Cradle to Grave Continues

Listening to NPR this morning I heard a preview of the State of the Union speech and it sounds like President Obama is reviving a key "education" provision from his original platform, namely universal birth to college tax payer subsidized institutionalization of children and young adults in the "educational system". From the Huffington Post.....

Days before President Barack Obama outlines his agenda for the coming year, a think tank with close ties to the White House is outlining a plan that would provide preschool for all children within five years.

The Center for American Progress proposal, released Thursday, provides a road map for how the Obama administration could move forward with pre-kindergarten programs for all 3- and 4-year-olds. For families with younger children, federal subsidies for child care would increase to an average $7,200 per child and the number of students in Early Head Start programs would double.

The troubling results from Head Start coupled with the fact that we have no money should quash this but few politicians want to take a stand that appears to be voting against "education" even though this has nothing to do with education in the first place. The report from the Huffington Post tags the cost at north of $25,000,000,000 per year and that of course is laughably low balled since any program like this is going to overrun costs right out of the gate under the banner of "It is for the children!". In case you missed it, we don't really have any money right now and every year we add a trillion to the debt. Just a little fiscal factoid for ya!

This part killed me....

Closer to the kitchen table, the proposals have an economic resonance. The average family with two parents working and with children younger than 5 spends roughly a one-tenth of the income on child care. For families making less, that percentage climbs quickly.

So little Johnny and Suzie are going to get to go to a tax payer subsidized day care, er early childhood education program so that mom can go to work without paying for child care but since we don't have any money those same kids stuck in preschool warehousing early childhood education programs will get to deal with the additional debt incurred on their behalf to pay for their care when they hit adulthood. In other words, mom and dad get to pass off the cost of child care to their own children. What a great deal! New iPhones for everybody!

Set aside this sort of stuff. What is going on here is the continuance of a policy that seeks to separate children from their families, especially their mothers, at an earlier age and for more of the day. Children now barely get twelve weeks with their mothers before they are shipped off to daycare and the time after this three month period is filled with day care, preschool, public school, activities, sports, etc. that ultimately leads to children spending less and less time at home with their own family with each year that passes and in turn spending more and more time under the supervision of the state. This is a situation unprecedented in our history and unquestionably damaging to children and family cohesion in general.

That may come across as a little tin-foil hat hysterical but not when you examine some of the underlying philosophy behind the educational elite. You can be sure that the idea of adding thousands of government subsidized jobs that will fall under the umbrella of the teachers unions is a key driver for this movement. As we have moved further away from a child spending their preschool formative years at home with a parent and toward two income families with children increasingly cared for by strangers away from home, it is nigh impossible to make the arguments that families are stronger or education is improved. The only beneficiaries are the child care industry, including public schools, and large corporations that are able to pay less for labor thanks to the influx of women into the work force under the false impression that daycare for their children is "free". Make no mistake, for all of the noble language this sort of effort is couched in, the real motivation is almost certainly far more sinister.

The Problem with Public Schooling: More of the same

By almost any measure, the public school system is failing. So what is the logical response to the failure of the system of government mandated and funded schooling?

More of the same!

When you examine the education proposals of the new administration, one thing jumps out: More. More funding. More money for universal preschool. More money for college. More teachers (and consequently more union members and dollars). More and more and more. Many education “experts” have been calling for an extended school day and school year for decades. That is like trying to fix our infrastructure problems by having people spend more time at the DMV.

Is that really what we need? Do we need to trap kids for more time in a failed system? Johnny, the system is failing you now in the enormous amount of time you spend there. So let’s get you to school earlier, keep you later and extend the school year. If nine months of ineffective education are good, think how incredibly wasteful twelve months of the same would be! Why in the world would we think that more of the same would produce improved results? Without a fundamental change to the way public schooling is done, or doing away with it altogether, why would we expect different results? You don’t fix something that is broken that way. If a tractor trailer breaks down on the side of the highway because the engine blew up, putting a heavier load in the trailer and painting the cab is not going to make it run again.

Based on what the administration is proposing, not only are we looking at pumping an enormous amount of money into the system, nothing is being done that will actually improve that same system. So we should expect the same poor quality results but pay more for them (kind of like the car companies). Anything that might actually improve the whole system is done away with, especially when it comes to competition. The one thing that would make a huge difference in education (not schooling, education) would be to have real educational choice available to parents. As it stands now, lower income parents have really only two options: public school or homeschool. Private schools, religious and secular, are too expensive. Charter schools are being done away with. Where you live dictates the relative quality of the school your kids attend, so better school districts are more desirable which means that homes in that district are more expensive and thus become off limits to lower income families which traps kids from lower income families into disastrous schools. Introducing real competition would help this whole process. Poorly run schools would go away and well run schools would thrive in a free market. Unfortunately for kids, that is an uphill battle and especially so in an environment where teachers unions have gotten a huge boost in influence and power. In almost every decision we make for services, we have choices. You aren’t forced to shop at the Wal-Mart down the road because you are in that Wal-Mart’s “shopping district”. You go shop where you want. Even recipients of government food assistance can pretty much shop where they want. Not parents of school aged kids. This quote from a Wall Street Journal editorial captures the grim reality faced by many lower income parents, many of whom are black and supported Barack Obama…

So, does Mr. Obama care more about criminals than kids? Of course not. He just cares most about not upsetting a hugely important liberal special interest group that helped elect him and other Democrats. The raw political calculation is that poor black parents will forgive him long before the National Education Association does.

