We're starting off the quarter with a kind of a two-pronged look at legislation in Alabama,
and our first seminar is going to be given by Mr. John Hay, who is a research associate
with the Alabama Family Alliance, and he is working with the governor and the governor's
The Federal Reserve's Office on the issue of school funding, and that's what he's going to be talking about today,
judicial welfare, the case of school funding in the state of Alabama.
So, welcome John, and take it away.
Thanks for having me. I have to say, right at the start, I'm more of a formal speaker,
so we'll see how I do in this kind of setting.
But basically we're going to be talking about judicial welfare,
And by that, we don't mean welfare in perhaps the common sense that we all think of welfare or food stamps, AFDC, things like that.
But we will be talking about a special kind of welfare that still involves transfers of monies from a specified party to another party.
I guess Cleveland will talk, Dr. Cleveland will talk about Bastiat some, but I like a quote that Bastiat had.
Well, it's called welfare or socialism, the politics of plunder, and basically that's what we're going to be talking about here in the judicial welfare cases.
Sometimes this plunder is accomplished through a so-called representative vote.
Usually this is accomplished after long appeals to decency, compassion, and all the other heart-strain issues.
Sometimes the redistribution is accomplished through the bureaucratic tinkering.
It's amazing what unelected bureaucrats can accomplish without anyone knowing about it.
And still other times, this redistribution is a result of decrees from a judge's bench.
In the case of school funding, we get a little bit of everything.
We of course have emotional pills for the sake of the children.
This emotional onslaught led to the compulsory education that we have today, in which all
children are required to attend school.
At this point I should point out that the Constitution is silent on education and the Alabama Constitution
doesn't provide any inherent right to education either, but you want to know that according
to the plaintiff's brief in the latest lawsuit.
Some people don't quite realize that the argument for financing school education is that the
The whole of the society benefits from this education, which is also, of course, the reason we made it compulsory, and therefore the whole area should pay for the education.
In other words, for a publicly financed education, the parents of the children are, on average, getting a pretty good deal.
And we could call this a type of welfare in which monies are transferred from the whole population to a specified group, the parents of the children, for the purposes of the children's education.
However, it goes much further than that in the current lawsuit.
Basically, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit charge, and I'm going to paraphrase, that due to the rampant racism, meanness, selfishness and general unfairness of life, they've gotten a raw deal.
You see, some areas of our state have citizens that have a higher average income and net worth than other areas.
These same areas also have higher property values than other areas.
This is seen as unfair because even at equivalent rates, whether you're talking about sales tax or property taxes,
the so-called richer areas will raise more revenue for their schools than the poorer areas.
To add insult to injury, these richer areas often tax themselves at higher rates than the poorer areas,
which creates a large gap in school funding.
The plaintiffs basically came and got together and argued that it's not enough for education to be adequate, it needs to be equitable or equal, which of course is a word that gets bandied about a lot nowadays.
They haven't had any relief through the representative body or the legislature and no one's really bought the argument.
Basically, I guess most Alabamians are willing to put up with helping fund their neighbors' kids, but they're not willing to help fund kids halfway across the state.
So, of course, the only relief, if you want to have your will as far as getting more money for educational funding, is to go through the courts.
The best way to do this would be to find a sympathetic judge who harbored ambitions for higher office, and that is what they did.
Circuit, the court case, Alabama Coalition for Equity, which is now v. Jim Folsom Jr. was, of course, filed under Guy Hunt's administration,
and was later also consolidated with Mary Hopper and some others and Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program.
They filed this before Judge Gene Reese, who is a county circuit court judge, which we'll get to that later as to where his authority stands on the issue.
Basically, the governor's position has been that the judge did not have the authority to tell the legislature and the governor what to do.
The Separation of Powers Doctrine is found in the United States Constitution, but is also found specifically in the Alabama Constitution.
Judge Gene Reese has asserted that he does have the authority, but when push comes to shove, he has extended his deadlines twice, when basically everyone has just ignored his orders to comply.
To show you a couple of the social engineering, the do-good-isms and just the general social leveling that is inherent in this remedy order that Judge Gene Reese came up with,
I'd like to read you a few of the gems in his findings and the opening statements are the finding that all Alabama students, all Alabama students can learn at significantly higher levels.
