Cinnaman

Obama's Myth Ignores Facts in Nation's Poorest City

Smooth as a milk shake, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama is about to hypnotize a nation and pulverize a former First Lady as he rides toward the White House on a media-powered magic carpet of adulation.

His recent speech commemorating the Voting Rights Act in Selma, Alabama, demonstrated once more that he is amazingly bright, dramatically eloquent and quite adept at stoking the emotional engines that guide and drive the liberal agenda.

But enough is enough. It is time to call out the young senator on his tired and deceptive use of myth as fact.

As Obama pulled out his “black folk” accent to energize the adoring crowd at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, he resorted to the old tricks the serve as an “Applause” sign for any liberal crowd. They all added up to one word:

Victimization.

Here is one snippet of his sloganeering that had the folks humming:

“Blacks are less likely in their schools to have adequate funding. We have less-qualified teachers in those schools. We have fewer textbooks in those schools. We got in some schools rats outnumbering computers. That's called the achievement gap.”

Surely Sen. Obama knows that such generalizations are misleading if not downright false. Like all bone-deep leftists, he ignores trillions of dollars that have been showered on the poor urban school districts since the War on Poverty was launched. He pushes for billions more, even while the evidence shows that this nation’s real quagmire is the high-funded, poor performing anti-poverty passion plays that go on in places like Camden, New Jersey, the “Poorest City in America.”

Please, Senator, let’s take a minute to hold your education sloganeering up against the real story in Camden.

Here are the facts, taken from the New Jersey state education web site for the 2005-2006 school budget year. Let’s look at Camden, the nearby affluent township of Cherry Hill, NJ, and also Moorestown, NJ, another neighbor just a few miles away. (Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, recently contrasted life in Camden and Moorestown, which is recognized as the Best Town in America.”

Here is the total money spent per pupil in each town:

Camden
$14339
Cherry Hill
$10924
Moorestown
$10792

To put that into perspective, the state compared 104 school districts in the state, with the lowest, or worst, rank being 1 and the best, or highest, being number 104.

Camden ranked 94th in spending, meaning only 10 districts spent more. Cherry Hill ranked 50th and Moorestown 41st.

Camden spent more money on classroom salaries and benefits than the other two districts (and 94 other districts in the state). It spent more money on general supplies and textbooks than Cherry Hill, Moorestown and 83 other districts. Yes, it spent more on textbooks – another liberal buzzword – than most NJ districts.

Oh, and about that myth which shows poor districts devoid of teachers because no one wants to teach there? Here is the real story. In Camden, there was one teacher for every 10.6 pupils. Cherry Hill and Moorestown teachers all had an average of 13.4 students.

And how about the poor districts that can’t afford to pay good teachers?

Well, in Camden, the median teacher salary was $52,564.

That was a bit better than teachers were paid in Cherry Hill ($49,303) and Moorestown ($50,878).

Same story for the median administrator salary, which was $108,726 in Camden. The number is Cherry Hill was $108,080 while it was $103,861in Moorestown.

How can this be, how can the Poorest City in America be spending more for education, paying teachers and administrators more than affluent suburban towns? And, especially, how can this be true when the Camden school system is a colossal failure, marked by terrible student performance and corruption scandals covered almost daily in the media?

One reason is a decision by the state courts – the Abbott decision – that pumps more than $4 billion extra to 31 “poor” school districts each year. That’s not $400 million, but 10 times that – yes, $4 billion in taxpayer dollars. All because of a decision by judges who are appointed, not elected. And those school districts, by the way, aren’t doing very well, despite the annual windfalls going their way.

The bottom line is this – money is not the answer, just as the trillions spent to revitalize America’s gutted cities and its uneducated, unemployed minorities have not put much of a dent in the problem.

This country really is ready for new ideas and new direction. While Barack Obama skillfully persuades Americans that he really is open to all ideas, that he can lead all of the people, hidden beneath his clever words are the same old principles that have failed for decades.

His answers include massive government programs designed to soothe the sting of slavery, the redistribution of wealth through high taxation, and a culture based on the lowest common denominator of values.

Listen carefully to the man and you clearly will hear the myth.

Labels: barack, education, hilary, Obama, poor, selma

posted by Lou Antosh @ 8:57 AM