Louisiana Doubles Down on Dumb

Who Dat

The headline from Reuters read “Louisiana's bold bid to privatize schools” but it could have as easily read “We plan on becoming dumber than a bag of hammers” 

Via Reuters

Louisiana is embarking on the nation's boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.

Like Louisiana didn’t have enough problems.  Shiteeeeeee. 

What has happened to our country that we know do not trust the government to run our public education but we are more than happy to pack them off to a one room school house like we did their great-great grandfathers.  "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and we will educate them like we did one hundred and fifty years ago.  So much for progress.

Via Reuters

"We are changing the way we deliver education," said Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican who muscled the plan through the legislature this spring over fierce objections from Democrats and teachers unions. "We are letting parents decide what's best for their children, not government."

Hey Gov. Bobby Joe Billy Bob – I have a suggestion for you.  Why don’t you change Louisiana’s infant mortality rate (highest in the nation –edgamakation kant buy you dose numbers! )

Here’s some other numbers y’all might want to work on.

The fifth-highest maternal mortality rate, the fourth-worst life expectancy rate, the fifth-highest violent

crime rate, the second-highest poverty rate, and the fifth-highest obesity rate in the country.

 (Research courtesy of wonkette.com). 

The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

So Louisiana is going to teach the three R's - Republican, Regression and the Dismantling of the American Public Education System (I know that doesn't start with R but it won't matter soon)

People from all over the world come here so their kids can get a public education (with any luck they will have read this blog and will skip Louisiana  - waste of timeeeeee) and yet Bobby Jindal knows better than the government that instituted that system.  Are there problems with the current system.  Of course but do you things that are going to happen like detailed below are any better????

At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

"We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said.

I wish I could end on that quote but I have just two more things to say.

Under full disclosure - I sleep with a teacher and my son is in school to become one.  Do you think that really had anything to do with my response.  Come on man.

PS. Can we sell Louisiana back to France???? Retourner la vente de la Louisiane

What Pennsylvania had the good sense to do that the rest of you haven't figured out

Would you vote for someone running for president if he said some of the following things? For now let’s call him Mister X. 

Mister X referred to schools as “factories,” and argued that they are a tragic blip on the historical radar. After the Industrial Revolution, Mister X said  “people came off the farms where they did homeschool or had a little neighborhood school, and into these big factories … called public schools.” He added: “The idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic.”

Mister X said “We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit,”  Mister X then went on to call climate change “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life.”

 Mister X continued on the subject of global warming “When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate — this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government,”

Mister X said regarding birth control "It's not okay, because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," "They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal... but also procreative."

In his book It Takes a Family, Mr. X called "mass education" an "aberration," writing, "It's amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools."

Mister X said “There are no Palestinians, All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis.  There are no Palestinians.  This is Israeli land,".

Mister X said "President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob ... Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”

Mister X on the Crusades "The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American Left who hates Christendom. ... What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers. What we're talking about are core American values."

Mister X on same sex marriage  "Is anyone saying same-sex couples can't love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?" "What about three men?" "If you think it's OK for two, you have to differentiate for me why you're not OK with three. Any two people, or any three, or four."  "That's not to pick on homosexuality," Mister X said in another interview. "It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be," he said.

Mister X said “Mutually consenting adults do not have a constitutional right to privacy with respect to sexual acts.”

Mister X said that this year’s election was like the time between 1940 and 1941 when Americans didn’t act against Adolf Hitler because they thought he was “a nice guy” and not “near as bad as what we think.” “It’s going to be harder for this generation to figure this out. There’s no cataclysmic event,” he explained, but similar urgency. “Is anybody reminding us who we are, what made us great, and what these assaults are all about?”

I am sure you have figured out by now that Mr. X is none other than Rick Santorum. Maybe you hadn’t seen all of the above quotes.

 Now I get that Republicans are frustrated and I get the lack of love for Mitt Romney.  With all his money and the extensive political machine that has been in place for years he can’t shake Rick loose. I get that Republicans love Jesus more than Democrats. And no one loves Jesus more than Rick. Heck I love Jesus too (see my previous blog) but I haven’t lost my mind.  The good people of Pennsylvania had the sense to vote Santorum out of office.  In the November 7, 2006 Senate election, Santorum lost by over 700,000 votes, the largest margin of defeat for an incumbent senator since 1980. Come on people, draft Jeb or Christy or dig up the Gipper you can’t seriously elect someone who believes that God will replenish the earth after we ruin it or government shouldn’t be running schools or that birth control is wrong.  Do we need to have the good people of Pennsylvania to slap some sense into us?