Tag Archives: politics

Two Mistakes

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One is by the Department of Education, and one is by “some college presidents.”

Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said he wants accreditors to “do more to address substandard and underperforming institutions” by focusing their efforts on weak schools while reviewing elite schools less rigorously.

Sure. Because the Harvards and Dartmouths of college-dom are such paragons of free speech, diversity of ideas, and quality teaching. Never mind that elite school elite professors spend more of their time doing government-funded research than they spend in the classroom doing actual teaching.

The “college presidents'” mistake is this:

[S]ome college presidents worry that judging schools by things like graduation rates could mean that high-risk students will have less access to higher education.

If these schools have poor graduation rates, to what education have their students had access? These college presidents are conflating access to higher education institutions with access to higher education. Apparently, they don’t take their own institutions’ Logic 101 courses seriously. Or those courses are poorly taught.

Left unaddressed by both is another matter, described by a college president who’s willing to be named. John Bassett, President of Heritage University, is on the right track.

I think you need a better measuring stick than how many diplomas you hand out. I think you have to be very careful of unintended consequences. If you focus on graduation rates, then you incentivize schools to target wealthy and middle-class kids and not go after anybody else.

Focusing on graduation rates also drives fudging standards in order to prop up graduation rates. There’s no higher education for students there, either.

Here’s a thought; bear with me, apparently I’m on new ground here. How about focusing on rates of employment in their chosen major field for graduating students in a period (say, six months to five years) following graduation?

Graduating students who do well and become employed will identify a number of useful trends for the schools who graduated them and the Federal government that hectors the schools: the schools are teaching well, the schools are teaching marketable skills, and the schools are producing graduates less likely to default on their student loans because they have actual jobs and an income that enables them to pay their debts.

Compromise

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The AP had a piece on FoxNewsOnline that, among other things, expressed hope that in President Barack Obama’s (D) last year sitting in the President’s chair, there can be some compromise between him and Congress’ Republican leadership, that the two can work together.

Searching for potential compromise, President Barack Obama brought the Republicans who run the House and Senate to the White House on Tuesday to try to hash out an agenda for his final year, even as his top legislative priorities appear to be losing steam.

The hope, though, hinges on a question for a man who has spent the last seven years denigrating and insulting the intelligence and patriotism of Republicans—every single one of them.

The question is this: when will Obama start working with Republicans, when will he actually be willing to compromise?

Gross Incompetence?

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As if we didn’t need another reason to disband the Department of Education (see its Dear Colleague letter for an example of its gross dishonesty), here’s another, of utter failure to perform. DoE isn’t taking care of its digital data.

The Education Department doesn’t hold nuclear launch codes. But its vast data trove on student-loan borrowers and their parents—and the nearly $100 billion it disburses in new loans every year—are reason enough to want the bureaucrats to prevent digital intrusions. ….
The stakes go well beyond personal privacy. Federal student loans outstanding exceed $1 trillion, and Team Obama is trying to forgive those debts. It would add injury to injury if cyber-fraudsters were able to pile on for a taxpayer plundering.

It isn’t a matter of an isolated error, even a serious one, which can happen in any large enterprise, either.

Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe reported in November that her team has been “finding the same deficiencies over and over again” regarding information security. Since 2009 independent auditors “have found persistent IT control deficiencies in key financial systems,” she said.

For six years, auditors have found persistent DoE IT failure. This is not an inability to achieve perfection in personal digital data handling; this is a conscious and deliberate refusal to bother.

We don’t need a Federal government Department of this sort. Not at all.

Respect for Borders

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In addition to what it is showing with its sea grab, the PRC is demonstrating it has no respect for land borders, either. The PRC is actively sending its government forces—non-military, so far—into other nations to kidnap persons there that the PRC wants and bringing them back within the PRC’s borders.

Among those who have disappeared or been repatriated amid President Xi Jinping’s growing crackdown on dissent, rights groups say, are five Hong Kong publishers of Chinese political gossip, including one who was in the territory and one in Thailand at the time. Others in Thailand include a journalist seeking refuge, two activists who were recognized as refugees by the United Nations, and dozens of Turkic Uighur minority members. Two in the group are European citizens.

Ultimately, the victim nations are going to have to start defending themselves against what is little distinguishable from PRC invasions, capture the invading forces, and either jail them for espionage or imprison them as POWs in the quiet war the PRC is inflicting on them.

This is another response to the vacuum President Barack Obama’s (D) retreat from the world has created.

Voter Identification

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North Carolina’s Voter ID law is before the Federal Middle District of North Carolina with closing arguments just completed. The beef centers on the NAACP’s complaint (joined by the Obama administration) that voter identification is racist. Of course. What disagrees with the Left must be racist.

North Carolina’s law requires a prospective voter to have one of six forms of photographic identification, reduces the number of days of early voting, eliminates same day registration, and allows voters to cast provisional ballots if they say (not show) that they cannot meet the requirements (if a voter meets the requirements within a generous time frame after the voting, his provisional ballot becomes official).

The NAACP and the Obama DoJ think this is too onerous, and it disproportionately affects minorities.

This, though, is simply the racism of low expectations; it says the minorities are inherently less capable than other groups who do routinely meet these requirements.

Six forms of photo ID: driver license, driver license or non-operator identification, passport, tribal enrollment card, VA ID card, US military ID card. If a voter can’t get a photo ID, he has alternatives:

Provide their date of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number, or present their current voter registration card or a copy of an acceptable document bearing their name and address. (Acceptable documents include a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government-issued document.)

Anyone who says minorities are unable to satisfy those alternatives is simply insulting that minority—and doing it on the basis of race. Of course, there will be an occasional exception who truly cannot, but these isolated occurrences do not invalidate the requirement, they simply fall into a special handling category.

Reduced early voting days: there’s no requirement to have any early voting days at all; this is nothing more than a courtesy to reduce the need for absentee ballot handling. There’s an advantage to the voter, too, to reducing the number of days for early voting: it allows the voter more time to collect information about the candidates—a late-breaking announcement of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s criminal indictment, for instance, or of a fifth filing for bankruptcy by a company owned by Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

No same day registration: this is no impediment at all; it works to the voter’s advantage, especially for the voter who has not been able to get a photo ID. Aside from reducing the lines at a polling place by not having to process same day registrations, it gives both the voter and the state more time to process the information the voter provides in order to cast a provisional ballot.

The NAACP and the DoJ are making a bogus beef. There are few things more central to our freedom than the sanctity of an American’s vote, and keeping that vote from being diluted or effectively canceled by an ineligible voter is central to protecting that vote. Photo IDs—proving that the prospective voter is who he says he is—is central to that centrality.

The courts have had a good track record in those cases selected by me for commentary at reaching proper decisions. Maybe this court also will reach a proper decision. An American’s vote certainly demands it.