The Mason School Board in a meeting on Tuesday, January 25, 2011 more or less gave the people of Mason the finger; (figuratively speaking of course) The people of Mason were told that because they didn’t pass a levy in November that painful cuts were headed their way. Basically, they’re going to “extend” the busing routes, along with some “pay to play” initiatives that are designed to cut nearly $6 million out of their budget.
The following clip is from the day after, and on the eve of Jeff Reeds visit to promote School Choice, ironically in Mason on Thursday. Jeff and Sharon Poe, the woman behind defeating the levy in Mason went on the Big One with Doc Thompson to cover the various issues percolating in the shadows of the Big One’s radio transmitter.
Everywhere that monopolies exist, extortion of the consumer of the products monopolies produce can take place. If you’ll remember, the Federal Government during the Clinton Administration went after Microsoft, to bust up the market monopoly Microsoft had over other companies. And at the turn of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt, the Progressive Hero, went after the Railroads. But where are the demands from these same progressives to go after the monopolies of “public education?”
That’s what it is. Mason has no right to play the guilt game with the citizens of its district. However, Kevin Bright is one of the highest paid superintendents for a reason. He’s has been one of the instructors of Levy University, taught at the annual OSBA event in November of each year at Columbus. So he’s the master of getting levies passed, so in his district, they are “choosing to play the game.”
I had a teacher send me an email, “you’re not going to stop until we’re all making minimum wage are you? We’d all have to take a 30% cut to meet the budget at Lakota.”
All I can do is shrug my shoulders to that comment. Nobody said anything about teachers making minimum wage, but a 30% cut to meet the budget is something I suggested almost 6 months ago. If Lakota, Mason, and the rest of the districts that are in trouble, which is everyone, had taken such a step, they would have taken the steps to make themselves competitive for the future. A teacher that makes a $105,000 and takes a reduction of 30% would pay that teacher $73,500, which if they have tenure, and a master’s degree, is much more in line with a proper salary. Does anyone believe that making $73,500 a year with great benefits, summers off, and every federal holiday through the school year is asking teachers to work for minimum wage? On the other hand, I would argue that new teachers should be paid in line with what they are currently making. It’s the top end that is wrecking these school budgets, not the new teachers that are only making $35 to $45K per year.
Yet there is only silence to that obvious problem, and all districts are willing to deal with is the extreme low hanging fruit. And they do that because they are effective monopolies that feel empowered to punish its consumers because they lack competition. A district like Mason knows that parents are forced to use their product, and because of the property taxes residence are forced to pay, are literally pushed into accepting realities that would otherwise be completely deplorable.
In the end it’s more about ego and PR relations than doing what’s right for the community. What would happen if the man who teaches Levy University in Columbus couldn’t even get a levy passed in his own district? What message would that send to the surrounding districts?
At first I was ready to praise the Lakota School Board when they made the announcement that they were going to wait and look at the numbers from the state budget before placing the next levy attempt on a ballot. Until Mike Taylor commented, “Lakota needs new revenue, there’s no question about it. That need has not diminished, but no matter when a levy is passed, May, August, or November, funds would not be collected until 2012.”
What??????
What is the plan if Lakota doesn’t get another revenue stream, because the community hasn’t shown that it wants to add to their tax burden of $11 dollars per $1000 evaluation. Any more than that would actually be detrimental to home values of the community because people won’t move here in droves for a good school if they can’t afford the property tax. The school system needs to look hard at itself and figure out how it can survive on a $155 million dollar budget.
What will happen to the revenue stream if people decide they can’t live in the district because the taxes are too high, and they leave, collapsing the housing market? It’s happened in cities, it could happen to West Chester, and Liberty Twp. If the tax base left, where would the revenue stream come from? Another levy on top of the one they intend to pass sometime in 2011?
These are questions the arrogant school administrators just aren’t willing to look at. And I say arrogant because there are still comments to the effect that schools going well into the future will still be Zip Code oriented. Such a position is a refusal to look at the facts of what’s to come. In fact, the whole concept of public education has become less about reading, writing and arithmetic, but more of “social justice.”
Many moons ago, my wife and I home-schooled our children for about a year, I had to pay for the cost of educating them, and I still had to pay the property tax to the local school district, which I shouldn’t have had to do. Now it was important to us that the kids were home-schooled, because I felt the school system was holding them back, and we didn’t want our kids to feel that wall in front of them. I wanted my kids to want an exceptional life. Not just some silly life tossed into a big pot with everybody else like discussed in the above video. So we took the wall away, much to the opposition of friends and family. They just didn’t understand why we’d do such a thing. After all, wasn’t the school experience going to football games on a Friday night? Wasn’t it having a school jacket, a sense of belonging to a group identity? (check out what Bill Ayers says at that link, 4th video down) Wasn’t part of the school experience graduating with your class mates and tossing your hat into the air? Isn’t it all about school year books and other social aspects of the education process, because that’s what people told my wife and I when we were home-schooling our kids. They really didn’t understand our whole reluctance to the “social justice” concern.
I accomplished pretty much what I wanted after a year, and we re-enrolled our kids into Lakota. My kids had friends in school, but many of them have since fallen away now that they are all grown. Anymore, if they don’t speak to people on Facebook, they don’t care to maintain friendships with the kids they went to school with. Out of all the members of our family, only I graduated with my class-mates, and to be honest, I thought the whole experience was a waste of time. My wife graduated early, even though she was an honor roll student. And both my kids did the same, graduating a whole year early, finishing their senior years with online courses. To this day, my wife expresses no regrets about missing her graduation ceremonies; she and I went to dinner at The Golden Chain Restaurant as a married couple while her classmates were running around like idiots on their graduation night. We had fun in a way many of those people couldn’t even imagine at the time. Both of my children had similar experiences exploring Europe while the kids they went to school with were opening graduation presents and trying to figure out what party to go to that night. My kids find school pride sentiments to be trivial, and rather childish.
