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The Private-Sector, Jealousy-Misery Media Factor – Part 1/5

15 Dec

During my full-time university days on the GI Bill [1968 – 1973] before I graduated with a BA in journalism, I learned how easy it was for the media to make mistakes while practicing what is known as Yellow Journalism to boost profits.

And Yellow journalism [based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration] is what Associated Press [AP] did when it ran Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny by Don Thompson on December 14, 2011.

For example, how would you feel if you read, “Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter? His departure from the workaday world [he worked thirty-six years in public education and was the superintendent of one of California’s 1,600 school districts] is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.”

That previous quote was in the second paragraph of Thompson’s AP news piece and it is extremely misleading because of what it doesn’t say.

How many in public education do you think will earn that kind of money in retirement?

What AP doesn’t tell us is that in 2010 the average member-only benefit for retired public school educators in California was $4,256 a month before taxes [less than a third of what Godwin earns in retirement] and that only 16% of educators that retired in 2010 worked as long as Patrick Godwin did.  The median years of service was 26.6.

For example, if you were one of the educators that retired after 26.6 years of public service [the median] and was only 55 years old [the earliest you may retire and collect], using the CalSTRS retirement calculator, that person would earn about $2,130 a month before taxes—much less than the $14,525.66 that Godwin earns each month.

I calculated once that if a public school teacher in California taught for 42 years or more, his annual retirement income would equal what he earned the last year he worked.  In public education, less than 4% retire in the 100% category.

In fact, 9% retired in 2010 with 10-15 years of service in public education, 11% with 14-20 years, 15% with 20-25 years, 12% with 25-30 years, 23% with 30-35 years, and 16% with 35-40 years. Source: CalSTRS

The reason that AP’s Don Thompson ran with Patrick Godwin’s retirement income as his example is called sensationalism designed to cause an emotional response so people will talk about it. Word of mouth attracts readers and an audience.

In addition, Godwin was a school district superintendent at the top of the public education pay scale, which represents about 0.2% of the total.  That means 99.8% of public educators in California do not earn as much as Godwin did while working as a school district superintendent.

The result is that many readers may believe that most public educators in California will retire with Patrick Godwin’s annual retirement income.  However, this is far from the truth since most will not come close, but Thompson’s piece doesn’t say that.

The reason AP’s Thompson distorted the facts so much is because of audience share, which determines how much a media source [TV, newspaper, talk show, magazine, Blog, etc] may charge to advertisers, and balancing the news and telling the truth often does not achieve this goal because profits are the foundation of the private sector media.

It’s a simple formula: if you don’t make a profit you go out of business and everyone working for you loses his or her job so almost everyone plays the same Yellow Journalism game, and then there is the politics of money.

To understand why Thompson wrote such a misleading news piece, it helps to understand the trend away from private-sector pensions that were once similar to current public sector-pensions and the answers are in the numbers.

Continued on December 16, 2011 in The Private-Sector, Jealousy-Misery Media Factor – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on December 15, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Journalism, media, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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The US Federal Government — How BIG is “big”? – Part 4/4

10 Nov

Are you still thinking of that $548 billion that goes to the Department of Defense (DOD) with its 652,000 non-military employees paid from federal funds that come from taxes (that’s 32.6% of the Federal Government workforce), while the Department of Education (DOE) has only two-tenths [2/10] of one percent of the federal work force.

One thing we can bet on for sure, we will seldom hear complaints or these facts from a conservative source such as the Tea Party or conservative talk radio hosts such as Dennis Prager.

One example would be what Dennis Prager wrote at Townhall.com in “The Welfare State and the Selfish Society”.

In Prager’s essay, nowhere does he mention the number of people in the federal government that work for the DOD, the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Justice that combined add up to almost half of the federal work force and the largest combined slice of the federal budget pie dwarfing any so-called entitlement programs that help America’s most needy citizens to survive and thrive.


Entitlement Epidemic, Spoiled Rotten, People and Government

It appears that supporting wars, prisons and death is more important to conservatives such as Dennis Prager than offering help to Americans that need it to survive and live another day without hunger or shelter.

In fact, are minimum-wage jobs without health care benefits enough to survive on?

Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13, 2011, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993.

Entitlement programs that people such as Prager complain about mostly help the unemployed and those living in poverty but do not offer to support these Americans without any effort from the individual who needs help.

In many cases, those people may be working low-paying jobs such as companies like Wal-Mart or fast-food outlets offer. In fact, many fast-food outlets works its people twenty or less hours a week to avoid funding federal entitlement programs such as money used for unemployment benefits.

In other words, in a purely capitalist society without any social programs or safety net (what conservatives have tagged as selfish entitlement programs), if you cannot pay your own way, starve and die but do it out of sight and don’t bother us.

