Tag Archives: common sense

Hide-and-seek can be a lot of fun, but not when someone else — especially some big group — is playing it with your money. That’s why my friends at the Independence Institute make such a big deal about government spending transparency. But what about transparency for teachers who belong to, or have to pay fees to, a union? Following the story of the Indiana state teachers union that lost millions of dollars of members’ money through gross mismanagement, James Sherk and Dan Lips from the Heritage Foundation wrote a great piece for yesterday’s National Review Online called “Shady Dealings”. They explain how teachers unions have fought having to shine light on their financial activities:

It’s been a couple months now since the Democrats running Colorado’s House Education Committee went out of their way to double-super kill school spending transparency. But no matter how uncomfortable it may make some politicians feel, the issue simply is not going to go away. The Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell points us to a new Education Week column that explains why school officials really are without excuse when it comes to true financial transparency:

You know how this almost-six-year-old is no fan of the huge spending bill the President flew out here to sign last week. While it sounds nice on paper, I’m here to clue you in to the fact we aren’t going to be saved by a “magical money tree”. In the meantime, my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has a tip on how to make the best out of a bad situation. As he writes in yesterday’s edition of the Colorado Daily – if nearly a billion dollars is going to flow into Colorado for the purposes of K-12 education, let’s at least attach it to some serious and radical reforms: If the federal government is bound to spend untold billions it doesn’t have on education, nearly all would be better served by a student-centered approach to distributing the funds. Washington would do much better to offer incentives to states and school districts that attach funds directly to students, empowering families with a wide array of public schooling options. After all, parents best know how to make use of the money to meet their children’s needs. The so-called “stimulus” is a fait accompli. Yet for all the mammoth debt, the […]

I’m at home. My parents said the break from school is for something called Presidents Day. Among other things, our greatest presidents were gifted with tremendous common sense. While that often doesn’t seem to be the case with the way our public school system is run, a couple stories in the news give me a little hope that this might change. First, it’s good to see Boulder students tell their peers that the idea to rename a high school after a President who has been in office less than a month, who has accomplished nothing of significance, and who already has broken several campaign promises, is truly the height of silliness. Second, it’s good to see Aurora student Marie Morrow, who was busted for having a fake gun drill prop in her truck at school, is not suspended anymore. Now if we can do something to fix the “zero-tolerance” absurdity, we may have gained something positive from this experience. It’s truly hard to imagine what great men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would have to say about cases like the ones in Boulder and Aurora. But welcome to Colorado in the year 2009.