Tag: John Dewey

More Conservatives Win School Board Seats in Florida: We need more Darbi Boddy types at Lakota

Just because the conservative experiment at Lakota has not turned out well doesn’t mean it’s a failure across the country. I would say the problems we have at Lakota are natural and part of the transition process. Not the result of failed intentions. When I signed up to help elect a conservative school board at Lakota with a 3 to 2 vote on issues, that, of course, assumed that we were getting conservative candidates. But through the rigors of the day-to-day operations, sometimes people find out they aren’t so conservative. They may have thought they were conservative in the safety of GOP meetings, but when the rubber hits the road, and process bureaucracy starts to take effect, people learn a lot about themselves that they may not have known. And people fall off the wagon. In that case, we just need to look for more candidates and keep putting them on the school board. I signed up for a Darbi Boddy type of school board, not a bunch of softies who would let the superintendent rule the world. I expect the school board to be in charge, not to let radical employees rule the day, and so far, in 2022, that is what has happened. Once things started to get tough, we discovered that Darbi was the only one showing up for work. And that is why we have a lot of the problems that are going on at Lakota now. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure of an effort as much as we are learning what kind of people make good school board members, and we are getting a definition of conservative values that is challenging people’s belief systems in themselves, which will ultimately be good for the community, even if it’s painful now. And as usual, what goes on in Lakota, a big government school in Northern Cincinnati, in the community where I live, so goes much of the rest of the nation. 

In the recent elections in Florida, Republicans showed up to vote for school board members 3 to 1. The more states in America that start to run their states as Ron DeSantis does, the more this trend will continue. Ohio isn’t quite there now. There are a lot of RINO Republicans who still think of themselves as Bush conservatives and Reagan admirers. But Trump is a bit too much “solution” for them, and when the pressure is on, they crack like eggs over an omelet. School boards should never have been considered “politically” neutral. The goal in politics isn’t for everyone to get along.

Public schools are radical institutions conceived by liberalism for teaching liberal arts. They have not produced children that grew up into happy Americans, quite the opposite. Many parents are seeing that they are unhappy with the product of public schools and are finally inserting themselves into possible solutions. For years people have asked me to be a school board member at Lakota for several decades now. Over time, the idea of public school has absolutely made me sick. I don’t think they are good at anything they do. But I have offered my help, especially these last few years, to help make them into a solution. I was quite aware that the people I was dealing with were professional community conversation types who befriend you to win you over, like a timeshare salesman. But I helped anyway because the school of Lakota was already in my home district. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year into that mess. So, I was open to the idea if it could be saved somehow. So, I helped where I could to see what might happen. It was worth a shot.

Other Darbi Boddy types are out there, and school boards across America have elected them by popular vote. It’s part of the trend of populism that is migrating to form the modern political movement that is going to sink all the mistakes of the administrative state finally, as it was conceived by communist and utopian socialists like John Dewey when they came up with the dumb idea of public education in the first place. Sure, it’s been a good free babysitting service for busy parents, but it has raised disasters in people who are failures of the 7 liberal arts in every way they could be measured. Even the best students of the public education system have turned out to be disasters of people and what is bad about the whole institutional approach is that public schools led by liberal-leaning school boards have developed the habit of protecting the bad conduct that goes on in the schools, rather than managing those problems for the betterment of the children involved. It’s all been a disaster from top to bottom, and finally, people are starting to admit to it and are offering themselves as options to get elected and help the way Darbi has been in Lakota. Even if the vote count at Lakota isn’t as conservative as it should be, it’s still better than what we had before. And future elections can certainly smooth that ratio out and will naturally match the national trends toward populism. 

