Districts are forbidden to lay off teachers or cut programs, so they better stock up on magic beans because – surprise! – revenues are falling short of projections. The Sacramento Bee reports the state fell $541 million short of July expectations, and there are already signs the state may also miss its August projections.
But on Wednesday, Aug. 31, at 7:55 a.m., three days after the storm closed down much of the state, the four school buses pulled up right on time, and off hopped 18 children from the dark side of the mountain (their electricity was still out).It's a nice feel-good story. And if I can toss in some political commentary, I notice that no one there is waiting for the federal government to come save them.
“They were so proud,” Ms. Prescott said.
They had reason to be. Their families had discovered a half-mile-long forest path that they could walk, from Route 4 across the mountain to their school bus. At first, the woods were still and unsettling. “My hands shaked a little bit,” said Jillian Bradley, a second grader.
But as Sophia Hussack, another second grader said, “Since Vermont got hit by the storm, people think we couldn’t, but we do.” And what townspeople do and have done is a thing to behold: they have taken that quiet trail and in two weeks’ time turned it into the I-95 of wooded paths. More than a 1,000 people a day now walk it to get to their jobs and go food shopping on the other side. So many cars line Helvi Hill, the dirt road leading to the path on this side, that handwritten no parking signs have been posted to make sure the road stays passable.
The University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a position as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in any of the following three areas: (1) Diversity and Identity; (2) Legal or Philosophical Frameworks for Diverse Democracies; and (3) Diversity, Civil Society and Political Action, or some combination thereof. The anticipated starting date is July 1, 2012. The search is part of the interdisciplinary Haas Diversity Research Center and will be conducted under the auspices of the Diversity and Democracy cluster of this Center. Applicants may read about the Haas Diversity Research Center and the Diversity and Democracy cluster at the website: http://diversity.berkeley.edu/hdrc.There's definitely a diversity problem at Berkeley, but it's not the problem implied in this job posting.
Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts
Lee Harris: The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.
Mark Steyn: From "Let's Roll!" to "Let's Roll Over."
Andrew Almazán, the 16-year-old Mexican who has just received his psychology degree and is scheduled to finish medical school in two years, told me something in an interview last week that I wasn’t aware of: Millions of exceptionally talented youngsters in Latin America are being pushed out of public schools for lack of gifted-student programs.
In an interview from his home in Mexico City, Andrew told me that when he was in elementary school, he was bored in the classroom, and got into trouble with teachers for challenging what they were saying in class. His teachers saw him as a troublemaker, and diagnosed him with attention-deficit disorder, although he had an IQ of 162, higher than Albert Einstein’s...
Citing World Health Organization estimates, Andrew told me that an estimated 2.3 percent of the youth population of every country is highly gifted. That would amount to nearly 800,000 youths in Mexico alone, he said.
“But here in Mexico, about 95 percent of highly gifted minds are wasted because they are not identified as such,” Andrew said. “We are losing that intellectual capacity, because of a tendency to adjust everybody [downward] to the average.”
This is the face of one of Obama’s core constituencies. This is what you voted for when you voted for “hope and change.” He can’t even curse creatively.
UPDATE: John Hinderaker: “Has any Tea Partier ever acted in such a violent, threatening, disgusting manner? No. You might think that the union member is a low-life from the gutter, but the remarkable thing is that in all probability, he makes more money than you do.”
After a union wildcat strike turned violent on Thursday, triggering a walkout at five ports in Washington state, longshoremen went back to work on Friday.
But in an unusual twist, the National Labor Relations Board succeeded in getting a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction Thursday against further union activity at the Port of Longview after the union ignored the temporary restraining order that he issued a week earlier.
Lawmakers essentially threw in the towel Thursday on comprehensive public pension reform - at least for now.If I had any faith they'd reform and not merely tinker around the edges, I'd applaud their being circumspect. Instead, I sigh at their lack of fortitude.
With this year's legislative session scheduled to end at midnight today, the Assembly voted 51-21 to approve a last-minute bill declaring its commitment to pension reform but conceding that more time is needed.
