What started out as a grand quest by Texas lawmakers to provide all school employees with state-sponsored health insurance benefits has quickly turned into a futile search for rapidly evaporating discretionary funds. Big-ticket road construction projects, exploding Medicaid costs, and dozens of other non-negotiable spending items have consumed the lion's share of funds available for new projects. The inevitable result has been a severe shortfall in the amount of money available to prime the teacher health insurance pump. This lack of funds has left teachers' groups undaunted, however, in their quest to secure yet another legislative victory to go along with their $3000 pay increase just two years ago. Donna New-Haschke, vice-president of the Texas State Teachers Association, wrote in a recent editorial that teachers "find it disconcerting that with less than 60 days to go in the 77th Legislative session, there is still no health insurance bill for school employees."

With all due respect to Ms. New-Haschke, the problem is not that the legislature has yet to consider a teacher health insurance bill; the problem is that legislators have been unable to discover a way to PAY for any of the proposed teacher insurance plans without a tax hike. Judging by the numbers, there is a good reason for this legislative gridlock. A fully funded teacher health insurance plan would constitute a huge budgetary commitment at a time when fiscal restraint is needed.

This year, the state budget is expected to be a touch over $109 billion, of which approximately $45 billion comes from dedicated monies, federal funds, etc., and is not available for discretionary spending. The remaining $60 billion is called general revenue, of which $23.3 billion goes to fund public education. The cost of a fully funded teacher health insurance program is expected to carry an initial price tag of between $2-$4 billion per year, and would have to be increased yearly at the annual rate of inflation for health care services, which currently stand at nearly 15%. Given these considerations, teacher health insurance could easily boost state spending on public education by 35% and constitute over 6% of the entire budget!

Funding for such a large program must come from one of two places, discretionary money or "new revenue" (read new taxes). Unfortunately for state lawmakers, the discretionary funding pool is quickly drying up. Much was made earlier in the session of $800 million in available "settle-up" money-education funds that the state keeps when property taxes revenues increase. The Senate Finance Committee took that money off the table recently by appropriating it to Medicaid and state universities, while the House was forced to approve an emergency appropriation of $718 million to cover the cost of overruns in state Medicaid and correctional programs. These new expenditures have materialized as legislators are grappling with the prospect of having to borrow money in order to build and maintain roads and highways. In theory, legislators could always cut back or eliminate programs in order to free up money for teacher health insurance…but again, that's a theory with no basis in real life experience.

Thus, with funding scarce and teacher's groups on the prowl, state lawmakers become easy prey for the final legislative solution: a tax increase. Although politically toxic, a number of representatives have endorsed and even embraced the idea of raising taxes. House Ways and means Chair Rene Oliveira stated, "Anybody who puts their head in the sand and doesn't think that it's going to require additional and massive streams of revenue in the future…shouldn't vote for (teacher health insurance). He then went on to say, "I'm willing to… vote for a tax bill to fund this."

Hopefully, the people of Texas will discover that a tax increase is not what it takes precisely because a fully funded statewide teacher health us neither feasible or necessary. Although supporters of a teacher health insurance plan have argued that providing such a benefit to school employees would mitigate the teacher shortage problem, a study conducted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that only 14% of educators identified "insufficient financial compensation" as a major factor of low morale, compared to 40% who cited "student attitudes and behaviors" as the culprit. In fact, of the 1041 school districts and 142 charter schools that existed during the 1999-2000 school year, only 17 did not offer health insurance to their employees.

Clearly, creating a massive, multi-billion dollar entitlement to meet the needs of 17 school districts and 10 charter schools would be like using a bazooka to take out a Chihuahua. The legislature would better serve those school districts that cannot obtain health insurance bids by creating large risk pools and keeping the funding emphasis at the local level. There may even be room for lawmakers to experiment with self-funded, defined contribution insurance plans that would re-establish the buyer-seller relationship between consumers and providers of health care services. If lawmakers choose the alternative tax-and-spend method, then all of us should expect to have leaner pocketbooks in the near future.

Tests, standards and accountability are being advocated as the solution to the problems of public school education. These are such good words; why can't they do the job?

The testing system has been corrupted. Under the 1997 revision of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the school must give "appropriate accommodations" on every test to all "children with disabilities." Accommodation means that the child can be given assistance by someone who can read the test questions to him, explain to him what was read, and even write the answers for him. An 8th grade reading test is ridiculous if the student can't read it himself.

Allowing the schools or states to assist learning-disabled students, or even exclude them entirely, provides an open door to finagling the test results, and the states have figured out how to work this racket. Since schools receive additional federal money for every child labeled learning-disabled, there is a financial incentive to increase the numbers.

