“The current budget cut proposals being debated in Congress are the political equivalent of making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight going to the gym and then not going after the first week.”

So writes Tim Shoemaker on the Campaign for Liberty blog.

Shoemaker is right.

Neither the White House nor congressional Republicans are proposing deep enough spending cuts to turn America’s economic ship around and escape a deficit that threatens to drown our future.

Of course, it doesn’t help when self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives, including the Kentucky delegation, would vote for a defense earmark that even the Defense department has repeatedly indicated it doesn’t want and that the nation doesn’t need.

In fact, conservatives refer to it as the “Mother of all Earmarks” and the new “Bridge to Nowhere” project.

But GE wants it, as does Rolls-Royce, its partner in the project to build an alternate engine for the F-35 joint strike fighter.

Yep, that’s right — an “alternate” engine.

Since GE lost in the bid to build the initial jet fighter’s engine to Pratt & Whitney, it’s using its considerable resources — as evidenced by a recent aggressive ad campaign aided by a $9 million lobbying effort — to be allowed to build an “alternate” engine … all at taxpayers’ expense, of course.

Even Tea-party conservative types in D.C. are having trouble saying “no” to GE, which has a presence in or near many of conservative leaders’ districts, including Speaker John Boehner’s in Ohio. About 1,000 employees have been working on the engine at a GE facility near Cincinnati.

GE claims that having an engine making competition will “drive down costs.” Not so, says the Defense department. In its own release, the DoD said the additional costs, including “the burden of maintaining two logistical systems,” will likely outweigh the savings.

On March 24, the Pentagon ordered a halt to the engine’s production.

Despite the fact that the two biggest-spending presidents in U.S. history — Barack Obama and George W. Bush, both administrations’ defense secretaries and the Defense bureaucracy itself said continuing to fund the $4 billion project could sap resources needed for more immediate security concerns, GE vows to try and find a way to keep it going.

Of course, that’s no problem — as long as they do it with their own money.

Click here for a timeline by Citizens Against Government Waste of spending that’s already occurred on this boondoggle.

While Congress was busy passing a bill that would restore the torpedoed D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program on Wednesday, a state closer to (my old Kentucky) home was also passing landmark education legislation dealing with school choice and spending.

Indiana’s House of Representatives approved a voucher bill allowing students in a family of four with household incomes up to $62,022 to receive a voucher covering from 50 percent to 90 percent of a private school tuition.

Imagine how such an option could shake up, say, a district like Jefferson County, where 60 percent of students are from low-income homes.

No doubt, anti-choice forces would wail about how such a voucher plan would throw government schools into chaos. But have you taken a look at that district’s student-assignment plan and busing disaster lately?

It appears chaos arrived long ago. We’re still waiting on choice to get here.

So says the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Education Organization (CEO).

Unfortunately, adult interests are overriding the best interests of students and parents in the struggle to educate our youth. The CEO also points out:

“Too many of our legislators talk about children and the need for better education, but are more worried about supporting the adult groups who are busy protecting the status quo for their own benefit.”

That is certainly true in Kentucky, which is one of the worst school choice states in the nation, without even one charter school.

Adults in ‘the system’ also attacked a very popular school choice program in Washington, DC after the Obama administration took over. Responding to that pressure, in an action that sent incredibly mixed messages about the new administration’s real support for educational reform, the Congress and the President torpedoed the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP).

Now, it looks like the new Congress is planning to right that wrong. A bill to reinstate the Opportunity Scholarships is working its way into law.

That’s good news for kids in our nation’s capital, but what about kids in Kentucky, many of whom are poorer, and more challenged than the inner city DC children?

When will Kentucky legislators stop deferring to selfish demands from adults who work in the school system and start doing things that make sense for the students who are trying to get an education in that system?

In its article, “Reducing band director’s position frustrates crowd,” The State Journal (subscription) just provided another great example of the power that teachers – not parents – have in Kentucky’s schools. This story just played out in Franklin County.

