Monthly Archives: May 2020

Education Standards

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A St Paul, MN, public schools educator helping teachers decried insistence that consistent standards be applied to students and their school performance.

A child living in poverty with a single, working parent, little support, marginal technology, and a spotty Wi-Fi connection cannot be held to the same standard as a child of a well-educated family, whose parents are working from home, with ample technological devices, high-speed connectivity and support.

Of course, he can. The child either has mastered the material and is qualified to move on, or he has not. An honestly assigned grade is an index of the level of mastery.

The reason(s) for a failure to master are what is worthy of addressal. Inadequate teaching, immaturity of the child’s development relative to the material, incapacity of the child, unavailability of the needed materials and/or inadequate access to available material (perhaps due to the effects the “educator” listed) are a few such reasons.

It’s breathtaking that someone styling herself an educator is confused by this.

Federal Aid to States

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Dead equine pounding time.

Brian Blase, ex- of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, had a thought on this. While generally skeptical of expanding Federal aid to the States qua States during the present Wuhan Virus situation, he did suggest guidelines within which Congress should act in the event it does decide to provide any Federal dollars to the States.

If it must incur additional debt to help states, Congress should abide by four principles. usw.

No, there’s only one principle by which Congress should abide here.

The States don’t need help; it’s the many (even most in the present Wuhan Virus situation) citizens of, and businesses in, those States who need help. Any Federal dollars should go directly to those citizens and businesses, bypassing the States’ governments entirely.

The only State government involvement that might be useful here would be to make available to the Federal government the State unemployment insurance data bases and the identification of those small businesses applying for loans under the Feds’ various Wuhan Virus situation relief programs.

One bonus principle: once the current situation is reasonably under control, the Feds’ copies of those data should be certifiably and verifiably destroyed.

Personal Responsibility and Black Americans

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Surgeon General Jerome Adams, among too few others, has pointed out that part of the reason the Wuhan Virus is hitting minorities so much harder than others—with blacks getting the bulk of the ink on this—is because of their inaction on factors under their control.  Leave aside factors like the pre-existence of health conditions like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, medical conditions that are generally beyond their control. Leave aside, further, that individual life-style choices can nevertheless significantly affect, if not eliminate, those conditions.

In addition to suggesting that blacks should put more of their personal attention toward those medical conditions, Adams was so rude as to suggest that blacks should exercise an additional measure of personal responsibility and do better about complying with CDC guidelines regarding preemptive measures: frequent hand washing, shelter in place except for essential tasks, and use face coverings/keep safe distances from others when in public (especially the former when the latter isn’t possible).

Of course, the Left, with its race-baiters at the fore, objected, vehemently and in their own racist way.

To assert that blacks have the power to affect their own destiny was deemed racist, heartless, and outrageous.

Well, of course it was. No less a light than that icon of the Progressive movement, Woodrow Wilson, insisted to blacks that they should be grateful for the protections of segregation.

Blacks, in the eyes of the Left, simply aren’t capable of personal responsibility.

Federal Money for Local Communities?

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That’s what Congressman Tim Ryan (D, OH) wants—and not just for States; he wants Federal dollars for local communities within the States.

I talk to my mayors every day, township trustees, they’re in a world of pain here. There’s no money coming in. There’s gonna be huge layoffs at the local level.
I think that [McConnell’s plan is] a strategy to let these states go bankrupt so that they can renegotiate the pensions and…renegotiate the contracts for the police and fire and get the wages down[.]

This is ignorant on a number of levels. On one level, Ryan obviously slept through his junior high school civics class. In our federal democracy structure, those mayors, township trustees, et al., lead the governments of communities of the State in which they’re resident, not communities under the jurisdiction of the Federal government. John Jay wanted the States to be nothing more than political bodies established for the purpose of enforcing Federal diktats, but fortunately, he lost that debate at our Constitutional Convention all those years ago.

It’s the State governments that are responsible for the communities within them.  Those mayors and trustees should be looking to their State governments for fiscal help, and it’s solely on those State governments to provide it, or to say “No, clean up your spending.”

On another level, Ryan slept deeply through those civics classes. States cannot go bankrupt, not as long as they have taxing authority. They have no need of Federal dollars.  Beyond that, the States that are in fiscal trouble need first to get their budgets in order, to cut their spending to fit within their revenues—to, among other things, fix their irresponsibly profligate public pension programs rather than demand money from the citizens of all the other States—which is what Federal monies are—to pay for their own foolishness.

On yet another level, there’s Ryan’s threat of huge layoffs at the local level. That would simply expose the government bloat that exists as much at the local level as it does at the State and Federal level. Most of those folks would be better off working in the private economy and so would those communities. The police and firemen about whom Ryan shed his crocodile tears would be better off, too: the payroll funds allocated to that bloated work force could be reallocated to the police and fire departments—and at no extra cost to the rest of the citizens of those local communities.

Judicial Abuse

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The Wall Street Journal has laid out the present abuse. DC Circuit nominee Justin Walker is up for confirmation hearings this week.  Now recall how the so-called watchdog of judicial ethics, the Codes of Conduct Committee tried to get potential judges disqualified from their nominations for the apostasy of belonging to the Federalist Society. There was considerable blowback over the Committee’s draft rule that would have affected the bar: 210 appellate and district judges signed a letter to the Committee demurring from the rule.

One of those letter signers was…Justin Walker. Now the Left, including particularly Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI), who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants to use that letter as the reason to disqualify Walker from the DC Circuit confirmation.

Note, now, that the Committee’s draft rule remains in draft; it has not been withdrawn from consideration.  At this point, the WSJ exposed a surprising naivete.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the official head of the Judicial Conference, and he should call Judge [Codes of Conduct Committee Chairman Ralph] Erickson and tell him to kill this draft forthwith.

Roberts has shown himself too timid and too mindful of his image in the press to make such a call.

On the other hand, his call isn’t strictly necessary: the Codes of Conduct Committee is a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. The latter, in turn, is a creation of the Congress.

It would be straightforward for an honest Congress to rein in the Code of Conduct Committee, to disband it altogether, to alter the Judicial Conference, to disband that body altogether, or to otherwise reform the Judicial Conference so as to eliminate abuses like those of its subordinate committees.

On the third hand, reform is especially difficult with the present House.

Look for an especially vitriolic “hearing” by the Judiciary Committee’s Progressive-Democrat members.