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Thursday, January 13, 2011

That damned Fix

What's Mallard raving about today?

Education, Taxes.

I don't seem to recall these huge increases in Education spending to which Mallard refers.

I do recall No Child Left Behind, which altered the focus from teaching children to preparing them to takes tests to which funding levels are tied.

Of course, being  Bush Administration policy, that could  not possibly bear any of the blame for poor test scores.

10 comments:

Tog said...

And I recall Republicans screaming that teachers were useless overpaid union trolls, demanding cuts everywhere, and dismissing the very idea that larger class sizes might be detrimental.

They applied mass production standards to education for the sake of tax breaks. And how Batshit wonders why things are the way they are?

Tell me, Batshit: do textbooks fixated on whitewashing history and dismissing science in favor of "religious values" make this problem better, or worse?

Madpuppy said...

Our chools are failing because we took out all references to Jesus. It's a fact that Indian and Chinese students do so well because their governments never took the Christianity out of their curricula.

Kip W said...

It's pretty clear that we're getting our butts kicked in doggerel verse. Japanese T-shirts scan better than this.

Rootbeer said...

I wonder what the countries who are "kicking America's butt" (impossible, the USA is the #1 best nation in the history of everywhere) spend on education.

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Tinsley is incapable of accepting the idea that increased funding could help schools, for no other reason than that his half-assed ideology stipulates that TAXES ARE TEH SUXXORZ 4EVAH. This explains his violent, burning hatred of teachers--it must be all THEIR fault! And in that case, we can just fire all of them and hire new ones who will use their secret faerie magic to fix the problem without hard-working (or hard-drinking, in this case) taxpayers being compelled to make any personal sacrifice whatsoever.

dlauthor said...

I thought conservatives like Tinshley were all about preserving the status quo, whether it's the poisonous tone of punditry, the taxation levels of the rich, discrimination within the military, or untreated alcoholism. But I guess that when it comes to unfired teachers, he's willing to make an exception.

b said...

What for we need them schools anyway? Close 'em all, and leave the kids at home to watch Discovery, The History Channel and The Learnin' Channel! Soon, they'll be experts on Hitler, and all grow up to find profitable jobs in the ghost-hunting and ice road trucking sectors!

rewinn said...

Fun fact: teachers in every advanced nation but our don't come out of college saddled with huge student loans they have to pay off; as a result, their effective pay is much higher than our (...even not allowing for the extra benefits they get from more effective yet less expensive health care systems).

You get what you pay for; in the USA, the financial sector gets the most innovation.

P.S. Day 13 of 2011, and so far, not on day in which Mallard Fillmore expresses any emotion except something negative. What a sad and cheerless thing it is to be an alcoholic conservative!

Michael Foley said...

It's a bad sign if someone reads through 90% of your poem before realizing it's a poem...

Erich said...

It occasionally irritates me when a poet (real or alleged), stuck for a rhyme, simply repeats the same word. I'll let Stevie Wonder get away with rhyming "shirttails" and "pigtails" in "I Was Made to Love Her," on the strength of his better work. Tinsley gets no such free pass for rhyming "in" with "in." (Or for rhyming "in" with "again," for that matter.)

VW: "vanqu." As much of the word "vanquish" that you can say before Mallard tunes out.