Americans are generally willing to make considerable sacrifices in order to pay the taxes that fund the most expensive public school system in the history of the world — even though the effectiveness of said schools in advancing our students much beyond what the rest the “first world” would call a fourth- or fifth-grade level [...]
The short version of the controversy over the state of Nevada seeking federal “Race to the Top” schooling dollars goes like this: The weak economy has left Nevada schools short of cash. “Race to the Top” participation would provide more federal dollars, but the program requires states to use student test scores to track how [...]
The phone rings at 7 in the morning. The phone rings at midnight. If we don’t answer the phone, letting the machine screen the calls, the patients leave interminable messages, explaining that the insurance company already paid, that the second test on their sexual plumbing wasn’t really necessary. It’s amazing the detail about their very [...]
Aiming for brevity, trying to avoid long strings of documentation already presented many times, I posted on Nov. 11 at www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/ a response to a letter-writing government schoolmarm who contends she should not be held responsible for the failure of her young charges to learn anything, since it’s all their parents’ fault. I answered, in [...]
In a speech before the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Tuesday, President Barack Obama embraced merit pay for teachers, spelling out a vision of education that, The Associated Press reports, “will almost certainly alienate union backers. “A strategy that ties teacher pay to student performance has for years been anathema to teachers’ unions, a powerful [...]
Preening that Nevada could lead the nation in linking job creation to energy efficiency, state Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford detailed his “green jobs” initiative to a legislative panel in Carson City last Friday. SB152 would use federal stimulus funds to train an estimated 3,200 workers at a cost of about $3,500 each, and cover [...]
A few weeks after Proposition 8 was approved by California voters back in November — banning same-sex marriage there — Professor John Matteson apparently assigned members of his public speaking class at Los Angeles City College to address the issue. Did the instructor actually expect all his students would adhere to the minority position — [...]
In the fourth and final installment of a series reporting results of a poll of nearly 70 Southern Nevada business owners and managers, published in Tuesday’s Review-Journal, 43 percent of respondents said local schools and colleges are “not at all effective” in preparing students for the workplace. A startling zero percent — not a one [...]
I see where the Review-Journal published without notable dissent (lede story, Page 2B, Jan. 16) another one of these cooked-up “report cards” on how Nevada is doing, this one from a Henderson-based outfit calling itself the Children’s Advocacy Alliance. As usual, the finding was: “We suck.” Oh, the state scored an A-minus for infant and [...]
The Nevada Democratic Party and its affiliated unions did a great job turning out voters for the Nov. 4 general election, and placing in the hands of many of those voters endorsement sheets “recommending” how they might vote — all the way down the ballot to the supposedly “non-partisan” elections for judgeships, school board, etc. [...]
Vin’s Blog at the RJ