The reason I support alternative education methods is because I’ve seen the benefit. And obviously I have no sentimental value to those other social aspects of the school experience. Because of that, I don’t see why anyone would value any of those things. If you want to have friends, talk to them on Facebook, or Xbox. Why do you have to have relationships established in the halls of a school building? In the age we live in, it really doesn’t make any sense any more.
So why is there so much focus on a “revenue stream?” And why does Lakota have to increase it?
If we look at the sentimental avenue of education being all about the “experience” of school, so it’s football games, class-rings, and school jackets, then paying extraordinary amounts of money to educating children is something to entertain. But increasingly, the world we live in is becoming less centralized, and people will want the options of that freedom. Sentimentality has a terrible cost, and these days, fewer people are willing to pay it. I’m certainly not alone in my lack of sentiment.
I’m strictly a performance based individual. I expect an education that continues throughout life, and doesn’t just end at grade 12, or even college. My experience with college is that people are putting their lives on hold to fulfill the dreams and market sentiment of the baby boomer generation that swallowed whole the pill of a college degree will be a cure-all and is a life-time of security. We’re learning now that’s not the case. I’ve had to give job interviews to grown adults with 4 to 6 year degrees trying to get a job paying ten to twelve dollars an hour, and wanting the job badly. The world that was promised to those recipients of degrees isn’t there. It is for some, but more and more, people are discovering that they are terribly in debt after their college experience, because the tuition is just too expensive for what you get, and the jobs available in the marketplace are not paying the type of wages that will allow those people to pay off their debts.
According though to the Lakota School Board, they seem to think everything will always be as it has been, and that’s not very forward-looking. To survive, they need to look hard at their expenses and not only consider a loss of revenue because of the next failed levy, but also the loss of revenue from parents that take their money from the state and use it on a program like School Choice. The only real hindrance to School Choice has been the union lobby in Columbus, and given the inefficiency in schools and the continuing increase per pupil of the cost of education, and the continuing problem of our state funding structure being unconstitutional, the new Governor could go a long way to solving all those problems by using School Choice to create competition and using that competition to drive down the cost of education per pupil. Think about it, $10K per kid is out of control. The state funding issue can never be addressed when the cost per pupil is that high. Changes to that perception have to be implemented now.
That’s what’s coming, and why comments like the Lakota School System will need further revenue streams, are arrogant. Lakota needs to prepare for less revenue streams, not more. To assume that education is so central to the community, not just the parents that enjoy watching their kids play sports, but the entire community, is audacious, and short-sighted.
Innovation and the embrace of technology will bring down the cost of education in the future. It will start first with parents that take an active role in their children’s education, which will put pressure on parents that are basically using the schools as a day care facility, or possible scholarship generator, clinging to the education methods that have been in place since frontiersman settled the North American Continent is expensive, archaic, and will be phased out soon. The schools that survive will be the ones that adapt to those changing circumstances. The ones that stand in the way will find themselves on the outside looking in.
What comes out of all this discussion is that education is on the precipice of change. It will not be the same old way of top down education that we’ve had in the past.
It’s probably obvious by now, that my extreme dislike of organized labor is due to the way they slow down the process of innovation. In many ways, schools should already be offering classes online as the norm, and not just an unpublished option. There are many innovations that should have already been commonplace, but are not, because unions need stability and predictable cash flow.
That’s not just the case for education, but virtually all business. Innovations are more hampered from politics than the technical challenges and to me that is a crime.
But when the discussion is about education, and hung on the backs of children, emotions cloud the minds of otherwise intelligent people. Parents gather on a Saturday afternoon to watch their children play basketball, and thoroughly enjoy seeing their children in a group oriented activity. Sports is one of those issues that has been confused with education as unions have made the push over the years to constantly justify their existence with lobby power in the ears of sleepy politicians just cruising through their positions.
I spent my weekend playing a fantastic video game called, Fallout: The New Vegas, and was amazed at the level of action and detail put into the game. I’m about 15 hours into an experience that will probably go on for 70 to 110 hours before I get to the end of the game. These games are so involved, and there are so many decisions that a player has to make, that reality truly does get altered while you are playing. I was playing with my youngest daughter and her boyfriend, who is a real game wiz, and I couldn’t help but be impressed with their ability to rapidly process information. And I realized that kids these days are passionate about technology, and they are taking in a tremendous amount of information, and their education tomorrow will be along the lines of technology.
A school building with a school bus, a class-room, an auditorium, a lunch room with lunch food, a sports program, even a library, is things that are going away, and they’ll go away within the decade. What we are seeing is the first vision of the market place creating options, but the resistance of organized labor to accept that change is the first reason that I despise organized labor, because they are too slow to accept innovation.
Probably the worst however is that inflated costs that are used to disguise entire industries are built to supply the status quo. A caller in the mentioned interview brought up school books, and this is true whether you are talking about college or grade school education. In college, I used to stand in the book store on the University of Cincinnati’s campus and ask………..WHY! It was as plan as day to me, even as a young man of 21 to 22 years old, that professors were actually serving as book salesman. Many of the books being dictated for use were incredibly expensive, because students had to have those books. When I was in college, the Celestine Prophecy which was a spiritual fiction book popular at the time was at least 25% higher in cost than what I could buy the same book for at the local mall. But most of the books students had to buy couldn’t be bought at the mall. And Amazon.com wasn’t around yet back then, so there wasn’t any other option.
