Ivory Tower Decay
Jenny Hatch

This one is pretty funny:
Did I miss the hip part?
“CNN commentators keep telling us how young and hip the audience was for last week’s YouTube Democratic debate, apparently unaware that the camera occasionally panned across the audience, which was the same oddball collection of teachers’ union shills and welfare recipients you see at all Democratic gatherings.
Noticeably, Gov. Bill Richardson got the first “woo” of the debate — the mating call of rotund liberal women — for demanding a federal mandate that would guarantee public schoolteachers a minimum salary of $40,000.
So much for the “younger, hipper” audience. Maybe CNN meant “hippier,” as in, “My, she’s looking a bit hippy these days.”
Not counting talking snowmen, the main difference in the YouTube debate audience and the audience for the earlier CNN Democratic debate is that the YouTube debate had 173,000 fewer viewers in the 18-49 demographic. So it was provably not young and, on the basis of casual observation, definitely not hip.
As usual, the audience consisted mostly of public schoolteachers. According to CNN, the highest reading achieved on the CNN feelings-knob was for Richardson talking about public schoolteachers.”
…..
‘Democrats care about social service bureaucrats who make their living allegedly working on behalf of the poor — the famed “public service” the Democrats always drone on about — jobs that would disappear if we ever eliminated poverty. That’s why Democrats keep coming up with policies designed to create millions and millions more poor people.
Democrats fight tooth and nail against any measures that would actually help the poor, such as allowing schools to fire bad teachers. They refuse to allow parents with children in the rotten D.C. public schools to take money out of the public school system so their kids could go to Sidwell Friends like Chelsea.
Most important, Democrats resolutely refuse to tell the poor the secret to not being poor: Keep your knees together until marriage.
That’s it. Not class size, not preschool, not even vouchers, though vouchers would obviously improve the education of all students. You could have lunatics running the schools — and often do — and if the kids live with married parents, they will end up at good colleges and will lead happy, productive lives 99 percent of the time.
But Democrats don’t care about the poor. They don’t care about the children. They care about government teachers and other government bureaucrats — grimy, dowdy women who “woo” at political debates. Or as CNN calls them, the “young,” “hip” crowd.'”
One of the things I love the most about my childrens charter school is all of the young fresh faces….the teaching staff! My experience in Michigan with most of my teachers being tenured old biddies who were winding down their education careers with democratic political activism sort of warped my mind about who public school teachers were. Sure I had some good teachers, but the memorable rotten ones make for some interesting stories.
I had a teacher who was suffering from alzheimers for 8th grade english. What a waste of my time to spend a whole year in her class! Because she was tenured they could not get rid of her. I grew up, married, and left home and was at my parents house reading the paper one day when I saw that this same teacher was suing the district because they had finally gotten up the gumption to fire her for incompetence. I wondered how many students had passed through her English class during those ten years since I had her as my teacher in Middle school.
It was a horrible example of how difficult it is to fire a teacher in regular public schools.
I love the charter school that my children currently attend. The distric had some bad press around this issue of firing teachers the first year that they opened. It was such an unheard of thing for teachers to be fired in BVSD. But it sent the clear message to the staff that if you don’t do your job, you will be gone next year. Our teachers have to get rehired every year, and while this has made some of our programs somewhat iffy, like the theatre department which has had a new acting teacher every year that it has opperated, I do believe overall it has kept the teaching dynamic and fluid rather than allowing the staff to relax and just “get by”.
Wouldn’t it be great to see all tenured positions dropped and the education establishment completely rebuilt from the bottom up with no government money or rules messing things up and local control handed back to individual school boards?
Jenny Hatch

David Horowitz on Hannity and Colmes
Jenny Hatch