The diversity, including racial and ethnic, that parents, teachers and students bring to Alabama's education system must be respected, and all education must be provided in an atmosphere free from prejudice of whatever variety.
Then he provides us with the capacity that he expects students to acquire sufficient support and guidance so that every student feels a sense of self-worth and ability to achieve, and so that every student is encouraged to live up to his or her full human potential.
Now, there's not a whole lot of education going on right now.
And then as far as implementation, he says that you shouldn't track students.
A paragraph later he says, students with cognitive disabilities should be taught economic, social,
self-help skills and environments which are the same as those in which they shall perform
those skills.
So in other words, you can't track them, but you have to separate them too.
However, the saddest aspect of the remedy order, at least from my perspective, is that
beneath all the talk of educational performance and student achievement lies the implicit conclusion
that the terms adequate and equitable are defined solely in dollars.
His remedy order doesn't even have a marginally specific definition of educational performance.
It does, however, contain a long list of physical inputs the state is required to furnish,
as well as the levies to be used to raise the necessary revenue.
And just to pick out a couple select ones to show you about, under programs he requires
that appropriate student teacher ratios and adequate guidance, health and library services
along with adequate clerical and support staff.
Anyone who has tracked school staff over the last 30 years knows that they don't need more
A State Plan shall be developed and implemented that minimizes the degree to which health
problems, malnutrition, abuse and neglect, and lack of basic necessities, i.e. housing
and clothing, interfere with students' access to an adequate and equitable education.
The state plan shall include funding to assist students in elementary and secondary schools
and provide an operating budget and staffing based on the number of at-risk students in
the school.
That, of course, at-risk is actually defined as the number of students eligible for free
or reduced-price lunches, which probably gives you a window of insight into the furor over
the school lunch controversy in our nation's capital, and that is all government programs
All schools which are eligible for a school breakfast program shall implement it. Parental
education programs will be provided for parents of disadvantaged students in grades K-3.
An early childhood education development program shall be developed and implemented to supplement
Head Start.
Preschool services for 3 to 5 year olds shall be provided for children with disabilities.
So we're going to start up a 3 to 5 year old school for disabled children.
These are extra schools and programs.
I think it's at this point that it becomes rather obvious that the remedy order has as
much to do with salvaging and preserving what we have traditionally thought of as welfare
programs as it does in furthering education.
So even if you want to talk to someone about proving that education funding is a case of
welfare, well, you pretty much have an easy job at it now, he's explicitly united them
all in one little basket, or one big and growing basket, or the better.
Under buildings, Judge Reese declares that schools shall have adequate science laboratories,
Computer and Foreign Language Facilities, Administrative Offices, Sick Rooms, Auditoriums, Gymnasiums,
Cafeterias, Athletic Facilities, and Vocational Facilities.
They shall have libraries and media spaces appropriate in equipment, lighting, and materials.
The spaces shall be of suitable size and format, and on and on and on.
It's just minute detail, the same and is comparable to what a lot of judges have done to the prison
system in that they have specifically said that each prisoner is entitled to three frisbees
My favorite order is that school buildings and grounds shall be clean, safe, and sanitary.
Bathroom supplies, including soap, paper towels, and toilet paper, shall be in available and
adequate supply.
All buses built before 1977 shall be replaced immediately.
All students who meet reasonable distance requirements will be provided with free transportation.
So basically, this is a catch-all to make sure that every kid that could possibly get
free transportation will get it, even if parents have been making sacrifices or people have
been carpooling or whatever.
Now the impetus will be to just go ahead and be bussed.
And then there is a long, page-long list or so of all the materials that the state needs
In the next section, which may even be the longest specific section, Judgery Steals with
Students with Disabilities, after you read this section, it becomes clear that the entire
educational program will be built around disabled students, not that they will be mainstreamed,
The funding program sets forth how the funding will happen.
This is where it gets really interesting.
The state shall establish a foundation program to adequately fund every child's education.
The state is six years in which to totally phase in this program.
School funding, both among schools, school systems, among schools, within school systems
shall be equitable.
The funding system shall minimize educational disadvantages due to economic or social deprivation.
