A look at some of todays stories while wondering how the Cardinals overcame a 4-0 deficit against Cliff Lee:
If you’ve got fundraising muscle, it pays to be tea party. That’s the takeaway from recently released financial reports for five of the biggest conservative groups that latched onto the small government movement, according to Politico. The groups – Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, Leadership Institute and Tea Party Express – raised $79 million last year. That’s a 61-percent increase from their haul in 2009, when the tea party first started gaining traction, and an 88 percent increase over their tally in 2008, according to a POLITICO review of campaign reports and newly released tax filings.
Writes Kenneth P. Vogel:
It’s an entirely different story for the rag-tag local groups that form the heart of the tea party, which struggle to raise cash.
The imbalance is worrisome to some grassroots tea party activists, who warn that the movement is at risk of becoming dependent on the type of centralized, top-down political structure that contributed to tea partiers’ distaste for both political parties, as well as Washington’s conservative establishment.
Former NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton excoriated teachers unions in a Monday Wall Street Journal editorial that envisions what would happen if some of America’s education policies were applied to the football field.
America’s favorite curmudgeon delivered his final rant on Sunday’s ‘60 Minutes’ after 62 years at CBS News. From grumbling over Bill Gates to moaning about his eyebrows and bellyaching over mixed nuts, see Andy Rooney’s best essays.
The only problem with Frans analysis is how NFL players are evaluated versus how most want to evaluate teachers. Imagine for a moment, Fran, if the entire NFL had their pay and performance evaluated not on how they personally did on the field but on how the Kansas City Chiefs were doing on the field. People want to evaluate teachers based on how another human being performs. Give teachers a class full of kids who eat three square meals, don’t have parents in prison, aren’t taking care of their brothers or sisters, live in a stable home, don’t dream in the second grade of becoming a porn star, don’t come to kindergarten with mom’s crack pipe and maybe then you can evaluate how they are doing their job based on the kids performance. People need to go spend a month in a classroom setting and see the social ills teachers have to deal with rather than teaching. In many respects, classrooms have become little more than cages in a zoo where the animals are kept alive.
Doctors don’t get penalized when a 500# patient with diabetes, heart disease and COPD dies on the operating table because that patient was expected to die. Its called risk adjustment. The problem is nobody wants to admit that there are kids with certain social traits that are equally as at risk to fail in school. We have to hang on to this fantasy that every child can be anything they want to be if only we reach them. Risk adjusting a teachers performance would be tantamount to admitting some of these kids are a waste of time in some peoples estimation. However, if you want teachers to buy into being evaluated based on another human beings performance, you are going to have to find a way to not penalize them for kids who should be expected to fail just like you would with a doctor.