Now I’m a guy that likes to buy books. I buy a lot of them, and always have. I love to have a book in my hand, I love the smell of the print, I love books! But for students, there is absolutely no reason that most text books couldn’t be downloaded to a Kindle type of device, which would dramatically bring down the cost of book buying for all students. And that is the future. Kids could download all their text books on their phones if need be, and they’d be more inclined to read their assignments while they are at the movies with their friends waiting for a film to start, or whatever they’re doing. Kids don’t want or need to lug around a whole back pack of books any more.
The future will demand that we all change our jobs, and our comfort levels many, many times. Things will not stay the way they are today; in fact they will change dramatically within just years. Education cannot survive under the current funding model. It’s broke financially and terribly inefficient. The people that adapt to that reality sooner rather than cleaving to it, will find life much better and personally profitable much quicker.
Georgetta voteyeslakota@aol.com 75.185.0.41 Submitted on 2011/01/20 at 11:14 pm Evil prevails when good people do nothing. I am a good person and I am about good education. I am doing something: speaking out. Rich Hoffman is misleading people. Teachers teach children so they DON’T end up working themselves into an early grave and barely making payments on a lot in a trailer park. The good teachers will go elsewhere in order to make a living wage. Rich Hoffman raised children and his wife didn’t work. Apparently he is making too much money. Yet, I hear no one attacking him. Some of us have to have both parents work in order to put food on the table.
Georgetta here reflects many of the comments that I get from people who think just like her. The premise is this, that education is a right, they hide the actual numbers in the scribble of government bureaucracy, and if you show that you don’t support it, or if you even question their reasoning, they use “peer pressure” to shape the community to their will, just like kids on a playground. That’s the mentality. They end up sounding like children with their minds wrapped up in extreme assertions to make their points seem to carry more weight.
The first thing they do is attack you “the tax payer” and your ability to pay the increase in tax. They’ll say, “Public education was there for your children, but now that you don’t have children in the school, you don’t want to pay.” They do the same with business leaders, “We built the good schools and you provided the homes, and now you don’t want to pay.” What doesn’t get said is that as all this growth was going on, the LEA, the teachers union at Lakota, negotiated an aggressive contract in October of 2008 that was focused on wages and that contract is bankrupting the community because at the same time, indications were that state funding was on a decreasing trend. So the contract was irresponsible, and what is happening now, is the community is establishing the parameters of future contract negotiations, because we can’t trust school officials to do the job, otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten this far out of control.
These pro levy people will attempt to proclaim that nobody but them can look at the numbers and understand the situation. They sadly put out apologist groups to plead the case like what you will hear in the below interview. What they don’t want to discuss is why there is a financial crises. They simply discuss finance as if it were beyond their control. When listening to this interview ask these questions, if cutting only a million here, or there isn’t much because the numbers are so large, then why is it such a large savings that cutting busing to 9000 students will only save $600,000, then why cut busing? And how has Lakota done everything it can do before cutting busing. Did the LEA come to the bargaining table to renegotiate their contract? And how does the tax dollars stay in the district when the union spends the union dues on political candidates. One of the reasons the LEA wants its teachers to make so much is so that the teachers will want to pay their union dues without hardship. But nobody talks about any of that here. The sum of this discussion is that there isn’t an answer. These are nice parents that just want the system to work long enough for their children to get an education. Nobody wants to play the hot potato game when the music stops, and the music is stopping. All they can really do in an interview like this is paint over the dirt.
All businesses whether they are service oriented or manufacturing oriented have a responsibility to keep their costs in line. One way that businesses do that is to use the 10-80-10 rule as it’s applied to labor. That rule states that 10% of your workforce will be your typical “top” performers, and they will get the most dramatic increases, 4% to 15% depending on the situation. 80% of your workers are average, and will typically get a standard 2% to 3% increase, otherwise considered a “cost of living” increase. And of course every place of business has approximately 10% that are poor performers and they won’t get an increase of any kind. Why? Because those bottom 10% you want to look for another job, and you want them to leave so you don’t have to pay them. It gives you a chance to hire somebody that might want to compete for the top 10% percentile. If you manage things correctly, your bottom 10% are the kind of people that your competition is hiring at the middle 80%, and you want that so you can maintain a competitive edge.
What you don’t do is uniformly advance everyone in your place of business with some socialist “everybody is equal” policy like what we have in school systems, and unions advocate. That’s a disastrous concept and gives employees like Ryan Fahrenkemp time and the luxury of job security to participate in an evil deed like child pornography. I would argue from experience that if Ryan had to fear for his job, and didn’t feel comfortable hiding in the muddy 80%, he probably would have not indulged in his warped perversion while at school. He might have done it in hiding, or in his mother’s basement, but not with his students, and not with school equipment. And he certainly wouldn’t have been making 70K at only age 42 no matter how much experience he had with the amount of tenure he’d accumulated in a relatively short time.
I used Fahrenkemp as an example because he belonged in the bottom 10% and somebody didn’t do their job in the review process of weeding him out. And that didn’t happen because he was protected by the complicated process created by the OEA which the president of the LEA had been a big part of, and knew how to manipulate the system to the advantage of her members.
I’d say you are, by telling the tax payers that the budget just “grows” on its own. That the school system had no way to deal with people like Fahrenkemp, and that all teachers are worth over 62K, and if the community doesn’t pay it, those beloved teachers will leave the district for another one.
I would say any teacher that would leave Lakota is only in it for the money, and those are personalities that I would rate low on a review, and may be tempted to put them on the bottom 10% anyway, so for them to leave would be desirable.
