There’s a doozey of a tale (and I use that term very literally) up on Andrew Breitbart’s website “Big Government”. For those who don’t remember, or who tend to block out bad memories, Andrew Breitbart is the racist conservative who got his start suckling on Matt Drudges nipple before branching out to other, more dastardly things like heavily editing videos of African American government employees so that they appear racist and get fired.
Needless to say, your hopes shouldn’t be high for a well researched, thought provoking piece of journalism. What Breitbart publishes is more akin to buffalo dung: It’s Big and splashy but stinks to high heaven.
The story is headlined, “Time to Stop Blaming Public School Problems on Lack of Funding” and the author’s (Alexander Marlow) disdain for public education becomes evident in the first paragraph as he refers to a well-regarded Los Angeles-area music and arts high school as “a juvenile detention center”.
Despite the headline, the last time I checked public schools were 100% funded by the state and federal government, so when a school district like Los Angeles Unified has a projected deficit of $500 million for the next fiscal year, I’m pretty sure you can blame the problem on lack of funding.
Next up on the author’s list of reasons why he hates public education: Drugs.
An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium
Kids doing drugs in school? Obviously nobody condones what his “anonymous” source told him, but are we to believe that drug abuse among students is a problem reserved only to liberal areas? The author must think his readers are idiots. The author clearly knows his "Big Government" audience.
At long last the author gets to the crux of his argument. That lack of funding isn’t the problem, it’s…
One of reasons we’re in this mess is because tax rates are already so damn high in this state (not to mention in the city of Los Angeles) that businesses are leaving in droves and taking their jobs, and potential tax revenue, with them.
Well now I’m confused.
Is the problem for schools lack of funding/revenue or is it not? Because the headline says it's not the problem, but then right there in blank ink (actually black rendered pixels) the author says lack of revenue is the problem!
I’ll let you in on a secret. The problem is lack of funding. And a decrease in tax revenue has almost everything to do with it. But contrary to what the author would have you believe, it is not “Liberal LA’s high taxes” that has led to a decline in revenue. It actually has something to do with that pesky little recession we're trying to pull ourselves out of.
According to the Tax Foundation, a DC-based conservative think tank, Texas ranked 13th out of the 50 states for “best business tax climate” in 2011. California ranked 49th.
Despite a supposedly great business climate, one that the author insists is the key to fully funded and all-around perfect education, Texas is proposing $10 billion in cuts to education in order to close the states approximately $27 billion deficit.
The facts just don’t line up for the author. Maybe for his next article Alexander Marlow should attack education from the angle that he clearly did not receive a very good one.
Crossposted at Gabbing with Graff
