A Look at Government Schooling Today

A - Excellent; B - Mediocre

The government schools that I went to weren’t all that hot, but there was at least one big difference between them and the so-called schools of today. When you got a "B" in a class, you generally earned it. Teachers didn’t give away grades.

That was then — before the Hope Scholarship. Yes, the Hope Scholarship is probably the most popular government program in Georgia. I like it for two reasons.

First, it’s funded with Lottery proceeds and the lottery constitutes a tax on the stupid and the poor. The poor need to pay taxes, dammit, and this is as good a way as any. My insensitive nature just likes the idea of some marginally literate close-to-minimum-wage loser standing there at the convenience store counter trying to make that momentous decision of whether to spend five bucks on lottery tickets or two packs of cigarettes. Buy the lottery tickets!

I just love the thought of you forking that five bucks over to some upper income family to pay for an education you eschewed. Second, I like the Hope Scholarship because it opens the doors to higher education for high school graduates whose parents were more interested in fancy vacations and expensive cars than they were about saving for their child’s education.

But there has been a big downside to the Hope Scholarship — something called grade inflation.

Across Georgia we have high school teachers handing out B’s like hall passes. Once upon a time a B was considered to be above-average work. Now it is, at best, average. It’s run-of-the-mill stuff. It is no longer a grade you work hard to earn in Georgia government schools.

B is now a grade handed out by teachers who don’t want to stand in the way of the student’s chances for a Hope Scholarship.

Believe it or not, 12 percent of our sharp young people who graduate from Georgia government high schools with their precious B-average can’t handle basic college work. These are supposed to be our above-average high school students, and they can’t handle basic college stuff. So they get plugged into remedial classes.

Do you expect the Georgia legislature to go along with toughening the standards? Are you nuts? They respond to the electorate, not to the reality of grade inflation.

So many parents don’t really care about this grade inflation. They care about having to pay for college. If their kids have to get grades they don’t deserve in order to save college costs, so be it.

There’s one big problem here, though. University professors don’t particularly care whether or not you’re there on a Hope Scholarship. Your parents pay, the government pays — either way, someone pays. And that means students

I read a story from Newsday over the Christmas weekend about a teenager who was arrested because of something he wrote.

Evidently he's an aspiring writer of the Stephen King variety, and he wrote a manuscript which included some rather descriptive murders of some classmates and others from his school.

And, for that he ended up in jail. That's where we are now in politically correct America. So much for freedom of speech. So much for freedom of the press.

We have reached the point where someone can be arrested and charged with a crime just because they write or say something that makes someone else uncomfortable. No violation of rights, no action taken against someone, just write a story that makes someone edgy and you're off to jail. With the left-wing push for "hate crimes," this is only going to get worse.