Just as the Cash for Clunkers program spurred false demand for new car purchases that later resulted in months of poor performance for those in auto industry, we are starting to see a similar pattern emerge where other stimulus dollars spent.  The most recent culprit: the public education system.  As many states faced massive budget shortfalls, they decided to use stimulus money to avoid having to layoff workers in the public education system.  Now that these Recovery Act funds have been exhausted, the budget shortfalls will now be more substantial.  What would have been a controlled and steady stream of layoffs will now most likely be a tsunami.  Alas, the Recovery Act would be more aptly named the Prolonging the Inevitable Act.

Inevitably, schools will be facing deep cuts as they run out of stimulus money.  The stimulus money has also been sheltering schools from the economic reality that property tax collections are also dropping quickly as real estate values drop.  The shortfalls that schools will be facing will be steep, and those who thought their jobs were saved by the stimulus will soon be unemployed.

If you get really good at math, maybe one day you can run for Congress

I know a lot of school administrators, and they pretty much lose sleep over this.  They are doing everything they can think of to try to not layoff their staff.  Where the loyalty here is admirable, the excessive inefficiency characteristic of the public education system is a disgusting waste.  If a for-profit private school was facing the same budget problems that face most American schools, they would probably take the necessary action of laying off staff they could no longer afford.  Affordability is a word that most government agencies seem to completely ignore.

Ultimately, what I think about this is pretty irrelevant.  I feel bad for the many education workers who are going to lose their jobs.  I wonder what criteria school administrators will use to determine who gets fired.  Since the NEA resists any movement towards tying teacher’s pay to performance, so if performance is irrelevant how do you determine who to let go?  This is where economics will finally kick in.  Schools will get rid of the most expensive employees, this will typically mean those with Master’s degrees and PhDs.

In my previous post, I discussed the recent Obama plan to address the nations youth in an address to school students.  My impulsive reaction was to come out against the speech, and especially against the Ashton Kutcher propaganda video.  I am not changing my position here, although I am less concerned about the speech.  After further thought, I let the inner conspiracy theorist get the best of me.

With Congress coming back to work and an expected intensification of the healthcare debate, I am imagining that at some point over the last few days the Obama administration had a meeting to discuss the following question:  How can we get more right-wingers with Hitler signs out on the streets?

Answer: Let’s broadcast an Obama speech to the youth of the country through the public education system.  That’ll get ‘em riled up.

Youth serves the leader

If this is the case, then this was certainly a brilliant plan by the Obama administration.  This otherwise “non-issue” has mobilized Obamaphobes into a frenzy.  As Obama becomes an increasingly toxic figure, many people, myself included, have the knee-jerk reaction to oppose everything that he does.  For the administration to take Obama’s toxicity to manipulate those who oppose him to become sidetracked over nothing is smart.  Well played.

Rather than oppose an Obama speech to students in public schools, we should be encouraging Obama to give more speeches.  I think he should have a speech for the kids every day, and the teachers should have to keep the kids in during recess to watch it.  To overexpose these kids to trite rhetoric, vague abstractions, and pathos driven banality at an early age, would be a healthy educational experience for them.  Perhaps an education such as this might yield a generation of voters that wouldn’t be as embarrassing my generation.

Those who oppose Obama should be enthralled every time he wants to interrupt prime-time television, to give yet another speech.  Ubiquity breeds irrelevance.  Let us hope that those who pull Obama’s string to make him talk never figure this out.

I close with a quote from George Will:

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. 

And some great quotes by Mark Steyn:

*The Omnipresent Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of Third World basket-case dumps: The conflation of the man and the state is explicit, and ubiquitous.

*Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a “servant” to the head of state, would reply, “Get lost, creep.” And, if they still taught history in American schools, he’d add, “Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776.”

*Now he’s giving a 112th [speech] — to a joint session of Congress — and this one, we’re assured, will finally do the trick. That brand-new Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals the deal, but America’s Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign in the end.

The president has made the mistake of believing his own publicity — or, at any rate, his own mainstream media coverage, which is pretty much the same thing.

*No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America’s schoolchildren is to suggest what you’d like him to do in his next speech. Here’s mine: Call in sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president’s speech.

But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid, I dare you: “That’s all, folks!”

Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words in order:

(1) Try (2) Something (3) Else.

to brainwash my kids before the public education system does it for me:

A school in Utah decided to show this video to the students on the first day of school.  Of course, most parents weren’t too thrilled about it, and the principal who hadn’t seen it before it was shown had to apologize for propagandizing.  On top of this, Barack Obama is planning on delivering a historic speech to school children on Sept. 8.  The Dept. of Education also created lesson plans for teachers to use afterwards to indoctrinate kids into becoming Obama supporters.  As in Utah, many parents aren’t too thrilled to see the public schools become indoctrination camps for Barack Obama.  After all, he already has plenty of mindless supporters, that have been thoroughly brainwashed by universities.  It is interesting that the same parents that are so upset about propaganda in the public schools don’t seem as concerned about the same kind of propaganda being advanced in publicly funded universities.  

The following passage from a Washington Times editorial summarizes what makes this latest blunder by Obama so lamentable. 

Radicals always have viewed children as wards of the state to be shaped into shock troops to advance their revolutionary agendas. It is an idea of ancient provenance. Plato said that “children must attend school, whether their parents like it or not; for they belong to the state more than to their parents.” Every radical leader of the 20th century put indoctrinating children at the top of his agenda. So when someone with Mr. Obama’s background reaches directly into every school in America, parents are rightly concerned.

