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Tuesday February 9, 2010 
by Christopher Chantrill

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The End of Health Care As We Know It How Will Immigration Issue Break?

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Romney's Six Point Education Plan

by Christopher Chantrill
April 10, 2006 at 3:38 pm

THEY SAY THAT Bill Clinton’s great success in the presidency was that he acted like a governor. After the failure of tax increases and Hillarycare in his first two years he focused on close-to-home issues like midnight basketball and 100,000 cops that are the sort of issue that you expect city mayors and state governors to deal in. Still, it probably helped him win the soccer-mom vote.

George W. Bush did the same thing, campaigning for No Child Left Behind, and passing a pale shadow of his plan once elected.

Now comes presidential hopeful Governor Mitt Romney with more governor stuff, a carefully placed article about education in the Washington Times.

If you are a Democrat, then education is simple. More funding for education—and your number one special interest, teachers.

But a Republican like Mitt Romney has to be more careful. He can’t say that teachers are rent-seeking scoundrels comparable in greed to the worst robber barons of the 19th century. He can’t say that partly because it’s not nice and partly because there are hundreds of thousands of nice teachers who believe what their union has told them, and really believe that they are underpaid and overworked. So a Republican has to weave and dodge. He will want to curb the rent-seeking; he will want to recommend school choice, but he will want to be nice about it. So here’s what Romney comes up with.

1) Make teaching a true profession.

Translation: break the union.

2) Let the leaders lead.

Translation: break the union.

3) Measure up.

Translation: unless we can test we don’t have a clue what they are doing with our money.

4) Let freedom ring.

Translation: Break the union.

5) Pull in the parents... For our lowest-performing schools, I've proposed mandatory parental preparation courses. Over two days, parents learn about America's education culture, homework, school discipline, available after-school programs, what TV is harmful or helpful and so on.
6) Raise the bar. Our kids need to be pushed harder. Less about self-esteem; more about learning.

Good luck with the union, Mitt old chum.

Mitt Romney is coming up with some unexceptional ideas here. But at least they take one small step along a long road back from the dreadful mess we have got ourselves into. It is the mess that Horace Mann got us into 160 years ago with the idea that government-driven education would be better than parent-driven education. What a grand idea it seemed back then. What a dreadful waste of $500 billion a year it has turned out to be.

And what an injustice it is to impose the system upon our nation’s children.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com.  His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.


 TAGS


What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican


Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State


Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph


Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self


Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion


Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America


Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital


German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West


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