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The Cal Ripken
President
(3)
by Ann Coulter
Posted at
Human
Events Online
February 25, 2009
As
Obama prepared to deliver his address to Congress on Tuesday, the Republican
House Minority Leader John Boehner, Fox News' Bret Baier and Charles
Krauthammer all gushed that history was being made as the first
African-American president appeared before Congress.
Are we going to have to hear about this for the next four years? Obama is
becoming the Cal Ripken Jr. of presidents, making history every time he
suits up for a game. Recently, Obama also became the first African-American
president to order a ham sandwich late at night from the White House
kitchen! That's going to get old pretty quick.
But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one
going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded
woman can become speaker of the house?
Obama spent more than twice as much time in his historic speech genuflecting
to the teachers' unions than talking about terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan.
So it was historic only in the sense that Obama is the first
African-American president, but was the same old Democratic claptrap in
every other respect.
After claiming that the disastrous stimulus bill would create or save 3.5
million jobs -- "more than 90 percent" in the private sector -- Obama then
enumerated a long list of exclusively government jobs that would be "saved."
He was suspiciously verbose about saving the jobs of public schoolteachers.
Because nothing says "economic stimulus" better than saving the jobs of
lethargic incompetents who kick off at 2 p.m. every day and get summers off.
Actually, that's not fair: Some teachers spend long hours after school
having sex with their students.
As with the Clintons, Obama so earnestly believes in public school education
that he sends his girls to ... an expensive private school. He demands that
taxpayers support the very public schoolteachers he won't trust with his own
children.
It is one thing to tell voters that school choice is wrong, because, you
know, the public schools won't get better unless Americans sacrifice their
children to the teachers' union's maw. But it is quite another for Democrats
to feed their own kids to the union incinerator.
Consequently, no Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send
his own children to a public school.
And yet the stimulus bill expressly prohibits money earmarked for
"education" to be spent on financial aid at private or parochial schools.
Private schools might use it for some nefarious purpose like actually
teaching their students, rather than indoctrinating them in anti-American
propaganda.
The stimulus bill includes about $100 billion to education. By "education,"
Democrats don't mean anything a normal person would think of as education,
such as learning how to talk good. "Education" means creating lots of
useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with
teaching.
Apparently, nothing irritates public schoolteachers more than being asked to
teach. While 80 percent of the employees of private schools are teachers,
only half the employees of public schools are. The rest are "coordinating,"
"facilitating" or "empowering" something or other.
The Department of Education alone provides more than 4,000 jobs that haven't
the faintest connection with teaching. And now the stimulus bill will double
the Education Department's funding. (For those of you who went to a public
school, that means it will become twice as big.)
We've come a long way from Ronald Reagan promising to eliminate the
Education Department, which itself was a Jimmy Carter sop to the teachers'
unions.
Federal meddling in education has been an abject failure, so the Democrats'
plan is to keep doing more of the same. If only there were some aphorism
about people who fail to learn from history -- oh, well!
It can't be easy to reduce the educational achievement in America year after
year, but the education establishment has done it! Yes they can!
Thanks to the hard work of thousands of government workers at the Department
of Education and well-paid teachers' union employees, American
schoolchildren perform worse on education tests for every year they spend in
a public school.
It turns out that being in U.S. public schools has the same effect on people
as hanging around Paris Hilton does.
In fourth grade, the earliest grade for which international comparisons are
available, American students outperform most other countries in reading,
math and science. Fourth-graders score in the 92nd percentile in science,
the 58th percentile in math and the 70th percentile in reading, where they
beat 26 of 35 countries, including Germany, France and Italy.
But by the eighth grade, American students are only midrange in
international comparisons. (On the plus side, by the eighth grade they're
noticeably fatter.)
By the 12th grade -- after receiving the full benefits of an American
education -- Americans are near the bottom. Let X represent the number of
years spent in U.S. public schools, and Y represent average test scores in
math and reading -- oh, never mind.
With an additional eight years of a public school education under their
belts, Americans fall from the 92nd percentile in science to the 29th
percentile. While American fourth-graders are bested only by South Korea and
Japan in science, by 12th grade, the only countries the American students
can beat are Lithuania, Cyprus and South Africa.
Which suggests that if public education were extended all the way through
college, by the time a student gets to graduate school he might very well be
qualified to be ... speaker of the house!
Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent
for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander,"
""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," "If Democrats Had Any
Brains, They'd Be Republicans" and most recently, Guilty: Liberal "Victims"
and their Assault on America.
Copyright © Ann Coulter. All Rights Reserved.
Resource:
Human Events
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