Return to The US Federal Government – How BIG is “big”? – Part 3 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 10, 2011 in child abuse, family values, government, media, politics

 

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The US Federal Government — How BIG is “big”? – Part 3/4

09 Nov

Another sore point among conservatives is entitlement programs such as food stamps and any form of welfare or unemployment benefits.

Many conservatives also see Social Security [SS] as an entitlement program, but Social Security by law [like the US Postal Service] must not be supported by federal taxes collected by the IRS.

Social Security must support itself with funds collected from employees and employers as part of the SS program and regardless of the popular conservative politically correct opinion that Social Security is broke, SS has more than $2.6 trillion in its trust fund as of December 2010 and collected $781.1 billion in 2010 while paying out only $712.5 billion. Source: Social Security Online – Trust Fund Data


Kids to be denied Health Care

Is it the fault of Social Security that both houses of Congress borrowed all that money that was meant by law to fund the SS Trust Fund and spent it? The facts are that the US Government owes SS and better pay up or risk millions of wrinkled, gray haired seniors limping to Washington D.C. to mob both houses of Congress.

Another federal agency that handles so-called entitlement programs is the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] , which is the principal federal agency charged with protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services. The Federal Budget includes $81.3 billion to support HHS’s mission.

However, the Department of Education, with its 4,000 federal employees, has a total authorized budget for 2011 of less than $50 billion — less than one-tenth the budget for the Department of Defense, which is $548.0 billion.  Source: Budget of the U.S. Government – Fiscal Year 2011

Another comparison that directly affects Americans and includes more of those evil entitlement programs (according to most conservatives) is the The Department of Labor’s 16,000 federally paid employees that enforce laws guaranteeing fair pay, workplace safety, and equal job opportunity, administers unemployment insurance (UI) to State UI agencies, regulates pension funds; and collects and analyzes economic data. The budget for this department is $14 billion, which is 2.5% (two “point” five percent) of the budget for the Department of Defense.

Continued on November 10, 2011 in The US Federal Government – How BIG is “big”? – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 9, 2011 in child abuse, family values, government, media, politics

 

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The US Federal Government — How BIG is “big”? – Part 2/4

08 Nov

In September 2011, the conservative newsletter of Hillsdale College, Imprimis, pointed out that it isn’t the number of employees that count or the amount of money spent that defines “BIG” government.

The author of the Imprimis piece, Edward J. Erler, Professor of Political Science, California State University, San Bernardino, says, “The task today is not to weaken the power of government — it is to confine the government to the exercise of its delegated powers [according to the Constitution] and to restore to its full vigor the partly national, partly federal form of government that was the legacy of the Founders.”

I recommend clicking on the above link to Imprimis and read Erler’s essay for a better understanding of what he means — it’s educational and may open your eyes to another truth and another reality than what is currently politically correct thinking among many Americans.


Response to Entitlement Programs – Michele Bachmann

As for the actual number of people that work for the federal government and are paid by the taxpayers [The US Postal Service does not count, as it must pay for itself (according to the law) through postal fees such as first class stamps or bulk mail for advertisers], according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), that number is two million.

Since the US population is about 312 million, that means 0.64% of the population is paid by taxpayers to work for the federal government.

In addition, on November 4, 2011, according to the BLS, The employed civilian labor force numbers 139,960,000, which does not include the 14,876,000 that are unemployed. Even if we subtract two million from the total number employed, we are left with about 138 million people or 58.3% of the population — a far cry from that 0.64% [“point” six four] that works for the federal, so-called “big” government.

In fact, of the 2 million federal employees paid out of taxpayer dollars, the often-maligned Department of Education (DOE) has about 4,000 employees, while the Department of Defense has 652,000, Veterans Affairs 280,000, the Department of Homeland Security 171,000 and the Department of Justice 108,000 — the rest have less than 100,000 employees with the DOE one of the smallest.

Continued on November 9, 2011 in The US Federal Government – How BIG is “big”? – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 8, 2011 in child abuse, family values, government, media, politics

 

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The US Federal Government — How BIG is “big”? – Part 1/4

07 Nov

It is a conservative battle cry that the Federal Government is too big and must be smaller. Another battle cry to solve America’s budget crises is to abolish or cut what is known as entitlement programs.

One example could be the National School Lunch Program, an entitlement program that supports student nutrition in over 101,000 schools and residential facilities. It provides free and reduced priced meals to low-income children before school, during school, after school, and over the summer.

