The Return Of Common Sense

To Florida schools.  From Tallahassee.com, Editorial: It makes sense
Law will force another look at zero-tolerance

Amid the flurry of bills Gov. Crist has signed into law in recent weeks, one got the governor’s John Hancock with little fanfare. It should have been publicly heralded as the return of common sense.

In fact, SB 1540, which requires school boards to revisit their zero-tolerance policies, was lauded by the governor as just that. With support from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice and law-enforcement agencies throughout the state, the measure is touted as a means of reducing the number of juveniles who are needlessly thrust into the system because of minor infractions — most commonly, petty disobedience.

Consider cases from several headlines: In March, a Lakeland boy was suspended from school for intentionally passing gas on a school bus. In Hernando County, an 11-year-old girl was suspended for bringing a plastic butter knife to school. A student in Brandon was suspended because a calculator he brought to school was equipped with a “knife-like object.”

In too many cases, it had become clear that the state-sanctioned zero-tolerance policy was being abused by school districts to dump children into the juvenile-justice system rather than finding acceptable ways to deal with minor cases of acting out or acting up.

Much more at the link.

H/T Overlawyered

School Choice In Indiana

Governor Daniels wants a tax credit for charitable donations that fund scholarships.

The Indiana School Scholarship Tax Credit program would provide a 50 percent state tax credit for charitable contributions to qualified scholarship programs serving lower-income families.

Children in grades kindergarten-12 could qualify for scholarships to help attend the public or private school of their choice.

The program passed the Indiana Senate with bipartisan support earlier this spring on two occasions.

A May 2009 study by researcher David Stuit, a fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, found that a scholarship tax credit would result in significant net savings for the state.

For example, the analysis model found that at an average scholarship of $2,500 or less, the state would realize at least $13.4 million in net savings alone in the first year.

“In a fiscal crisis, the program could provide the state with much needed savings and struggling families with much needed choices,” Executive Director of School Choice Indiana Network Jeff Brantley said.

More information here.

Sounds good.  I hope it becomes law.

H/T The Foundry

Not Entitled To Choose

Potentially good news for opponents of personal responsibility–you will no longer be required to exercise it when it comes to financing your college education, if the President gets his way.  Proposals Would Transform College Aid

Obama Plan to Expand Federal Control of Lending Includes Creating Entitlement

President Obama’s health-care goals may be garnering attention, but his higher-education proposals are no less ambitious.

If adopted, they could transform the financial aid landscape for millions of students while expanding federal authority to a degree that even Democrats concede is controversial.

At stake is a plan to expand the Pell Grant program, making it an entitlement akin to Medicare and Social Security. Key to the effort is a consolidation of student lending that would give the U.S. Department of Education a near monopoly over the practice — a proposal that has mobilized the private loan industry, which lent $55.3 billion to 6.4 million students in the 2007-2008 school year.

It sounds to me that the plan has mechanisms for funding similar to the proposed cap and tax program, which redistributes the money generated by the fake emissions permits market and paid directly through higher energy costs by everybody to some favored constituencies.  This one would take the profits from the monopolistic government loan agency, which will be able to set whetever terms it chooses, and redirect some of it to selected people:

But Obama would go much further. He wants to terminate the private Federal Family Education Loan program, the primary source of student loans. Advocates say the move is a formality: The government already effectively controls the program by guaranteeing the loans, paying a special allowance to lenders, and in recent months, buying back loans by the billions from struggling firms.

Shifting all lending authority to the government through its Direct Loan program would save $94 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Obama would use that windfall to expand the Pell Grant program, created in 1965 to cover most tuition costs for low-income students.

So the government already effectively controls the market, and yet it is still a mess, the best fix for which is more government control.  Starting to see a pattern yet, Obama fans?

The President’s remarks about this mind-bogglingly expensive new entitlement program–Who are you going to believe, your lying rational mind or me?

“In the end, this is not about growing the size of government or relying on the free market — because it’s not a free market when we have a student loan system that’s rigged to reward private lenders without any risk.”

In other words, it’s not about what it’s about.  In Obama-speak a new entitlement program run by a new Federal bureaucracy is not increasing the size of government.  It’s a free market when students have only one lender to go to.  There’s no risk to lenders when borrowers default.  Orange is green, water is dry, cats are the most dependent creatures on Earth.

