I hope you’re enjoying your nice spring weekend, now that our taste of summer has gone. Who can keep up with this weather? So now it’s time for a weekend open thread. Come and play!
I think you already knew that Glenn Beck was a big phony. He can care less about the people who adore him or the trouble he is causing:
With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: “I could give a flying crap about the political process.” Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. “We’re an entertainment company,” Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. He gets $13 million a year from print (books plus the ten-issue-a-year magazine Fusion). Radio brings in $10 million. Digital (including a newsletter, the ad-supported Glennbeck.com and merchandise) pulls in $4 million. Speaking and events are good for $3 million and television for $2 million.
It’s all about the benjamins.
Also from the not a big surprise files – children on vouchers don’t perform better academically than their peers in the public school system.
About halfway into a five-year evaluation of Milwaukee’s 20-year-old school voucher program, new data shows that groups of low-income students in the city who use public vouchers to attend private schools are still scoring about the same academically as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools.
The new results come from a series of reports released Wednesday by researchers working under the umbrella of the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research organization that randomly selected 800 kids in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program in the 2005-’06 school year and matched them to 800 peers in MPS, with the goal of following them through the 2011-’12 school year.
Private schools have not found some magic bullet on how to educate kids. If you’re allowed to leave out the behavior problems and learning disabled, you get better results. I think we’ll really only get somewhere in improving education if we start seeing the world as it is, and not how we wish it to be.