In fiscal year 2009, federal school nutrition programs underwrote more than five billion meals served to over 31 million students. Total funding for all nutrition programs adds up to about $12 billion in both cash and commodity payments. School nutrition programs are one of the largest federal funding streams to schools. Source: New America Foundation


The TEA BAG Party’s spin on what is wrong with America

In fact, in an October Jobs Report, Daniel Gross reported, “Since May 2010, government has cut one million jobs (under President Obama — the so-called flaming liberal that wants to grow the federal government according to the scare tactics and Yellow Journalism of conservative pundits and talk radio) while the private sector added 2.28 million positions.”

I’m sure members of the far-right conservative “Tea Party” will jump to their feet and cheer believing they are the cause of government job losses.

However, just how large is the US Federal government?

What I discovered might surprise you — about one-half of one percent of the total population of the United States works as an employee of the federal government paid for by taxpayer dollars.

Continued on November 8, 2011 in The US Federal Government – How BIG is “big”? – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 7, 2011 in child abuse, family values, government, media, politics

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 4/4

30 Oct

Since so many Hispanic/Latinos and African-Americans live in poverty, you may believe poverty is the problem, and the facts support this progressive politically correct opinion. After all, in 2010, the National Poverty Center reported, “27.4% of blacks and 26.6% of Hispanics/Latinos were poor, compared to 9.9% of non-Hispanic whites [caucasions] and 12.1% of Asians.”

If you support  this “politically correct” opinion, think again as we visit one “tiny” rural Kansas school district.

Liz Goodwin writes in The Lookout, “The average student at the Waconda school district of 385 kids scores better than 90 percent of students in 20 developed countries on math and reading tests, according to The Global Report Card, published in the journal Education Next.

In Waconda school district, “Most of the students are white, and no kids need English language learning classes.”

However, 65% of these white students qualify for free or reduced federal lunches, which is an indication that they live in poverty.

The formula for success in the Kansas Waconda school district is that “almost every parent shows up for parent-teacher conferences at the elementary school level and participation stays high in the older grades as well.

[Note—the public school where I taught (1975 – 2005) always had more than 70% Hispanic/Latino students, and less than 10% of parents came to parent-teacher conferences annually]

In addition, the district keeps its pre-kindergarten to third grade classes “very” small so the teachers may deal with a lot of problems quickly and early in child development.

A third difference is that the district keeps an assessment card of each student and that card follows the child from grade to grade. The card lists skills the state expects each child to master in each subject and teachers update the cards continuously.

Another factor is that this small Kansas district does not follow education trends. “We don’t believe in the next biggest thing or the next biggest theory,” the superintendent, Jeff Travis, said, “We’ve not made any major changes.”

[Note: the public schools where I taught in Southern California implemented many of the biggest theories and these education trends often made my job as a teacher more difficult and the situation worse]

In conclusion, according to Robert Weissberg, “Regardless of geography, everybody, white, black, and brown, knows what a bad school is — a school dominated by poor black and Hispanic students.”

However, it doesn’t matter if one is an American conservative, moderate or liberal, few muster the courage to speak this truth even when that truth is supported with solid facts.

Return to Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 3 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 30, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 3/4

29 Oct

To understand the lack of motivation among most Hispanic/Latino and many African-American students, all one need do is be aware of a few facts, which I have written about in several posts.

In Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 3, we discover that forty-four percent (44%) of youth gang membership are Hispanic/Latino while thirty-five percent (35%) are African-American, which means that combined, Hispanic/Latino and African-American youths make up almost 80% of youth-gang membership in America, and youth gangs are not pro-education.

Then in Civil Disobedience and No Child Left Behind – Part 7 we learned the dropout rate in Mexico’s schools is almost 70% compared to 8.1% in the United States.

You may question why the dropout rate in Mexico has anything to do with America’s public schools until you learn that about 3.5 million public school students in the US are here illegally from Mexico and that high dropout rate is an indication of a cultural bias toward education. When those students slipped across the US border, many brought their lack of motivation to learn with them.

As most of us know, actions speak louder than words, and The Pew Hispanic Center offers more facts that indicate a lack of motivation.  Pew.org says, “Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number — 48% — say that they themselves plan to get a college degree… ”

In fact, In 2009, just 19.2 percent of Latinos between 25 and 34 had a university degree, while among Asians the percentage was 69.1 percent, with 48.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 29.4 percent for African Americans.” Source: Fox News

In addition, the largest numbers of dropouts come from Hispanic/Latino (17.6%) and African-American (9.3%) students, which is another indicator of motivation. However, only 5.2% of Whites drop out while 3.4% of Asian/Pacific Islanders do.

In Yet One More Doomed Education Reform,  Robert Weissberg defines the ‘politically correct’ head in the sand when he says, “Like the unsuccessful NCLB and every other reform of the last few decades, it speaks of transforming the ‘lowest performing schools’ as if schools, not the occupants, were the culprit.”