The foundation program shall require a uniformed local tax effort equalized by the state so
so that every school child shall receive an adequately funded educational opportunity regardless of factors such as local indifference, low aspirations, or other conditions unrelated to educational need.
So basically, the parents don't care, the community doesn't care, the kid doesn't care, but gosh darn, he's going to do good in school, you know, and we're going to make sure.
Authorization for local school system taxes shall be uniform. School systems shall distribute all resources among the schools within each system in an equitable manner. The system of fringe benefits for local school employees shall be equalized by incorporation into the foundation program.
Equitable and equalized are a big catch phrase in here.
Basically what it means is that under the system as it now is,
a community or tax levy authority is assured of the percentage of local revenue
that will be coming back to their school.
They usually set that percentage themselves when they pass the bill or whatever the levy is.
Well, now basically what we're saying is it'll go to the state and there we might mix it up a little, you know, and spread it out a little and just make things kind of equal.
And this is, of course, what some people have characterized, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's the politics of plunder.
It just sounds good and it sounds, according to the Constitution, you know, hey, everybody's equal.
Unless you have any doubt that this is the case, he says that the funding system shall direct relatively greater resources to children with measurably greater needs. A waiting system shall be established for this purpose.
As an aside, I should probably say that the poor school systems also have an incredibly high proportion of children that have been diagnosed with disabilities.
In fact, Alabama is almost a, I shouldn't say, it's very high. In some counties it's 30% or so.
It basically came about through the SSI disabilities program and the retroactive payments that were available for parents of school children who acted up.
And so if they act up, and as an article in the Birmingham News said, they act dumb, we can buy them pretty things and at least they look good.
So that's what we have going on in a lot of the poorer school systems.
So of course the state's caught in a catch-22 in some areas because another part of the order says of course,
now that I've set up all the incentives for you to have more kids diagnosed as disabled, I just want to make sure that you don't do that.
And that's the other thing it says in that same paragraph.
This part of the revenue order could even result in a poorer school system sleeping ahead of the so-called richer school systems in that they will have been equalized and then you also will have additional waiting for children with disabilities.
Now, I'm not going to talk about this from an immoral perspective, we can get to that at the end.
I'm just saying that no matter what you hear, the goal is flat, serious attempts at equality.
Not adequacy, but equality as we would think, sameness.
He also goes on to say that the transportation funding will be separate from the foundation program.
The State has to see how much it will cost to fund the transportation program, in other words, we're going to meet all the so-called educational goals of Judge Reese, and then we're also going to meet the transportation goals of Judge Reese, and there will be separate funding programs, and that is so that they all can grow.
In other words, the state will, when they look at transportation costs, will not look at the money they have and try to say, we're going to take this much towards transportation and this much to this.
The state has to see how much it will cost to fund the remedy order, say, in transportation,
and then they have to meet it.
And that's just the way it is, as far as the remedy order is concerned.
Then another foundation, I should say foundation program, another fund shall be provided outside
the foundation program to eliminate all physical plant deficiencies within five years.
This is, of course, the schools with the ceilings falling down, and priority will be according
According to per capita, it will not be according to per capita, but according to needs.
So once again, use of facility obviously could be correlated with the amount of students
that go through it, but in this case it will be correlated with how well or not how well
a local school system is taking care of their building.
If they haven't taken very good care of it, they'll get more money and the building will
be updated.
okay so basically what I'd like to point out as far as this this case for school
funding that you've heard about in Judge Reese's court is a classic from my
perspective example of a way to redistribute the wealth and of course the
bow cries the children the children how can you not help the children and under
This guy's, not only educational equity will be achieved, but all kinds of, what we used to think of as pure welfare type programs will be folded into the educational program and then will also be funded.
Quite a mess.
It's a real mess.
I know it gets a little boring when you read straight from the remedy orders and things like that, but there's really nothing good in it.
I hate to say it that way, but of course the people of Alabama thought so also and overwhelmingly rejected the judge's bid for the high court.
Report. So, we're kind of stuck in the, kind of, he said, she said, he said, Goenner said,
and who's going to call whose bluff? I mean, Judge Reis is seeing no compulsion to charge
anybody with anything for not failing to come through on his remuneration. So, it's going
to be kind of interesting to see how that plays out.
