New Paltz Journal II

This is essentially what the school district is arguing in defense of its renovation plan for the Middle School, which goes to the voters on Tuesday, February 9:

That the kids will get new wonderful learning spaces with fresh air and sunlight, a new energy-efficient building with a new heating system, and easier access to the gym and various parts of the building. And, of course, “studies” show that this is all very good. Fifty million dollars please. And if you buy all that today, we’ll throw in some solar panels to soothe the moral vanity of even the most wild-eyed environmentalists.

Got that? One of the members of the school board, rhapsodizing these wonders, insisted that there was not a thing in this plan that has been overdone — clean air is hard, and energy efficiency ain’t cheap, you see — and that this was no Rolls Royce: It is, in fact, a Prius! And there is some truth to it, because when it comes to this project the brakes clearly never worked, even if someone might have thought to apply them.

Remember, this is all for the children. That’s the big sales pitch, just how much this will mean to “21st Century learning” for the children. When I suggested in the comments section of that other New Paltz blog that it was about a lot of things before it was about the children, I was challenged to explain myself:

“And you still haven’t explained where you think it’s going to if not to the children, though you’re willing to make such veiled accusations.”

I’ll give you as brief an answer as I can about just one element of what this is about other than “for the children.”

The school district has huge contractual commitments to the teachers union (very high salaries, benefits, pensions). In order to meet those obligations in a community without a significant commercial tax base, the district needs to have wealthier homeowners move into the district. The Middle School, as is, is not physically a sales winner with people who look at the school system before moving anywhere. In brief, whatever the state of education in the Middle School, it lacks the allure for the better class of taxpayer that the district needs to maintain the financial commitments it has made.

To put it another way, the school district is in this community, but it is not particularly of this community. It is tied into the power establishment of public employee unions in Albany and into a state education bureaucracy that is further entangled with those unions. All of that gets squeezed into a very tight dress that tries to make it look like it’s “for the children of this lovely community,” but that is not the reality of it.

The personalities involved in the school district are unimportant. They were all carefully drawn into the solidarity of a particular sort of groupthink before they even stepped into their pre-established roles. The endeavors of the school district are endeavors for people who will endeavor for the school district. It repels critics with its institutional demeanor and its own invincible ignorance based in the rightness of itself as all-good object. And when it comes to the money of taxpayers, the school district sees it as its money. Hence the ludicrous “Prius defense” for a bloated project to be floated on top of a bloated, overfunded school system. The appeal to moral vanity would be gaspingly funny if it were not so absurdly expensive.

It would take the “paltry sum” of $10 million to repair and upgrade the Middle School and make it serviceable for a long time. That was the conclusion of a report put together five years ago. But add in a little fresh air and natural lighting and those spectacular “21st Century learning spaces” and Voila!, your Prius is brought around from the parking garage by a honking goose and the tip is just $50 million.

It’s, it’s, just magic!

Nothing against architecture, or buildings, but if you examine the question of “public schools” and “school buildings” carefully, in light of all the much better alternatives to them, the only justification for them that is left at the end is the babysitting function. The “school system” in the form of the “school building” is functionally the place to send kids so that someone else can watch them for six or seven hours a day.

The fact that the state compels parents to send children to these schools has created the culture of “schooling.” This culture does not necessarily have a strong relationship with learning, and may in fact have an inverse relationship with it.

The “learning space of the 21st Century” is cyberspace. The kids already know that, even if the parents and education bureaucrats and public employee unions do not. The marketplace for learning in cyberspace could be compared to 10,000 department stores stacked atop one another, but even that might be too modest an analogy.

The kid determined to be a car mechanic or a plumber or both can get all of the conceptual work to prepare for that done online and be ready to try work while still in his teens. It’s the same for every interest in virtually any field. If the goal is to become a physicist, get to it and be ready for the online courses available from MIT by the age of thirteen or fourteen. The modalities evolve so quickly that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them. A student could have twenty different online algebra courses thrown at him and still wind up finding a twenty-first that more precisely fits his way of learning. Students who don’t like one teaching approach can audition five more in fifteen minutes.

The public school curriculum is not a force for learning; it’s a static model that purposely limits learning.

Again, get past the babysitting function of the public school paradigm and you’ll understand that the day the shovel goes in the ground for the next “school building” it will already be a quarter century out of date.

The public policy purpose for forcing kids into schools was to get them to learn, to give them the tools to develop mind and character. The schools might serve other functions, unconnected with learning, but the very concept of them as necessary places of learning holds no water, at all, anymore.

Reader ML on socialism:

“When all share equally in the bounty of the earth, who will get to summer on Nantucket?”

Hayek is obviously very old here, and he’s having some difficulty. But this is a genius. Listen carefully:

Hayek on the “knowledge problem”:

It sounds like the preliminaries for that are underway:

Asked by Sen. George LeMieux, R-Fla., why the United States restricted questioning of the suspect in the attempted airliner bombing of Dec. 25 when it typically places no such limit on interrogation of terrorism suspects taken off the battlefield, Gates said, “That’s a question better addressed to the attorney general, sir.”

Strike one: He was the Clinton bag man on the Marc Rich pardon, and shouldn’t have been nominated for AG in the first place.

Strike two: His law firm represents several Guantanamo terrorists, and he shouldn’t have been nominated in the first place.

Strike three: He conspired with Obama to try 9/11 mastermind KSM in a civilian court instead of before a military commission.

Bonus strike four: Mirandizing the Christmas Day bomber instead of having him questioned as an enemy combatant.

The bus can’t come soon enough or fast enough.

But just the idea that the reprehensible schmuck Charles Schumer could be ousted from the U.S. Senate is too great a temptation.

So, I say, go for it, Larry.

