Governor Sandoval recently declared that when he asked teachers and school administrators about mandatory all-day kindergarten, preschool and other tax-funded educational expansions, they told him these educational power grabs are a “no brainer” to improve Nevada children’s learning outcomes.
Governor Sandoval is not the first Nevada governor to refuse to use his brain by offering unquestioning support for these teachers’ union sponsored initiatives. Former governor Robert Miller testified at the 2015 legislature for Sandoval’s new taxes. In 1989, Miller’s tax hikes targeting class size reduction and early childhood education were also called a “no brainer.”
Since 1990, Nevada has spent almost $2.5 billion on class size reduction, and early childhood education, and the results have been dismal. The reason why these schemes to expand public education from cradle to grave are no brainers is because anyone with a brain can see they don’t work. Numerous studies and Nevada’s own experience shows that children in larger classes often learn more than children in smaller classes, and any measurable advances in achievement due to early childhood education dissipate after a few years.
In 2001, the Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau concluded that although popular with teachers, administrators and many parents, the Miller reforms produced no measurable educational improvements. Governor Sandoval should use his brain to look at the studies and Nevada’s experience and protect the taxpayers of Nevada from these old, failed nostrums. Failure to do so will fuel the revolt in his own party against his tax-and-spend educational policies.
The liberal culture war flamed up recently over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s support for her husband President Clinton’s infamous 1994 Crime Bill that led to the over-incarceration of black males, with devastating effects on minority families and neighborhoods.
The then First Lady exploited the fears of soccer moms everywhere to declare that the “crack epidemic,” (which many believe the CIA had a hand in causing), was creating new “superpredators,” a.k.a. young males with no consciences who were murdering and rampaging in the inner cities. Black Lives Matter activists and Bernie supporters have rightly hammered her and Bill for their fear-mongering for political gain. Hillary later admitted Bill’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws were a “mistake,” you know, like bombing Yugoslavia, voting for the Iraq war, and destroying Libya were mistakes.
Husband Bill opened the wounds again by defending her superpredator urban legend in a speech saying those who attacked her (i.e. Black Lives Matter) must like “gang leaders who send 13 year olds hopped up on crack out to kill African Americans.”
Any politician who spreads the old chestnut about how drugs cause violent crime and how they magically bestow super human strength and pain imperviousness on those who are “hopped up” on them is a fear mongering, craven jerk. The number of violent crimes due to drug intoxication itself is minuscule. Drug-related violence is almost always the result of black market turf wars due to prohibition itself, and sometimes addicts who are not “hopped up” on drugs but out of drugs and use violence to obtain them. Legalization is the cure for both these problems.
Are the 13 year olds who are given drugs to “hop them up” the same 13 year olds who are also “trafficked”? An urban legend that complex would make Michael Myers seem tame, but there are always white folks who will believe it. It is time for young people, and older ones who still have a brain, to push back before the Clintons’ liberal law and order state ruins thousands more lives.