All the Yes Lakota people have to argue with is emotion,
• “The money is for the kids.” No it’s not, if it was, the LEA wouldn’t have threatened to strike in 2008 to get more money, and again in the spring of 2010.
• “We have to offer top pay for top teachers or they will leave.” No they won’t because the other districts are broke too and are getting ready to go through the same process Lakota is.
• “We have to protect property values by voting for the schools.” No you don’t. If taxes keep increasing that will kill real estate values anyway, tax payers in the district already pay $11 per $1000 assessment on their property.
• “I’m for education.” No you’re not. If you were, you’d keep the budget under $160 million. Throwing money at something doesn’t mean you’re for education. It means you don’t value the source of the money but want what the money can buy.
• “We have had explosive growth and must adjust to it.” Growth, like budgets can be controlled. If the cost is too high, growth will slow down, and growth will slow down because of the economy. Growth will also slow down from parents wanting to go to Lakota who aren’t willing to pay for the extra things they want, too. One of the reasons Yes People want sports and extracurricular activities is so enrollment will increase, so parents looking for those items can move to the district and participate cheaply. It’s all about job creating and getting parents used to programs that the district tax payers fund collectively. No different from colleges with NCAA programs that are nationally known for their sports, will see increases in enrollment. It’s always about increased enrollment so money can be justified.
• “The state is forcing us to all-day kindergarten.” No, the OEA lobbied to get all-day kindergarten passed, and the Republicans in the state house are getting ready to eliminate that unfunded mandate along with many other mandates lacking funding. So that anticipated requirement will be taken away from district budgets.
• “We have to spend $50,000 dollars to get the best superintendent we can get.” No, you are throwing money at the situation like you do everything else. It’s that kind of mentality that locked us into the contract with the LEA that is causing the current financial crises. Money does not equal quality. It seldom does. Money can be used to create competition, but it is useless without competition. If money is not getting you dramatic results, it is simply killing your budget.
• “Paying for a school levy keeps your money in the community.” No it doesn’t. The union dues collected by school unions are directly applied to liberal politicians that further perpetuate the bureaucratic mess creating expensive economic necessity. The OEA had revenue of over $62 million dollars in 2008. Where did that money come from? They don’t make any products that they can sell? Check the info for yourself here. http://teachersunionexposed.com/state.cfm?state=OH All that money comes from union dues, paid from the salaries of teachers that are paid exceptionally well by the local tax payers. The average pay at Lakota for teachers is 62K per year. So the money doesn’t stay in the community.
And you Yes Lakota people go ahead and leave your comments. I’ll post them, and I’ll use them. People need to see your thoughts. For those of you wanting to see some of them, read the comments here. I am quite aware that there are many people at many levels reading all the posts I’ve put up here and you’re looking for a way to spin it to your advantage. For an example, have a look at the work David Little from Progress Ohio attempted. I’m happy to fight your sloppy facts with the truth and if you want to spin the community around and make them so dizzy they can’t tell which way is up or down, I’ll continue to prevent it, as I have. And I’ll do it because I love my community, and I want to see education continue to be an option for families in the future. But it won’t be in a form controlled by organized labor. Those days are over.
Don’t believe me; read this from your parent union the OEA, this is how bad the financial situation is. Even the union staff is threatening to strike and the union itself is participating in union busting strategies.
The Ohio Education Association and Its Goose
The executives of the Ohio Education Association sent a memo informing local presidents that if the union gave in to striking staffers’ demands, it would require an $80 to $90 dues increase per member. Such an increase would raise roughly $10 million. That sounded familiar to me, so I checked the archives and found this, in the May 8, 2000 EIA Communiqué: Ohio Education Association in Severe Financial Straits. The last time the Ohio Education Association negotiated a staff contract, in September 1997, it resulted in a two-week strike, restraining orders against picketers, and a lot of bad publicity. That contract expires this year and it’s bad financial news all around for OEA, its members, and the staff. OEA recently informed its local presidents that the union is facing a projected deficit of $6.3 million for next year. The union is asking staff to accept benefit cuts totaling $4 million. The rest of the deficit would be eliminated through a dues increase of up to $25 per member.
“Specifically, and regrettably, we can no longer afford to sustain the current number of OEA employees at their current level of compensation and benefits and continue to provide the expected level of services and programs without significantly raising OEA dues for you and every other member,” reads a memo from OEA President Mike Billirakis and Executive Director Robert Barkley.
If our community is going to continue to be a “great” and “excellent” district, we have to get in front of this problem. Not avoid it by tossing more money at the problem. And the Yes Lakota people need to listen to the No Lakota People, because the solution is in good business strategy. The same tired old bullet points won’t be valid any longer. I’ll make sure of it.
Seeing miles and miles of backed up traffic the morning that Lakota’s busing cuts were implemented was like watching a world of sanity coming undone and going backwards into a time of primeval foolishness. Scott Sloan and Tracy Jones capture the lunacy wonderfully.
So what’s the next step? Without question, the school system is poised to put another levy issue on the ballot targeting the roughly 10% that are anti-tax but only moderately. Those people will have to decide if they will be steadfast, or buckle under the pressure extorted by the busing cut strategy, because it’s all about converting a few percentage points in voter turnout, into a “yes” vote.
When you talk to just about anybody about sports they are quick to declare what their favorite team should do in order to win. “Get rid of T.O. He costs too much and is a pain in the ass!” Or, “get rid of Chad, he runs his mouth too much, he’s too expensive and they can’t even win with him.” I am refereeing to a couple of players for the Cincinnati Bengals, and I hear comments to that effect all the time.