So before we get into the specifics, what does happen if the remedy order is simply ignored?
Well, if the remedy order is ignored, we will have editorials in the paper that tell us how backward we are,
and what a redneck status is, and we need to catch up, and we have a judge now,
and why are we rejecting what the judge says and all that stuff.
But I think that Judge Reese is just going to extend. I think you're going to probably see at least one more extension.
And I think what's basically going to happen is the gun race is going to come up with some kind of plan.
It's not going to touch hardly any of these points. There's going to be some attempt at helping out the poor school systems.
And that will kind of settle out of the limelight, so to speak. That's what I think is going to happen.
So the feds can't come in it?
Well, if it gets past Governor James' administration, maybe the feds will come in, but I think as
long as Governor James is governor, it will be tried to be settled at state level as much
as possible.
Who's the plaintiff coalition again?
It's the Alabama Coalition for Equity.
Forgot that they changed the titles, changed a couple of times because of consolidation,
but it's the Alabama Coalition for Equity, then another series of plaintiffs is individuals,
parents and their children, and Mary Harper et al. is how it's put, and then the Alabama
Disabilities Advocacy Program, so there's three classes of plaintiffs that have been
and Consolidate Together, and then the defendant is, the only defendant left is the governor.
All the other defendants switched over to plaintiffs and left, you know, the governor
standing and the state school board of education switched back and forth more than once.
I read in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that a, I believe it was a federal judge
ordered an increase in local taxes to support the busking program.
Is there any sort of precedent for what this judge is doing?
I don't know what the resolution is with that
federal court.
I'm not familiar with that exact one. I know
as far as federal law, the case of Kansas City is the most
comprehensive case in which the federal
judge
not only specifically set up the whole curriculum, set the whole busing scheme, set the whole
physical plan scheme or what the buildings would be like, Judge Reese goes close but
not that far, he even passed the tax, just said here you have this tax, pay it, and it's
going to go to education.
In Kansas City I think, just off the top of my head, they're spending approximately $8,000
for People, I think, now on education, which is one of the highest I've ever heard of.
Haven't I heard that the results have not shown any improvement in the education?
No, they haven't. It's been, I mean, it's been like all studies of funding and educational
performance. There's no relationship.
There's no relationship.
As a matter of fact, if you look at Alabama, there may be a slight inverse relationship.
Alabama's per-pupil spending has more than tripled, and that's in real dollars in the
last 30 years, and test scores have decreased a couple tenths, as far as ACT, have decreased
a couple tenths at percentage point.
I'm concerned about the quality of the teachers, the training and the ability of the teachers,
and I didn't hear any of that referred to the teaching staff.
Well, basically what there is part in here for the teaching staff and it's to give them
extra staff days for professional development and to give them extra professional development
programs which is, you know, which is how they would say they're getting more training.
But a lot of this development will be is, it's not said, but basically is to recognize
the diversity of the school population and also meet special children and you know, it's
It's the whole social training that the teachers will go through.
I had an understanding that a lot of the teachers in Alabama are very under-qualified.
Now that's going too far, I'm sure, but we do have that problem.
We do have it.
You have no comment.
No, we do have a problem.
And I would think that's the first thing, if you want to approve a school that you would go to.
Well, I would agree.
I would definitely agree.
If I could just play God or be a judge, whichever, I would just write out, you know, I'd love to write out an order and it'd be radically different from this one.
This one, I just, is basically more, it's social, it's more than educational.
How far is it that you made things your style?
Well, I guess the equivalent would be due process, and they have taken that and from that say,
well that means of course a liberal education.
Well they said basically de facto education is a right that systems recognize, they burden
themselves to pay for it and they've made it mandatory.
Then they say that this education then will of course just by definition be liberal, liberal
I read some figures recently, and I'm not prepared to verify my exact figures, but they were approximately, that in America we're spending about $1,000 per child that's disabled, about $2,000 a year.
$7.50 per child who is gifted. In other words, we are spending a great deal of our... this is nationwide. Nationwide programs, perhaps. Perhaps not the whole deal, but the y'all. That seems to me to be highly inequitable and stupid.
