The Republicans and Democrats of Idiot America

Idiot America has two political parties (there are other parties who get virtually zero percent of the votes). The Republicans and the Democrats.

Both parties get some things right and some things wrong.

It will be so nice if there was a 3rd choice, a political party that does everything right, but that's not going to happen.

The Republican fucktards are famous for wanting to destroy the environment and wipe out other species if it's lucrative to do that. The Republicans are extremely anti-science. Virtually all Republicans politicians and Republican voters are evolution deniers, aka uneducated morons. They are Christian scum who want to force their disgusting fake moral values down everyone else's throat. These theocratic assholes have my contempt.

Republicans get one thing right. They are very pro-business. They understand capitalism works best when the government gets out of the way. When President Fucktard Trump got the job despite being a celebrity clown he threw out unnecessary regulations that discouraged small businesses from creating more jobs. Even better was the recent tax reform bill which has already been very successful. Thousands of jobs are being created and workers are getting bonuses and raises. Meanwhile the anti-business Democrats are complaining about this success. Apparently the Democrats want to keep losing elections.

The Democrats are aways completely wrong about how to improve the American economy. They would never have passed a tax reform bill. They don't understand how capitalism works.

The Democrat politicians get lots of cash, aka bribes, from the teacher unions. These asshole Democrats are more interested in protecting incompetent teachers than protecting the students who get stuck with these know-nothing teachers. At the end of this post a copy & paste job explains the problem.

The Democrats get some very important things right. They will never be accused of being theocrats. They share my contempt for Christian scum. Even more important the Democrats are very pro-science and they want to protect the environment instead of destroying it.

Another thing I like about Democrats is they have some common sense about something I'm very interested in, the legalization of the special substance, aka marijuana. The Republicans think this is wrong. Fuck you Republicans.

In Florida we have legalized marijuana for health reasons, no thanks to our asshole Republican governor. I'm looking forward to some day being able to go to a marijuana store and buying some marijuana edibles which will help me sleep at night. I would never smoke the stuff but it's virtually harmless to eat it as long as the user doesn't use too much which would not be pleasant. Meanwhile much more dangerous drugs like tobacco and alcohol are legal. It's not a good idea to drive while stoned but it's many time safer than driving when drunk. A stoned driver might get lost but they rarely crash. Stoned driver: "Where are we?" Stoned passenger: "I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

From now on I'm voting for the Democrats even though they are totally wrong about some things including the teacher unions problem.

Wall Street Journal - There’s One Thing Worse Than Paying Bad Teachers Not to Work. Bill de Blasio’s New York has started putting them back in the classroom, especially in poor areas.

By Marcus A. Winters Feb. 9, 2018 143 COMMENTS

What should a city do with poor teachers who, thanks to union rules, cannot be fired? For years New York has let them linger on its Absent Teacher Reserve, where they are paid without having a permanent spot in any school. But now the city is taking the opposite approach: putting them back into classrooms.

The ATR is an example of what happens when reform runs up against inflexible labor rules. In 2005 Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended the practice of filling teaching slots in New York’s public schools by seniority. Instead, he gave principals increased power to hire the teachers they thought best. The complication was the union contract. Laid-off teachers could either look for a position elsewhere or join the ATR, where they receive full salary and benefits as they move across schools doing short-term work, often as substitutes.

The ATR differs from the notorious “rubber rooms,” or reassignment centers, where suspended teachers accused of misconduct once awaited adjudication of their cases. Teachers aren’t placed on the ATR because they are facing dismissal. They just can’t (or won’t) persuade a principal to hire them. Some have received ineffective teaching ratings. Others have records of disciplinary problems like absenteeism or sleeping on the job.

As the Bloomberg administration closed the city’s worst schools, the ATR pool grew. On the first day of school in 2013 it included 1,957 teachers. Since Bill de Blasio became mayor in 2014, his administration has offered ATR teachers buyouts and given principals an incentive to hire them by having the city cover part of their salaries for the first two to three years. By the end of the 2016-17 school year there were 822 teachers left in the pool; that year paying ATR teachers cost the city about $150 million.

Then last summer the city announced it would simply place some 400 ATR teachers into classrooms without giving principals any say. As of early December, only 41 placements had been made. Still, the administration has shown its willingness to reduce the ATR with forced teacher placements, meaning more will doubtless come as vacancies arise.

Neither the union-friendly de Blasio administration nor the antagonistic Bloomberg administration has been able to strike a deal imposing limits on how long teachers can remain on the ATR. The United Federation of Teachers opposes any deadline, even on teachers who haven’t found a principal willing to hire them after five years. Today that’s the case for one-quarter of ATR teachers.

Rather than admitting defeat, the de Blasio administration has joined with the union to spin the placements as a better way to allocate resources. The argument is that at hard-to-staff schools with high turnover, permanently hiring a teacher from the ATR is better than relying on substitutes. “What we’re trying to do is give a more stable educational environment to the students,” the union’s president, Michael Mulgrew, said last year.

The most difficult-to-staff schools are often those that serve low-income and heavily minority populations. As expected, a disproportionate number of the ATR placements have been at such schools. The city says it is holding the teachers accountable. ATR teachers have one year to show their effectiveness, after which the city says it will remove the low performers and in some cases follow the required process to fire them. But the fact that it’s nearly impossible to do so is the reason the ATR exists in the first place.

And here is where the political calculus becomes clear: Some struggling schools won’t get any ATR teachers forced on them. In 2014 the city designated 94 of the worst schools as Renewal Schools, singling them out for extra money and attention. The point was to demonstrate that with enough resources, the current system could improve. Now these Renewal Schools have been made exempt from taking ATR teachers. In other words, the de Blasio administration is perfectly willing to put poor teachers in disadvantaged schools, just not the ones in which the mayor has a political interest.

The ATR debacle is the latest illustration of how hard it is to create lasting change in urban public school systems. No wonder, then, that so many parents in struggling districts are trying to get their children admitted to charter schools. Operating outside collective-bargaining agreements, charters don’t have to hire teachers based on seniority or pay bad ones not to teach.

A study last year from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that New York City’s charter students made gains equivalent to an additional 23 days of learning in reading and 63 days in math, compared with their peers in traditional public schools. The researchers have found similar results for charters in other cities. As New York puts ATR teachers back to work, it’s clearer than ever that the best hope for change in urban public schools isn’t to reform the current system, but to circumvent it.

Mr. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Education. This essay was adapted from the winter issue of City Journal.

Appeared in the February 10, 2018, print edition.