But speak to those same people about how to deal with Social Security, or Education, or any number of social programs, and people clam up and refuse to commit an opinion. I suppose that’s because the game under which politics is played is just too complicated for many of them, or they are taking something out of the systems in question, and lack the courage to assert an opinion.
And that’s the beauty of sports. Sports allow people to become arm-chair coaches because they don’t have anything invested in the team other than committing to an occasional game or a sport jersey. So they can be objective as to the possible problems with the team they’re watching.
People like Doc Thompson, and myself, can be objective about social issues, because we aren’t expecting government to do anything for us. I wrote off Social Security a long time ago, along with all the other entitlements that are floating around out there. So I particularly enjoyed Doc’s show on January 18, 2011 where he laid it on the line as to what the real problems are. Listen to that here.
My team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not in the playoffs, but I am proud of how they played over the 2010 season. I watched how management approached the off-season last year and I believe they are on the march to winning ways going forward. But the team in my home town, the Cincinnati Bengals continue to be a bad team no matter how much money they spend.
Now you can go to any sports bar in America and even a drunken fool could tell you why the Bengals can’t win. And the same holds true for our county. Everybody knows how to fix the problems. But we won’t win if we don’t toughen up. It’s that simple.
What Doc talks about in that clip is a perfectly articulated synopsis of our counties problem. It sounds easy to hear him say it, but he has the luxury of seeing things clearly, because he doesn’t want anything from government. People like Thompson rely on themselves first to do most things, so the problems are easy to see.
So America, you better get tough quick. Because being tough is how you win.
The gravy days are over. The citizens are paying attention to many aspects of education that were never discussed, like teacher salaries being excessively high, and buildings with luxurious amenities. In a recent survey from Braun Research Inc. who conducted phone interviews with more than 3,400 Hoosier registered voters November 12-17, 2010, that firm’s president, Paul Braun, expressed confidence in the accuracy of the study’s results, due to “thorough briefings stressing objectivity, heavy monitoring, sample performance reviews, verifications and post-data-collection checks on each survey by interviewer and phone center.” Of the many conclusions of that survey Indiana voters lacked awareness and information about how much is spent in public schools. Nearly two out of three respondents (64 percent) underestimated per-student spending in the public schools.
As usual, Doc Thompson did some great work on this topic that he covered on the January 12, 2011 broadcast that is worth listening to. It is refreshing to have real discussions about these issues now. The gist of this discussion is that things are going to change, and change rapidly for public education funding.
But know the door has been opened. I know how difficult it was and I felt the wrath of attacks when I first started the enterprise of enlightening the public about education funding. The organized labor behind these tax levies attempted to apply The Delphi Technique on me, like they do everyone who speaks against wasteful spending, so I understand first-hand how the information has been kept quiet all over the nation for such a long time.
I countered that technique by using aspects of my personality that are entertainment oriented, something I’ve developed over the years performing in wild west shows and interviews for other projects, to throw a curve-ball at their strategy and start the ball rolling so others could hold the door open, and then others behind them could start pouring in to get control of the out-of-control spending that has been occurring in schools. It took that initial surprise from the organized unions by my approach to pry the door open. They really believed that by painting me as some hick cowboy running around with a whip that I would be made into something of a fool, which they counted on. What they didn’t know was that I have a business background, and I’m better at understanding difficult concepts than I am with the whip work. So because of their one-dimensional understanding of people, they were unprepared. And much to my surprise, people enjoyed the image I was projecting, of rugged individualism, and standing firm in overwhelming odds.
The truth of the matter was that it felt that way to me, like I was against the world. But I actually had hundreds of people behind me supporting the structure of everything, people who put up the money for the yard signs, people who went to all the meetings and took notes that they’d pass to me. People from inside the school system that was tipping us off to what was going on, and people who were going door to door to pass out literature. There were other people who worked the email campaign, and helped in so many other ways. But since I was the face of it, the wrath came at me, and I deflected it with the cowboy image while the business side worked with some very smart people to crunch numbers and get to the truth.
At the end of the day, that cowboy image says more about me than the business side. My children and grandchildren won’t discuss someday how good I was at working with numbers in a spreadsheet or negotiated a contentious point in a dispute. They’ll talk about the speed and accuracy competitions at cowboy events, and the many times I’ve shocked audiences with my fire whip displays, including professional stuntmen. So that image is far from just some conjured up image for marketing reasons. But it did help in this case, to overcome the opposition in a unique way.
What usually happens in management is that once you show people how to do something, they’ll then take that information and put their own spin on it. And that’s what’s happening by people who are far more passionate about education reform than I am. I have discovered now through correspondence from people who have been fighting this fight for many, many years, that all some of these people needed was a crack in the door. And they understand more about how the game is played than ever, now that we’ve started having really intelligent conversations on WLW.
Darryl Parks has been talking this talk much longer than I have, so it wasn’t difficult for him and me to feel some passion about the shake-down that occurs. But I think everyone was surprised when I went on WLW with our treasurer, Dan Varney and discussed the wage levels back in September, because that information was straight out of the newspaper. But the game that is played is that information is released in March, when the last things people are thinking about are schools or elections. Spring is on their minds, and coming out of a long winter. So most people would wad up the paper and toss it in the trash.
But my good buddy Graham George, who is a senior citizen, and is always organized kept that paper from March of 2010, and we went on the air at WLW and discussed it with Scott Sloan. The reaction from the public was so violent and sudden that I was surprised that nobody had done this kind of thing before.