Ultimately, however, my opinion hasn’t changed, even with this trend toward conservatism on school boards. Public education as a concept is doomed. It’s too expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t produce good people. It’s just a trainwreck in the best of cases. It certainly has not been a replacement for good parenting. After the behavior I have witnessed so far in 2022 regarding school board behavior and how the big liberal administrations behave toward it, it’s obvious to me that public education is doomed to complete failure. Suppose they think Darbi Boddy is bad and that the only acceptable Republican on a board is some wishy-washy RINO who will go way out of their way to get along in a “nonpartisan” kind of way, always bending the knee to radical liberals empowered through the teacher’s unions. In that case, there is no hope for them. If they are having trouble now, what will they do in the next elections when more Darbi Boddy types get elected and replace the stale old establishment types who covered up way too much bad behavior just to protect the school from outside opinion? They aren’t going to make it. I remember in April when the news story was all about Lakota might lose their superintendent over the radical school board member, Darbi Boddy, as if we needed to get rid of her to keep him and his $200,000 salary. Well, I don’t think he’s worth it, especially after watching his performance through Covid and recently over several things. We would do better with a much more engaged and less progressive person. I know they fear teacher shortages and bad state report cards, and the public relations of the superintendent are meant to put rosy glasses on all that for the illusion of goodness. But when a district is garbage, it is garbage. You can’t put perfume on it to make it smell better. The fact that the public employees of Lakota want so badly to get rid of the best school board member, Darbi Boddy, says that they aren’t ready to deal with the national trend in public education that is happening everywhere. And that fault is their own for failing to adjust to a changing world and holding on to a failure from the progressive past. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Snake and the Mouse: How to defeat the Liberal World Order

I was asked a few times during the North Coast Gunslinging Championships off of Lake Erie where I got my rattlesnake skin grips on my Ruger Vaquero and why I had them. It’s not enough to just say they are cool, for me, as there usually is a backstory. I explained that it was good to be a snake in life, which raised some eyebrows because we often think of snakes as maniacal devilish creatures that are the embodiments of Satan. So as a crowd gathered around my story, I explained that the Liberal World Order designed for snakes to be seen that way in our society because that’s how they see themselves. They get their ideas from Plato’s Republic regarding their ability to be the philosopher kings who rule all of society. One of their big concerns in life is to gain enough social prestige to be considered to be in that category, which is one of the primary aims of government, to be among the ruling class the way Plato envisioned it. They are fine for the rest of society to be scared of snakes because they are like the snake in the Genesis story, the possessors of knowledge of all good and evil who trick Eve into defying Adam and God to eat from the fruit of that tree and bring down the whole kingdom of everlasting life with the knowledge of good and evil, as defined by that ruling class. As I’ve explained many times about John Dewey and even going back to classics like the socialist propaganda book from 1888, Looking Backward, public education itself was designed around using peer pressure to control all the inhabitants of society to do as they are told and to be fearful of the opinions of the ruling class so not to fall out of favor. That is the purpose of the ruling class over all others, which is created for us very young in public education and politics. 

As I continued the story, I mentioned that I recently had watched a snake being groomed as a pet, eating a mouse thrown into its little aquarium enclosure, which I have seen many hundreds of times over the years, but it has always bothered me. Of course, the snake wants to eat. The mouse just wants to live. They are doing what nature designed them to do, one to eat the other. But it is troubling always that humans insert themselves into that process by capturing the snake and being an intermediary. The snake is now dependent on a human to feed it. And the mouse, once put into the cage, has no defense. When the snake decides it’s going to eat it, the mouse has no option but to accept its fate. It’s always a sad thing to watch. The poor little mouse, once thrown into the aquarium, knows it’s over the moment its placed there, and the creature will do everything it can to avoid the inevitable; it will try to dig its way under a water bowl or some other aquarium feature to survive, but there essentially is nothing it can do but wait for the snake to eat it. The only defense it has is to attempt to ignore the snake and live its life normally, hoping until that last moment that it will live life as long as possible. Thus, its only defense is to ignore the problem and pretend that its crisis is not a doomsday scenario.    