The one-size-fits-all approach inherent in any bureaucracy will pose problems:

Industry officials contend that private loans provide stronger default protections and better serve smaller schools, and some institutions have suggested that they may be content to play a more limited role. Industry officials are urging lawmakers to convene a summit of industry leaders to search for middle ground. But they also acknowledge that the prospect of capturing $94 billion and directing it to Pell Grant assistance could prove hard for Congress to resist.

According to the article, not much opposition to this new power grab has surfaced yet.  One opponent:

Rep.  Timothy H. Bishop (D-N.Y.), a former college provost and a member of Miller’s committee, said the lending proposal “goes to the very heart of one’s perception of what is the role of the federal government. And I think there will be a significant fight over it.”

But he added, “If you just look at it from the practical aspects of how the program functions, it’s really hard to justify. Why do we need a middleman?”

Why, indeed, an objection that can be made to most Federal programs.

In the free market, businesses are accountable to customers.  If you don’t like the price, you can buy somewhere else.  In order to get or keep customers, businesses can lower their prices, or offer different services, in other words, compete with each other.  Financing higher education is a business that has been subject to free market conditions, albeit with a fairly high dose of government meddling, like every other part of the financial sector.  If the Obama plan flies, that whole dynamic disappears.  You’ll take what the government gives you and like it.  There will be no shopping around because there will be no one else to do business with.  No more confusing choices to make–no more choices, period.

Obama’s Army Mobilized

To further his plan to nationalize health care, sell the crushing energy tax called cap and trade, and please his teachers union constituency, Obama musters campaign army for economic fight.

US President Barack Obama mustered his powerful campaign army on Monday, calling on his millions of supporters to lobby on behalf of his budget and economic plan.

The appeal to back the president was made in an email and video sent out by “Organizing for America,” the organization which morphed out of Obama’s campaign machinery to push his agenda when he entered the White House.

In the video, Mitch Stewart, the director of Organizing for America, urged the president’s supporters to take part in the “Organizing for America Pledge Project.”

“The pledge project is an ambitious effort to map out and identify support for President Obama’s economic blueprint across towns and communities in America,” Stewart said.

You could almost feel sorry for Congressmen.  Tea partying tax protesters to the right of them, looting socialists to the left of them.  Almost.

Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, has stressed that Organizing for America is not aimed at twisting the arms of members of Congress but meant to keep activists engaged on issues such as health care, energy and the economy.

Yeah, right.  These activists are just going to talk politely to each other.   None of this “in your face” stuff.   And how big a role will  the Federally-funded ACORN and its fellow travellers play?  I expect to see in-depth reporting on that any day now.

It’s going to be an eventful year.

Tuition Dollars At Work

The cost of Harvard tuition for one year?  $47,000.   The thought processes of the Harvard law faculty?  Priceless.  Anti-Socialist Personality Disorder

What Harvard wants to know is: what sort of mental illness drives a man to believe in free markets?

Some agenda items of the “The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, And Consequences,” Harvard’s Third Conference on Law and Mind Sciences:

Jaime Napier, “The Palliative Function of Ideology”

In this research, we drew on system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. Specifically, in three studies using nationally representative data from the United States and nine additional countries, we found that right-wing (vs. left-wing) orientation is indeed associated with greater subjective well-being and that the relation between political orientation and subjective well-being is mediated by the rationalization of inequality. In our third study, we found that increasing economic inequality (as measured by the Gini index) from 1974 to 2004 has exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality.

Translation:  Conservatives are happier than liberals because they are selfish pigs, either clueless about social injustice, or not giving a damn because they’re better at rationalization than liberals.

Juliet Schor, “Colossal Failure: The Output Bias Of Market Economies”

Mainstream economic theory claims that a competitive market equilibrium delivers optimal levels of consumption and well-being. The reasoning relies on a number of invalid assumptions, including the crucial premise that individuals’ preference structures are independent. If consumption is social, as considerable social science research shows, then the market delivers excessive levels of consumption, too many hours of work, and too much ecological degradation. (This is in addition to the well-known argument that ecological goods are externalities.) In this talk I discuss the implications of what has become a profound market failure, and how we can rectify it.

