bureaucracy

I would be perfectly fine with – and actually feel a whole lot better – if the DoD created three backups of everything.  Maybe even four would be good.

While teachers have walked off their jobs in several states this spring to protest what they believe to be low pay and lack of classroom resources to support teaching, armies of bureaucrat have been bickering over implementing the massive Every Student Succeeds Act.

The Left doesn’t like acquiescing to the will of We the People. They like – to degree that they can pull it off – to PRETEND to acquiesce to the will of We the People.

It is one of the many, many reasons our nation’s Founding Fathers profoundly limited government. They trusted businessmen much more than they trusted government bureaucrats.

On July 4, 1776, American colonists declared their independence from a distant monarchy in Great Britain that had passed mandate after mandate without input from the people over which it ruled. Today, lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington, DC and state capitals across the country pass mandates local schools hundreds or even thousands of miles away must obey or else face severe budget cuts.

A government taking occurs when the regulatory strictures placed on a piece of property so limit its use that it is stripped of economic viability. Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City is the leading case in the Supreme Court’s regulatory takings jurisprudence.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a decline in the level of trust in government, and a rise in distrust, to levels unprecedented in American history. But to think this is an entirely new phenomenon is a mistake: trust in government has steadily declined since the Great Society and the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson.

A cautionary tale about the pitfalls of bureaucratic incompetence played out in Ireland over the last several days. American country music star Garth Brooks was scheduled to play five concerts in the Croke Park arena, one of the largest venues in the country. In all, 400,000 tickets were sold. That is an astonishing number, considering Ireland’s population is just under 4.6 million. Close to one in ten citizens was planning to attend!

Storm clouds have been gathering around the Common Core for some time. Until now, most of the critical attention has been on the political ramifications of the program, that it centralizes and federalizes teaching, diminishing the power of parents to participate in the educational process. When the criticism does turn to the content of the curriculum, it usually focuses on social studies, such as Joy Pullmann’s excellent account of the Common Core’s trashing of the Constitution and Founding Fathers. Yet the Common Core’s treatment of math is proving to be even more questionable.

It’s crucial you don’t see a free 40-minute documentary film out today or you might get concerned about an effort to control and dramatically reshape every American child’s education. Building the Machine has Common Core right: It’s the biggest reform you know nothing about.

Seventy years ago this month, on March 10, 1944, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich A. Hayek was first published in Great Britain. For seven decades it has continued to challenge and influence the political-economic landscape of the world. Hayek delivered an ominous warning that political trends in the Western democracies, including America, were all in the direction of a new form of servitude that threatened the personal and economic liberty of the citizens of these countries.

Put “Spies Like Us” vintage Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd at the top of EPA rather than the top of CIA field operations, and you have an idea of how John Beale monumentally screwed up EPA climate policy and international climate negotiations.

Is common core a set of general guidelines or does it tell teachers how to teach?