My life in this grooming process was never what the Liberal World Order expected. I never developed a care for what other people thought about me going way back to 2-3-and 4 years of age. Therefore, my public education experience was utterly divorced from Dewey’s purpose for it, which was to break down members of society into their various social groups, ultimately to be led by the philosopher kings, those with the highest liberal level of education in society, and to be like the mouse in life, to live in the aquarium of their own making and to accept our fate when the snake decides to eat. Of course, the philosopher kings of Plato see themselves as the snake and the rest of the world as their next meal. That is the purpose of all monarchies, secret societies, every bureaucratic organization, even sports. But what was unique about my life is that I never accepted such an absurd concept as a little kid, and of course, that caused a lot of consternation as I got older and didn’t fit into the socially constructed categories. I never accepted the liberal world order aquarium we were all thrown into. Several times in my life, this relationship with the established order and its expectations of it rattled the participants. In the video above, I tell a few personal stories that are comical where the people trained by the Liberal World Order were disarmed entirely as to how to deal with me. One was a 5-year class reunion for the public school I went to. The other was a big presentation I was a part of with the mayor of Cincinnati, city council, all the big media at the time, and all the powerful money people for what to do with the Banks Project back in the 90s. In both examples, I represented life outside the aquarium, and the rulers didn’t know what to do with me, so they ignored me as best they could, which is a typical reaction. To them, it’s earth-shattering because they think of themselves as the snake, but when they meet someone who does not follow their liberal world order rules, they realize that they are actually the mouse in life, and they freeze and try their best to pretend that their end is not near. And it’s terrifying to them.

The purpose of me telling that story to that small group of Trump flag-waving gunslingers on the shores of Lake Erie was to assure them that the Liberal World Order is not scary. They are easy to beat; all you have to do is not care what they think of you. And once you do, you will gain all the power in the relationship. They have been taught by the Liberal World Order that they are the snake in life and that everyone else is food for them. But when you do not care about their controls, they are powerless to do anything to control you, and in that way, the roles become reversed, and they become the food. Watching them go through their cycles of paralysis when they realize such things is always funny. And when it is wondered about what will happen next in the political world of our current life, that is the ultimate fate for them. They were never the snake but were always the mouse, and they are food to be consumed at our leisure. And now we’re hungry, so it’s only a matter of time. And that is what I told that group who asked about my gun grips. That is how I see myself, and my work with the guns is my own reminder of that fact and the vulnerabilities of the Liberal World Order. Like the snake in the aquarium, we can eat when we see fit, and that reality of the Liberal World Order is the most terrifying aspect in the world. They have trained all their lives that their role was the other way around, that they could use peer pressure to control all of existence. But the moment they run into someone who doesn’t care about their opinions and actually sees them as food, they lose all their power, which is the inevitable fate for them all in the months and years to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We Have Lost 7 IQ Points Since the Year 2000: The purposeful attack on American culture by the new slave masters

When some education person starts yacking on about more government pre-K education programs, just consider that since the year 2000, human society has lost 7 IQ points. It used to be through most of the previous two centuries in America, people were free to develop their intellects and were actually encouraged to do so, civilization increased in IQ. Of course, IQ is developed in many more ways than just education. But especially since the time of the year 2000, as global competitors have looked to America to harvest its wealth, the old slave mentality of old has come into play. The people who want to rule the world do not want a bunch of smart people running around thinking for themselves. They want human capital to shut up, do the human labor, and to do what they are told for the rest of their lives. And the only way the Desecrators of Davos characters can get such a compliant society is to dumb down the world so that people would no longer think for themselves. If the evidence for such an intent was ever in question, just look at what has happened to America and society in general since 2000. Since the Bush, No Child Left Behind bill that essentially just empowered the teacher’s union to take control of the public schools and ruin them into communist propaganda branches and political think tanks for all leftist causes, we have seen this downward trend in general intelligence.   If you are someone who wants a compliant workforce that looks to you to do all the thinking for them, then you have been successful. But if you want a world of innovation and free thinkers driving society and culture in positive ways, this IQ report is a disaster.

That’s not to even consider the amount of IQ we have lost over the two years of Covid that miraculously went away as the Ukraine war with Russia started. Just about the time, hmmmmmmmm, what could it be? Since the publication of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health came out, people are beginning to understand it. That book implicates many factors of the medical profession, the money guys, and climate activists like Bill Gates. The government brokers who distribute funds to everyone, like Dr. Fauci, the pharma industry that only has an eye on their next quarterly profit forecast as publicly traded companies, a media industry of prostitutes in the literal sense of the word, who will do and say anything depending on who is paying them. The book presents a disaster of a culture, and it brings the evidence in droves. Yet the gist of it all is that such exploitations could have only occurred in a dumb society, the kind of society where the government says, “wear a mask to slow the spread” of a made-up virus that the government artificially propped up for the power grabs of government. Then there were actually people who were driving around in their cars with the windows rolled up by themselves, wearing their masks. That is the result of a low IQ society. The fault I would point to is the Desecrators of Davos who have been trying to build the world toward globalism since the progressive John Dewey came up with our current education system as a socialist propaganda arm of government to breed enslaved people for the new masters who were above all the world and looking to control labor and the governments of those people with a heavy hand and a parental eye to direct all behavior as if we were all four years old again. 