Fortunately I had scheduled with the Cincinnati Enquire to have a backyard interview with me because of my YouTube video, A Whip Trick to Save America the very next day, and they wanted to do a feature about that and how it applied to my resistance to the school levy. So when that story came out, the gloves came off. The progressives all over the state that were listening to WLW decided to make me out to be some illiterate cowboy, which of course didn’t fit the facts I was able to put out on the radio broadcasts. People saw how the game was played and when I didn’t turn away and hide, but only increased my activity, it allowed people to see the structure of the game.
Now that the deed is done, the School Board is struggling to figure out what to do next. They are talking about solar panels, which is fine, but still doesn’t address the largest cost to the budget which is wages, and should be explored regardless of a budget crisis. The board is now fighting for the president position arguing over who should lead. Ray Murry is talking the right type of issues, discussing whether or not the district should have spent 90K on an employment search for a new treasure and superintendent. Those are nice discussions and I’m happy to hear the debate on both sides, but in reality, it’s just politics because the numbers are just peanuts compared to the elephant eating them.
However, the problems will only get tougher, so while the School Board is struggling with each other to figure out what the community wants, they would be very “wise” to accept the help of our local business leaders that have offered to assist.
I have placed the offer to the board and was told that “most business people would probably become frustrated by the restrictions.” That was a polite way to say that the situation is too complicated for most businessmen to deal with. Well, that complication has been made complicated for a reason, and it’s to prevent “outsiders” from being able to offer fixes. It’s all part of the organized labor strategy, and the community knows it.
And I can promise that the education of those types of methods will only increase as more and more people send me information hoping that I’ll articulate it on the radio or on this blog.
So it is advisable that the games stop now. Grab the hands that are offering to help and be ready to do things you’d consider unthinkable 6 months ago. If you do it now, you can save the district and yourselves, and many, many jobs. If you don’t we will go off a cliff as a district.
The next levy attempt will not be about Rich Hoffman the cowboy whip cracker. Too many people want to be involved and I will gladly accept their help. I have enough personality and success that I don’t need the attention. I’ll put myself out there if people don’t feel comfortable doing it themselves, but I don’t see that being a problem in 2011. Because I see a wave of volunteerism, and other people who can speak coming boldly forth to push that door open even wider. So the decision doesn’t just sit on the shoulders of Lakota, but every public school everywhere.
So stop the games. Embrace the public, because they are your employers anyway, and be ready to do what’s right. Things are at a point where many things can be fixed and nobody has to be contentious enemies. It’s just business, and there are people who can offer that assistance for free, and once it’s done, Lakota could serve as a bright light of hope for all others to follow. But it takes one school to courageously step forward and be the first to open the door. Everything else will take care of itself.
But cling to the way things have been done, and the world will soon swallow you up. So make a decision…..quick!
Doc Thompson had on Chad from School Choice Ohio on 700WLW. If you don’t know what School Choice is, listen to the conversation with Chad below. Not only do they talk about School Choice, but there is some great discussion of several incidents of gross waste from districts surrounding Cincinnati.
I’m a tremendous supporter of School Choice, because people are thinking and it is working where it’s being used. So why isn’t it being implemented? Well, organized labor is very much against it, because they have to maintain the current structure in order to support the collective bargaining agreements they’ve negotiated for themselves.
School Choice is being tossed around by a new group of several representatives from districts all over Ohio that have been meeting to implement educational changes, called Educate Ohio, which I’m a proud part of.
There are options out there. We don’t have to just do the same old thing time and time again, which are just to put funding issues on a ballot for a school levy against our property taxes.
I spoke recently on WLW about how both my kids took online classes during their senior years and finished their entire senior year before Christmas. Now my kids are smart kids. They had been on the honor roll a number of times all through their education and tested well above average on their SAT tests. They attended Mason for about half their youth, were home schooled by their mother for about a year, and then spent their high school years at Lakota. During their entire education lives they excelled. But once they got past their junior years, they wanted to move on, which they get from their father, not having the patience to just cruise through life held back by the shackles of people happy with a mundane existence. Both my children spent their remaining years of their senior years traveling Europe, camping at Stonehenge and exploring places like the British Museum, and I’m eternally proud of them, while the other kids their age were spending their Friday and Saturday nights drunk and puking at mindless parties and wasting away while they waited for college classes to start in the fall of the following year.
The system we’ve had in my opinion is broken. I’m happy to go along with things as long as all those mediocre enablers called school officials don’t ask for more money than we already pay in property tax.
But they are asking for more money, and asking for us to pay for their communist leaning tendencies, and yes, they do have a communist leaning. If you don’t know that, or can’t understand that, or don’t want to call it that, go do some reading, then get back to me. I’m not going to waste my time giving you an education that you should already have.
Meanwhile, it’s time to explore other options that bring out the best in our individuality, and we reject the collectivism that has emerged with the current, “expensive” system, because we can’t afford it, financially, or intellectually.
Check out the below article from Indiana. This is the way things will be done in the future. The sooner we get started, the better.
New Poll: Indiana Voters Support Choice in Education, Substantially Underestimate Public Education Spending INDIANAPOLIS, IN – Voters in Indiana decidedly favor school vouchers and charter schools, and desire a balanced variety of options when it comes to educating their children, according to a poll released today by the Indianapolis-based Foundation for Educational Choice.
The poll-“Indiana K-12 & School Choice Survey”-also reveals that Indiana voters are unaware of how much is spent in public schools; most respondents substantially underestimated per-student spending.
“Hoosiers see the tremendous value in giving families options,” said Robert Enlow, President and CEO of The Foundation for Educational Choice. “If a school voucher, charter school, private, or home school can give a child an effective, personalized education, that child has a right to receive it. This poll shows Indiana voters agree.”