Translation:  Since consumption has nothing to do with individual choices but is part of the collective behavior of people, I have a right to distribute your wealth.

From the author:

I encourage you to read the entire agenda and its abstracts, all of which drip with the assumption that people who believe economic liberty is morally right, or simply utilitarian, are deluded creatures who deserve study and treatment.

There’s a lot of analysis at the link.  Read it if you want to know how the future leaders of America think.

H/T Overlawyered

Individuals Need Not Apply

Uncle Sam is here to help:  Conservatives Wonder How $140 Billion in New School Spending Will Stimulate Jobs

Conservatives and tax-limitation groups are raising concerns over whether the federal government should be reaching so deeply into what is typically regarded as an area left to state and local authority.

“This would be the most direct intrusion into fiscal policy making in education ever,” said Pete Sepp, vice president for communications at the National Taxpayers Union. “There really isn’t a precedent.”

Members of the Obama administration defend the education funding as being economic stimulus, saying that it is an “investment” in America’s future generations.

Oh, I see.  It’s for the children.  Why didn’t you just say so?

It’s the thought that counts:

The legislation would also provide $15.6 billion for Pell Grants, scholarships granted to undergraduate students to help subsidize college costs. Even with such a large sum of money, the impact on individual would be marginal–the maximum award for the Fiscal Year 2009-2010 ($5,350) would only increase by about $600 from the previous year’s maximum ($4,731).

Instead, McClusky said Pell Grants might actually have the opposite effect–pushing tuition costs up, which would exacerbate the already existing financial barrier to college. The more aid that is available to students, the more money colleges and universities can charge for tuition, thus causing inflation in college fees.

“The timing is hardly ideal,” Sapp said. “For those who would say we need to fix these schools for the children, what about the debt that is being passed onto them? There’s not going to be much of a future for them if we don’t start considering the implications of all this borrowing.”

Being the human part of the infrastructure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

H/T The Loft

In The Zone

I always thought college campuses were bastions of free thought.  Apparently, I’m behind the times.

Did you know that many American college campuses have “free speech zones”, that is, they have policies that allow free speech in administration-approved areas only?  And that is allowed only after being authorized and scheduled, such as at the University of Cincinnati?

How does that work, exactly?  How can speech be free if it must be approved and scheduled?  By whose standards?  And how is it remotely constitutional for a public college or university to enforce such rules?

Enter the FIREmen.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, keeps an eye on the individual rights situation at American colleges, including freedom of speech issues.  And is there ever a lot to watch.  FIRE’s National Mailing Puts Public Colleges and Universities on Notice

Over the past several months, FIRE has sent letters to 266 public colleges and universities to notify administrators that their maintenance of unconstitutional speech policies may subject them to personal liability. As previously announced in September, following the victory for free speech in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s ruling in DeJohn v. Temple, FIRE sent letters notifying administrators at public universities and colleges in the Third Circuit (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware) that they were legally bound by the DeJohn ruling, which struck down Temple University’s former speech code as unconstitutional.

They can run, but they can’t hide from liability:

By sending out our warning letter via certified mail, FIRE has now made it all but impossible for policymakers at public colleges and universities to argue that they were either (a) ignorant of their obligations to uphold the First Amendment on campus or (b) ignorant of the fact that their present policies encroach upon First Amendment freedoms. The specific policies at issue for each school are freely available in our Spotlight database. Were any of these public institutions to be sued in court for violating the First Amendment rights of their students or faculty members, this development is of vital importance, because as our letter states:

State officials and employees are offered qualified immunity only “insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). This means that administrators may be held personally liable for continuing to maintain unconstitutional speech codes in violation of students’ First Amendment rights.

They say fire purifies.  For once, they’re right.

H/T The Jawa Report

Have You Hugged Your Little Eco-Warrior Today?