The high stakes involved in test results virtually mandate that teachers will be required to "teach to the test." Teaching to the test means teaching only the small percentage of material that will actually be covered on the test.

Traditional teaching, on the other hand, involves presenting a considerable quantity of information to the students and then testing their knowledge by asking questions on items randomly selected from the total material. When test-taking takes priority over learning, this dumbs down education because a narrower body of knowledge is taught.

Tests are now called assessments, which is a semantic clue to the large element of subjectivity that has invaded the questions and the scoring. The most commonly understood meaning of the word assessment is the tax-collector's assessment of our property, and we all know how subjective that can be. Some of the answers are not right or wrong, true or false, and are scored by temporary workers who get rewarded for speed. More and more tests are burdened with the liberal/feminist dogmas called Political Correctness.

One Michigan test required students to write an argument for or against sending women into military combat. That topic will inevitably be scored on attitudes and values rather than on composition, grammar or spelling.

One National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test contains three questions that ascribe unworthy motives to white settlers who came to America, three questions that measure the student's support of radical environmentalism, and a question instructing students to write a letter to their U.S. Senators telling them which government programs the student wants funded.

Nationally, the tests are planned to be given only in reading and math. This means that English, science and history will be given a short shrift or even omitted, since tests will be all that matters in evaluating teachers and schools.

When it comes to standards to which the assessments are tied, have we so quickly forgotten the uproar about the federally funded National History Standards of 1995, which omitted or downgraded some of America's greatest achievers and used obscure and third-rate figures to teach diversity revisionism? Those standards were so anti-American, they were denounced by the U.S. Senate in a vote of 99 to 1.

Have we so quickly forgotten the national math standards, which were denounced by 200 prestigious mathematicians, including four Nobel Laureates, because they failed to teach basic skills? Their criticisms…had no effect on the U.S. Department of Education's determination to induce schools to adopt fuzzy math curricula.

Then there is the announced goal called accountability, a word that cries out to be followed by a preposition and an object. Accountability has no meaning unless one is accountable to someone or something.

It appears that the plan is to make the schools accountable to the U.S. Department of Education and Labor. But what parents want is accountability to parents and local school boards, not to a federal or state agency.

The stated goal of the new proposals is to "narrow the achievement gap." Let's remember that the gap can be closed by bringing top and bottom together, not necessarily by raising the bottom to a higher level of achievement.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Make plans now to attend TEF's Education Summit on Saturday, September 8 with Phyllis Schlafly and other noted speakers. An evening dinner reception will follow. Details TBA.

I first became interested in the subject of modesty for a rather mundane reason-because I didn't like the bathrooms at Williams College. Like many enlightened colleges and universities these days, Williams houses boys next to girls in its dormitories and then has students vote by floor on whether their common bathrooms should be coed. It's all very democratic, but the votes always seem to go in the coed direction because no one wants to be thought a prude. When I objected, I was told by my fellow students that I "must not be comfortable with [my] body." Frankly, I didn't get that, because I was fine with my body; it was their bodies in such close proximity to mine that I wasn't thrilled about.

I ended up writing about this experience in Commentary as a kind of therapeutic exercise. But when my article was reprinted in Reader's Digest, a weird thing happened: I got piles of letters from kids who said, "I thought I was the only one who couldn't stand these bathrooms." How could so many people feel they were the "only ones" who believed in privacy and modesty? It was troubling that they were afraid to speak up. When and why, I wondered, did modesty become such a taboo?

At Yale in 1997, a few years after my own coed bathroom protest, five Orthodox Jewish students petitioned the administration for permission to live off-campus instead of in coed dorms. In denying them, a dean with the Dickensian name of Brodhead explained that "Yale has its own rules and requirements, which we insist on because they embody our values and beliefs." Yale has no core curriculum, of course, but these coed bathrooms, according to Dean Brodhead, embody its beliefs. I would submit that as a result of this kind of "liberationist" ideology, we today have less, not more freedom, than in the pre-1960s era when modesty was upheld as a virtue.

Many of the problems we hear about today-sexual harassment, date rape, young women who suffer from eating disorders and report feeling a lack of control over their bodies-are all connected, I believe to our culture's attack on modesty. Listen first to the words we use to describe intimacy: what once was called "making love," and then "having sex," is now "hooking up"-like airplanes refueling in flight. I was interested to learn, while researching my book (A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue), that the early feminists actually praised modesty as ennobling to society. Here I'm not just talking about the temperance-movement feminists, who said, "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine." I'm talking about more recent feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, who warned in her book, The Second Sex, that if society trivialized modesty, violence against women would result. And she was right. Since the 1960s, when our cultural arbiters deemed this age-old virtue a "hang-up," men have grown to expect women to be casual about sex, and women for their part don't feel they have the right to say "no." This has brought us more misery than joy.