Braun Research Inc. conducted phone interviews with more than 3,400 Hoosier registered voters November 12-17, 2010.That firm’s president, Paul Braun, expressed confidence in the accuracy of the study’s results, due to “thorough briefings stressing objectivity, heavy monitoring, sample performance reviews, verifications and post-data-collection checks on each survey by interviewer and phone center.”
The following are the poll’s key findings:
Indiana voters are unsatisfied with the current public education system. On average, registered voters in Indiana are more likely to think K-12 education is on the “wrong track” (51 percent) compared to the “right direction” (31 percent). Indiana voters describe the state’s public school system more often as “fair” or “poor” (55 percent) versus “good” or “excellent” (42 percent).
Indiana voters lack awareness and information about how much is spent in public schools. Nearly two out of three respondents (64 percent) underestimated per-student spending in the public schools.
Hoosiers support charter schools. Indiana voters are far more likely to favor charter schools (66 percent) than to oppose such schools (16 percent). Respondents who said they “strongly favor” charter schools outnumber those who say they “strongly oppose” by a four-to-one ratio.
Hoosiers support school vouchers. Indiana voters are far more likely to favor school vouchers (66 percent) than to oppose them (24 percent).
Indiana voters indicate they should have a variety of schooling options. If they had the option to select any type of school to obtain the best education for their child, 41 percent said they would choose a private school, 10 percent a charter school, and 7 percent a home school.
“This poll shows most Indiana voters do not realize how many of their tax dollars are being spent on an education system they do not even consider effective,” said Enlow. “Giving families the freedom to choose the education that’s best for their children would ensure funds were spent more effectively, and it would give every child access to the education they deserve.”
To see a summary of survey results, a series of PowerPoint slides highlighting key findings, and description of the methodology, visit http://www.EdChoice.org/IN-Survey. Braun Research callers interviewed 1,017 registered voters in Indiana to produce an initial statewide sample. Braun Research then made additional phone calls to achieve at least 350 total completed interviews in each of eight counties. The margin of sampling error for the statewide survey is ±3.1 percentage points and approximately ± 5.4 percentage points for each of the eight countywide samples.
About The Foundation for Educational Choice
The Foundation for Educational Choice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, solely dedicated to advancing Milton and Rose Friedman’s vision of school choice for all children. First established as the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in 1996, the Foundation continues to promote school choice as the most effective and equitable way to improve the quality of K-12 education in America. The Foundation is dedicated to research, education, and outreach on the vital issues and implications related to choice and competition in K-12 education.
Since I began this web log, a lot has changed. The intent was to provide some conservative views to combat the numerous liberal sites that are out there. One thing the left is good at is selling their position. Conservatives tend to trust the law and keep themselves out of some of the crazy rhetoric that one must engage in to combat the radicalism of the left’s strategy. Conservatives have great ideas, and often have history on their side. They just need to become better at selling it, and have lost over the last two decades terribly to the radical left at communicating ideas.
There have been great strides at the top-level of communication, to sell logic and traditional principles. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and many others have emerged to fill the market void that exists due to many Americans that lean-to the right. Only a small percentage lean left, yet it is the left, because they are more aggressive that is shaping the world in a way the majority of Americans don’t want. But those top names can’t due it on their own. The left has managed to be very successful at having their own big names at the top, people like Michael Moore, Sean Penn, George Clooney, Keith Obermann, and James Carvel do their work, but they also have active grass-roots to carry the baton MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post along with many, many others to lead an active online campaign that occurs daily and fills millions of email boxes with a leftist spin that partially inquiring minds have difficulty combating.
Radio like what Doc Thompson does locally on WLW is particularly powerful, and while those sounds broadcast over 50,000 watts to hundreds of thousands of ears, people often forget what they heard just a few hours later. It is my intent to capture some of those moments so people can return to them later and listen at their convenience. Stations like WLW makes it available for complete podcasts of these programs, but I seek to make it easier for people to filter out the important moments, so I am going to the trouble to provide some professional editorial help for the convenience of the curious listener. One such example is the below section of Doc’s show from January 10, 2011, the first time he was on the air after the Arizona Shooting.
There are other conservative blog sites out there. I particularly like American Thinker, and The Blaze.com. But, I have found that I have some abilities that are particularly beneficial to the blog medium, experience in video, editorial training, and the ability to write thousands of fresh words each day that is pertinent to current events and complimentary to the other work within the conservative movement. I also understand the value of entertainment, and live a colorful life that people find inspiring. It is a pleasure to share that with people to use in their own lives. In other words, not all conservatives are suit-and-tie men and work in the law profession. So I have a unique position to speak from and I’ve found that people enjoy it because it loosens up the seriousness of some of the topics.
Currently I’m drooling over my copy of Colonel Roosevelt, the new book just released by Edmund Morris and given to me by my youngest daughter for Christmas. I had some things to finish up before being able to jump into that book. Roosevelt back then read a voracious amount, and I share with him a childlike curiosity for everything. I adored the previous two books on Roosevelt by Morris called The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex so I understand his ravenous appetite for fun and knowledge that only children seem able to combine. I have often wondered what a man like that would be like in today’s culture where a person can read on a digital pad, write on a keyboard as fast as his mind can produce the information, and be exposed to thousands of various media in television, radio, and the internet.
I can imagine because in my own life I often write while walking, read whenever I’m sitting, and if I get pinned down in my living room I watch two televisions at the same time while scanning the internet on a lap top, and playing Xbox. My wife has gotten used to my multimedia abilities even though she is accustomed to reading 12 to 16 hours per day in the same spot without any noise, which is how she prefers it. She often cringes when I come home and “power up” plugging myself into the world. She prefers to turn off the world so she can see it clearly. But as for personalities I can relate to, Roosevelt is one of them. He was a Republican. He was a lot more power-hungry than I am, but his adventurous nature and insatiable appetite for knowledge I share with him. I was very disappointed to hear Glenn Beck proclaim that Roosevelt was the creator of the Progressive Movement, which anyone who has read my stuff here knows I despise. But those events had not yet been explored in Theodore Rex, and would not be revealed until this Colonel Roosevelt volume. I am hungry to see how those events transpired.
