Can’t Keep Teachers? Import Them

Posted on January 11, 2005 by Sean

With a spouse who’s about ready to enter the teaching profession (and as the son of two retired educators and the parent of a city middle-school student), I’ve been following the adventures of Epiphany in Baltimore with some interest. His recently-deleted diatribe about how bad things are getting for Baltimore City teachers has convinced Paula that perhaps she should look elsewhere for a job. Too bad for the city.

But the city schools apparently have a solution to that problem. Yesterday, I was glancing at the Baltimore Sun and spotted a dual-byline story about how the city is using a recruiter to import as many as 45 teachers from the Philippines. Amused, I alerted Paula to it when she got home from student teaching. She looked at it online, and did a quick Google on the recruiter’s name–something they still can’t do, apparently, in the Sun’s bullpen, because the results were interesting.

Last November, KGO-TV in California reported on how the same recruiter was charging Filippino teachers $3,000 each for placement–and then Oakland was firing them, and going back to her for more teachers, after only a few months. Some of the recruited teachers were left stranded, without enough money to return home to the Philippines, because they had paid their way to the US on assurances that the jobs were long-term.

This article from a Georgia paper from last June suggests that the recruiter was under investigation by the FBI, and a school district in Georgia had severed its ties to her as a result.

Then there’s this article from SF Weekly, published four years ago. While still an employee of the the San Francisco Unified School District, Ligaya Avenida had apparently violated a number of Filipino laws and US labor regulations.

But, no matter. Just think about how those highly-qualified Filipino teachers will feel when they show up for their first day of school in an uncontrollable classroom in West Baltimore somewhere…that alone will be enough for them to file a human rights abuse.

State of Grace

Posted on April 12, 2004 by Sean

This morning's news featured a discussion of the “Kerry Communion Scandal” — John Kerry, who is divorced, apparently took communion at the Catholic Easter mass he attended this weekend, sending the Opus Dei set into a tizzy.

The only difference in this regard between me and John Kerry is that my first marriage was annulled by the Catholic church (because it was officiated by a Methodist Navy chaplain, and not a priest) and my ex never got around to the details required to get our marriage blessed before she fell in love with the assoicate pastor and… well, there's a novel in that story. So, even though I have two children from that marriage, I get a Catholic “do-over.”

Kerry apparently doesn't rate one, and in the eyes of some he therefore is not in a “state of grace”–and should therefore be refused communion, or have the common sense to stay seated while the queue forms. Others tut-tut, but say that it's up to the individual to determine whether he or she is in a “state of grace.”

Forget if a politician could *ever* be in a state of grace, by definition. What ever happened to, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” Oh, I forgot, this is the juncture of politics and religion, where the first stone is cast in order to appear to be without sin.

And you'd better be casting a stone if it's a Sunday, because the Pope just told Australian bishops that all secular activities should be avoided on the sabbath–so throwing a baseball on the sabbath is a sure path to Purgatory. Get your indulgence payments ready.

I spent Easter morning in church with my wife, children, and (erk) ex. She came in cursing her father and sister over how he had given her the furniture out of his condo that he had just sold, fuming over how he had never asked HER if she wanted any of it, and how her sister had slighted her in so many ways over the weekend. She then took communion. Was she in a state of grace when she did so, still muttering words of hate under her breath?

When so-called Christians shower hate upon people who are different from them, are they in a state of grace? When we sit by as a country and let our leaders send our brothers, sisters, and children off to kill on a whim, can any of us be in a state of grace?

Can't we all just get along?

Posted on March 30, 2004 by Sean

“I know there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I HATE people like that!” – Tom Lehrer

A
couple of weeks ago, I was at a toddler birthday teaparty (actually, I
was in the next room at the time, drinking a beer and watching college
basketball with the other parents). One of the moms who was there was
telling me, for one reason or another, how her outgoing and blunt
demeanor didn't usually yield a favorable first impression. “People
either love me or they hate me,” she said.

“I can't hate anybody,” I replied. “It takes too much energy.”