Weissberg then asks, “Why should a kid who hates school improve if moved to a new building?” Then he explains why Americans do not put the blame where it belongs.

“The term “bad school” is a euphemism,” Weissberg says, “a way of avoiding political trouble with grievance group leaders just waiting to exploit alleged [ethnic/racial] “insults” to rally the troops to extract material benefits.”

Continued on October 30, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 29, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 2/4

28 Oct

In Yet One More Doomed Education Reform , Robert Weissberg hits all the important points of why any meaningful education reform will never take place in the US as long as Americans refuse to take their heads out of the sand, abandon conservative and/or liberal political correctness and accept the facts.

I may not agree with everything Weissberg believes or writes but he is spot-on in this essay.

Weissberg is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois and points out that “one feature of American education that dares not speak its name in public: the intellectual quality of students.”

Anthony Daniels writing for The New Criterion says, His [Weissberg] choice of topic and method of attack has led him to be described as a ‘slaughterer of sacred cows’.

In Weissberg’s 2010 Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, he claims that Hispanics/Latinos and African-Americans have lower IQs [on average] than whites and Asians [which has been documented by valid and reputable often ignored scientific studies], a difference, he claims, that is genetically determined.

If you doubt Weissberg’s claim, I refer you to Appendix F, Racial Group IQ Comparisons on page 575 of the hardcover edition of K. D. Koratsky’s Living With Evolution or Dying Without It to see these facts.

Koratsky documents that 61% of Asians have IQs above 100, 52% of Caucasians, 33% of Hispanics and 17% of African-Americans.

Those above an IQ of 110 make up 37% of Asians, 27% of Caucasians, 13% of Hispanics and 7% of African-Americans.

In addition, 58% of African-Americans have an IQ lower than 90, while Hispanics number 41% in this category, Caucasians 27%, and Asians 15%.

Of course, reputable studies have discovered that IQ is not an indication of success and motivation is more important, but what happens when IQ and motivation are both missing?

Continued on October 28, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 28, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 1/4

27 Oct

There are at least three ‘false’ truths in America. There is the liberal/progressive truth, the conservative truth, and a moderate truth and then there are the politically incorrect but true facts many ignore for fear of being criticized by one or more of the politically correct mobs.

To define these mobs, we pin them with terms such as liberal/progressive or conservative and even these terms may be broken into smaller mobs such as hard-core liberals and conservatives. As for moderates, they seem to be spread all over the political spectrum.

For example, in August 2011, Gallup reported, “41% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.”

In addition, hard-right Republicans outnumbered hard-left Democrats two to one.

If you are curious which way the majority leans on a number of hot-button issues such as abortion, Gallup reported May 2011 that 49% of Americans are “pro-choice” while 45% are “pro-life”.

However, “pro-life” is politically correct to conservatives while “pro-choice” is politically correct to liberals but only 21% of Americans are considered liberal.

It appears few moderates support “pro-life” but when it comes to handguns, on October 26, 2011 Gallup reported, “A record-low 26% of Americans favor a legal ban on the possession of handguns in the United States…,” which tells us that when it comes to handguns most moderates support the conservative politically correct agenda on this hot-button issue.

However, when it comes to public education, the issue gets confusing. Gallup reported in August 2010 that, “Americans continue to believe their local schools are performing well, but the nation’s schools are performing poorly. More than three-quarters of public school parents [77%, which has to include at least 20% of the conservatives] give their child’s school an “A” or “B,” while 18% of all Americans grade the nation’s public schools that well.”

In other words, almost 80% of American parents [including almost half of all conservatives] believe the public school his or her child attends performs well but all other schools in the nation suck unless you are the parent of a child at one of those other public schools.

This is the opposite of the “grass is greener on the other side of the hill” attitude and more a belief that the grass is dead and failing where I never visit.

In addition, looking closer, we discover 67% of respondents say the amount of money spent on a public school student’s education affects the quality of his or her education “a great deal” or “quite a lot”, while 34% [Note—this probably represents the audience that regularly listens to conservative talk radio] respond that to earn an “A”, the public schools have to improve the quality of teaching.

How can that be when almost 80% of parents are satisfied with the public school [which would include the teachers] his or her child attends?

Improving the quality of teachers to solve so-called public school problems tends to be a conservative politically correct belief while spending more money on public schools leans toward the liberal/progressive aisle—another switch for most moderates and some conservatives.

After learning the confusing facts of public opinion in the United States, we hear from Robert Weissberg writing for “the American Thinker”, who complains of Yet One More Doomed Education Reform, a post that smashes many politically correct toes of all types.

Continued on October 28, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 27, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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