Why he was fired isn’t why he should have been sent packing long ago.

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This post went up at Watchdog.org with minor edits a short time ago.

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Last week, an audio recording of Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee exposed him opening his gaffe-prone mouth several times too many in just one appearance.

At a meeting of OSU’s Athletic Council six months ago, Gee fired off smears in rapid succession at Catholics (“You just can’t trust those damn Catholics on a Thursday or Friday”); Kentucky’s two largest universities (they aren’t “institutions of like-minded academic integrity”); the University of Cincinnati (“They’d have to take [OSU Athletic Director] Gene [Smith] out and shoot him to let Cincinnati into the Big Ten“); Wisconsin’s former football coach (“he left just ahead of the sheriff”); and finally, the Southeastern Conference, and really the South in general (they need to “learn to read and write”).

Despite self-evident self-serving denials, this final episode, following several years of similar though more spread-out missteps committed by a man who of all people should know that every word you say matters, is what led Gee several days later to retire as the school’s president.

Gee’s retirement is effective at the end of this month. But like a bad penny, he will reportedly hang around, “probably as a law professor and definitely to raise money for the university.”

Gee should have been dismissed long ago for three more substantive reasons: his overwhelming sense of self-entitlement, his obliviousness to the consequences of his actions, and his failure to reform OSU as he said he would.
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This column went up at Watchdo.org with minor edits a short time ago.

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In July 2012, the Columbus Dispatch broke the story of “attendance scrubbing” in Columbus City Schools. It seems safe to say that reporter Bill Bush had no idea of the full extent of deception and corruption he, other Dispatch reporters, state investigators, and other law enforcement officers would uncover, both at CCS and elsewhere.

If Bush had found nothing else, it would have been bad enough. But since then:

• Nine other mostly large districts throughout the state were found — one by the Ohio Department of Education, the other eight by the Ohio Auditor’s office,  to have purposely engaged in the practice.
• The auditor’s office, headed by Dave Yost, found that CCS had also expanded its fudging by changing the grades of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of students.
• As if this wasn’t enough, the Dispatch learned in mid-February that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has expanded its involvement, and is looking into “possible contract fraud and bid-rigging” at CCS.

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From Indianapolis:

May 10, 2013 / 02:03 am

Six weeks after the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the state’s voucher program, Gov. Mike Pence has signed into law a bill that makes more children eligible for vouchers.

“Our Hoosier students deserve every opportunity to be successful. That includes having the choice to attend the school that works best for them,” Gov. Pence said May 9 at a signing ceremony at Calvary Christian school in Indianapolis.

He said the legislation would give more educational options to the state’s students.

The present program allows a family of four with an annual household income of $64,000 to receive vouchers up to $4,500 per child. Unlike programs in some other states, it does not limit vouchers to low-income students in failing schools.

The new bill expands eligibility requirements for vouchers. More children will be eligible without having to spend at least a year in public schools. Siblings of current voucher students, students with special needs, and children living in the attendance district of a public school that received a failing grade in state performance evaluations will also be eligible, the Associated Press reports.

The Indiana Catholic Conference said in a legislative roundup that current Catholic school families who meet income requirements are eligible for a tax credit scholarship through a scholarship granting organization. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Expect more heavy-handed tactics such as those described here (HT Instapundit) as the grassroots revolt against Common Core coalesces:

The district has obtained a subpoena for Google to find out the identities of the person who runs the blog, “Concerned Hamburger,” and two people who have posted comments on it, “Klozman” and “Super.”

Concerned Hamburger’s blog is here.

Temporary student “residents” should not have a say in a community’s long-term direction.

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This item went up at Watchdog.org with minor editing earlier this afternoon.

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Ohio’s General Assembly is considering a measure which would grant in-state tuition to out-of-state college students if they so much as pretend to be interested in voting.

Specifically, the Columbus Dispatch reported on April 23 that under a Republican budget amendment approved the previous week, “an institution must charge in-state tuition if it provides an out-of-state student with a letter or utility bill that the student can use to show residency and vote in Ohio.”

You read that right. As described, this proposal would force a school to charge its in-state tuition rate to any out-of-state student who asks for documentation certifying his or her presence there. From all appearances, those student recipients don’t even need to bother registering to vote to get this break, let alone cast a ballot. Out-of-state students at Ohio State wouldn’t even have to get out of bed, as they “can input information online and have a utility bill emailed to them, which they can print and take to the polling site.”

