAS ATTACKED? WHAT HAPPENS IF CHINA WON'T LEND US ANY MORE MONEY? Liberals think that conservatives have their heads in the sand and don't care about people's problems, I think the liberals have THEIR heads in the sand and don't care about the nation- which is the future for all of us and perhaps the world.


For profit businesses continually come up with needs to fill- that new product or service that will sell. If they are right, their investment and risk pays off, if not, they go out of business and lose money. In the non-profit world they make up needs and propagandize the public to build their own "wedge product". It's rather easy- Who's against helping "mentally ill" children? Who's against helping children with "autism". Who doesn't want to feed the poor? And so on it goes.I know the new non-profit that will push it's way into our schools very shortly here - they start with advertising - did you know we have a suicide problem?Yes- the world is full of problems and these non-profits encourage more problems for their own self interest. THAT'S THE TRUTH.And they get to stay in business because they NEVER SOLVE A PROBLEM!


A once proud nation that loved itself and believed in itself has become humbled and afraid. A nation that had a big heart succumbed to the rhetoric of the left until they didn't even believe in their own rugged individualism any more- that they could take care of themselves and their families. Their schools have been taken over by non-profits that are now more important than the TEACHERS!!When I taught teachers wanting to teach took a back seat to non-profit programs of all stripes. The teacher who was once the Queen or King of the classroom has been humbled to all the programs and education has suffered as that spirit and pride has died.


Something much worse even than this has happened though. Our freedom has slipped away. Washington runs everything now, schools, cities,counties, states. families, individuals.People are bowed to the Federal Government whomever they are and where ever they are. The only thing that will change this is to discontinue the federal grants, let people and families once again solve some of their own problems,let the employees of the non-profit corporations find real work in the private sector, and let this nation begin the long journey of starting to balance the federal budget, begin to pay back all this debt to China,and begin to be a proud and strong nation once again.