Greed Prevents New York's Teachers' Unions from Learning Math

New Yorkers for Growth sent the e-mail below (with this article attached) in favor of Andrew Cuomo's  property tax cap.  The article points out that Taxachussetts has lower taxes than New York and that the Taxachusetts tax cap, which is similar to the one that Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing, has resulted in  better education than New York's more expensive education system.  More spending will not improve education.

Last semester a student in my class said that she was majoring in education and that after graduation she planned to become a principal.  I spent several classes on writing.  Following one of the classes the future principal asked, "Are we going to keep working on writing, or will we learn?" 

Its achievement is average but the state's spending is the nation's highest. The problem is its   "progressive" education approach, which reflects a Democratic Party-dominated education establishment.  Many New Yorkers prefer to spend thousands of dollars per year to send their children to Catholic schools whose budgets are one fourth --no typo-- public schools'.  In other words, New Yorkers spend $4,500 to send their children to Catholic schools to avoid public schools that cost $17,500 per student.  But the New York State Union of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers insist that too little is spent. 

Why did not Governor Pataki propose a tax cap five or ten years ago?  If the New York State GOP can answer that question without blaming the Democrats (for Pataki was a Republican, not a Democrat, and if what he does depends on the Democrats, then there is no point in voting for Republicans) then they will be on the road to improving their party. 

My complaint about Cuomo's proposal is that it does not go far enough.  Vouchers are preferable to the current education system.

>February 7, 2011


We thought you might be interested in this article that appeared in the Buffalo News yesterday. It compares New York's tax burden to that of our neighboring state, Massachusetts. The article highlights how Massachusetts' property tax cap has been a successful tool in driving down the overall tax burden for residents and small business owners.

Massachusetts, once notoriously known as "Taxachusetts," implemented a property tax cap in 1980 similar to the one now being proposed by Governor Cuomo and already adopted by the state Senate. Despite what teacher union critics in New York say, the property tax cap in Massachusetts has worked extraordinarily well.

As a result of the cap, the attitude toward taxation has changed. Localities have found ways to consolidate and reduce duplication of services. Taxpayers have found themselves with more power, while local governments have been forced to make a case for increased spending. The days of taxpayers being simply an endless source of financing for ever larger, less efficient government has come to an end.

The article also rebuts critic's most threatening claim that the quality of education will suffer. Massachusetts scores higher than New York in nearly every fourth and eighth grade reading, math and writing test and ranks number one in the nation in fourth and eighth grade math and reading. While New York spends the most per pupil in the country, our test scores consistently rank 24th or 25th in performance.

The proof is in the pudding. Massachusetts has successfully reduced its tax burden and New York can and must do the same. Of course, the tax cap is just one piece of the puzzle, albeit a critical one. We have a lot of work to do to change our "tax attitude," including reducing spending and ending unfunded mandates. New Yorkers for Growth will continue to be a leader in this fight, and we hope you'll join us in our efforts to make New York affordable again.


Best,

New Yorkers for Growth

Meshugana Jews Voted For Obama

In the recent past, Jews have been saddled with the holocaust, oppression in the Soviet Union and the dhimmi, embodied in the jizya tax, in many Islamic countries. Now that some have their own country, Israel, and others live in America, they are free from tyranny.  Ironically, though, given American freedom, many if not most American Jews  have supported reinstatement of the socialism that murdered them in Germany and the Soviet Union and from which they fled.  The self-destructive support for "progressivism"  is a martyr wish. The Jews' martyrdom is a biblical theme:  the Jews sin, suffer penalties like the breaking of the tablets by Moses, and then are redeemed through suffering like the Babylonian captivity.  