Although the idea originated with Republicans, it really shouldn’t be characterized as coming from the left or the right. Outer space would be more like it.

At least one Democrat’s reaction is from space’s nether regions. Kathleen Clyde of Kent, a university town, acts as if the measure is an attempt to suppress out-of-state student votes and not a self-evident attempt to increase their number. She actually took to the floor of the House to incoherently accuse Republicans of “forcing universities to do your voter-suppression dirty work for you.”

Please. Bruce E. Johnson, president of the state’s Inter-University Council, as paraphrased by the Dispatch, described what would really happen:

… every out-of-state student will demand one (a letter or utility bill), and those who don’t get it will sue to force the university to provide it.

The move would all but end the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at Ohio’s public institutions of higher learning.

I have been unable to identify a good reason why this proposal shouldn’t be laughed out of Columbus. As for reasons to oppose it, everyone in Ohio should find something objectionable.

Most obviously, there’s the lost tuition. To cite just one example, out-of-state tuition at Miami University in Oxford, at $29,158 according to the latest annual survey done by U.S. News, is over $15,500 higher than its in-state charge of $13,595. Miami alone estimates that it could see its tuition income reduced by $60 million annually. The grand total reduction statewide is an estimated $370 million.

So who is going to absorb this difference? Students and their families are already stretched thin, something at least two of the state’s universities, Ohio State and the University of Toledo, have recognized by freezing tuition for the 2013-2014 academic year. Earlier this month, students at Ohio University in Athens protested trustees’ plans to raise tuition by 1.6 percent and room rates by 3.5 percent.

Buckeye State taxpayers certainly shouldn’t be asked to cough up any more money, especially for an idea as misguided as this one. The reason out-of-state tuition differentials exist is that the parents of students from other states aren’t Ohio taxpayers. Letting out-of-state students pay the same rate unfairly forces Ohio’s taxpayers to pay a large share of the cost of their college education.

The elephant in the room, pun intended, is voter fraud. It is already far too easy to vote in multiple states without getting caught. Now every out-of-state university student in Ohio would face that temptation.

Most fundamentally, the fact that an idea like this would even appear on the radar, let alone get proposed as legislation, demonstrates how so many people who should know better have completely lost touch with the basic concepts of responsible citizenship.

Let’s face the obvious. The vast majority of college students at residential universities have little if any personal stake in the long-term well-being of the cities and towns in which their schools happen to be located. They are mostly, like it or not, more like transients than residents. After they graduate, or in all too many cases drop out, most will only occasionally visit these towns. Regardless of whether they get a break for doing so, thirty-day residency laws which make voting easier for adults who have moved or relocated should not be unethically abused by students who should be paying attention to developments back home and voting there as absentees.

In the real world, the chances that out-of-state student voters will adequately educate themselves on state, county, and local issues are extremely low — and even if they do, they should not have the ability to influence issues which won’t affect them personally or financially. For example, there is no reason why student votes for a public school property tax levy, especially if they live on campus, should cancel out the votes of resident adult property owners who oppose it.

Hopefully, this idea will be quickly rejected once its negative impacts become more widely known.

In a roundup of editorial commentary published on Wednesday, the Associated Press excerpted an editorial at the Los Angeles Times condemning the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, which has thus far led to 35 arrests, including that the of the district’s former superintendent. “Somehow,” the excerpt omitted the specifics of the excuse-making on the part of the American Federation of Teachers and it President Randi Weingarten in the organization’s press release.

What AP excerpted, followed by the key passage it chose not to, follow the jump.

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It’s a de facto federal takeover of the nation’s schools — ultimately all of them.

It effectively dictates how all schoolchildren will be taught — even those who are homeschooled — with no exceptions and eventually no opportunity for opt-out.

It ends individual privacy. The state and federal governments will know more about you and especially your kids than anyone else on earth, even including you, considering that we all have incomplete and imperfect memories.

Viewing the five important videos below (direct links: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5) will take barely more than the time it takes to sit through a TV sitcom episode. Please watch.

The two key web sites mentioned in the final part of the video are here:
- StopCommonCore.com
- TruthInAmericanEducation.com

Please take some of the actions suggested in the second half of Part 5.