It's
true. Generally speaking, I can't even stay angry at people for very
long, if I know them. And I tend to give those I don't know the
benefit of the doubt when they run afoul of me; never mistake
incompetence for malice, I always say. Odds are that, if I had a
non-alchoholic beer or two and some pretzels with George Bush, I'd
probably find something to like about him.

And there's the
rub. America is full of people who hate other people right
now. And for the most part, we can thank so-called
religious leaders for that; the lack of tolerance preached in Jesus'
name is such that, had he not risen from his tomb on Easter, he'd
certainly be spinning in it now.

There's the hate that comes
from dissonance–people learn one set of Truths for their whole lives,
and naturally they respond negatively when told those Truths are, in
fact, Lies. There's no room for debate over fundamental
assumptions about the Underlying Truths of the Universe, especially
when one of those Truths is that all who believe otherwise are Evil.

Then
there's the backlash hate. There's the hatred that comes from the
righteous anger that the gay community feels because of the intolerance
directed against them in the interest of political gain (thanks to
those Klansmen posing as prophets at CBN and elsewhere); there's the
hatred spawned by anger at the boldfaced lies told by political leaders
daily, which are taken by their followers as gospel.

The whole
tenor of political and religious hate-speech as discourse has spread
into so many other aspects of our lives, too. It seems that our default
response to anything that vaguely threatens our sense of infallibility
is the middle finger.

What ever happened to “Live and let live”?
To “Love thy neighbor”? Why is so much of our lives defined by who we
can't stand? Maybe it's because it's easier to hate people we don't
understand or agree with than it is to actually learn about them as
people and understand their point of view.

It's time for the
whole country to just step back for a moment, take a deep breath, and
get over itself. Get your nose out of Leviticus, and start looking
around at the human condition; judge not lest ye be judged. Agree to
disagree, but find common ground. And if you can't be nice, as
Bill O'Reilly would say, “SHUT UP!”

Greenspan Urges Swiftian solution to deficit

Posted on February 26, 2004 by Sean

“Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says Congress should deal with the country's escalating budget deficit by cutting benefits for future Social Security retirees rather than raising taxes.” [NY Times]

I've taken the Greenspan testimony and run it through the Washingtonese Translation Engine. Here's what he meant to say:

“Mr. Chairman, members of Congress, good afternoon.

Thanks to the tax cuts you've approved, and the war that the White House ordered up, the books are a mess. If you continue to spend money without having any, I'm not going to have enough to lend.

But, given this is an election year, nobody wants to raise taxes. Besides, given that most corporations are now hiding most of their income in tax havens overseas, we'd have to focus tax increases on wealthy individuals. And that means you, your wealthy contributors, and me. That would be “bad for the recovery.”

No, instead I suggest we just dispense with this stupid Social Security con you keep running on the American people. You know it's just part of the general fund, I know it, and everybody who reads the Wall Street Journal knows it. Besides, who can afford to retire these days anyway?

Instead, I suggest we cut benefits to those whining Boomers who will overwhelm the system in a few years and collapse the whole Ponzi scheme we've based Social Security on. Let's face it–they'd only waste the money anyway on crap made for WalMart by Chinese manufacturers, and all the money would go whooshing out of our tax base anyway.

I do have an alternative, however. In the long term, it would be cheaper to outsource the upkeep of the retired to countries with a better competitive advantage. So, I suggest we ship retirees to Mexico. There, they could be used to staff up the growing number of maquilladoras that our companies have been outsourcing work to, and subsist on the lower benefits comfortably without having to worry about expenses like high heating bills and prescription co-pays.

It's a win-win. The resulting drop in the burden on our medical insurance systems would mean dramatically lower costs to business for health benefits, and the sudden availability of large numbers of homes in urban areas would stabilize housing costs in our current bubble real estate market, offering better housing opportunities for guest workers and other immigrants.

Of course, you may decide to use my comments as a distraction to cover your own hedging on Social Security until after the elections. If so, fine. But I'll still be here after November.

Hell, I can't afford to retire.