The planned speech reinforces the lurking creepiness factor around the cult of personality being erected for this president. The White House is billing the speech as “historic,” and perhaps they even believe it. But there is no reason for this federal intrusion into family and community affairs. It’s not the president’s job to be a surrogate parent, teacher or principal for America’s children. He would better serve our kids by not bankrupting the country they will inherit.

On another note, maybe parents shouldn’t be so worried.  After all, it is just one more speech by Obama.  I have to say that it is a little disappointing that he is doing this during school.  I am sure that he could convince all the major TV networks to air the speech during prime time instead of kicking off the Fall television season.  Oh wait, that slot is reserved for yet one more speech on health care.  Yawn…

From New Mexico, to Colorado, to Maryland, my google news alert for school lunch flooded my inbox with stories this week about various schools across the country that have enacted policies that disqualify students from receiving school lunch if their accounts are unpaid.  As you would expect, most of these articles are mostly about the public outcry that these schools would even consider to stop giving lunches away that haven’t been paid for.  Of course, the schools are still giving these kids a cheese sandwich and a drink, but this isn’t fair.  These poor students are only getting a sandwich where their peers get a nice hot meal.

Some of the schools in these reports are in the hole $140,000 because of delinquent school lunch accounts.  Yet there is no outcry against the thievery of the parents who are sending their children to school with no lunch and stiffing the school with the bill.  If you ask me, I think that parents who steal school lunches should be thrown in jail for stealing instead of whining about their children being given a free lunch.

Since the national school lunch program is funded by import tariffs, you can expect this program to completely collapse over the next year.  With the economic recession decreasing demand for imported crap from China and the 60% drop in the price of oil, I would imagine that the available funds for the school lunch program will dwindle.  Of course this is coming at a time when record numbers of people are signing up for the free and reduced lunches.

Ultimately this all goes to show that even if your entitlement program has the best intentions, it is doomed to failure because there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  Even though millions of children receive free lunch every day, the cost of these lunches are built into everything you purchase that wasn’t manufactured or produced in America.  However, when you put economic costs aside, we also find that entitlement programs lead to an even larger moral cost.  The entitlement culture created by the school lunch program has created a moral environment where stealing is tolerated if not encouraged.  

I could solve this problem pretty quickly.  I know from experience that a private school lunch service can offer better food at a lower price than the government and still make a decent profit.  I say increase the child tax credit and completely privatize school lunches and get the federal government out of the picture.  

Read Tanstaafl and The Parable of the Broken Window if you want to learn more about how the unintended consequences of well-intentioned entitlement programs are far more dangerous then the problems that they solve.

The recent economic crisis is reminding us that, unfortunately, our economy is still inextricably overdetermined by the scarcity of resources.  Despite all of the Icarian efforts and intentions of Wall Street bankers to invent infinite risk mitigating financial instruments, their wings of wax could only get them so close to that symbol infinite resources.  I have come to believe that our education system is built on many of the same failed assumptions upon which our currently failing economy was built.  America’s education system is built on the assumption that intelligence is infinitely and evenly allocated.  My experience tells me that intelligence is scarce.  Just as our economy needs to tether itself to economic theory that admits reality of resource scarcity, our education system could really use an intelligence theory that admits that intelligence is scarce.

On the contrary, the intelligence theory that seems to carry the most weight in current education programs is Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences.  The basic premise of his idea is that intelligence in humans is manifest in multiple varieties and it can’t be empirically quantified.  Therefore, school curricula should be tailored to meet the individual needs of each student.  The idea of custom education to accommodate the various intelligence levels of students is certainly seductive product of heartwarming liberalism and it is certainly a reflection of an assumption that intelligence is an abundant resource.

This article describes the latest installment of the Icarian tragedy of our public school system.  When you believe in multiple forms of intelligence, it is easy to believe that failing grades are detrimental to the project of education.  Rather than tell a student the he is failing (most curricula are engineered to ensure that girls are more likely to be successful in school), we can find a flicker of intelligence if we just give him 100 chances to succeed and throw enough resources and money at him.  The notion that you are entitled to a bailout when you fail is one that is instilled in Americans at a young age.

Willful ignorance of the reality of scarcity leads to a false sense of security that leads to a sense of entitlement.  I would argue that the current state of the automobile industry in American is just an extension of what is wrong with our public education system, which as one of our most liberal institutions is just an extension of what is wrong with our culture.  You can blame the current economic climate on a variety of causes, but I haven’t heard anyone pinpoint the cause of our downturn to the liberal culture of entitlement that originates in our education system.

Let’s keep telling students that failure is not an option in life.  Let’s keep telling the CEOs of one failed company after another that they can have one more shot.  CEOs learn at different rates and in different ways.  It isn’t fair that a company should fail and millions of workers lose their job just because the people in charge haven’t figured out which brand of intelligence best describes their leadership style.  All CEOs are winners.  Doesn’t anyone care about what would happen to the self-esteem of these poor CEOs and union bosses if their industry  and companies were to fail.

The assembly lines of Henry Ford used to symbolize the budding greatness of America.  The public education system and the current auto industry reflect an indolent empire that believes it is entitled to an infinite portion of scarcity.