Yes, the Desecrators of Davos knew they were doing just as what was done to enslaved people in the past; they cut off the feet of slaves who kept running away to keep them in the fields. And they certainly didn’t teach them to read because if they could, they would figure out what was happening to them by the enslavers. The best thing for maintaining human labor was to keep them dumb and thoughtless. The slave masters needed the muscles of the human capital, not their minds. And that is essentially how those types of people have shaped all education systems for well over one hundred years. That is also why we have lost 7 IQ points since the year 2000. That is what the Desecrators of Davos want, those cryptical losers that everyone calls the “elites.” People like the progressives John Kerry, Al Gore, and Janet Yellen. People who can’t survive American politics but have found a home among the World Economic Forum and those who call themselves “globalists.” They are the ones who want to take kids away from parents as early as possible, to put them in pre-K classes as “free babysitting.” But the real intent has been to ruin the minds of the young people and keep them from learning anything for the next 13 to 14 years while the parents slave away for a big house with a dual-income so that men and women can be equal in society and both make the same amount of money. And those same parents start saving for college for those kids while they are still in pre-school, only to lose those children to a Marxist professor who is there to destroy what’s left of the child and turn them into a compliant hack for whatever corporation hires them. That is the wheel that the parents are placed on to run until they drop dead from some illness that the pharma companies keep alive long enough to make all they can until they are no longer useful. Now we have a society that won’t even call a woman a woman. You see where this is going. You’d have to be an idiot to accept such a ridiculous premise, but it’s what they think of us and what they expect us to know and accept. 

Meanwhile, the kids are turned into drones for the Desecrators of Davos while the parents are busy with their lives, serving the state so that they can pay their taxes so that the government can waste money on sheer stupidity, to pay losers like Dr. Fauci to tell us to wear a mask in our cars with the windows rolled up. It’s not for our benefit. It’s not for public health. It’s to torture and abuse us so that we will never run away from our role as human capital to not just our government, but what our government serves, the Desecrators of Davos. The new enslavers in the world who intend to rule us all with low IQs and a smile on our faces because we are too stupid to think of it expect compliance to the rules they come up with. It is easy to control dumb people, and these globalists have always wanted us stupid. They don’t want us thinking for ourselves. They want to control all thought and action in every way possible. That has always been their plan; just read what they say. They think they are so much smarter than the rest of us because they know what they’ve done to our education system. They don’t believe we are smart enough to see what they are doing and what their intentions are. The low IQs were purposeful. And if we lost another 7 points just over the two Covid lockdown years, it would not surprise me at all. And it also wouldn’t surprise me to learn that was part of the plan too. A dumb society is easy to conquer, and the attackers, in this case, want the infrastructure. They don’t want to kill us; they want our labor. But they don’t want us thinking. They have purposely dumbed us down and intend for us all to be the newly enslaved people in the world serving the masters of globalism who wish to rule as the new “elite.” What they have done has been on purpose, it’s no accident, and now after a few decades of their true intentions coming to the light of day, we can see the results in our lowered IQs.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Everyone Understands Supply Chains Better than Joe Biden: When the government makes itself the problem, what we have is the result

Yes, Joe, We Understand Supply Chains, its You Who are Stupid to Them

If Joe Biden doesn’t understand supply chains, I’ll be happy to send the White House stacks of copies of my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, so he can learn how they work, as I said in the video above. I’ve wanted to cover this topic for over a week since Joe Biden stated that if you went to dinner and talked to someone at the next table over, that nobody understands supply chains.  That is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard a president say or anybody in high office.  If you don’t understand supply chains, you have no business being an adult.  Specifically, in my book, I deal with supply chain problems quite specifically.  Everyone knows what the problem is with the Biden people, and playing dumb won’t help.  Essentially, this is a topic we’ll talk about a lot in the months to come, but all progressives are broken on a failed concept that was first really expressed in the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward, which came out in 1888.  That was one of the first times a creative author tried to put Karl Marks communism into the context of a socialist utopia by justifying the government takeover of all industry and labor.  It is the fantasy of most big-government types who fantasize that they can better manage businesses than at the local level.  When the government gets involved in supply chains, they find that they become the constraint, which is why we have problems now, because through policy, they have tampered with the free market, and now the blame is on their shoulders. 