Michelle Malkin had a great post on the privacy-ending aspects of Common Core on March 15.

On March 11, Malkin also posted an opt-out (via Truth in American Education) and links to her “Rotten to the Core series.

That opt-out form is important enough that yours truly, despite technical ignorance, figured out how to embed the form here at BizzyBlog. It’s below.

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UPDATE: Obviously the big-picture issues are far more important in the long run, but Malkin’s dig into the details of her child’s Common Core-aligned Algebra book reveals that it “is crap,” and would make anyone wonder why we should be relying on the people who developed these materials as the sole source for national standards and curricula. Go see one of the busts here.

The president seeks to add another statist layer to society.

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This column went up at FrontPageMag.com earlier this morning.

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The first and most obvious question about the “universal preschool” idea President Barack Obama proposed in his State of the Union address has to be: “How in the world did we ever survive without it?”

The answer, until the nation and its culture began losing its way during the 1960s and 1970s, is that we mostly did just fine. Rich or poor, most families contained a married couple that stayed together. Their children generally grew up to competent with the help of strong reinforcing support structures in our neighborhoods, churches and communities.

Now we largely don’t have intact families. We’re paying for this devolution dearly in more ways than I can hope to enumerate in a single column. But I will note the primary result: Too many of our children are not being raised in home environments conducive to healthy early (or later) development. I will also note why this has happened: For decades, government policies have discouraged marriage while encouraging family break-ups.

Now the same people who brought us 30 years of a welfare system which did those very things (until 1996, when welfare reform began to improve that situation, but only marginally, because the culture by then had changed so markedly for the worse), an urban education system which has been failing children for decades (with the rot spreading to the suburbs and exurbs faster than more people recognize), and urban neighborhoods which have become virtual battle zones, are offering yet another “solution” which won’t solve anything, and could possibly do significant harm. But it will expand the government’s power and influence, which is what all of this is really about.
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Angela McCaskill, Chief Diversity Officer at Gallaudet University, has been reinstated following three months of administrative leave which began after the university learned that she had signed a petition supporting the placement of an initiative to repeal recently passed legislation legalizing same-sex “marriage” on the Maryland ballot.

The headline at the Associated Press story about Ms. McCaskill’s statement (“GAY MARRIAGE FLAP: GALLAUDET REINSTATES OFFICIAL”) should have instead read “free speech flap.” That’s what the McCaskill controversy was about, as the underlying AP story by Ben Nuckols, which virtually ignores the witch-hunt sentiment directed at her, still makes clear (bold is mine):

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… which is why anonymously arming teachers is the best prevention (go to the link if the video below won’t play):

Interesting and valid points:

• A previous school shooting was perpetrated by a milk delivery driver — someone who will always be able to get into a school.
• Police can’t possibly respond quickly enough to mass murder attempts. The school prinicipal noted that recent mass killings have only involved three to nine minutes of time.

From what I can tell, a major scandal involving teachers in three states has received almost no national press coverage since CNN first broke a story about it in July. Among the non-participants or nearly non-participants (again, from what I can tell based on archived news search attempts) is the Associated Press, which decided early this morning on a slow news weekend when few are paying attention to publish Adrian Sainz’s 1,200-word story on the topic.

What follows are portions CNN’s original report, today’s AP item, and a “edu-blog” post, in wondering why the conspiracy hasn’t received more attention, identifies a sadly predictable likely reason.

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From Manassas, Virginia (internal link added by me):

Oct 25, 2012 / 02:30 am

The Cardinal Newman Society has published its 2012-2013 edition of “The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College,” along with a companion magazine to help high school students and their parents pursue faithful higher education.

Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, explained that it is “not enough that our Catholic sons and daughters survive college with their faith intact.”

“Catholic college graduates should be wise, pure, and ready to serve with distinction in any career and vocation,” he said. “The colleges and universities in The Newman Guide provide this preparation for life.”

First published in 2007, the Newman Guide evaluates the Catholic identity of colleges to identify those that exhibit fidelity and excellence.

The latest edition of the guide includes thorough profiles of the 28 recommended colleges, offering facts on each institution’s academics, spiritual life, student activities and residence life. …

Go here for the rest of the story.