Think of it this way: our cell phones have operating systems built into them. There's no Republican way to make a phone call with your iPhone, and no Democratic way to do it. There's no conservative approach to checking your email with a BlackBerry or an Android, and no liberal approach to doing it. You just do it the way your cell phone's operating system requires.I'm just saying.
It's the same with an economy. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of economic operating systems: a free-market economy and a command economy. In a free-market economy, the government sets the rules and enforces them, but otherwise stays out of the way and allows individuals and businesses to call the shots. In a command economy, the government's role is so large that it not only sets and enforces the rules, but also calls the shots...
In a free-market economy like ours, it's the entrepreneurs who create jobs. They do this by starting new businesses, and by expanding businesses that are already up and running. If you want to create more jobs, you create an environment in which entrepreneurs will thrive. They'll take it from there, because creating jobs by starting and expanding businesses is what thriving entrepreneurs do.
Think of it this way: if you want more milk, create an environment in which cows will thrive. And just as it makes no sense to say you want more milk but oppose cows because they're smelly, dirty, and leave their droppings all over the place -- it makes no sense to say you want more jobs but oppose entrepreneurs because when they succeed they often wind up with more money than the rest of us. You cannot have it both ways...
Let me give you one example to illustrate this point: in the course of my lecture business I meet a great many owners of small- and medium-sized companies -- precisely the men and women we depend upon to create jobs for all the rest of us. One evening, when my lecture to a group of these entrepreneurs had ended and we were all having a drink in the hotel bar, the CEO of a rock-solid manufacturing company said something that stopped the conversation cold: "I'll be damned before I start hiring people now, just in time to send the unemployment rate plunging so it re-elects the president next year. In a second term, this guy'll kill my business." There was a dead silence, and then every other business owner at the table nodded in agreement.
The point isn't whether these CEOs are right or wrong. The point is that this is what they've come to believe, and their actions will be based upon their perceptions. For all of us who depend on our country's entrepreneurs to create jobs -- which is to say, for all of us without safe government jobs -- this is more than depressing. It's terrifying.
From consumers to investors to voters, everywhere you look these days, confidence is falling over the state of the U.S. economy. And now a new scorecard by SurePayroll, the leading online payroll service, shows that small business confidence is lagging as well...I have a hard time believing they've lost faith because they expect lower taxes, less regulation, and a government that sees them as more than just social program contributors.
Just like the rest of us, small business owners have lost faith in any sort of government solution to the country's economic problems. Herein lies the real concern. "Small businesses are the ones that have traditionally grown us out of every recession we've had," says Alter. If this pessimism persists, it seems the country could be in this economic downturn for the foreseeable future.
It has now been a little over two years — and eight full economic quarters — since the end of the recession Obama inherited. It's time to ask: How does his record of economic growth in the wake of a recession stack up against the records of other presidents?Only the willfully partisan can defend this president and his record.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines a recession as "a period between a peak and a trough" during which "a significant decline in economic activity spreads across the economy and can last from a few months to more than a year."
By consensus, the most recent recession ended in June 2009, less than six months after Obama took office...
Some might argue that the anemic post-recession growth rate under Obama has resulted from his having inherited a worse recession than most. There's little doubt that he inherited a particularly long (18-month) and significant recession. But the historical record suggests that, pre-Obama, the general rule was: the worse the recession (or depression), the better the recovery...
Average real quarterly GDP growth in the two years coming out of those recessions was 6.2%. The 2.4% figure under Obama has been a mere 39% of that — which, come to think of it, roughly matches Obama's current approval rating.
If the teachers union is as wonderful as it claims, then it should have no problem attracting members, without the need to force teachers to join. How is this any different from any other professional organization that teachers, as professionals, may choose to join? It’s a question I have been pondering since I became a public teacher in Wisconsin.
For years, I have chosen not to be a member of the union. However, this is a choice that I didn’t exactly have before Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill went into law. As a compulsory union state where teachers are required to pay union dues as a condition of employment, the most I could hope for was a “Fair Share” membership, where the union refunded me a small portion of the money that was taken from my paycheck that lawyers have deemed “un-chargeable.”