Time was when kids aspired to be cowboys, firemen, ballerinas or astronauts.  Now, thanks to cable TV’s Nickelodeon, they can get a head start on becoming environmentalists:  Nick’s Big Green Hype

It’s not that that Nick has replaced “Sponge Bob” or “Fairly Odd Parents” with adult programming – Nick’s entertainment fare is still fun and silly. It’s that Nick has launched “The Big Green Help,” a multimedia campaign that encourages the network’s young viewers to become junior environmentalists, and major finger-waggers. “Nickelodeon’s Big Green Help is all about helping YOU find simple, positive ways to protect the Earth every day,” explains the home page on Nick’s Web site.

There’s nothing wrong with helping children learn there is a universe outside themselves.  In fact, it’s essential to their maturation.  Part of becoming a responsible adult is recognizing that your actions have consequences and accepting that you must take responsibility for your actions.  With luck, the little slobs may even apply that insight to their bedrooms.

According to a press release announcing the launch of the initiative, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group Executive Vice President of Public Affairs Marva Smalls said, “With The Big Green Help, we want to provide them with the necessary tools and information so they can become part of the environmental solution.”

Wait a minute.  You mean this isn’t about a child’s journey to self-realization?  Could it possibly have some other goal?  Whose brilliant idea was this, anyway?  The National Resources Defense Council.

NRDC, who’s Board of Trustees includes liberal celebrities like Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurie David, boasts a staff of “more than 350 lawyers, scientists and other professionals,” and spent about $59 million on “environmental programs” including lobbying in 2007.

A glance at NRDC’s Web site is evidence enough of the council’s extremism. Humans, through greedy uncaring business interests, are slaughtering species, polluting the oceans and destroying the planet with our greenhouse gasses. The global warming we’re creating contributes to all sorts of scary – but unproven – phenomena, including coastal flooding, more frequent and damaging wildfires in the western United States and stronger hurricanes.

NRDC’s answer? It advocates massive, compulsory disruption of the U.S. economy to cut CO2 emissions. The Group’s Web site calls for new laws, regulations and technology mandates for industry, and even wants government to regulate the “appliances and equipment in our homes and offices to reduce our electricity needs.” That the cost might run to trillions of dollars and diminished liberty is of no consequence. Funny, though, just about the only measure NRDC doesn’t propose is increasing use of mostly carbon-free nuclear power.

But, surely, they wouldn’t dream of pushing their political agenda on innocent children, would they?  It’s just entertainment.  There are games (“Battle CO2 monsters in 3D!”), they can  “Pledge it!” that is, “Help battle CO2 in the in the real world by pledging Big Green Help actions,”  and they can help their parents

… by reminding “parents to turn off the engine when their [sic] waiting in the car” and reminding them to “keep their care (sic) tires properly inflated every month.”

There’s even a message board where they can vent to other  kids with the same concerns.

In other words, they can start developing philosophical tunnel vision, terminal activist syndrome, a bossy attitude and coping skills for their increased anxiety about polar bears at an early age just by watching TV.

I’m sold.  I can’t think of anything that would be more fun for a kid than that.  And think of all the money school districts will be able to save,  with no more need to teach critical thinking or problem-solving skills.  It will be a bonanza for taxpayers everywhere.

To paraphrase Pink Floyds Another Brick in the Wall part 2,  Hey! Environmentalists! Leave them kids alone.

Jews Need Not Apply

From Europe, the human rights capital of the world, we get this remarkable headline:

Schools Caught Up in Palestinian Conflict.

Oh, no!  Those Jews are attacking Copenhagen!  Zionist conspiracy alert!

Uh, no.  Barbed-wire fences and security guards are a regular part of many Jewish childrens’ school day

A number of school administrators have come forth in recent days to confirm that they recommend Jewish children should not enrol at their schools.

According to school administrators, law enforcement officials and social workers, the on-going conflict in Gaza has led to heightened tensions between Jews and Arabs -particularly Palestinians – here in Denmark.

And although few headmasters of schools have faced the situation, most of those at schools with a high percentage of children of Arab descent say they try to prevent Jewish parents from enrolling their children there.

So if I read this correctly, this “tension” isn’t affecting most schools in Denmark, but to prevent future problems they are telling Jewish kids to stay away.  You might call it a pre-emptive strike.  Almost like there’s a culture war going on.

I can’t wait until America sheds its xenophobic skin and learns to live in harmony, like they do in Denmark.

H/T  Gatewaypundit