Glenn Beck I think feels the same as me about Roosevelt, because Beck himself appears to be a similar personality, always plugged in and learning and doing it with a childlike curiosity. And he knows that the creation of the Progressive Party, which Roosevelt ran against the Republican Party, ushered in Woodrow Wilson.
I don’t personally know Beck. I’ve only been around him, so I can only make assessments about him based on the work he does, which is the volumes of books he reads, he is writing about three books a year, does three hours of radio, one hour of television and still values time with his family. Roosevelt did much the same, while President he wrote books, read many more, and still had time for all his interests. And I’ve been getting the same type of comments, “how do you have time to write all this.” And, “how do you scan all those videos, and listen to all that radio content, and read too. Is your wife lonely? What do you do for a living?”
All I can really say is that it has something to do with never really growing up. If more people took into their adulthood the energy of their childhoods, they’d find they can do a lot more with their lives. And they’d be less prone to chemical abuse such as smoking, over-eating, and drinking. An active mind is a happy mind, and that is what will be finding its way to this web log.
What makes me happy is sharing with people who things can be different. WordPress sent me the December numbers and seemed shocked that there were over 10,000 readers of my articles, which WordPress seemed to be very impressed with. And in just one business quarter I can see that many, many people want to help with the Lakota School Levy next time, which will make it a lot easier on me and the other people who worked hard on that campaign. Back in August you couldn’t find anyone wanting to even stick their name next to a controversial idea like saying no to the levy. And people are reading the stuff that is more libertarian and those articles are getting passed from email to email and is having an effect, even if it is only encouraging people to get involved in their local Tea Party, or the 9/12 Project and any of the movements emerging. It is a useful service to offer, which is to provide a place for people to meditate on some of these ideas at their leisure.
After putting topics on this web log, such as the pay rate of the teachers at Lakota, and the governor pay rates, and the amount of people that did not go to college, but are successful anyway, it has allowed people to openly question sacred cows that have simply been glazed over in the past, and I feel very privileged to have been able to provide that.
For the third No Lakota Campaign, there is now a line of people that want to be a part of the campaign. People heard me on the radio, and read what I wrote, and they saw that the levy failed, and now they are drooling to be a part of the next victory campaign, and not just at Lakota. There are districts all over Ohio that feel empowered to act. And that is much to my delight. A group called Educate Ohio is emerging from some of those curious minds, and that is something which brings me great delight.
I feel I can inspire more people to action the way I have been doing, which ultimately puts more troops on the battlefield. I avoid long drawn out meetings like the School Board Meetings at Lakota because they are very inefficient meetings. I tend to rely on “eyes and ears” for the important stuff. I attend when absolutely needed, which is something I’ve learned to do in management work. What’s coming is something that people who see clearly need to be free to articulate. So I will keep myself free of peril with tenacious equanimity. I welcome those who want to help and ad their names to the great fight to jump on board and help anyway possible. For it is the dream of all artists that their work inspires some didactic reaction to move beyond ones previous limits, and it gives me great pleasure to see that happening as a result of the work done at this site. Such a reaction is more important to me than money, fame, or any form of orthodox social acceptance. There is room for everyone that wants to cast an arrow on behalf of truth, justice, and the American Way!
As more and more facts come in about the Arizona shooting, and the left oriented continue to complain about the vitriol coming from talk shows and radio I think the honest question deserves to be asked. Why is there anger?
Did it ever occur to any of those left oriented people when Nancy Pelosi marched with her gavel up the Capital steps locked arm and arm forcing Americans to a Health Care Bill that they didn’t want, and subverted many legislative steps in the process to accomplish the task, that there wouldn’t be anger?
Are the American people supposed to just be happy about Constitutional subversion, or by-passing congress all together to pass Net Neutrality? Did they really think there wouldn’t be anger?
Are we supposed to be happy with a government that spent us into seeming oblivion and left us essentially broke, while congress continued to give themselves raises and fly all over the country on tax payer funds?
Can those leftist identify a period in history where so much was crammed down the throat of the American people right out in the open, and not have people get angry?
Or congressional members that have been openly corrupt, and when caught, treated the American people like they were fools.
I could go on, and on, and on. But how could anybody on the left expect that all these things would be imposed on the American public, and American’s wouldn’t get mad about it?
Statements like even questioning the level of anger of the American People say that the left has absolutely no respect for them. It’s as foolish as stealing from the company you work for, then wondering why they want to fire you.
What the left is really mad about is that there are people on talk radio and TV that are pointing out the things that are being done. Those voices are supposed to be suppressed. That’s what they are really saying. Here’s the difference, the left cannot argue any points. They use radical methods to hide the emptiness of their ideas. On the other hand, those in the conservative movement rely on the rules to allow the validity of their arguments to emerge. The Tea Party or any other group that is focusing on traditional values doesn’t need to use guns, or violence to make a point. Because the truth is all that is needed.
As far as hate, here’s an example of what Glenn Beck talks about. Anyone that thinks Beck preaches hate doesn’t know what hate means. Beck is all about overcoming that kind of stuff.
And here is a clip from his show talking about how the left uses hate to motivate people.
The only ones talking about peaceful, and logical solutions are the members of the Conservative Movement.