At issue: Due to tight funding, what staff positions should be cut at Franklin County High School?

Parents had one point of view; teachers had another.

When the voting time came, parents got squashed.

One of the position reductions was for a science teacher. That’s a great way to increase STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) qualified graduates! Sadly, the motivation for this choice becomes crystal clear once you consider the specialties of the teachers on the Franklin High school council: an English teacher, a social studies teacher, and an agricultural teacher. No math teachers or hard science teachers to be found!

Another outstanding example of how parents loose out in school council votes occurred in the very upscale Fort Thomas school district back in 2007. In a story now long gone from the web, a showdown between parents and teachers over selection of a new principal at the Johnson Elementary school went solidly against the parents.

Civil asset forfeiture strikes at the heart of property rights. Authorities simply seize private property without all the messiness of convicting someone of a crime. It’s blatantly unconstitutional and it shouldn’t happen, but it does. What’s worse, many state governments offer little to no information to the public about what they’re doing with those ill-gotten gains. A new report and video from the Institute for Justice illustrates the case of Georgia quite well. The video was produced by IJ’s multitalented Isaac Reese.

Kentucky, for the record, is among the worst performers when it comes to transparency of its civil forfeiture records.

Jefferson County Superintendent talking mush about turning around low-performing schools

Fantasy:

“I just don’t think the transformation model is effective in producing immediate, dramatic change. It may have some long term benefits, but they are really long term.”

Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Sheldon Berman, quoted March 29, 2011 by the Louisville Courier-Journal

Fact:

As I discussed in this blog back on March 2, 2011, we now have early evidence from the recently released PLAN and EXPLORE scores for the first group of 10 schools to be designated as Persistently Low-Achieving Schools. Trend arrows on the far right of the table below (click on table to enlarge) show the Composite Score trend in each school between 2009-10 and the 2011-12 school years (PLAN and EXPLORE are given early in each school year).

The trend arrows show that three of the four NON-Jefferson County high schools made improvements in their performance after they adopted the “Transformation Model” for school turn-around.

In sharp contrast, the majority of the Jefferson County Schools, all of which choose the “Restaffing Option,” showed declines in scores.

Only one Jefferson County school using the “Restaffing Option” in this list showed improvement.

So, if we are talking about evidence of fast indications of progress, the data shows the Jefferson County superintendent does not have “the right stuff.”

Most would call the Lawrence County High School’s one-year Composite score jump “dramatic.” Many would also consider Leslie County High School’s one-year improvement notable, as well.

So, I’ll go with Commissioner Terry Holliday on this one. Holliday is also recommending the “Transformation Option,” which ties teacher evaluations and compensation to student performance. Keep in mind, the commissioner has been able to look at other during-the-term testing results that have not been released to the public in addition to the PLAN and EXPLORE data above.

By the way, I don’t care if the teachers union in Jefferson County doesn’t like the “Transformation Option.” It is time to do something for the kids instead of the adults in our schools. It seems to be happening in places like Lawrence County and Leslie County.

Some Fayette County schools started using the ‘Singapore Math’ program in 2009. Initially, there was fear that this rigorous math program would cause declines in scores.

Well, flash forward to 2011. Now, a lot more of the school district’s elementary schools want ‘in.’

It seems that Singapore is starting to really shine – with Kentucky kids.

According to a Jim Warren report in the Herald-Leader, several Fayette schools using Singapore have made dramatic progress, including some nice improvements for minority populations.

Even the New York Times knows Singapore is a program to watch. The Times reports Singapore Math is being used in schools from inner city New York to the exclusive Sidwell Friends School in Washington that President Obama’s daughters attend.

The news about Singapore Math is no secret to us. We wrote about the success of this program in our KERA @ 20 reports, “KERA (1990-2010): What have we learned?” and “KERA@20,” both on line here.