I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to take readers back to Edward Bellamy’s time and defend capitalism in one of its rawest forms.  The Bellemy types were in love with Karl Marx.  I think there will always be those types of people, and as I say in my book, they have a useful purpose.  But you cannot give control of anything in your life to them because they are what I call “Below-the-line thinkers.” Actually, that term comes from a book I like called The Oz Principle, a popular book on business.  But I feel that not enough people understand how business books can help their lives, so my Gunfighter’s Guide is intended for a broader audience curious how we arrived where we are in history and what they can do to fix it.  I propose that we have to go back to the ideas that worked before all these below-the-line types sought to use Karl Marx to cover their timidity in life and shape politics toward centralized authority to mask their weaknesses about everything.  After all, that is at the heart of all communism, socialism, and Marxism in general.  The Bellemy types never figured out what was wrong with their way of thinking; they made assumptions in Looking Backward about the government taking control of all production and assumed that corruption and human frailties would be removed from the supply chain process and everyone would live happily ever after.  I don’t think people understand how destructive this way of thinking has been and how much it has shaped the minds of the modern progressive. 

When Bellemy wrote his book, to be fair, nobody knew what would happen.  It was an ideological concept by Marx created by people who were naturally lazy and timid types.  So, of course, the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism seemed cruel to them.  The titans of industry were “evil.” That is their perspective, but it doesn’t mean it’s the correct perspective.  History has shown the value of capitalism over the many attempts since to utilize Marxism in any way. My Gunfighter’s Guide gives a perspective history of how we arrived where we are today and why America produced the most outstanding economy in the history of the world.  We have so many options in America with a relatively small workforce instead of China because of capitalism.  We can get anything in just about any color at any time of day, and that is a culture worth talking about.  But what the Biden people are talking about, and the global greenie weenies want, is a government take over of all means of production and to force the world to live under their constraints, their limited government hours at the office, their bureaucratic cubical culture of lazy, below the line thinkers, their discontent minds who want to make a lot of money, but not wanting to work for it.  Essentially, the government workers of today like school teachers, IRS workers, and even the FBI, people who want to get paid, but they don’t want to work for the value of the job.  The government can hide those values if they are the only employer. Biden’s administration follows the Bellamy concepts to the letter with vaccine mandates, government shutdowns of industry, and setting rules that essentially annex human resource departments into becoming state agents through enforcement and penalties.  Then they dare to declare that they don’t understand supply chains. 

Supply chains work because they are created creatively by people who want to make a little money in the process.  They aren’t going to go out and risk themselves creating a new company if there isn’t a little “something something” in it for them.  And the government isn’t going to figure out what they need to fill a supply chain under a government takeover of the industry because they don’t have it in them.   The progressives and Marxists who loved Bellamy’s book never figured out why; they just insisted that the world would be a better place if they did.  So many of the same stupid things the world governments have done over the years have not changed since Karl Marx wrote his books in the mid-1850s, which provoked the labor strikes that Bellamy writes about in Looking Backward.  They created the labor problems with Marxism then proposed to correct them with a government takeover of the means of production.  They made their own mess, and history has shown the guilt.  I propose in my book to go back to before Bellamy, to attack Karl Marx, and to unleash capitalism with boldness.  Not the other way around. 