The problem is not that we don’t spend enough money or that kids don’t spend enough time in the public schools. The public school system IS the problem and forcing kids to spend more time there isn’t going to help anyone but the teachers unions and the Department of Education.

The abortion – daycare connection

I have been giving some thought to this whole issue as it relates to President Obama’s “Zero to Five” plan for families. That name is not accidental; the Zero to Five initiative really seeks to widen the influence of the government over families and especially children at an ever earlier age. The logical end result of this initiative is to reduce women to baby incubators just long enough to give birth and then get back to work.

Some people in the abortion debate are advocating a “Third Way”, where we recognize that abortion is the law of the land even though it is not pleasant so our focus should be on reducing the number and need for abortions instead of seeking to ban abortion outright or at least overturning Roe v. Wade.

I hope that Christians do not embrace this idea.

This is a false choice fostered by a socialist mindset. So the trade off is either more abortions or more kids in government sponsored daycare? While murder is certainly the less palatable option, neither of these options should be seen as appealing. The carrot being dangled here is that if you decide to go ahead and have children instead of aborting them, the government will take care of that child in subsidized daycare. Abortion and government daycare/ universal preschool are two sides of the same socialist coin. Christians should support women who get pregnant, either in marriage or out of wedlock. Pregnancy resource centers around the country do a wonderful work in helping frightened moms-to-be to prepare for successful motherhood. But there is a world of difference between helping expectant moms so that they keep and raise their children and buying into a worldview that sees women as units of production and pregnancy as a barrier to productivity.

Either way, abortion or state subsidized and controlled daycare, the cause of socialism is advanced. Either women abort their children and stay in the workforce or they have their children, get government mandated time off and then ship their kids into government subsidized daycare and go back to work. How about this option? Woman gets pregnant, woman keeps child, woman stays home and cares for child while husband works? Now that is a novel and radical idea if I have ever heard one!

April asked a very pertinent question in a previous comment:

Seriously...moral debate over abortion aside, why are we funding it IN OTHER COUNTRIES when our own country is on the brink of economic collapse?

I believe the reason is simple and chilling. Abortion at its core is not a health care issue or a women’s issue or any of that other garbage. It is a socialism issue. By giving people a sense of control over reproduction and child rearing, the socialist agenda achieves its goal of controlling human behavior to benefit the state. Ironically the state controls people while making them think they are enjoying new found freedoms. There is little fundamental difference between the abortion clinics in America and the killing fields of Cambodia or the gulags of the Soviet Union. In all of these cases, the lives of people who are a threat to the state are destroyed, sacrificed in a misguided and twisted desire to serve the common good. In essence these human lives are being snuffed out, one by one, by the millions to further a cause that at its heart is not about health care but is about rejecting God’s pattern for humanity and replacing it with the idol of the state where we will all be called one day to bow down and worship. When that day comes, where will you stand? Where do you stand today?

The Obama education plan: Control over people from cradle to grave

Voddie Baucham is speaking the truth yet again.

Voddie Baucham doesn’t post anything on his blog very often, but when he does it is always “must read” material. The latest post is no exception. You should read his post And So It Begins and get a quick synopsis of the Obama agenda. Here is a clue, it is not pretty.

One of the scariest points Voddie brings up is the Obama Zero to Five plan to expand daycare, Head Start and other programs. From the White House webpage:

Early Childhood Education

• Zero to Five Plan: The Obama-Biden comprehensive "Zero to Five" plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, the Obama-Biden plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama and Biden will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state Zero to Five efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.

• Expand Early Head Start and Head Start: Obama and Biden will quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding, and improve quality for both.

• Provide affordable, High-Quality Child Care: Obama and Biden will also increase access to affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.

Even the name of the program is creepy, Zero to Five Plan. As Voddie points out, that really amounts to this: “that’s right, the government not only wants to indoctrinate your children, they want to start the moment they are born”. Maybe even earlier, it might be a good idea for the state to grab them while they are still in the fetal stage. That way the very best genetic material will be allowed to develop to birth, and the others can be experimented on or just destroyed. Who wants people running around that limp, or have poor eyesight, or maybe are not as smart as other people? The best thing they can do for our society is to be used for experiments to improve life for the more worthy, productive members of society.

