What happens when a billionaire gives $100 Million to a corrupt, self-serving bureaucracy? Answer: Bureaucrats and their buddies in the consulting business got to buy vacation homes.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a splash by announcing his plan to give $100million to help turn around Newark, New Jersey’s public schools in an appearance on Oprah in 2010. 

But nearly four years later, Zuckerberg’s money has run out, having been spent mostly on labor contracts and consulting fees with no noticeable improvement in student performance, a report in the New Yorker reveals.

Zuckerberg’s money has mostly gone into the early stages of overhaul, paying consultants upwards of $1,000 a day to find solutions to Newark public schools’ problems.

According to the report, between 2010 and 2012 ‘more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms and various specialities: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, [and] teacher evaluations.’

The bureaucrats and consultants got richer; and the kids got nada.

My utter lack of faith in Government, vindicated once again.

The New York Post published a story on a NYC High School program called ‘Blended Learning’ which allowed students to take courses on-line for credit – nothing inherently wrong with that – exccept this ‘Blended Learning’ program was a joke. The coursework was ridiculously easy, there were no controls to prevent cheating, and students demonstrated no mastery of the material after completing the online course.  Students began blowing off normal classroom work because ‘blended learning’ was so much easier and credits counted the same.

So, after the Post did its expose, students were encouraged by the school’s administrators to write letters defending the program. The results were, to summarize in one word, FAIL.

“What do you get of giving false accusations im one of the students that has blended learning I had a course of English and I passed and and it helped a lot you’re a reported your support to get truth information other than starting rumors . . .”

Blended learing is actaully helping us all who need the credit to graduate on time cause we dont want to be left behind. we need to move on with our lives.

“Us as New York City Students deserve respect and encouragement. We are the future of New York City and for some students, The future of the country.”

All of these students are now eminently qualified to leave comments at Breitbart.com stating how stupid they think Sarah Palin is.

Philadelphia Schools are embroiled in a cheating scandal. Teachers and administrators helped kids cheat to get better scores on assessment tests. The teacher’s union claim it’s the fault of Government officials for demanding that they teach kids things.

“Do you know how many of us sat in meetings with our bosses and were told, ‘You have to bring your scores up’?” Robert McGrogan, a one-time Philadelphia principal told the Inquirer. “There was no how-to book given to us.

Sir, you call yourself an “educator.” Figuring out how to teach kids math, reading, and science is supposed to be your job. Supposedly, you want to college and got a degree in that. And now you’re claiming you’re too stupid and incompetent to do it without a manual?

A public school teacher in Michigan was convicted of molesting a 13 year old boy. (Statistically, children are 100 times more likely to be abused by a public school employee than by an official of the Roman Catholic Church.)

He was rightfully sent to prison, but not before several of his unionized, public education colleagues weighed on his behalf, arguing for leniency and understanding.

In her leniency letter, (a fellow teacher) wrote that Neal losing his teaching certificate, coupled with the parole that will prevent him from molesting other children is “steep enough of punishments that a long incarceration term is not warranted on top of that.”
…
Social studies teacher Amy Huber Eagan, wife of school board member Mike Eagan, said that Neal “has been, and will be, greatly missed in the educational arena,” which Huber Eagan feels “in and of itself has been a huge punishment to Neal.”

Huber Eagan beseeched the judge, “considering all the circumstances surrounding the case… Neal [should] be given the absolute minimum sentence.”

In the latest “in yer face, taxpayers” move, the teacher’s union is suing to collect the molester’s severance pay. Because prison subscriptions to Highlights magazine cost money, yo!

The Roman Catholic Church was sued for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the progressive left is still bashing them constantly for covering up and enabling the sexual abuse of children. But when a public school teacher’s union does the same thing, there is no outcry in the liberal left media. Why is that? Could it be because teacher’s unions are such loyal and generous members of the social democrat coalition?

I’ve seen two examples this week of jaw-droppingly appalling liberal logic which, I figure, just have to be shared in the same way that unusual specimens belong in a museum.

The first one appeared in Salon on Tuesday, and it purports to be a treatise on the necessity of “positive” rights.  It says that the original Bill of Rights doesn’t go very far, and conservatives are foolish and “short-sighted” to insist that those rights are essential and shouldn’t be tampered with.  According to the author of the piece, Michael Lind, what we really need is to endorse FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights”–which includes things like the right to a job, to a good home, and to medical care and good health.  Lind writes: “FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, and similar proposals, are not intended to replace the original bill of rights, but only to supplement it. Progressives believe that we should have both the right to free speech and the right to minimal healthcare at public expense.”

Lind’s article uses both appeals to authority (FDR and Cass Sunstein) and some sleight of hand to avoid tackling the very real contention that we can’t demand “positive rights” at other’s expense without in some sense enslaving those who are tasked with providing or paying for those “rights.”

In a brief rebuttal at PJ Media, Stephen Kruiser cites his own, contrary authority:

The negative/positive rights debate is brilliantly explored by Richard A. Epstein in his book Mortal Peril. He begins with a general discussion but his focus is on American health care. He points out that the positive rights frenzy contains “certain remnants of a discredited socialism” and that “…the protection of these newly minted positive rights invests government at all levels with vast powers to tax, to regulate, and to hire and fire the very individuals whose rights it is duty-bound to protect.”

The story, of course, is one we’ve seen over and over. The government continues to bloat itself as the social welfare state grows and in the process more rights are trampled upon than created.

The title of Epstein’s treatise can apply just as easily to the second, even more stunning example of liberal logic, which I saw linked by several folks on Facebook today.  It’s an article in Slate entitled “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person: A Manifesto.”  The idea behind the article by Allison Benedikt is that public schools are ruined because students whose parents care enough about educational quality to devote their own resources to education aren’t forced to remain in the public school system.

Nowhere does it occur to this genius that perhaps the real problems with the public schools have to do with the teachers’ unions or with the educational bureaucracy which has arisen at public expense.  No, according to this author, the solution to all the problems with the public school system is that if everyone has to go, they will get better because parents will demand it, even if some large number of kids who would or could have had better options has to be sacrificed for the sake of liberal mediocrity.  (You really do need to read the article to believe it is not some sort of ridiculous hoax.  Even the usually liberal crowd of commenters at Slate are put off by the article.)

A much saner, contrary view appeared several days ago (before the absurd Slate article was published) at the Sippican Cottage blog (hat tip Transterrestrial Musings).  The whole piece is worth reading, but this excerpt nicely encapsulates the tone of the piece:

You see, there are no public schools in America that I know of. They’re reeducation camps for people that weren’t educated in the first place, maybe, or little prisons, or pleasure domes for creepy teachers, or places where tubby women work out their neuroses about eating on helpless children at lunchtime — but there’s not much schooling going on in school. A public school is a really expensive, but shabby and ineffectual, private school that collects their tuition with the threat of eviction from your house.

To liberal “thinkers” like Allison Benedikt and Michael Lind, unfortunately, that sort of a situation apparently sounds like a “great society.”

My new piece is up at Watchdog Wire, North Carolina.  After all, it is School Choice Week!

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)