In voting for Obama 77 percent of American Jews aimed to induce a biblical cycle.  The Jews' favored candidate, whether through incompetence or intent, is about to destabilize the Middle East and pose a serious threat to Israel's existence.   In a recent letter David Horowitz writes:

The situation on the streets of Cairo is confusing, but so too is the message coming out of the Obama White House. The White House appears to be leaving Hosni Mubarak, an ally for three decades and lynchpin of Mideast stability, twisting slowly in the wind. And worse, it appears to be open to allowing the Muslim Brotherhood play a key role in a "reformed" Egyptian government, as long as the organization renounces violence and supports democracy... If the Obama White House really believes this is possible, it is even more hopelessly incompetent than we imagined...In suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood can be a democratic partner in Egypt, the Obama White House has outdone even the Carter administration's destabilization of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and its welcoming of the theocratic fascist Khoumeni as a "saint."...From the Bolshevik Revolution, through Mao and the Ayatollah Khoumeni, the left has always seen figures who turned out to be monsters as "reformers."
 

There were probably some Jews who supported Hitler in 1932, before he got to power. The effects on Israel of the Obama administration's actions could turn out worse than I thought likely in 2008 (but not worse than I feared).  His meshugana Jewish supporters bear responsibility for the threat that Muslim Brotherhood now poses to the Jews.

Kristofer Petersen-Overton Revisited

Sharad Karkhanis's Patriot Returns,  which goes to 13,000 CUNY faculty and staff, published a recast version of my piece on the Kristofer Peterson-Overton matter that was covered in  The New York Post, New York Daily News, New York Times, and Inside Higher Education.  Brooklyn College's president, Karen Gould, decided to hire Petersen-Overton after the administration initially rescinded his contract.

Several of Karkhanis's associates and I made a few changes to my original piece to address President Gould's decision, which was of course politically important to her. My piece appears here.

THE
PATRIOT
RETURNS

   Vol. 54, No.1                                                          February 02, 2011

Freedom and Standards at CUNY: The Case of Kristofer Petersen-Overton

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, School of Business, Brooklyn College.

The Professional Staff Congress's (PSC's) president, Barbara Bowen, aimed to use the rescission of Kristofer Petersen-Overton's contract to bait Brooklyn College's and CUNY's administration and for partisan jockeying. Based on the Monday evening announcement from Brooklyn president Karen Gould, the Brooklyn College administration displayed astounding weakness in the face of faculty bullying.  Now, people of academic goodwill should press to uncover facts that would contribute to understanding the events that preceded the original appointment to improve hiring and personnel practices at Brooklyn College and at CUNY.

The New York Times, Inside Higher Education, and The New York Post  covered the Petersen-Overton case. There are two sides, but the facts are scrimpy. The administration stated that before hearing Petersen-Overton's political views they had determined that he was not yet qualified to teach--only to reverse their position, for reasons unknown, a few days later. Mr. Petersen-Overton and his supporters stated that the contract rescission reflected an incursion on his academic freedom. Rejecting the possibility of any alternative to the second explanation, President Bowen condemned Petersen-Overton's short-lived firing as "meddling in academic decisions" and, gasconaded that "the union will defend the rights of our members if their rights have been violated."

Bowen's claim is not fact. In the case of Professor Robert Johnson several years ago, Professor Johnson had uttered pro-Israel statements (in contrast to Mr. Petersen-Overton's anti-Israel position) and found his promotion bid denied. Rather than defend Dr. Johnson, as it is the union's fiduciary duty to do, Bowen and other union officials, such as then-UFS chair and New Caucus executive committee member Susan O'Malley, publicly attacked him. In that case Bowen failed to live up to a minimal legal duty, the avoidance of partisanship in defending faculty rights, and Dr. Johnson was forced to hire an attorney to successfully defend himself.

Now, defending Mr. Petersen-Overton's left wing anti-Zionism, Bowen claims that her support for free speech is unqualified. This shift is consistent with a pattern whereby the PSC's leadership aims to represent those who are politically correct and to squelch those who are not.

There are a number of questions that need to be asked before anyone can conclude much about Overton's firing. Does Brooklyn College generally hire doctoral students to teach master's students? If so, do the favored doctoral students consistently adhere to left-wing ideology? Is there bi-partisanship in offering adjunct positions to doctoral students, or is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans 100-0? Have CUNY and Brooklyn College established best practice guidelines for the hiring of adjuncts?

