{"id":152,"date":"2009-01-25T05:33:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-25T12:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=152"},"modified":"2009-01-27T22:36:37","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T05:36:37","slug":"nevada-again-draws-a-poor-report-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=152","title":{"rendered":"Nevada again draws a poor report card"},"content":{"rendered":"

I see where the Review-Journal published without notable dissent (lede story, Page 2B, Jan. 16<\/a>) another one of these cooked-up \u201creport cards\u201d on how Nevada is doing, this one from a Henderson-based outfit calling itself the Children\u2019s Advocacy Alliance.<\/p>\n

As usual, the finding was: \u201cWe suck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, the state scored an A-minus for infant and child mortality and a B-plus for alcohol and tobacco use. (Apparently that means most Nevada infants have not yet taken up cocktails and cigars. I TOLD you the casinos would suffer for taking away all those comps.)<\/p>\n

But after that our grades pretty much went to hell, with Nevada drawing \u201cF\u201ds for immunization rates of 2-year-olds (69 percent); children without health insurance (47th in the nation) and mothers receiving prenatal care (49th in the nation.)<\/p>\n

Those rankings netted the Silver State a \u201cD-plus\u201d grade in children\u2019s health, while the worst overall grade was the state\u2019s \u201dF\u201d in education, caused by Nevada\u2019s 50th ranking among the states in high-school dropout rate and 45th ranking in spending per student.<\/p>\n

Where to begin?<\/p>\n

Lots of women giving birth in Nevada hospitals — way up in the double-digits percentages — are illegal aliens. While it would indeed be nice if prenatal care were readily available and affordable in the Third World countries most of these women hail from, if it\u2019s not, how is that our problem?<\/p>\n

The clear implication is that Nevada taxpayers should provide not just free maternity wards where these illegal invaders stand a much better chance of delivering a healthy child than they would back home (instant citizenship; more welfare; yay!) but also unlimited free \u201cprenatal care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Women tend to get better prenatal care when they\u2019re wealthier. A good way to increase the general level of wealth (see America: 1781 through 1912) is to lower the government seizures known as \u201ctaxes\u201d — especially taxes that punish the accumulation of job-creating capital. Yet why do I suspect the Children\u2019s Advocacy Alliance would instead advocate higher taxes to subsidize second-rate prenatal care for illegal immigrants, thus leaving Americans who have worked hard to join the middle class with less of their own earnings to pay for their own prenatal care — at the same time inadequate \u201cMedicaid\u201d reimbursements force doctors to hike up fees for their paying customers?<\/p>\n

The same quibbles could apply to Nevada\u2019s reported infant immunization rate, though there\u2019s a more important point to be made, here.<\/p>\n

LEAVE MORE CHILDREN BEHIND<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not much evidence that these shots work very well. When there are outbreaks of the diseases they\u2019re supposed to guard against, \u201cimmunized\u201d children can be infected at rates similar to those not immunized. The manufacturers often claim effectiveness rates around 70 percent for the first few years — which ain\u2019t great — but offer no guarantees.<\/p>\n

Parents should be free to make their own evaluations of risk versus effectiveness of these shots for their individual children, though \u201cpublic health advocates\u201d are notoriously poor about acknowledging (let alone publicizing) risks, which can include autism if vaccines are preserved with Thimerosal, and permanent brain damage where the pertussis shots (usually packaged inside a \u201cDPT\u201d shot) are concerned.<\/p>\n

Read the books of Neil Z. Miller. Peruse such Web sites as www.worldnetdaily.com\/news\/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49094; www.naturalnews.com\/011764.html; www.nvic.org\/Diseases\/autismsp.htm; and www.medicalnewstoday.com\/articles\/69427.php.<\/p>\n

Ask why — if everything is \u201cperfectly safe\u201d — we have a national Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, how many victims it compensates, and how many claims are turned down as \u201cnot proven.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ask why the \u201cattenuated\u201d Sabin polio vaccine is the largest cause of polio in America, and why the safer Salk \u201ckilled\u201d vaccine is now so hard to get.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s \u201ceducation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevada\u2019s spending on government schooling only ranks 45th among the 50 states if you exclude the cost of building new schools, which we were doing a lot of, until the 2008 downturn. Include school construction and bonded construction debt service and Nevada has ranked about in the middle of the 50 states in recent years.<\/p>\n

But who says spending per student on the government youth propaganda camps can even be shown to CORRELATE with high education achievement — let alone that it\u2019s causative?<\/p>\n

