Hillary’s education “SWAT team.”

AP Photo - Carlos Osorio

AP Photo – Carlos Osorio

Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 3/11/16

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If you watched the Democratic debate last Sunday night, you heard Hillary Clinton’s “education SWAT team” proposal.

Said Mrs. Clinton,

I want to set up inside the Department of Education, for want of a better term, kind of an education SWAT team, if you will, where we’ve got qualified people, teachers, principals, maybe folks who are retired, maybe folks who are active, but all of whom are willing to come and help.”

An education SWAT team straight from Washington? Here to “help?” You can’t make this stuff up.

Can you just imagine Hillary’s army of federal educrats swooping in to some already over-stressed local school and offering the government version of “help?” As if the Department of Education hasn’t already “helped” enough.

Rick Perry – for all that went wrong in his 2012 presidential bid – was right when he said he wanted to eliminate the Department of Education. That’s because it’s not clear how much more federal “help” our local schools can stand.

Thanks to federal courts and the Department of Education, public education has been all but destroyed in America. With the help of the DOE, the country spends more per pupil than almost every developed country on Earth save for tiny little places like Luxembourg. Yet American student test scores are among the worst in the world.

The amount of direct federal spending or federally-mandated spending on public schools to no good effect is simply staggering. Twenty three billion per year under “No Child Left Behind.” Four billion for “Race to the Top.” Ten billion for “Common Core.” Nearly a billion on standardized tests. Ten million here, fifty million there on various teacher development programs administered (read: absconded with) by teachers unions.

Under the now infamous Obama ‘Stimulus,’ the DOE pumped $530 million into the Detroit public schools – where it promptly vanished. The Detroit school system is expected to file for bankruptcy protection next month.

All of this money spent on education is of a piece with all of the other massive wads of federal money from the past half century spent to little or no good effect. Think $20 trillion spent in the “War on Poverty,” the result of which is to arrive at the same national poverty rate as prevailed when the so-called “war” started. Or the $1 trillion spent in the “War or Drugs,” which sees us in 2016 with a burgeoning heroin epidemic.

Hillary proposing a national education “SWAT Team” is but another manifestation of the liberal belief that every societal problem calls for a massive federal program requiring billions of dollars and thousands of federal bureaucrats.

That none of the previous massive programs championed by liberals has ever produced the promised results goes completely unmentioned by current proponents and utterly unexamined by the New York Times, the Washington Post or any of the legacy TV news networks.

Will we ever learn? Virtually no problem that the federal government sets out to fix ever gets fixed.

Will the majority of us ever vote accordingly?

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Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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1 Response

  1. Linda E Montrose says:

    Ever since the government got involved in the education of our children, it has all gone down hill. Kids get dumber and dumber instead of smarter and smarter..isn’t that a huge red flag to get the government OUT of the education system??? The brightest of the bright are HOME SCHOOLED! Shouldn’t that tell you something?
    The other night on a new show called Little Big Shots, there was a 7 yr old boy who could spell any word you threw at him correctly! Steve Harvey said something about his teacher and he promptly told Mr. Harvey that HE WAS HOME SCHOOLED!

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