Department of Education - ThisIsCommonSense.org

Former principal of Maspeth High School, Khursid Abdul-Mutakabbir, exemplifies the who-gives-a-crap approach to education.

After a foot-dragging investigation, the New York City Department of Education finally fired the man for urging staff to concoct fake grades, fake classes, fake graduation rates.

His attitude: “I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45, it’s your job to give that kid credit.”

An official report outlines the many derelictions at this public school. Yet when the local DOE removed the principal, it also gave him a seven-year sinecure paying $260,000 a year.

Wha — ? Why?

Well, they’re all members of the same club.

Such nihilism and grift are rampant, if not universal.

Calling the settlement a “deeply symbolic insult” to taxpayers and students, columnist Bob McManus wants Mayor Eric Adams to “claw back” the payoff to prove that he really does mean to “fight for public education.”

Frankly, the conduct of everyone involved is life-destroying — not just a matter of insults and symbolism.

The minds and futures of young people are at stake.

In many schools, things only get worse. Maybe your kids are stuck in a public school that cannot be reformed, with perverse ideological agendas displacing reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, never mind how to learn and think. Maybe homeschooling isn’t an option.

Glenn Reynolds advises shutting down the imploding public schools and replacing them with “universal vouchers, in the name of public health.”

Regardless of what specific reform we take to this mess, remember the goal: a learning lifeline to every kid who wants better. A choice. A chance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Disarm Power-Trippy Bureau-Thugs

“This is the sort of thing that should never, ever happen in a free society,” says Quin Hillyer at the Center for Individual Freedom site.

By “this … sort of thing” Hillyer means pre-dawn raids in which “thuggish bureaucrats … burst into a man’s home and handcuff him in front of his children because his estranged wife is late on student loan payments.”

I’ve already commented on this vicious and stupid Department-of-Education-sponsored raid. I return to the story to echo Hillyer’s suggestions for reform.

He observes that such baseless assaults on innocent citizens are “an increasing problem.… [A] horrific number of similar stories [show] that we are all subject, at the whim of idiots without any good reason to carry arms, to tactics reminiscent of a terrible police state.” More and more commonly, agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board, which have no business having armed agents, nevertheless do.

Hillyer suggests that the SWAT-like raid teams and the people who order them should both be subject to imprisonment for these flagrant abuses of power. He also wants Congress to stop criminalizing mere clerical errors and to “de-arm federal agents.” The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, concurs, saying he’d “like to see some Tea Party members of Congress pass bills to disarm all non-law-enforcement agencies.”

Yes. Let the congressmen openly debate and vote whether rampant, arbitrary, armed raids of innocent citizens should or should not continue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.