If Biden doesn’t understand supply chains, I would be happy to give him a class on the subject; I could speak infinitely.  I understand supply chains, and I know literally hundreds of people, many very smart people who also understand supply chains.  They are not a mystery to anybody who works and understands the wonderful concept of capitalism.  But for those who are into Marxism, below-the-line thinking, government socialism, well, that’s where they are trying to force a square peg into an undersized circle.  It’s never going to work, even if you try to hammer the thing into place with force.  Marxism was broken as Marx wrote it, and for all those big-government types who want to be important in the world without the risk associated with effort, it was always just a fantasy.  It was never going to be a thing, yet the world, what we call “elites,” is still in love with the ideas set up by Edward Bellamy in 1888.  The answers I will always say lay before that ridiculous book.  Once you understand that, supply chains are not a mystery.  But the real problem shows itself, which Joe Biden and his United Nations friends never figured out and are in complete denial.    

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The LEA Union at Lakota Goes Too Far: Trying to screen school board candidates to protect their stranglehold on the district

Labor Unions think they are Management, they aren’t

It’s safe to say it now; it’s no longer a conspiracy theory, as it used to be when I first started talking about it years ago.  Teacher unions formed under the John Dewey public education system have been communist recruitment centers meant to re-shape the minds of our children into diabolical menaces against American values, life, liberty, and capitalism.  In my school district of Lakota, the LEA labor union has been a treacherous disaster for decades, imposing on the community, which tends to be conservative, a lot of liberal ideology that people aren’t comfortable with.  Many of the kids who have been through the Lakota school system and are now adults can easily see the damage.  Parents tell me all the time the sad stories of their precious little kids who were so sweet and wonderful, who turned into delectable losers through their high school and college years.   By the time the kids get into their 20s and 30s, they end up as unrecognizable communists of anti-American sentiment.  And where did it all start?  Well, in Lakota, there is a group of mad moms led by Sandy Wheatley, an old name to me but likely new to unsuspecting parents new to the school district.  She used to lead the local teacher’s union at Lakota and still has been one of the “sweat bees” always aggravating Lakota school business in the ways you can see in this article.  All the trouble starts with people like her.  In truth, all labor unions were born out of the push for communism during the mid-1800s when Marx published his destructive concepts that have stifled the world in many ways we see today.  But it’s one thing to look at it happening and have feelings about it, but quite another for it to happen in our backyards and not be expected to do anything about it.  I’ve never felt compelled not to do something about it.  I think we should fight these losers everywhere they show themselves because now many can see what I’ve been saying for years.  Teacher unions have not just been bad for our public education system, wasting millions of our taxpayer dollars over the years as an actual imposition. They are additionally harmful to our flag and country and must once and for all be considered domestic terrorists and threats to our children’s very lives.  Because they are.

Recently I have told many stories about a group of school board challengers endorsed by the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio, running this year to replace three seats on the Lakota school board.  They are great candidates functioning on their own for good reasons which they have determined for themselves.  But I’ve been around for a while and understand the impediments that get in the way of good people intending to do a good job where good jobs are needed, and old labor union presidents like Sandy Wheatley don’t want to see a good job done in public schools.  They function from a different idea of what “good” is.  You and I, dear reader, might call “good” a well-balanced kid who can read, write, think, and grow up to get married, have good kids, a job, run a good household, and come over to a happy family gathering on Christmas for some quality exchanges.  For the communist labor union types, “good” is to turn the kids into servants of the state, do drugs, experiment sexually, collect unemployment, and vote Democrat.  And when it comes time for Christmas dinner, to send those children into those nice American homes filled with nice American families and to torpedo them all from the inside out with disappointment, anxiety, and malice.  Yet many people have always thought that my statements about the teacher’s union were overstated and purely political.  Because I have been more involved in these school board candidates this time around, I have seen how the labor union at Lakota behaves from a different point of view, and that view has been ugly.