Well, you know I would say that a society that targets, targets subsidence to, and this is going to sound hard, I'm just talking on a pure practical level, there's always of course room for personal charity and church charity, community organization charity, but when you target and set up societies or a portion of society in which you subsidize basically those who don't make it or those who have difficulties, don't produce, whatever,
really creating a situation that's not going to last, in other words, a civilization that's not going to stay coherent.
It was like what you were saying with the quality of the building. If they don't take care of their building and things start falling apart,
then those are the schools that are going to get money to have their buildings completely redone, refurbished.
Right, and like earlier, the SSI thing, the disability, I mean, we're talking 30% of some children.
And I think it's, pardon this, this was a Birmingham News investigative story just a couple of months ago.
And we, of course, were on the national news some about that shame, shame, shame on Alabama.
They're always, you know, making all the kids, all these kids, you know, disabled.
We had nothing, you know, the state, there's no malice intended, it is the parents.
And they will not let you take their children off or let you retest the children
to make sure it wasn't a fluke and that they are actually normal and not disabled.
Of course, they've been coached, a lot of them have been coached at it.
So you, when you say disabilities, you're not talking about physical disabilities, you're talking about
learning disabilities. When disabilities is talked about in remedy order, it's not talking about
someone who's lost a leg or a child with multiple sclerosis or anything like that, we're talking about
disabilities as we have come to know them after the
Disabilities Act, American Disabilities Act, and that is disability, anything that you
think is a disability.
So I mean hyperactivity has become attention deficit disorder, I know some children do
indeed have it, but it's just being diagnosed at astounding rates these days, astounding
rates.
How do they get the SSI benefits?
for kids who act up and you get lump sum so you get lump sum back payment and so
you can prove that your kids start acting up six years ago and that you just
now gotten around to filing well you know you're eligible for six full years
worth of crazy money some people call it crazy money and so and so the what
The top cases, these are the exact same areas, they're coinciding with the areas in which
the plaintiffs reside, asking for more money and what we supposedly strictly educational
expenditures.
And so, yeah, I'm familiar with this in a different angle.
This is when the parents coach the kids to go in and they get quote unquote tested.
Right.
And if they qualify, they're given this money, and they're also put on Ritalin, right?
The narcotic drugs?
Not necessarily.
It may not even be treated.
Okay, well see, I came across this in a different connection where the counselor or whatever
would put them on Ritalin to suppress this, but they would also get the money too.
I mean, the reason the parents would coach them is to get the money.
But the attempt to remedy the situation is by putting the kids on the top.
Right.
I mean, you know, it's just, just drug them and take the money, and of course, that doesn't
leave much room for individual treatment.
I mean, when you're warehousing kids through the school counselor's office, you're not,
you can't really be claiming that you're doing it for a child's good, all of that is, of
It's approximately 30% in some counties of school-aged children have tested or in the process of testing, knowing that they will test positive for disabilities or they act up, because that is now a disability, I mean that is now a disorder, you know, defiant disorder, there's a disorder, oppositional disorder, defiant disorder, there's a disorder, there's a disorder, there's a disorder, there's a disorder,
You know, if you've ever, you should go through DSM4, go through DSM4, it's better than buying a joke book or something like that.
I shouldn't say that because I was in a graduate of psychology, but I guess then I can say that.
So they're trying to say then that as a matter of doing business, that instead of expelling a child, they're going to pay that child and his parents for having deviated?
Now see, that's not necessarily through the school, and this is through SSI, but Judge Reese is now saying that school funding will be funneled or priority will be given to children who have greater need.
Now, read that as children with disabilities. I mean, they're right. They follow each other.
And so, I mean, it's the age-old perverse incentive. You get paid to be miserable.
The more misery there is, the more money comes in, or at least you can put on misery.
And that's, of course, what a lot of people think is the immoral aspect of all welfare programs.
In SSI, is Social Security, is it Social Security?
Supplemental Social Security, it's the, it was established, I guess, in 70, it's a Carter program.
Near that one, if it's not Carter, I can't say the word.
Nixon?
He did, I mean it's amazing what he, the programs he put in place.
Doesn't that also go for alcoholics and drug addicts?
Oh yeah. They've just put forward bills and of course again we're back to the federal level.
They've just put forward bills to try to cut that out.