Conrad, Haworth and Millar (1993), in a book on master's degree programs, note that non-academic adjuncts play a crucial role in supplying practical experience that supplements theory. Many master's students in political science aim for careers in diplomacy or government. Does Mr. Petersen-Overton supply such experience? Or is he a shill for ideologically committed advisors and their cronies in the PSC? Does the political science department ever offer adjunct teaching posts to doctoral students who agree with Bernard Lewis (2001), or is the ideological tenor monotone, the drumbeat repetitive, and the harp played only with the left hand?

References

Conrad, CP, Haworth , JG, Millar, SB. A Silent Success: Master's Education in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Lewis, B. The Muslim Discovery of Europe. New York: WW Norton & Co. 2001.

 

Sharad Karkhanis, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Editor-in-Chief

Issues of The Patriot may be accessed at
http://www.patriotreturns.com
Archived editions are available at
http://www.patriotreturns.com/archive.htm

BPMA--BiPartisanship My A**

The Economist is on sale at the Barnes and Noble on Ulster Avenue in Kingston, NY.  I picked up a copy of the venerable weekly, founded in 1843 by followers of John Cobden and Richard Bright of the Anti-Corn Law League.  From its inception The Economist has been in favor of globalization. Though associated with the Manchester liberals, advocates of laissez faire, the magazine supports Keynesian, big government policies that never work but result in subsidization of a readership mostly comprised of welfare mothers:  investment bankers and their lawyers.  As long as it avoids lobbing bouquets at the Federal Reserve Bank and Bush-Obama's Wall Street bailouts, the magazine is useful.

The Economist notes that the Obama State of the Union speech was tepid and unconvincing. It also mentions that in light of Jared Loughner's shooting of Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), wounding of 13 others and murder of six, the two parties have recently attempted to be bipartisan.

Bipartisanship is a mistake.  In light of the unfortunate violence in Arizona the Tea Party ought to press forward with more specific demands for freedom.  Extremist violence has attended many, if not all, political movements and there is less of it associated with the Tea Party than with the American left.

The American left has a long, persistent history of violence.  The lying in The New Republic and The New York Times about the mass murders in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; Noam Chomsky's ongoing Cambodian holocaust denial; Michael Moore's acclamation of Cuban murderer Fidel Castro (responsible for 100,000 killings); Hollywood's acclamation of serial killer Che Guevara.

Closer to home social democracy is  violent; regulation is violent; forced saving through Social Security is violent; taxation is violent; the suppression of dissent through the Patriot Act is violent.  Dissenters to the income tax are  violently incarcerated, and the Amish, who refused to pay Social Security taxes,  were for a time subjected to violent harassment from the US government. Anyone who doubts that the federal tax system is violent should write a letter to the IRS saying that you are not going to pay your taxes.  See what happens.

For many decades university professors defended the Soviet Union with psychopathic denial about its ongoing violence:  its mass murder of 65 million human beings over 70 years.  Paul Anthony Samuelson's economics textbook crowed about the Soviet Union's success just a few years before the 70-year-old socialist experiment completely collapsed for the reasons that Ludwig von Mises had published in the 1920s. The deprivation, despoliation of the environment, Gulags, forced starvation, torture, and imprisonment of millions were all matters of indifference to the Progressive movement of the 1930s and 1940s and later, which repeatedly lied about it.

The violence extends to institutions that the Progressive movement has imposed. That they were democratically imposed does not change their violent nature.  A plurality of Germans put Hitler in power and likely a majority supported him after he was in power.  Millions of Germans were willing to die on his behalf. So much for the legitimacy of democracy.  As de Tocqueville observed in 1835, the greatest threat to American freedom is tyranny of the majority.  Tyranny of the majority is the promise of Progressivism; the violence of The New Republic.

The violence in the Lockean American revolution was miniscule. People died in the American revolution, but  respect for human dignity is fundamental to American liberalism of which the Tea Party is the chief manifestation today.

In short: BPMA -- bipartisanship my a**.  Let us transform the violent and illegitimate federal government in Washington. Its supporters are thugs.