Recent Comments
Re: “The Economic and Educational Inequity of Results-Based Funding”
As long as we have high rates of immigration, we will lack the social cohesion to adequately fund poorer schools. It's basic in-group/out-group dynamics. But the cheap labor industries are still in charge in Washington and have successfully brainwashed the entire left into believing that reducing immigration is equivalent to racism, so don't expect a change any time soon.
Re: “A Needed Prescription”
" he was faced with two options: remain in a job he wished to leave, or live without insurance"
Yeah, sometimes we have to make sacrifices rather than have others make them for us.
Re: “Triple Play”
"She also copped to voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in last year's presidential election, saying she believed Hillary Clinton would win anyway and so she could safely cast a vote"
She thought Hillary would win Arizona? She either doesn't understand the electoral system or doesn't understand politics.
Re: “Is the Strong Start Tucson Initiative a Good Idea?”
" research agrees that the benefits of early childhood education starts when the child enters school and continues into adulthood. "
This is simply not so. Plenty of research seems to show that the effects of preschool wear off or could even be negative.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-evi…
Only in low income and neglectful homes does the research seem to agree. In those homes removing the child from the home helps simply because they're no longer neglected. In that case CPS should step in and remove them.
The best place for children below the age of 5 is in the home with a loving parent. I absolutely don't want my tax dollars wasted on what amounts to a baby sitting service.
Why is cradle to adulthood (and beyond) care by the government always seem to be the goal of liberals?
Re: “Arizona's Un-Credential. Is It the Beginning Of the End Of Teaching As a Profession?”
Sounds like a tempest in a tea cup. With pay so low and teaching being such a tough profession, the only people who will do this will be people who are very motivated to teach and will probably do a great job for that reason.
Re: “Ask a Mexican!”
If the U.S. took half of Mexico then the U.S. took half of France in the Louisiana Purchase. The Mexican Cession was primarily unoccupied country (neither Mexico nor the U.S. ever counted Native Americans) with arbitrary lines drawn back in Europe based on a few Spaniards on horses riding through the area years earlier and some treaties made with Spain. Santa Anna gladly handed it over for some quick money to save his butt. Mexico couldn't control that region and had very little population there and, quite likely, if the U.S. hadn't taken it, someone else would have or it would've seceded from Mexico anyway. It was a semi-autonomous region with constant revolts and mixed populations.
Besides, Mexico stole it from Spain 25 years earlier (who stole it from the Apaches, Navajos, Hopis, Utes, Pasquas, etc.). Not saying the war was right, far from it, but let's not make up a simplistic and misleading history in order to create some vast grievance that justifies illegal immigration all the while pretending to be teaching stupid Americans their true history.
And Mexicans were forced North like the Irish? I must've missed the news of the famine and the U.N. airlifts of rice and flour. Comparing it to the potato famine is hyperbole.
Migrants came north not due to famine, but because of a population surge prior to widespread use of birth control, economic disruptions and lack of opportunity (partly based on policies their own government set), and better money was available in the U.S. These are the same reasons most immigrants came here. But you make it sound like the big bad U.S. forced them into NAFTA and it was a choice between death and immigration. This is over-simplification to advance an agenda.
Not saying anything for or against Mexican immigrants, or minimizing all of the crap Mexico and Mexicans have put up with from the U.S. and Americans over the years, but if you twist and over-simplify history with the transparent goal of creating a special right for Mexicans to immigrate to the U.S., you lose all credibility.
Re: “A Look At TUSD's AzMERIT Scores”
"They only test what's testable in a fill-in-the-bubble format" - very true, but, on average, I'd bet the students who can reason well and write well also do well on the tests. You have to measure somehow or you can never know what is improving and the state is too lazy to actually have more meaningful tests.
You can blame high rates of immigration of poor and unskilled people from countries with little tradition of education for most of TUSD's issues.