But basically, it goes to alcohol and drug addicts because they're an alcoholic or a drug addict.
I mean, that's the reason you get it. Not in spite of, but because of.
And investigate a reporter for Reader's Digest, which I was reading the other day while I was sitting in an office waiting for the doctor.
I got to read the whole thing.
But they would go, this investigative reporter would go down, basically skid row or see the bombs
And social welfare workers, federal bureaucrats, were handing out pamphlets to them saying you may be eligible for SSI benefits, you may be eligible for retroactive lump sums.
And this is what private charity workers are calling death on the installment plan.
Japan people kill themselves.
Isn't there a recent line-up that's been going on in Texas called the Robin's Plan, something like this, a mobilization plan where they're taking money from the rich communities to Dallas and Houston and whatnot and trying to redistribute it throughout the state. Do you know what's come of that?
That may be generally in limbo too, I think right now it is.
Every time they got it situated, there was another deal where the judge ordered this, and then every time they got a plan in place, it was challenged by Dallas or some of the richer school districts, and it was always thrown out as being unconstitutional, so I didn't know if...
One sentence in there that says, no school system will receive less funding in the first
year of this plan than received the year before.
Basically, next year they're going to receive at least as much as they received.
They won't lose money.
So in other words, that sounds good and that holds for the first year or two.
But what it also means, though, is the money they now have may not be taken, but they will
be levied new forms of, you know, getting revenue.
and they will, and those will be directed against the school systems, the Richard school systems.
But those are really only the public school systems, the state school systems.
You can't levy against the private school systems.
No, not yet.
Taxpayers.
Well, I mean, of course, people are sitting there, you know, if they talk about per pupil funding,
but if all the private school kids would go into the public schools, they actually lived,
Is this causing any movement or backlash against this judge?
Do you see any significant trends away from this, or is everyone just running headlong?
He has a lot of people who do not like him.
Like I said before, he blatantly used this issue as his platform for the high court.
and when he gave his, I read what he calls a preliminary remedy order which does, which I asked some lawyers and they said it does not exist
because he's kind of changed remedy order so this is the place one was called preliminary and I was told remedy order is a remedy where it's not
so basically he knows he's kind of threatened but you know he was just gunned down I mean no one bought any of that stuff
Is that because of the issue or is that just because it's him?
Well, I mean, in him, they coincide to a great degree because he is, you know, he's a social engineer.
and he's also the same judge who ordered, you know, this is the same judge who ordered the ballots to be counted in the Hooper Contest.
You know, not to get into partisan politics, but this is the exact same judge.
Judge Reese is the one who started saying that ballots that have no witnesses, signature or notary are in substantial compliance with a law
Well, that's only two provisions is, you have witnesses or a notary, you know, I mean, it's, so, this, this,
He qualified for the Supreme Court.
He qualified, he just, he just, well.
Is there any remedy we have against such a judge?
Well, um.
Can we throw him out?
That's what I was going to look into. That's what my next thing I'm going to look into is personal remedies.
I mean, I don't want to say personal vendetta, but...
I mean, legal remedies.
Personally, in this particular joke, we're going to go into illegal.
Perhaps it'll sound a little more hot than I meant.
Did Alabama do any real studies on the reasons that the schools were not progressing before they went into the court, or did they just assume that if somebody piled in a lot of money that they would get care of the state?
What we need to look at is performance. Of course, unfortunately this is how OB or performance-based
education came about. It was a very good idea, but the people, very people most threatened
by changes in the education establishment are the people that are put in charge of writing
out the changes in the establishment. So we ended up with the same old, same old. But
I did a study that I haven't released because we're still working on some of the line items
I read that court were to take it completely through, and it seemed to me that America
at one time had poverty, but they still learned, America at one time had poor nutrition, and
Children Still Learned. And it seemed to me that a lot of things that were in that court order, if my mother had lived in that community, they wouldn't have had things like that that were not clean for their children to have an atmosphere to sit in.
I want to know, what are those parents doing there to uplift the communities for their own children?
If they really want this, do they want to go after it themselves and make certain that their children learn the English language
so that they can communicate, not drop out of fifth grade?
Or do they want to say, well, we'll buy some computers.
