Oprah & The Kids
Okay, I'll be upfront from the get-go here...I don't really like Oprah Winfrey. I don't think her show is any better than any other tabloid show, and her magazine is a shrine to herself. Having said that, I must agree with Star Parker in her column today. A lot of people are giving Winfrey grief regarding the $40 million she spent to open a school in South Africa, griping about how she should have spent it here, etc. Well, as Parker points out, the bottom line is it's Oprah's money. She can spend it as she pleases. From the article:
"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going," she says in a Newsweek story about her new school. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they say an iPod or some sneakers."
In an interview in USA Today, Winfrey says when she has tried to help kids in this country, "I have failed."
This is not to say that Oprah has a clue about what will work to help these kids. But she sure has a feel for what doesn't. And that is simply going into America's inner cities and giving out money.
Are you paying attention Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Black leaders around the country who relentlessly defend a failing status quo despite reams of evidence that we need to do something different?
If we're really looking to be critical about how money is spent, how about a little more attention to those who spend other people's money rather than on those who spend their own.
Throwing money at the problems rather than really trying to DO something about them is the way the Democrats have done things for as long as I can remember. When it doesn't work, rather than try something different and maybe making some tough decisions, they want to throw MORE money at it. Welfare was like that for a long, long time.
There are a lot of teachers in my family; wonderful, good people. However, mess with their "turf," and you're the bad guy. They are upset now because Mitch Daniels, our governor, has had to make some tough decisions to clean up the mess the Democrats made of our system, and that has resulted in some cuts in the education budget that they're really yowling about. From what I've seen, what he has done has been the right thing, but people always throw stones at the ones who have the guts to actually try and make things better, rather than smoothing over the problems with more money. Give more money to the schools, and you're automatically the good guy. Make them spend what they have more efficiently, and you're the bad guy.
To illustrate this point, Star points this out:
How about our Department of Education, with a budget of $90 billion this year? DOE got started in 1979, compliments of President Carter, with a budget of $14 billion. Anybody out there think our kids are doing six times better on tests?
Despite appropriations for elementary and secondary education that are, in real dollars, more than 50% higher today than in 1980, reading scores for 9-year-old kids are virtually unchanged.
The bottom line:
That is, when things aren't working well, you've got to look for fundamentally different approaches to the problem at hand.
This is exactly what the political establishment and the teachers' unions fight to prevent in education. It's because their goal is not to deliver the best possible product to their customers, the kids, but protection of their own interests. Innovators whose goal is the best possible product will try anything to achieve that end, that goal, that very best result.
It's too bad that the teachers' unions are not first and foremost interested in the education of our children. But that's the way it is.
"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going," she says in a Newsweek story about her new school. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they say an iPod or some sneakers."
In an interview in USA Today, Winfrey says when she has tried to help kids in this country, "I have failed."
This is not to say that Oprah has a clue about what will work to help these kids. But she sure has a feel for what doesn't. And that is simply going into America's inner cities and giving out money.
Are you paying attention Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Black leaders around the country who relentlessly defend a failing status quo despite reams of evidence that we need to do something different?
If we're really looking to be critical about how money is spent, how about a little more attention to those who spend other people's money rather than on those who spend their own.
Throwing money at the problems rather than really trying to DO something about them is the way the Democrats have done things for as long as I can remember. When it doesn't work, rather than try something different and maybe making some tough decisions, they want to throw MORE money at it. Welfare was like that for a long, long time.
There are a lot of teachers in my family; wonderful, good people. However, mess with their "turf," and you're the bad guy. They are upset now because Mitch Daniels, our governor, has had to make some tough decisions to clean up the mess the Democrats made of our system, and that has resulted in some cuts in the education budget that they're really yowling about. From what I've seen, what he has done has been the right thing, but people always throw stones at the ones who have the guts to actually try and make things better, rather than smoothing over the problems with more money. Give more money to the schools, and you're automatically the good guy. Make them spend what they have more efficiently, and you're the bad guy.
To illustrate this point, Star points this out:
How about our Department of Education, with a budget of $90 billion this year? DOE got started in 1979, compliments of President Carter, with a budget of $14 billion. Anybody out there think our kids are doing six times better on tests?
Despite appropriations for elementary and secondary education that are, in real dollars, more than 50% higher today than in 1980, reading scores for 9-year-old kids are virtually unchanged.
The bottom line:
That is, when things aren't working well, you've got to look for fundamentally different approaches to the problem at hand.
This is exactly what the political establishment and the teachers' unions fight to prevent in education. It's because their goal is not to deliver the best possible product to their customers, the kids, but protection of their own interests. Innovators whose goal is the best possible product will try anything to achieve that end, that goal, that very best result.
It's too bad that the teachers' unions are not first and foremost interested in the education of our children. But that's the way it is.
posted by Jennifer at 7:05 AM
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