One of these school board challengers asked me the other day about the questionnaire shown in this article, along with correspondence showing some Facebook postings from old Sandy Wheatley herself disparaging members of the current school board and the challengers in ways meant to impact the vote the way labor unions all over America intend.  These documents show the intent of the LEA teacher’s union at Lakota in a very honest way that voters should know about.  I found the questionnaire sent to this particular school board challenger to be reprehensible.  As I explained to them, they want to do a nice job for the district, and all this labor union radicalism can be a bit scary, that as a member of the school board, they are the management.  The labor does not get to interview the management. The other way around is the first problem with managing all public schools, especially at Lakota.  These labor union types felt it was appropriate to gather information on incoming school board members at Lakota.  Just read the questions for yourself.  What is being proposed by this questionnaire is that the labor union wants to know how progressive the candidates are.  Will they support the current progressive political agenda such as gay rights in the schools or uncontrollable spending with perpetual tax increases on private property through school levies.  How the candidates’ answer will determine the level of activism the union will perform against those candidates.  The LEA wants people like what they have molded on the current school board, lapdogs of union appeasement from Julie Shaffer, Kelly Casper, Michael Pearl, and the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton.  As you can see from Sandy’s direct comments on Facebook, they hate Lynda O’Conner because Lynda has tried to do the job a school board is always supposed to do, represent the community who elected her into place.  While the rest want to get along with the communist teacher’s union so bad things won’t be said about them.

People never wanted to face the facts of the origin of the labor movement, especially when it came to their kids.  Parents wanted to like their teachers; many of them started with good intentions.  Everyone always does, including Sandy Wheatley and the union thugs sucking the life out of the Lakota school system.  Even in the human body, viruses want to live.  Cancer wants to live by being a parasite of the host.  Everyone from their perspective wants to live.  But good is determined by logic, and that is why we elect school board members to insert reason into the management of children in a school and the millions of dollars it takes to teach them with free education.  But the quality of that education has always been under attack by teacher unions who want far more than just a job in a school district.  They want to act as parasites to our children and the property we own and maintain to fund their menace.  Attacking private property is one of the communist goals as they were adopted directly from Karl Marx and John Dewey was quite aware of it from the beginning.  It was a mountain of corruption from the start, and it shows in the products of public education, most of us, our children, and the state of our nation now.  And based on these documents shown here, you can see what is going on in your local teacher’s union.  These aren’t unique to Lakota.  But they do require action from voters who have a mind to fix the situation.  In Lakota, during 2021, voters will finally have a chance to do something about all this nonsense.  But really, this is a nationwide problem, and it needs to be addressed in America once and for all.  Otherwise, we won’t have a country, making all teacher union members very, very happy.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Why EdChoice is so Beneficial: Removing Parkinson’s Law from the public education debate in Ohio

I’ve been watching and listening to the whole debate about EdChoice in Ohio with great interest. Of course, the Ohio Senate had to vote to delay the implementation of Ed Choice which was scheduled to take effect the day of this writing, until April 1st 2020. The public schools in particular have responded terribly to it, including the school in my own district which I’ve written a lot about, Lakota. It has been nothing short of embarrassing to listen to Lakota’s superintendent complain about the funding model that is coming whether they like it or not and move the entire district into a victimized status so quickly on the issue. The report back from some financial news from Lakota has not been good and they are floating the idea for another levy which would be a terrible, anti-growth tax increase just to supplement their mismanaged spending habits, so the news was bad enough. This EdChoice debate has only made things worse. Dealing with professional educators to me is the worst experience that there is in professional politics because they are so entitled and unrealistic about what they think their financial requirements should be, so we’ll deal with some of that here, and in the coming months. Listening to politicians attempt to put their minds around what to do about EdChoice, which is simply a grading system that inspires the financial contributions of the state to follow the student of that failing school to the school of their choice. This of course leaves variability in public school budgets for money they have been used to getting now going to an unpredictable number of students who may decide to go somewhere else with that precious state money.

I listened to Bill Cunningham and Representative Bill Seitz talk about this EdChoice problem on WLW and every word made me cringe. Here were two people who call themselves rock ribbed Republicans missing the whole point of the public education debate. Now, my history with these two is that they are on the wrong side of many issues. They mean well like a lot of people do, but their perspective has been tainted by years of acceptance of a system initiated by people like John Dewey during an experimentation of many things during the progressive era at the turn of the last century and like many have accepted that that’s just the way things are and the way they will always be. Money goes to the school from the state to teach children living in that district not just skills for a future job, but to turn them into democratic citizens with an emphasis on social change. In hindsight this has been a complete disaster, look at the products of the schools, which many of us are. People aren’t very smart, and they don’t set their sights very high in life. Dewey’s mistake was in attempting to steer society away from republic representation and more toward democratic majority rule, which we all know now is a disaster at the epistemological level.