Still, it’s nice to see more evidence that Singapore works, especially since that includes working with Kentucky students, especially our kids of color.

So, here are some bigger questions.

The nation of Singapore has been shining in international mathematics testing for years. As we ask in our KERA @ 20 report, why is it that only a handful of Kentucky schools are currently using it instead of ‘fuzzier’ math programs that confuse kids and parents?

How much evidence has to be put in front of our educators before they finally accept the obvious?

Part of the answer may be found in the New York Times article.

Teachers have to know some math to teach Singapore.

However, in Kentucky elementary school teachers can get a degree and be certified to teach after taking only one, trivial math course titled “elementary math.” It is taught below the level of college algebra. That probably isn’t good enough preparation to really teach mathematics, even to elementary school students. Just maybe, teachers fighting Singapore may think their own mathematics skills are inadequate to teach this highly successful program. If so, it’s time for someone to realize the kids deserve better. They deserve a high quality program like Singapore, which works in inner city schools, schools right here in Kentucky and the president’s daughters’ school, too.

According to WKU economists Steve Lile and Brian Goff, “the public sector accounts for a larger share of the KY economy than is the case of most neighboring states.”

In a paper on the new WKU Center for Applied Economics Web site, Lile and Goff offer the results of their research comparing the share of government activity that consumes states’ gross state product (GSP), which like the national GDP, is a leading indicator of states’ economic vitality.

Of the seven surrounding states, only Virginia and West Virginia — both of which house large federal government agencies — exceed Kentucky in the percent of their GSPs accounted for by government.

That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to believe the claims being made by Gov. Beshear and his get-along, go-along big spenders in the Kentucky General Assembly when they say that there’s no need for spending cuts immediately to deal with the ongoing Medicaid mess.

In one sense, they’re right. They should have been cutting the size of government a long time ago.

If you check out Western Kentucky University’s new Center for Applied Economics online, here’s some things you will find out about the commonwealth and its economic vitality:

• Kentucky’s economy relies more heavily on manufacturing than all of the surrounding states other than Indiana. The commonwealth is 59 percent more dependent on manufacturing than the national economy.

• Notice how Kentucky’s growth lags behind neighboring states:

• Persistent small differences in growth rates become a big deal over time. For instance, while Tennessee only grew at a 1.4 percent rate higher than Kentucky per year between 1997 and 2008, it added up to a 16 percent gap — or a per capita income difference of $29,000 (Ky.) and $33,000 (Tenn.) during that decade.

• Kentucky and Tennessee share 350 miles of border and are similiar in terms of size, geographical features and historical/cultural similarities. Yet Kentucky lags behind:
  • Ky’s “aggregate personal income” has dropped from 86 percent of Tennessee’s to 64 percent over the last 45 years.

  • Ky’s per capita income has dropped from 98 percent of Tennessee’s to 92 percent.
  • Ky’s population has dropped from 82 percent to 70 percent of Tennessee’s.
  • Between 2000 and 2005, more than three times as many people moved to Tennessee as moved to Ky. Could it be that lower tax rates, a reliance upon the sales tax rather than punitive income taxes, school choice and a right-to-work law really do have consequences?

Feds: Kentucky Department of Education didn’t identify enough

Sending a clear message that the US Department of Education is fed up with schools that persistently perform poorly for students, the Kentucky Department of Education was recently directed to add more schools to the official Persistently Low-Achieving Schools list to comply with federal requirements. Apparently, the department had engaged in some of that ‘KERA math’ and didn’t correctly calculate the number of schools that had to be identified to meet the federally required percentage figures.

The two added low-achieving schools, Knight Middle School in the Jefferson County Public School District, and Newport High School in the Newport Independent School District, bring the state’s total number of low-achieving schools to 22. Here is the full list:

Jefferson County now has 13 of the 22 Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in the entire state, or 59 percent. The district has less than 20 percent of the students, however.

Check the Courier-Journal’s coverage here.