© 2016 Jim Spence - We cancelled our subscription to the Las Cruces Sun-News more
than twenty years ago. Why? Let's see, do you have a few minutes?
The Sun-News is nothing more than a propaganda sheet.
Virtually every headline on budgeting in the Sun-News is written to serve the
political agenda of Democrat reporters and editors. Almost every story on
budgeting contains words and phrases designed to shape the views of the reader rather
than provide facts and inform.
Still, I need to look at the obituaries every day, so I log
on to the Sun-News website to make sure I didn’t die. This morning I logged on
and decided to surf the "news" stories.
Same old drivel.
There is a story in today’s paper with the headline “Students
stage walk in to support public education.” If you glance at the headline the
story seems harmless enough. But if you are even a wee bit informed, you quickly
recognize that activist teachers are manipulating naïve children to support
their Democratic Party political agendas. How wonderful it must be to get the local paper to write propaganda pieces to help your cause and call it "news."
The result data has been in on public education for
decades. Public education is failing and failing in a big way. America has been
throwing more and more money at education for three generations while simultaneously
seeing poorer and poorer results.
Most school teachers, who are at the bottom of the resource
consuming food chain in the public education monster, can tell you all about
the deterioration of attitudes and behaviors of children who show up in their classrooms every year. Overcoming this situation is the most difficult aspect of their job. More money won’t fix this horrible problem.
Teachers can also tell you they are shorted on resources with larger classroom
sizes and onerous testing requirements. Administrators call for one size fits all curriculum that replaces teacher creativity. Mandates from above are a way of life for the once creative island know as the teaching profession.
The larger classroom sizes are real, though studies unequivocally
show there is zero correlation between classroom size and academic achievement.
Unfortunately what is NEVER part of any discussion regarding education in the Sun-News is the
heavy hand of big government and of the teachers unions on the budget. Sadly,
many school teachers who think political activism is the solution to problems
simply call for more milking of the taxpayers. They never stop to think about
how much money gets squandered before it ever makes it to the classroom budgets.
Administrative jobs are thick at every public school as well as every administration
central office. You want to be informed about budgeting in education? Spend a week observing bureaucrats
killing time on the public school payrolls while wasting resources by the
millions. Do so and you will never plead for more milking of the taxpayers again.
Still this is exactly what the Sun-News article calls for without ever
bothering to use a little logic and follow the money wasted by the public
education monster.
And of course the propaganda in the Sun-News is predictable in that Governor Martinez (the Republican),
is the simplistic whipping girl of yet another sloppy hit piece.
There is another hit piece in the Sun News
today. It speaks of a budget repair sent to the Governor by the state
legislature. It focuses on the efforts of the GOP to reinstate the death
penalty in New Mexico for the most atrocious crimes. The article quickly
glosses over the basic problem in New Mexico, which is that despite the fact
that the oil and gas industry pays the bills in New Mexico, Democrats are
constantly poisoning the business environment for oil and gas as well as all
other businesses. Other businesses are capable of taking on more of the burden
from oil and gas, but only if they are treated more fairly with an eye towards
long term growth.
School teacher activists (Democrats) are the favorites of
Sun-News reporters and editors so their partisan views are constantly trumpeted in the paper. In the real world of results, Democrats have two clear solutions right under their
noses. Choice number one would be to call for the elimination of 20-25% of all
administrative positions in the education bureaucracy so that those funds could
be invested in more teachers and shrink classroom sizes. They could also stop
biting the hand that feeds them and improve the business environment for the oil
and gas industry and all others as is the case in every single state that
borders New Mexico. Instead of helping with real solutions it is a sign of the
times that journalists writing stories about budgets and their activist Democrat
school teacher pals are so uninformed about the subject that they are reduced
to blaming the only people who can actually provide real long range solutions.
No, I do not regret cancelling my subscription to the Las Cruces
Sun-News decades ago. The only thing that has changed at the paper is the
violation of basic common sense on budgets and finance is more blatant and
ignorant than ever.
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