The great David Horowitz, for whom my admiration continues to grow, on Howard Zinn (you have to scroll down the page a bit):

I’m uncomfortable with calling Zinn a “wicked man” and thereby putting him in the same category with child molesters such as Daniel Ortega and mass murderers like Stalin and [Pol] Pot, though Zinn actively abetted and supported all three. Howard Zinn was a fool with wicked ideas and wicked allegiances which continued to his last breath.

I have no such discomfort. I saw Zinn on CSPAN this past year sitting and talking with the writer Walter Mosley and “wicked” would be an easy call going by the debased, America-hating, rotten liar I heard. Like Horowitz, I long ago recovered from the America hatred induced by your average American university experience. I was in and out of that trap before I had even heard of Zinn, but I knew exactly what he was, aside from the folksy and rotten cracker-barrel Marxist he tried to come off as.

It is appalling to me that Zinn’s monstrous pile of crap, the fake history that I call “America With All the Good Parts Left Out,” has seeped down into public schools. And anyone who would promote it to young people is my enemy. That is a line that I will draw, happily.

Especially during the first hour, it was a driver’s side collision by an S&M video game featuring rubber-clad robots into a satanic mass that had run a red light.

Ghastliness interrupted momentarily here and there by a few people trying to be human.

The target audience seemed to be a co-ed sleepover exclusively for twelve-year-olds whose parents sniff glue.

I missed Lady Gaga’s opening act and only stepped into the room while she and Elton John were having it out over a couple of pianos. Gaga’s appeal I get. She’s a classical mystery slut, something I’ve always been a sucker for (you know who your are).

Pink arrived on the scene, and it must have been a while since I’ve seen her, because I hadn’t realized she had turned into Brigitte Nielson. She strutted forth and dropped her gown before being hoisted to the rafters in some sort of stunt that dazzled the audience of celebrities and their hangers-on. Madam Vandam commented that it was like Cirque du Soleil. I corrected that to Circlejerk du Soleil.

But don’t let me leave the impression that there was anything original going on at the Grammys. Lots of hackneyed horseshit was recycled, some of it from as far back as Weimar Germany.

I did finally find a New Year’s resolution, one month after the fact: Pay more attention to popular culture.

I suspected that the push-back against the Obama administration on its counterterrorism policies was only superficially political. My guess was that the real shoving was coming from the national security people. And that did indeed surface in yesterday’s Wasington Post in the form of an op-ed column by General Michael Hayden, who was the Director of the CIA prior to Leon Panetta, the current DCI. Hayden is clearly not speaking just for himself.

For instance, this blistering take-down of the way the Christmas Day bomber was handled:

We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not “an isolated extremist.” He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.

In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits?

When questioning its detainees, the CIA routinely turns the information provided over to its experts for verification and recommendations for follow-up. The responses of these experts — “Press him more on this, he knows the details” or “First time we’ve heard that” — helps set up more detailed questioning.

None of that happened in Detroit. In fact, we ensured that it wouldn’t. After the first session, the FBI Mirandized Abdulmutallab and — to preserve a potential prosecution — sent in a “clean team” of agents who could have no knowledge of what Abdulmutallab had provided before he was given his constitutional warnings. As has been widely reported, Abdulmutallab then exercised his right to remain silent.

In retrospect, the inadvisability of this approach seems self-evident. Perhaps it didn’t appear that way on Dec. 25 because we have, over the past year, become acclimated to certain patterns of thought.

It seems to me that the national security insiders, who don’t usually like to get involved in policy, do believe that actually defending the country is settled policy and not subject to revision. When someone like Hayden surfaces with this sort of blast it’s because he speaks for a “they” who see this counterterrorism devolution as intentional.

And that element of intentionality, my friends, is a more serious thing than we usually permit ourselves to imagine.

About to hit the mailboxes of every resident in the New Paltz Central School District is the district’s Winter 2010 Newsletter, already available online.

The newsletter is all about the proposed $50 million renovation project for the Middle School building. The public will vote on February 9th on whether to allow the district to borrow approximately $30 million to finance the project.

Issuing this newsletter now was the perfect opportunity for the school district to lay out the exact costs of the project, but if fails to do so. Instead of coming across with candid black and white numbers, the newsletter is more of a promotional brochure that soft-pedals the real costs by making no mention of the approximately $15 million in interest that taxpayers will be responsible for.

It mentions only the capital costs to taxpayers of $29,750,000 (which assumes that the state will kick in $20 million). Nothing is said in the newsletter about the interest on that capital cost.

In an online discussion about this, I asked a member of the school board if this was honest, and the answer I got was that this is a common practice.

Well, O.K., but is it honest?

Also, the newsletter fails to explain the current debt of the school district, i.e., the current unpaid principal and the interest owed on that.

Consequently, there is no clear number for the total debt (principal and interest) that taxpayers would be liable for if they approve the Middle School project on February 9.

This lack of candor and clarity also throws into doubt the number that the district gives as the average monthly increase in taxes over twenty years on a median-priced home. It’s not possible to ascertain how the district arrives at that number.

Mark Steyn on misstatements about the union:

In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.

In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants.

In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.

In France a group of top gynecologists led by M. Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.

But in America Barack Obama is talking.

Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 70 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, “After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle.”

Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court. He whined about all the problems he inherited. He demanded Congress put a jobs bill on his desk. Or was it a desk job on his bill? No matter. He does Nixon impressions, too: “We do not quit,” he said.

Boy, you can say that again!

It’s the learn any language you want to wing.

Here’s something from the video archaeology dig. A fascinating two-part YouTube of a 60 Minutes segment from about a quarter century ago. It’s about the “diversity” movement in the U.K. back then. Have you taken a recent look at the public schools in the U.S.? How’s that “we’re replacing your values with ours” thing going here?