Dems boast of state's great ed system!

SEPT. 2, 2010

Tuesday brought Californians yet another budget charade. The “drill” that took place in the Assembly and Senate over a supposed budget vote, spoke volumes about the real worth of legislators to the state.  But what senators and Assembly members said during the final day of session while debating the budget, is telling about the very different philosophies of the opposing parties, as well as the individual politics of some members.

The California state Legislature has missed the budget deadline 23 times in 24 years.

With a record like that, does anyone really believe that state’s legislators are serious about their jobs? Instead, legislators have re-written job descriptions to become labor union shills, hawking asinine and invasive special interest bills, in between fund-raising and campaigning.

State politicians have morphed into entitlement junkies, with unions feeding their habit. It’s no wonder so many Californians dream of a part-time Legislature.

As I wrote in my budget story, Bloviating Rather Than Budgeting, the Democratic talking points schpeal was about California’s great public education system, “the best public education system the world has ever seen,” according to Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco. The state education system is currently ranked number 47.

Using the emotionally-charged education cuts as an example of the need to pass the Democrat’s budget, Los Angeles Sen. Gloria Romero prattled on about the need for continuing public education funding, and complained about a $500 cut per-child in the classroom, as well as the lack of school librarians.

Romero should take her complaints directly to her Democratic colleagues and to the bloated California Teachers Association – also known as the teachers’ union. Under the watchful eye of the CTA, the number of school administrators has exponentially increased; so has educational funding, but not for the students.

Romero said that as a national average, there are 809 school children per librarian, but in California, the ratio is 5,000 students for every librarian. This may very well be true. Is this the governor’s fault? Did Republicans cut librarians?

As chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, Romero should voice her concern to the Los Angeles Unified School District, with its $640 million budget deficit, schools regularly ranked amongst the nation’s lowest performing for a decade or longer, and just completed $578 million public school.

Cuts to actual education are the work of the public employee labor unions, yet they continue expansion of administrative and non-teaching positions. Education has grown into a big government-funded business, with little accountability, and very poor performance. As the public schools in the state continue to drop in performance reviews and test scores, many of the state’s residents are finally waking up to the facts.

In another pro-union speech, Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, demonstrated how little he understands economics: “You don’t cure unemployment by laying people off,” Cedillo said, and then listed only teachers, police, social workers and other public employees as those suffering layoffs. San Leandro Democrat Sen. Ellen Corbett, nodded her head in agreement.

During the debate speeches, Republicans kept up the “cut taxes and spending” talk. But few ventured into hallowed ground of education. Assemblyman Chris Norby, R-Fullerton, challenged Democrats’ support for the powerful teachers union and said, “It’s a system based on protecting mediocrity – that’s what we’re cutting.” Norby said that his kids go to public school, and naturally, he wants his kids to learn. As if directly answering Cedillo’s comments, Norby said, “We’ve got to look at our education system to educate our kids, and not just protect jobs.”

The Sunshine Review reports “California‘s state spending has ballooned in the last decade at a rate much higher than the rate of inflation, and rate of population growth in the state.” And education funding and spending has ballooned as well, a full one-third of the state’s budget and growing. The Wall Street Journal has referred to this syndrome in California as “runaway liberal governance.”

A recent story in a women’s magazine was an excellent example of union dominated education systems gone wrong. The story featured an interview with New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus about her new book, “Higher education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It.” Dreifus charges that American universities “hold a monopoly on kids’ futures that is immune to all the basic economic laws that govern the rest of society, including the laws of the marketplace.”

Dreifus even says that “tenured faculty, bloated salaries, bloated building and land acquisitions, and an enormous administrative class on campuses is wasting money.” Dreifus told of a bloated college administrative staff with 70 percent of the staff in non-teaching positions. But this epidemic is not limited to colleges — the abuse is industry-wide, kindergarten through college.

Teaching kids has become a byproduct of the entire system. The money to be made in “education” in California, long ago took precedence over a noble concept. California’s education system is one sorry example of how government allowed the teachers union to manipulate and mismanage the system into riches for the union, while bankrupting reading, writing and arithmetic.

–Katy Grimes