Friday, March 05, 2010

Life in "Progress" City

From the city of angels, Los Angeles, where there hasn't been a conservative in city government since Thag and Ga took their last dips in the Lebrea tar pits....

It is all but impossible to fire even the worst teachers if they’re members of United Teachers Los Angeles and work in the L.A. Unified School District. The union that spends millions on radio and TV ads telling you that more funding is needed “for our students” has forced the cash-strapped district to spend $3.5 million over the last 10 years “trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance.” Of those, “only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.”

So it’ll be interesting to see how vigorously UTLA stands behind the three Wadsworth Elementary School teachers accused not of poor performance but of political incorrectness. In a parade during Black History Month, they had some students carry pictures of O.J. Simpson, RuPaul, and Dennis Rodman—an act that has now sparked outrage from no less than Mayor Villaraigosa and district superintendent Ramon Cortines, who dispatched “a human relations and ethnic diversity team.”

But what’s the big deal? Simpson, RuPaul and Rodman are all black. All have made history. And February is called Black History Month, not “Black Hagiography Month.” It makes more sense to be upset that the powers-that-be allocated the shortest month of the year.

Besides, during the other months, American history in our public schools focuses obsessively on the country’s sins as opposed to its extraordinary accomplishments. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is now often better known for being a scumbag slaveholder than as the author of the Declaration of Independence, which accounts for why so many schools named Jefferson have either changed their names or tried to.

I've been doing this blog for about 3 and a half years and I'm still waiting for Mr./Ms "Progressive" out there to give me one example of something "progressives" that is either a) progressive b) effective or c) better run than the private sector.

I'm still waiting.

In fact, the entire universe is.

More....



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