The Roanoke Slant

-
Roanoke Times, 1-28-12, Pg 3: Obama wants to see tuition reined in. Universities could lose federal funds if they don’t work to lower expenses.
-
Obama wants to kill No Child Left Behind (NCLB) because there are specific measurements for academic performance with associated penalties for lack of improvement or progress. However, penalizing Universities is a good thing! Is Obama suffering from some form of dissociative memory syndrome? Are performance measurements and penalties OK or not OK? And where in the Constitution does the Federal Government derive control over America’s schools?
-
Clearly college tuition's have risen far greater that the sum of inflation plus increased enrollment. And nowhere is there any sign of economy of scale or a visible effort to manage expenses. The universities simply add on overhead without any effort to eliminate marginal or obsolete programs and they are not exploiting or capitalizing on major investments in technology.
-
All these educational issues at both the primary and secondary levels are State Responsibilities and should be managed by the States; however, educational bureaucracies and powerful unions defy proper management of the systems. This conflict is starkly evident in Wisconsin where Teachers Unions, The Democrat Party and Obama Himself have waged war against Gov. Walker’s efforts to manage the education system and return control of the schools to the local school boards.
http://www.scottwalker.org/
-
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/08/two-15-million-obama-union-hit-jobs.html
-
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/02/obama-union-organizer.html
-
Once again Obama’s answer to problems is to expand Federal control into what the Constitution defined as States Responsibilities.
The best educational initiative Obama could launch is to reduce the Dept of Education by 25% per year for the next three years and thereby empower the States to improve their educational systems. The Federal DOEd is a totally nonproductive level of bureaucracy not helpful to the work that should be done by the 50 State education departments.
-
-
Prior Items addressing the tuition issues:
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/10/jim-webb-wrongly-slamming-for-profit.html
-
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/07/virginia-college-tuition-runaway-train.html
-
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2009/06/college-new-welfare-state.html
-