Teach for America — the privately funded program that sends college grads into America’s poorest school districts for two years — received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.
So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year’s applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.
This is a tragic lost opportunity. Teach for America picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money. More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it. Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment to a teaching career. But the Urban Institute has studied the program and found that “TFA status more than offsets any experience effects. Disadvantaged secondary students would be better off with TFA teachers, especially in math and science, than with fully licensed in-field teachers with three or more years of experience.”
It’s true that only 10% of Teach for America applicants say they would have gone into education through another route, but two-thirds stay in the field after their two years. One program benefit is that its participants don’t have to pass the dreadful “education” courses that have nothing to do with what they’ll be teaching. Those courses are loved by unions as a credentialing barrier that makes it harder to get into teaching.
Some districts may be wising up. Mississippi’s education superintendent has asked Teach for America to double the size of its 250-member corps in the poor Delta region and is encouraging local superintendents to raise hiring caps. Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has also sharply increased the percentage of corps members among its new teachers, to 250.
But why have any caps? Teach for America young people should be able to compete on equal terms with any other new teaching applicant. The fact that they can’t is another example of how unions and the education establishment put tenure and power above student achievement.
…we have more than $12 trillion sitting in offshore accounts. They’re sitting there in dollars because we have the strongest economy in the world and dollars are safe. They’re sitting offshore to be secret — hidden from the prying eyes of our government through the IRS.
Don’t misunderstand. Most of this money sitting offshore has been earned in a perfectly legal manner and for the most part no laws are being broken by those dollars being deposited outside of this country. Some of it has been legally earned by American corporations in their overseas operations, and they just haven’t yet decided to repatriate these funds. Why? Taxes. For some reason, these American corporations just aren’t all that happy with the triple — yes, triple — taxation that would hit those dollars if they were put to work in the U.S. economy…
In a FairTax conversation with former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, the chairman was asked if he thought this offshore money would in fact come back into American markets in a FairTax world. Well, he said, a small portion might remain offshore for other good business reasons — but the remainder would certainly come home.
How long would it take for that to happen? he was asked. Years? Decades?
The federal income tax imposed to finance the Civil War had two tax brackets — 3 percent and 5 percent — and was repealed in 1872. It remained off the books until 1913, when the 16th Amendment was ratified. The federal income tax rates in 1913 ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent. That highest rate applied to people earning $500,000 a year or more. Today, a married couple earning that much would pay a federal income tax rate of 35 percent, and with all taxes combined could pay more than half their income in taxes.
The greatest tax outrage in American history is Washington’s gradual convincing of the American people that giving so much of their income to the government is just and fair.
Our forefathers rebelled over taxes that amounted to pennies per item, and two centuries later we fork over 40 percent of our income and call it “fair.” The excise taxes and import duties that financed Washington for more than a century were not sustainable. A new tax system was needed. But in the century that followed its adoption, it changed the American people themselves.
Americans today are taxed at levels most of our forebears would have considered unthinkable. By our own nation’s historical standards, we are outrageously, insanely overtaxed. And yet we shrug our shoulders and say, well, at least we’re not France.
The Somali pirates are from where? Somalia. Does the name Mogadishu ring a bell? Mogadishu is the capital city, if you want to call it a city. And it happens to be the site of one of the most embarrassing incidents — not because of the military, but because of the Clinton administration — in modern American military history, Black Hawk Down. We originally went into Somalia because the New York Times published a picture of a starving kid with flies buzzing all around his belly. That picture on the front page of the New York Times convinced George Bush 41 we had to send in US military personnel to deliver Meals on Wheels. The media awaited them on the beach in Somalia when they arrived. The media went in, and we started passing out the food, and the lead warlord, Mohammed Mahib Sahib Skyhook Ado, whatever his name was, he and his thugs came in and took all the food. They shot people trying to feed themselves raw grain.
This led to an increase in hostilities, and the increase in hostilities resulted in the deaths of four or five US Army Rangers [correction: fourteen Rangers and four Delta operators], one of which was paraded nude through town, pictures of that were seen. At that point the Clinton administration pulled out. It was that incident, by the way, that Osama Bin Laden told a reporter at ABC, “That’s when we knew the Americans had become a paper tiger. They can’t take any losses; Americans can’t take any pain.” The Somali pirates are born to that culture.
James Carville, a key architect of the Limbaugh strategy, says Dems will be seeking to elevate Palin more and more, because she’s “an identifiable person who has a hook,” unlike GOP leaders like Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell.
“Her name conjures up all kinds of reactions in people’s minds,” Carville told me, adding that her association with the campaign will be used to portray the GOP as hidebound and to alienate moderates. “She’s an uncomfortable figure for a lot of Republicans,” Carville says. “They want to move beyond her. We like her.”
While holding elected officials accountable is laudable, most of the matters are beyond trivial. One of the complaints against her was for talking to reporters about the presidential campaign while she was in the governor’s office. Another objected to her office press secretary offering a statement to clarify a statement put out by her political action committee. The latest complaint is that Palin wore snow-machine gear advertising her husband Todd’s sponsor, Arctic Cat Inc, while “in her official duties as governor” when she served as the “official starter” of the race.
Palin owes $500,000 in legal fees, almost four times her annual salary. She says she may be forced to create a legal defense fund.
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. We originally went into Somalia because the New York Times published a picture of a starving kid with flies buzzing all around his belly. That picture on the front page of the New York Times convinced George Bush 41 we had to send in US military personnel to deliver Meals on Wheels. The media awaited them on the beach in Somalia when they arrived. The media went in, and we started passing out the food, and the lead warlord, Mohammed Mahib Sahib Skyhook Ado, whatever his name was, he and his thugs came in and took all the food. They shot people trying to feed themselves raw grain. 