Every September, after lengthy, bureaucratic and unadvertised hurdles, I would file my certified letter to try to withdraw my union membership. Then, they would proceed to drag their feet in issuing me my small refund. I often wondered why this kind of burden would be put on an individual teacher like me. Shouldn’t it be up to the organization to convince people and sell its benefits to potential members afresh each year? Why should I have to move mountains each fall to break ties with this group that I don’t want to be a part of in the first place? Something seemed dreadfully wrong with that picture.
A private, Chicago-based institution will be the first to put forth a deeply discounted deal on tuition via Groupon.Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it make more sense just to lower the tuition if you want more people to attend your school? Why jump through coupon hoop?
In an effort to bolster interest in its graduate teaching program, National Louis University will offer would-be teachers a Groupon for nearly 60% off tuition of an entry-level graduate teaching course.
As the U.S. Education Department is aggressively reinforcing colleges’ legal obligations to address allegations of sexual assault -- and making examples of those that don't -- a federal jury on Friday found a university negligent for how it treated someone accused by a fellow student of rape.You might want to click on that link and read the whole article.
The verdict will likely be mulled over at colleges across the country, where judicial hearings for alleged sexual assaults are the norm – and where confusion and a lack of guidance over how such hearings should transpire often result in the mishandling of cases, experts say. However, these discussions tend to focus on the rights of the accuser, rather than the alleged perpetrator.
At Georgia Tech, where the famous fight song proclaims "I'm a heck of an engineer," nearly 70 percent of the football team (43 of 62 players) has chosen to major in management, a business degree dubbed the "M Train" by those on campus who consider it an easier route to a diploma than the school's renowned engineering program.Raise your hand if you're surprised. In fact, I'd be surprised if this weren't so, and I am surprised that the study didn't find this phenomenon to be more widespread.
But the Yellow Jackets are hardly the only school where players tend to congregate in the same fields of study. There are four others universities where at least half the sophomores, juniors and seniors playing football are pursuing the same degree, The Associated Press found in a survey of the 68 schools in the conferences which receive automatic bids to the Bowl Championship Series, plus Notre Dame and Big East-member-to-be TCU.
At Vanderbilt, it's human and organizational development (35 of 59). At UCLA, history is a big draw (27 of 47). At Wake Forest, there's been a gridiron run on the communications department (34 of 60). At Baylor, upset winners over TCU on the opening weekend of this season, expect to find a lot of big guys in general studies (27 of 53).
“President Obama, this is your army,” Hoffa Jr. declared. “We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out and take America back to where America we belong.”
“Did Obama disapprove of Hoffa’s incendiary message? Apparently not; he mentioned Hoffa only to say that he is proud of him. But, what the heck: he sat through ‘God DAMN America’ for twenty years without protest, so I guess he can put up with Tea Party ‘sons of bitches,’ too. . . . In the meantime, my suggestion to any Republican is that he respond to Obama’s challenge by saying, ‘We’re not going to double down on failure.’”I'm sure our friends on the left will excuse Obama's religiosity. And his complete and total hypocrisy. And his complete and total failure as a president.
Remember when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot in Tucson by a mentally ill gunman? Do you remember the many voices calling for civility in our political dialogue that sprang from that event?
That happened only eight months ago, but civility has evidently become passe.
We've received a few recent, unpleasant reminders of this fact. Just before the holiday weekend, video emerged of Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., telling a friendly crowd that some of his fellow members of Congress would like to lynch him because he is black. Given that Carson obviously made this up (if he didn't, he is free to return The Washington Examiner's calls at long last and name names), it's a cheap way of spreading false fears and exciting base voters.
On Labor Day, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa had choice words for Republicans at a union rally: "Let's take these son-of-a-bitches out and give America back to America where we belong." The first part of that sentence seems slightly more serious than putting "targets" on a campaign map, doesn't it? (And no, I have no idea what the second half means.)