The District of Columbia spends more per student on government youth internment camps than any of the 50 states. Educational achievement there sucks, as it does in other big-spending, big-city districts. Utah\u2019s per capita spending is quite low, as is Vermont\u2019s. Their educational achievement is above average.<\/p>\n

And we haven\u2019t even gotten to that old bugaboo, the \u201cdropout rate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why on earth would anyone consider a \u201clow dropout rate\u201d to be a good thing? Would you want everyone who applies to medical school to end up licensed to dice your innards? Don\u2019t you want a large percentage of would-be doctors who can\u2019t make the grade to be \u201cflunked out,\u201d no matter how hard they \u201ctry\u201d? Beyond the elementary grades, isn\u2019t that \u201cscreening\u201d function part of the job of any legitimate educational institution?<\/p>\n

In European countries that regularly whup our butts in academic competition — and where it\u2019s considered nothing unusual for a high school graduates to speak three languages fluently, where most American high-schoolers are lucky to speak one — the \u201cdropout rate\u201d (as we\u2019d measure it here) is routinely at or above 50 percent, since about half of eighth graders are told, \u201cWith your grades, you\u2019re going to take up an apprenticeship and have a nice career as a small-engine mechanic — no college preparatory courses for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The notion that 90 percent or more of the young people in any large population — especially a population whose main intellectual pursuits are TV-watching and skateboarding — are well suited to go on to become doctors, engineers or even investment bankers is laughable on its face.<\/p>\n

\u2018KIDS DO WORSE THE LONGER THEY STAY IN SCHOOL\u2019<\/p>\n

The essay is now a decade old, but as Chester Finn, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former assistant secretary of education, writes at www.arthurhu.com\/98\/03\/finn.txt : \u201cBanish forever the consoling thought that, however mediocre the educational attainments of the average U.S. child, \u2018our best students are still the best in the world.\u2019 … It turns out that U.S. high school seniors — including the best and brightest among them — are the worst in the industrial world in math and science. It also turns out that the U.S. is the only country where kids do worse the longer they stay in school.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday the U.S. Department of Education officially releases the damning data, which come from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, a set of tests administered to half a million youngsters in 41 countries in 1995. But the results have trickled out. … Today we learn that our 12th-graders occupy the international cellar. And that\u2019s not even counting the Asian lands like Singapore, Korea and Japan that trounced our kids in the younger grades. They chose not to participate in this study. …<\/p>\n

\u201cThe results for advanced math and physics were even worse. … Just 14 percent of American seniors even qualified for the math test; they had to have taken (or be taking) pre calculus or calculus. The U.S. came in second-worst, besting only Austria. …<\/p>\n

\u201cThe public school establishment is already at work concocting excuses,\u201d Mr. Finn predicted a decade ago — and see if anything he says here sounds familiar. \u201cThey will blame parents, or leaky school roofs, or inadequately equipped labs or a shortage of \u2018certified\u2019 teachers. They will demand more money. …<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the failings revealed by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study cannot be explained away by lack of resources or corrected by more of the same. The U.S. has been \u2018reforming\u2019 its schools for the better part of two decades. We\u2019ve tried a hundred different programs and a thousand gimmicks. We\u2019ve poured countless billions of dollars into the schools. Yet it\u2019s now clearer than ever that none of these nostrums has worked — and a lot of them have made matters worse.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe public school system as we know it has proved that it cannot fix itself,\u201d Mr. Finn concludes. \u201cIt is an ossified government monopoly that functions largely for the benefit of its employees and interest groups rather than that of children and taxpayers. …\u201d<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not going to fix that by trying to reduce your \u201cdrop-out rate\u201d by bribing more non-performing students to sit at the back of the class in their stocking caps or backward baseball hats, ignoring the proffered course of instruction and instead listening to \u201crap\u201d on a Borg-like ear appendage while nursing their illegitimate welfare children or texting \u201cOMG\u201d illiteracies to their pals.<\/p>\n

Or by condemning the very kids with enough spunk to walk away and \u201cget a life\u201d as soon as their legal term of coercion expires.<\/p>\n

Because no education suitable to the populace of a free country can be achieved through compulsion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I see where the Review-Journal published without notable dissent (lede story, Page 2B, Jan. 16) another one of these cooked-up \u201creport cards\u201d on how Nevada is doing, this one from a Henderson-based outfit calling itself the Children\u2019s Advocacy Alliance. As usual, the finding was: \u201cWe suck.\u201d Oh, the state scored an A-minus for infant and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,26,22,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-literacy","category-media","category-welfare"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-2s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}