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by Free Market Duck

  Idaho Pub Ed System Run by Village Idiots?...
State Board Asks Feds to Restart Failure Clock for “No Child Left Behind” Program
(May 30, 2008)

Wow, it seems like everything in Idaho government is rigged.  Ada County Court House financing and development was unconstitutionally rigged.  The failed $136 million University Place fiasco was rigged.  Ex Gov Kempthorne’s choice of Water Center clients was “weighted,” ha-ha, not “rigged,” he said.  Voting to create an unnecessary Treasure Valley Community College was rigged with mail-in ballots.  And now, after years of teaching and testing, and hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on faulty No Child Left Behind education standards, the IEA, Pub Ed Administrators, and the State Board of Education want the Feds to scrap the rules and start the Failure Clock all over.  Why?  Because a good portion of Idaho’s Pub Ed schools have failed the NCLB system and are about to be sanctioned – i.e., lose millions of fed dollars.

 Hey, I know.  Dear, FIFA, World Federation of Soccer, let’s change the rules and re-play all the games in the 2006 Munich World Cup of Soccer, OK?  After all, the U.S. lost all their games and the regulations looked “faulty,” so let’s do it all over again.

Boise, ID – Shut up girlfriends, hold onto your pantyhose and pour yourself another hot cup of Rocket Java.  If it was up to the Idaho State Board of Education and the Idaho Education Association (IEA), last year’s Super Bowl should be replayed.  Sorry Manning.  And so should the 2006 World Cup of Soccer.  What about last weekend’s U-14 girls’ soccer tournaments at Simplot Fields?  After all, if you lose, all you gotta do is complain that the rules you volunteered to play under were “faulty” or “sub-standard” or whine-whine-it’s-just-not-fair and, hesto presto, you get to scream, “Overs, I called it first.”  What, are we in the Third Grade?

   Ya-yess, girl friends, even if you did – as the Idaho Pub Ed system did – receive hundreds of millions of federal dollars to play, “Let’s Make A Deal,” or better known as, “Leave No Child Behind,” and lose, you get to yell, “Hey, you can’t hold us accountable for the crappy rules we helped to create, so let’s start over and, by the way, continue to send us tons of federal money while you’re at it, yuck, yuck.”  Maybe it’s the water in Idaho, I don’t know.

   If there is any doubt in anybody’s mind that the true objective of the Public Education workers in America is to secure Guaranteed Full Employment with Wonderful Benefits, this latest travesty for an Idaho LNCB Re-Start – to restart the Failure Clock back to square one – should be the nail in the philosophical coffin that convinces even the stupidest of all the Village Idiots in both political parties who have been throwing billions of dollars at our Nationalized Public Education Fiasco.

   Last week, the Washington state Education Association (WEA) turned down millions of free dollars from Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Michael Dell (Dell Computer) for bonuses to WA Science and Math teachers whose students excelled on test scores.  Why?  The free market money conflicted with the WEA union teacher payment methodologies.  Tough luck for the teachers and the kids.

   Last month, a private law university announced it would build a private law school in Boise, Idaho.  Amazingly, the next day the University of Idaho jumped into the headlines and announced that it, too, suddenly needed to EXTEND its U of Idaho Law School to Boise from Moscow, Idaho, so the U of Idaho could pump out more Idaho lawyers.  What a coinkydink!  The free market comes along and the Pub Ed bureaucrats in Idaho jump in to squash it with more taxpayer money.

   While all the promoters of Public Education continually claim that the raison d’etre for Pub Ed is that the free market would never create private educational opportunities if left to itself, when opportunities for free market education do pop up, the Pub Ed bureaucrats do everything possible to shoot them down.

   Not only do the Pub Ed bureaucrats continually try to shoot down free market education, when Idaho's Pub Ed failed miserably, they petitioned the federal government to re-start the Failure Clock with a ludicrous excuse.

   The main reason for Idaho’s petition for a re-start of its Failure Clock:  we were running on faulty standards for the LNCB Act and thus cannot be accurately judged.  So, the Idaho bozos reason, we should get to wipe our slate clean and start all over again.  Thanks for the millions in fed money.

   But wait a minute.

   If the Idaho Pub Ed standards for No Child Left Behind were so faulty, why did the IEA and the State Board of Education continue to accept federal funding for what they now claim they knew were poorly written educational standards which were leading to bad test results?  NCLB is voluntary.  States do not have to participate.  If the standards were known to be bad, why continue implementing them and screwing up our children’s brains?

   There is no excuse.  Idaho Pub Ed wrote lousy standards, knowingly implemented them to collect federal tax money from the Leave No Child Left Behind Act and then used their predictably lousy educational results as an excuse to start the same crap all over again.  Idaho Pub Ed got paid to shoot itself in the foot and then shouted, Ouch, we shot ourselves in the foot, give us more bullets and money so we can shoot ourselves in the foot again.  By the way, thanks for the previous millions in fed tax money.  Waste, fraud, and abuse.

   The obvious truth is that as long as the Idaho Pub Ed establishment was receiving federal tax dollars for sub-standard programs, they didn’t care enough about the children to stop implementing those sub-standard programs.  And if somebody now wants to claim that they didn’t know the programs were sub-standard, then we have to ask the question:  so why are the Idaho Pub Ed officials writing the standards if they don’t know what they’re doing?  Either way, the Pub Ed officials in Idaho don’t have a leg to stand on in petitioning the Feds to re-start Idaho’s Failure Clock.  You can’t have it both ways.  You can’t claim you knew the standards were bad, and at the same time, claim you didn’t know.

   It’s time for the Idaho Pub Ed Establishment to take responsibility for its own failure and stop whining that it’s somebody else’s fault.

   So, let’s all stop pretending that the objective of America’s Public Education system is to teach children when we all know the truth, which is, the function of the Public Education Monopoly is to ensure Guaranteed Full Employment for a group of overpaid government bureaucrats who want to use the law to weed out all free market competition in the education environment.  They are no different than the Steel Workers in the 1960s or the United Auto Workers who have since bankrupted GM and Ford and eventually caused American car manufacturers to lose out to non-unionized Japanese car makers.

   In short, the kids lose out since they are simply pawns in the Public Education Union game.  And the Pub Ed Union game -- now officially affiliated with the AFL-CIO -- is not to teach children but to go get those federal tax dollars from the NCLB so they can finance their favorite socialist political party, the Democrats, who keep the federal tax dollars flowing for our nationalized Pub Ed monopoly.

   Pub Ed teachers and administrators’ paychecks from Uncle Sam – ah, yes, those hyper-inflated, deficit federal dollars for the Public Education Bureaucrats of America -- trump our children’s education every time.  And in good ol’ Idaho, where Pub Ed consumes 65% or $2 billion of Idaho’s $3 billion annual budget, it is becoming very obvious that the admittedly failed system is rigged, or else it’s being run by the Village Idiots in Idaho's Public Education Monopoly or Idaho's Parliament of Whores, or both. – FM Duck

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