MUTH'S TRUTHS 03/06/2014

FIRST FRIDAY DOUBLE-TROUBLE!

We’ve got two-for-the-price-of-one tomorrow night at our monthly First Friday Happy Hour!

Not only will Bob Beers - Las Vegas city councilman and U.S. senate candidate against Harry Reid – be joining us as our VIP guest-of-honor, we’ll also be joined by Adam Laxalt, the GOP’s newly-minted, high-octane candidate for Nevada attorney general!

First Friday VIP Club members are invited to join Mr. Beers and Mr. Laxalt for an early, private meet-and-greet and photo-op at 4:30 pm.  Doors open to the general public at 5:00 pm.  $10 donation (free for VIP Club members).

Location: Stoney’s Rockin’  Country in the Town Square Mall on the south end of the Strip in Las Vegas. 

AMAZING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BLOWS UNION’S CLAIMS TO SMITHEREENS

The only thing more annoying these days than Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” song is the incessant bleating by Nevada’s teachers union that education is underfunded and, therefore, we have to penalize the state’s job providers by slapping them with a new “margins tax.”

What a crock.

But don’t take my word for it.  Just look at the evidence provided by a small elementary school in the blue-collar section of Henderson, Nevada – C.T. Sewell – which in the span of about five years has gone from a low-achieving two-star school to a high-achieving five-star school and where some parents are actually lying about where they live just to get their kids into it!

Sewell’s success story explodes quite a few union-fueled myths…

1.)  The school building itself is over 50 years old; the oldest active school building of its kind in all of Clark County.  Yet the building is well-maintained, the outside walls are adorned with beautiful murals and the grounds are nicely landscaped.  So much for the notion that kids have to have brand-spanking new buildings in order to get a solid education.

2.)  Because of the popularity of the school with parents who want a quality education for their kids, many classes are technically “over-crowded.”  Yet all the kids have desks.  All the kids have books.  And they’re getting a better education than kids in neighboring schools with much smaller class sizes.  Go figure.

3.)  We constantly hear that the only way to attract good teachers is to pay them more.  Yet Sewell has been able to attract some of the best darned teachers in the entire state despite paying them – get this – no more money than other teachers are being paid.  Stop the madness!

4.)  The student population is not white upper middle class.  Some 72 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunches.  And many come from broken homes or whose parents are addled by substance abuse, chronic unemployment or worse.  So much for the ridiculous notion that you can’t teach poor kids who are living in poverty.

To be fair, the school was designated as an “empowerment school” a few years ago.  However, school leaders told me that while the little bit of extra money they receive is helpful, the real benefit of being an empowerment school is the greater autonomy to make operational and spending decisions independently from the home office bureaucrats at Central Planning.

So the notion that just dumping more money into a school without fundamentally changing the mentality of those who run the school will fix the school is, frankly, insane.

And speaking of insane, now that the school is performing at such a high educational level it’s at risk of losing its autonomy and that little bit of extra funding.  Yes, in the bizarro world of public education, C.T. Sewell’s students could very well be penalized for being too successful!

Worse, Sewell recently lost the principal who brought about this miraculous transformation, Dr. Carrie Buck, to a privately-operated charter school…and the school district might send in a new principal who doesn’t share the ethos and philosophy that has made Sewell such a top-performing school rather than promote the assistant principal who has been an integral part of the school’s turnaround and success.

Yeah, that makes perfectly stupid sense.

In addition, because the school is so good - and so many parents are, literally, breaking the law and fibbing about their residency to get their kids into it - the student population is bursting at the seams. 

But instead of looking at what has made Sewell so successful and replicating it in the neighboring schools, the school district is considering changing Sewell to a year-round schedule which will, without doubt, screw up both the teaching staff and the students and destroy one of the most amazing public education success stories in the entire state.

If the educrats do this to C.T. Sewell Elementary, then Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” should become the school district’s official theme song.  Instead, school administrators should observe the age-old wisdom that when something works, don’t fix it!

As for the teachers union, it - NOT lack of money - is the cancer that’s destroying public education and killing our children’s futures.  So instead of schools being “gun-free” zones we should make then “union-free” zones.  So let it be written; so let it be done.

COULTERGEIST

“As long as a Democrat sits in the White House, America will be repeatedly humiliated, the world will become a much more dangerous place -- and there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about it.”

“John F. Kennedy was in the White House for less than three years and, if you think he screwed a lot of hookers, just look what he did to our foreign policy.”

“LBJ's incompetent handling of (the Vietnam) war allowed liberals to spend the next half-century denouncing every use of American military force as ‘another Vietnam.’”

“Jimmy Carter warned Americans about their ‘inordinate fear of communism’ and claimed to have been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit.”

“Twice, when Clinton was president, Sudan had offered to turn over bin Laden to the U.S. But, unfortunately, these offers came in early 1996 when Clinton was busy ejaculating on White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton rebuffed Sudan's offers.”

“In 2004, nearly 100 soldiers, mostly Marines, died in the battle to take Fallujah from al-Qaida. Today, al-Qaida's black flag flies above Fallujah.  Bush won the war, and Obama gave it back.”

“Obama has become such an object for Putin's amusement that the fastest way to get the Russians out of Crimea would be for Obama to call on Putin to invade Ukraine.”

- Columnist Ann Coulter