We don't have anybody running a malficia, but we can say we have a computer and it's going to take care of it.
It won't. It just simply won't.
Well, I mean, you're definitely correct. I mean, like we talked about earlier, scores have actually decreased. They've gone down in the wake of tremendous increases in funding. They will say that this funding is still inadequate because other states spend more.
Well, you can always be relatively at the bottom. Someone's always going to be.
And that is just, you know, I mean, we're still spending the same as Germany and Japan, actually a tad more.
But you have children in the classroom now that are taking four and five years longer to finish the seventh grade than they used to.
And this is caused by medical problems that the public isn't even aware of.
And you're spending a lot of money for that.
And you're also spending a lot of money for top administrators in some of these schools.
And I don't think they're checking out.
I think they ought to get busy and say, what's the cause?
And do something about the cause instead of saying,
let's get the money out there and let somebody set up some fairy tale or some way that we might.
There was an article in the Birmingham paper on Sunday where Jimmy Rogers, a writer from
Demopolis, Alabama, said that he had just gone back to his hometown and back to his
old high school, and the town is the same size and the school is the same size, but
when he was there 30 years ago, they had two coaches for all the sports, males and females,
and now the school has nine coaches and I think it's that kind of thing and the administration
that if you went back and said what are the real problems in Alabama education, that's
the kind of thing.
Of course that's also true here at Auburn too.
How do you think that homeschooling and private schooling in the future is going to affect
Education in Alabama. Well I think it's it's definitely affected education the
fact that its growth has contributed to more better educated kids. Can you give some numbers on the growth of numbers of kids?
I wish I'd I wish I'd look that up. It's actually hard to find. It's not kept
track of very well and that's something that I'd be interested in looking at.
In Texas, some of the school systems got their groups together and evaluated.
They had buddy systems and administrators until it was top-heavy with administrators.
They were paying huge salaries, too.
In this country, I mean, I can say that, I feel confident saying that flat out.
They have changed legislation at the federal level quickly, they have stopped things cold quickly, and I think what this is going to do is this is going to open up the whole debate of whether education should be public, period, and whether or not it should be mandatory, period, which I would like to see, I went to private school, I went to public school, I went to private school, I've been to both.
and the ceiling tiles are falling down and just about all of them too.
Yeah, and the thing, also when you're looking at educational scores, for just a second,
I want everybody to realize that you may look and see an increase, but the ACT has been changed.
It's now two separate tests, and what happened was the new one's two points easier than the old one.
And they won't tell you that, but the same cohort, the same year, scored 17.9 on one, 20.1 on the new.
So basically we're looking at roughly two points difference.
So the whole so-called increase, slight increase, after the decrease trend is totally attributable to a new test.
When you look at it overall and adjust the two-point difference, it's a couple of tenths of a percent point less.
The so-called re-centering.
Right, right, SAT.
One of the great things about it is that it makes it impossible to compare scores over time.
That's what the SAT itself has said.
The same thing as with the financial books.
They have different categories each time.
Peter's question about homeschooling.
One of the reasons that it's so hard to track over time
Homeschooling was illegal in the state of Alabama until about 10 years ago.
It was actually illegal in the state to homeschool your kids.
Illegal in a lot of states in the United States.
So that's one of the reasons that there's not a lot of information about it,
is that it was undergrounded for a while and people were being put behind bars because of it.
We've passed by, but I want to respond to your question by equating the amount of money with the result of five games in the first month since you entered post-discipline and reimbursing the authority of the class and the teacher.
You went into classrooms to do that, and for the first time in Alabama, the national scores of Alabama students were above the national level, against the backdrop of pro-racial.
in the future. You have to shift priorities of that budget. I don't think anyone's saying to neglect students' needs. What I'm saying is, it should not be totally shifted to those students who may have a disability, because it may be tough on them, but it is also difficult on the students that are in the same classroom with that child, that they're all in there together.
And so, you have to balance, you want to sound like Spock in Star Trek, you have to balance the needs of the many against the needs of the one and the few and all that stuff.
So, that's basically what we're looking at, yeah.
That's a really interesting point. If we go back to the turn of the century and we look at the origins of a public school, the issue of educating the children is never really the major focus.
