Teabagger Maine Governor LePage plans to file legislation to force high school districts to pay for the remedial college classes for their graduates. This is his knee-jerk response to the declining state of Maine schools and test scores. Rather than look at what successful states are doing (like Massachusetts), he wants to take the punitive approach and force the rapid depletion of school district budgets in an obvious attempt to use their demise as an excuse to propose widespread privatization of the school system.
The ironic twist is that what he proposes isn't conservative; it's just plain stupid.
Kennebec Journal Report of Maine Gov Proposal
The governor says the reputation of Maine's schools is suffering nationally.
"I don't care where you go in this country – if you come from Maine, you're looked down upon now."
"The parents of this state pay taxes for public education, then they have to pay a second time when their kids enter college," LePage said. "That's inappropriate."
Fifty-four percent of students entering the Maine Community College System need to re-learn basic skills, as do 20 to 25 percent of students at the state's four-year universities,
So in his too-often-dipped teabagged mind, he thinks that forcing the local property tax payers to pay for the remedial college classes for every high school graduate that didn't take their studies seriously is a smart thing to do.
Let's get this straight, high school districts will be FORCED to pay for:
— every stoner who didn't pay attention in English class
— every jock who realized in August that the football scholarship to Penn State
wasn't going to happen.
— every student who didn't take it seriously in high school and now wants you to
pay for them to take it seriously now.
And who will pay for these classes? Local school districts are funded largely by property taxes. So my elderly parents who live primarily on social security will have to pay additional property taxes so that some stoner can get a remedial college course because they couldn't focus in physics class.
Of course, there is an alternative. Like all unfunded mandates, the state will offer no more money to compensate for the mandate and the city will refuse to raise property taxes. Thus the money to educate our children will be siphoned off to pay for remedial classes for stoner-boy. The result is predictable: more students/class, less learning material, delayed repairs to education infrastructure.
What happened to "Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and the "rugged individualism" that republicans brag endlessly about? What happened to accountability and responsibility? Why are these students being coddled and treated like college is a T-Ball game (everyone gets a trophy in T-Ball)?
This monumentally stupid idea needs to be defeated before it can ever get a moment of traction. It would financially destroy school districts. Considering the stupidity of the proposal, you have to assume that the real intent is to accelerate the disintegration of public schools so the GOP can outsource education to private religious institutions as soon as possible. Now that's republican...