For the two Bills talking on WLW about EdChoice, they are both people in their 60s and 70s now, to them public school is about sports programs, learning to follow orders so that kids learn to live in a civil society, and in establishing much needed social connections with peers. Way back, many decades ago when my wife and I pulled our kids out of public schools for a year to teach them at home because the results were just so disappointing we had family members literally melt under the news because they were afraid my kids would turn into complete social outcasts, because they believed after so many years of this Dewey philosophy that the goal of public schools was to establish these mental applications. Of course, those sentiments were completely fear based, just as about everything in public education is. We have learned to just accept the failure that is evident because that’s always the way we have done things. People like the “Bills” on WLW enjoy the idea that their public school is the holder of real-estate value, and that Friday Night Lights football in the fall months of every year make for great conversation. But it was flawed from the beginning and never was poised to do what Dewey wanted because his fundamental problem was in thinking that the state as a central authority should be in charge. It was a progressive experiment, but not a very “Republican” thing to do.

Schools like Lakota and many others who are complaining about the insecurity in their funding model should be looking at the situation like any business would instead of some free-loader sitting in a bird nest of a rich district and opening their mouths for tax money to flow in. They should be working to be the best school with the best options in a free market society. No matter what the report card states in giving families the choice of a school they’d like to go to, Lakota should feel confident that kids would want to go to their school for all the reasons that anybody would, to get a good education, be near a good sports program, or just to be around other students who aren’t problems coming from broken families. Students should have a choice and if Lakota wants those students, they should have to work to attract them.

The most tragic thing I have noticed, looking at the situation professionally, is that all public schools have become addicted to the natural state of Parkinson’s Law that has contaminated their budgeting structures. Everyone who has been involved professionally in process improvements understands that Parkinson’s Law is an adage that states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” meaning that a work schedule blankly stated will allow a worker to fill that time allotment from beginning to end by the nature of human interaction. If you give someone an hour to do a 5-minute job, they’ll take the whole hour. Process improvement demands to understand how long it actually takes to do a job, and to work out the tendencies of Parkinson’s Law to misstate labor needs. Well, that same tendency is at the center of the public education debate all across the country, and is why the EdChoice trend is so badly needed. Budgets have been filled to their maximum to accommodate whatever the state provides and to what extent local school district tax payers will put up with in increased levies driven by labor unions looking to use Parkinson’s Law to attach need to student performance by using the chaos of money going to the schools, not the student, to keep the process centrally controlled and with a false understanding of what education per student should cost, leaving the real state funding model perpetually broken, which is just how the labor unions and lazy superintendents like it.

Clearly what we have had hasn’t worked. Education needs reformed and the centralized aspects of it need to be removed. Free market solutions are the only way to improve schools and the students that come from them. People should have the option to vote with their feet putting schools into the same competitive situation that every restaurant, shopping complex and entertainment destination must do, compete for the dollars available. Education is not so sacred to not be attached to competitive market conditions, end of story. A quick look at our students declares that trying something new wouldn’t hurt, because we couldn’t do worse. And ultimately that is the direction of education anyway, just as the trends of the world are declaring. People want more choices in life, not less, and it’s a matter of time anyway where money for education shouldn’t even come from the state. But while it does, it should go to the students so they can vote with their feet. Not to hold them to a school that doesn’t feel it has to earn their business. If Lakota is such a great school, or any government school for that matter, don’t tell us how good you are. Make yourself one of those schools that people want to go to. Make it so that you are so crowded that you must turn people away, which only increases the value of the product. Sure, it makes the current way that schools do business chaotic, it forces them to understand how much Parkinson’s Law is in their processes. It forces the teacher unions to think differently for sure. But that is their problem, not ours. And the state will never know how much it should spend on students so long as Parkinson’s Law is contaminating their assumptions. That is the key to this whole discussion and we’re going to have it now or in a few years, but the way things have been are not the way things are going to be. The old Dewey model was poised from the outset to fail. But these days, life happens too fast and there is just too much to learn to attempt to squeeze everything into the traditional classroom setting that we have been attempting to do. The times and this new economy are forcing us to change, so let’s get at it and solve this problem once and for all by looking at the entire concept differently.

Rich Hoffman