Rush Limbaugh was commenting on Newark NJ earlier today, no doubt in resopnse to this Steve Malanga column here:

Newark: City Without Fathers

Courtesy Real Clear Politics

It dovetailed so well with my previous post I had to add more.

Substitute the word Newark with Milwaukee, or Oakland, or New Orleans, or Cleveland, well, you get the point.  Tweak the statistics and you find a plethora of case studies on the effectiveness of left/liberal/Democrat leadership in American citys today.  There must be some study out there showing the relative disparity between Democrat and Republican controlled cities, if the latter actually exists that is.  

And there's this from todays Milwaukee Journal

After-school activities declining at MPS

...featuring this white wash

There's no single reason why the decline in extracurricular activities has been more severe in cities. Some blame budget cuts or the back-to-basics emphasis of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Others point to the shift toward smaller high schools, which often cannot offer a full range of activities.

Odd how in a 1000 word article about the plight of schools the word union, you know the one that has the whole system in a headlock, the one that runs the entire operation from the board room down to the boiler room and everywhere in between, wasn't - even - mentioned - once.  Yet somehow the reporter found, or forced, an opportunity to blame Bush and No Child Left Behind early in the article.  Why blame local control when you have the convenience of an unpopular Republican President in Washington?  By the way, what was the excuse during the Clinton administration?  Also by the way, this President has increased fed spending on education by 70%.  Don't hold your breath waiting for THAT to find print in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

There's also this tidbit...
The extracurricular activities gradually disappeared as the school lost enrollment and funding, and budget cuts eliminated much of the extra pay for teachers who headed after-school activities.

Bravo.  I have no problem with teachers concentrating strictly on their discipline.  I mean really, what sense does it make to pay professional rates for a Pon Pom supervisor?  The second 800 pound gorilla ignored in this story is bureaucratic costs.  It's the overhead stupid.  It doesn't require calculus to show the reason declining enrollments, and the per-pupil funding that goes with it, leave budget shortfalls because the attending, non-teaching payroll costs of a feather-bedded bureaucracy are never cut commensurately.  (A hallmark of an institutionalized monopoly is that the top will always eat their own underlings for the sake of survival)     

At the risk of sounding like the cliche "when I was a kid I walked to school 5 miles through snow up hill both ways" I will say this however; just over 30 years ago, when I was in a public school, that district of well over 1000 kids had 1 Superintendent ( sans PhD.) 2 principals (sans PhD.) 3 secretary's, who ran the place, and a janitor for each building, period.  I am curious about how that ratio compares to MPS today.  I do know this however, their was no "achievement gap" and graduation rates were about 100%.  And all this on a fraction of todays budget, even in todays dollars. 

Later on, paragraph 17, a teacher accidentally tells the truth.... 

But lead teacher David Coyle says it would cost about $50,000 for their students to play on a larger school's sports teams, money he would rather spend on a teacher's salary.

Oops.  There you have it, when push comes to shove, the money will always be steered toward what's best for teachers - - not students.  The success of the monopoly hinges entirely on the illusion that what's best for the teachers is best for the students.   That may have been true at some point in history, and actually serves as a reasonable goal, but so long as the primary function of the union is to prevent bad teachers from being fired, that will never be the case.  

I am open to charges of hypocrisy since I enjoy the benefits of being a union teachers spouse.  I'm fine with that because she's not a slacker.  I sleep perfectly well at night knowing she puts more hours into a 10 month work year than most folks do in their private sector job all year long.   And you know what? it's true, with both the Heartland wife and almost all of our many teacher friends, the biggest headaches are always, always, from the extracurricular activities.