It was always cultural thing. We want to Americanize the immigrants. We want to put them all into one school. We want to Protestantize the Catholics, too.
And so the school system, the public school system, was never about education.
And it's really not supposed to be about taking care of children's disabilities or taking care of curing all these social ailments.
But that's what they're used for.
Well, and if you look at the reading nowadays, it becomes quite obvious that it's not to teach children to read or to do this or that, that it is a social program.
I'm going to quote everything, because I'm going to shoot me when I'm done, but he said that, at one time, he said that the education of one generation will be the beliefs of the next.
In other words, basically, you educate the kids, and you're going to have political beliefs when they're adults, a certain way.
And so, it's always been a tool of indoctrination.
Just to support Paul, a porous man who founded her in Massachusetts,
the American public school system, specifically said,
I mean, he patented it after the Prussian system, and he said it would be in Prussia,
they trained good soldiers, good civil servants, good citizens, to obey the state,
and that was why America needed a public school system.
Well, nothing to do with educating anybody, again.
That was the point of the whole language approaches, I think, and some of the
literatron stuff, you can't help but get the feeling that they say, well, kids are just going to spontaneously generate or acquire
language. I mean, it's an inborn characteristic, and you just keep them exposed to language,
printed or spoken, and they'll acquire it.
Therefore, we have all this time in the meantime that we're not spending on teaching them to read.
One of the big questions is, does this work? Does Judge Reese, in his remedy order, ever point to any evidence or experience which would suggest that his remedies, so-called remedies, would in fact work?
I mean, it's one question to say whether or not we should try to help certain groups and certain problems and certain issues within the right system or the wrong system, but it's a whole different question as to whether or not it could possibly even work.
Well, there's very few specific quotes or examples in the remedy order. They're usually in brackets, no detail, just names.
And it stars one of them, which I'll call another one, but we can go back to that one.
But there's, I think, there's some kind of reading and learning for life or something.
I just named a couple of them that I'd never heard of.
Some of this stuff sounds to me like it's related to the Chicago system, the Chicago system.
Master learning.
Yeah, some aspects of the remedies seem to be along those lines, and that's been a total failure.
Yeah, but you know, the parents didn't sued.
They sued to quit the program.
That makes it all the more unbelievable.
Is it possible, sort of contrary of you, I mean, since all you need for a school is a teacher, a room, desks and books,
and it might be when anything beyond that starts to be a problem,
is it possible that the so-called richer school districts will actually benefit from having less money,
Less government money spent on them, and of course, the poorer districts will have more therapists and more whatever else that will destroy them faster.
Well, I mean, I would predict that they would do at least the same or better. I mean, I would predict because...
I mean, the way that the scores and everything really have nothing to do with the amount of money we spend.
Right, there'd be some uncomfortableness.
You don't have to have a building and so forth, and a teacher.
I mean, you've also got to look, we have to also look at the whole nature-nurturer controversy and the whole beginning thing.
I mean, you're talking about people that have been successful in their children.
They are going to make their children successful, whether or not, you know, I mean, on average, sure not all, but on average.
And so, I really think that it won't do that much, but you know.
You've got this problem that, I mean, I teach these 7th graders in my semischool classes, do you want to hear this?
Oh, no. This is going to be a tale of a story.
You know, it's a sad thing. Most of these kids, you know, they're not brilliant, and they're not stupid.
But none of them have the slightest bit of respect for education, for their teachers, or for their studies, or anything.
They're not being challenged. You know, they're not in the honors classes, and they say they learn the same thing over and over again every year.
What I would like to see, and once again this is personal, if I could play God, I would
like to see more tracking in the terms of letting some kids go into technical training,
on Mechanically Oriented, and we have an information society but I'm afraid too that we're also
looking at some of the infrastructure needs that will be coming ahead and I don't mean
that saying I want a couple hundred billion for the roads, I'm saying that there's buildings,
there's cars, every piece of physical property has some upkeep to it and so, you know, be
those.
Well, I've got to plead God and myself here and bring the formal part of our brown bag
Seminar to a close. I hope you can stay for a few minutes and answer some more
questions. We haven't gotten around to finding out how this is going to affect
Auburn University yet. I want to thank you for enlightening us on it. I was ready for that.