Oddly one of the biggest drivers to this blog are people who do a Google search on "Obama universal preschool" and the end up at my post Obama and universal preschool. But that is not surprising, the Obama vision for universal preschool really one of the dreams of the secularist movement, to get their hands on our children at a younger and younger age to begin to instill in them their worldview and to counteract the pernicious influence of their parents. Many parents are willing participants in this because they have bought into the idea of preschool being a valuable and necessary part of a child’s education. After all it is just an extension of modern American parenting. Have a kid, put them in daycare so mom can go back to work, get them to preschool and then public school and finally send them away to college. The net result of this system of “education” is that the state will watch our children and mold them into productive units in society until they finally get old enough to move out on their own and join the workforce.

Welcome to Obamanation!

Obama and universal preschool

I know I say this a lot but there is a vitally important Albert Mohler show regarding the innocent sounding but dangerous proposal for universal preschool that is an integral part of the Democrat party platform.

From the Obama campaign official webpage:

Barack Obama's Plan

Early Childhood Education

Zero to Five Plan: Obama's comprehensive "Zero to Five" plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, Obama's plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state "zero to five" efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.

Expand Early Head Start and Head Start: Obama will quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve quality for both.

Affordable, High-Quality Child Care: Obama will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.

That sounds very noble, but underneath the nice rhetoric is, I believe, an ominous agenda. The goal is to sink the bureaucratic claws into our kids earlier and keeping them in longer. Obama is calling for both universal pre-school and a college education that is “the birthright of every American". Funny, I don't recall that as one of our fundamental rights. Just more overheated, empty rhetoric from Obama.So now we have universal education, K-12. Obama and his supporters want to expand that to universal health preschool and universal college.

One comment from Obama during his call for universal preschool seemed so outlandish as to obviously draw scrutiny, but you don’t hear much about it. Obama claimed very dogmatically that every dollar we spend on preschool “education” returns us $10 in costs associated with drop outs, remedial education etc. No idea where he came up with that number, since that is something that would be awfully hard to pin down, but he said it like the Gospel truth. A couple of writers in the Wall Street Journal cut through the rhetoric and exposed what is really going on and how futile this enormous spending plan would be in an article titled "Protect our kids from preschool". Read it and learn...

“Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use -- and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.

In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16%. But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- the nation's report card -- have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now -- two major organizations pushing universal preschool -- refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia -- both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago -- paint an equally dismal picture.

A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia's universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee's preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.”

So universal preschool will lower the welfare rolls ‘cause Obama says so, will it? The facts and logic don't seem to support that assertion, but that is Ok because they are irrelevant to Obama. The facts don’t mean anything, because whenever the government gets involved, we get higher quality at lower cost. Just remember, whenever a liberal uses the word “universal”, grab your wallet!

What it really amounts to is de facto tax subsidized daycare, and because it is government sponsored and sanctioned preschool, those workers in these daycare facilities become professional educators and guess what, that makes them eligible for and probably required to become members of a teachers union.

Always follow the money and always check the ideology. This is not about getting kids better prepped for school. This is about more money in union coffers driven by more union “teaching” jobs, more positions for education majors to fill and more control over children outside of the influence of their parents. It also drives more parents, mainly women, into the workforce sooner. With our economy in the state that it is, we certainly don’t need more people in the workforce. Wages are already artificially inflated thanks to minimum wage laws and labor unions.

Incentivizing the earlier and earlier separation of very young children from the parents, and by design from the influence of their parents is disastrous. Are children best served by having their formative years dictated by a state run institution that is beholden to unions and entrenched interests, or by care received from their parents? Make no mistake that there is an insidious underlying motive here. Secular humanists have assumed for decades that man’s “progress” would eventually lead to a complete rejection of faith but Christianity has proven far more stubborn than they could have envisioned. Clearly a large part of that is that children are raised in the faith by their parents, so what better way to wean society off religion than to intervene in children's education and formation as early as possible to minimize the impact parents can have on their kids worldview.

Another issue is that certainly bears discussion is the idea that we should pay for preschool to give “disadvantaged” children a boost. It sounds great, but at what point do we stop caring for the children of kids for these sorts of backgrounds? Should we take them at birth so they can be institutionalized and raised by the state? Certainly there are some who would advocate that. But it hardly can be argued that the government needs to get further involved in child care. Our focus should be on intact families, not a nanny state that raises kids.

This really sums up in the insanity of the universal preschool mantra.

“Why don't preschool gains stick? Possibly because the K-12 system is too dysfunctional to maintain them. More likely, because early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don't begin formal education until they are 7. Subsidized preschool is available for parents who opt for it, but only when their kids turn 6.
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If Mr. Obama is serious about helping children, he should begin by fixing what is clearly broken: the K-12 system. The best way of doing that is by building on programs with a proven record of success. Many of these involve giving parents control over their own education dollars so that they have options other than dysfunctional public schools. The Obamas send their daughters to a private school whose annual fee in middle school runs around $20,000. Other parents deserve such choices too -- not promises of subsidized preschool that they may not want and that may be bad for their kids.”

There is the crux of the issue. Spending billions to prepare kids to enter a dysfunctional system, worldview issues aside is like getting your car waxed and detailed before a demolition derby. It may look nice going in but it will look the same as every other wreck coming out.