In 1948, there was a song called "Baby, It's Cold Outside," by Frank Loesser, in which a boyfriend wants his girlfriend to sleep over. His argument is simple but compelling: Baby, it's cold outside, and if she doesn't sleep over, she could catch pneumonia and die, and that would cause him "lifelong sorrow." In response, the girl offers several counter-
arguments: "My father will be waiting at the door, there's bound to be talk tomorrow" etc. It's a very cute song. And while post-modern intellectuals at progressive institutions like Yale would no doubt say this song proves how oppressed women were in 1948, I would argue that today's culture-in which fathers can't be counted on to be waiting at the door-is far creepier.

The counterpoint to "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a story I read in a women's magazine, written by an ex-boyfriend of an 18-year old girl whose father had decided that she was too old to be a virgin. After commiserating with the boyfriend, the father drove the pair to a hotel, where the girl became hysterical and the scheme fell apart. The article was entitled, "My Ex-Girlfriend's Father: What a Man!" And although the story isn't typical, it is quite common for parents to rent hotel rooms for their kids on prom nights, which is essentially the same principle. So the father in "Baby, It's Cold Outside" waiting at the door, and the older culture that supported modesty, actually made women stronger. It gave them the right to say "no" until they met someone they wanted to marry. Today's culture of "liberation" gives women no ground on which to stand. And an immodest culture weakens men, too-we are all at the mercy of other people's judgment of us as sexual objects (witness the revolution of plastic surgery for men), which is not only tiring but also dishonest because we can't be ourselves.

We are where we are today only in part because the feminine ideal has changed. The masculine ideal has followed suit. It once was looked on as manly to be faithful to one woman for life, and to be protective toward all women. Sadly, this is no longer the case. Modern feminists are wrong to expect men to be gentlemen when they themselves are not ladies, but men who value "scoring" and then lament that there are no modest women around anymore-well, they are just as bad. And of course, a woman can be modestly dressed and still be harassed on the street. So the reality is that a lot depends on male respect for modesty. It is characteristic of modern society that everyone wants the other guy to be nice to him without having to change his own behavior, whether it's the feminists blaming the men, or the men blaming the feminists, or young people blaming their role models.

I don't think it's an accident that the most meaningful explication of modesty comes from the Bible. I was fascinated in my research to discover how many secular women are returning to modesty because they found, simply as a practical matter, that immodesty wasn't working for them. In short, they weren't successful in finding the right man. For me this prompts an essentially religious question: Why were we created this way? Why can't we be happy imitating the animals?

In Isaiah 6, we read that the fiery angels surrounding the throne of God have six wings. One set is for covering the face, another for covering the legs, and only the third is for flying. Four of the six, then, are for modesty's sake. This beautiful image suggests that the more precious something is, the more it must conceal and protect itself. The message of our dominant culture today is that we're not precious, that we weren't created in the divine image. I'm saying to the contrary that we were, and that as such we deserve modesty.

Source: Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu).

The Bush Administration has wisely decided to withhold submitting its bill to aid faith-based programs until it can revise the legislation to make it more acceptable to conservative religious leaders. The administration had expected opposition from liberal groups, but not the level of resistance coming from conservative religious leaders and organizations who fear that inviting the government in will mean eventual government control of their message.

Historians have debated whether the Roman Emperor Constantine was seriously converted to Christianity in the Third Century, or if he merely found that faith expedient in the pursuit of his military objectives. He may have believed the Christians could be persuaded to serve in his army if they were freed from the catacombs and their faith declared not only legitimate but also the official state religion.

What the Christians may not have understood at the time was that whenever government smiles beneficently on their faith and extends benefits to adherents (as Constantine did by exempting churches from paying taxes and allowing the church to own and inherit property), it eventually expects to be paid back in political currency.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. John Dululio, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, told a group of Christian leaders in Dallas that social service programs which have religious conversion as the central tenant of their work will not be eligible for direct government grants. People in need of drug or alcohol rehabilitation, the homeless, or anyone else seeking their services, would be given vouchers. It would be up to the clients to choose where to "spend" tax dollars. They could select a program that feeds and houses their bodies, or one that does that but also feeds their souls and seeks to convert them.

Evangelical organizations have long asserted that the social services they provide are not ends in themselves. Rather, they see them as means by which to demonstrate God's love for them in this life, so as to make them more open to the "Good News" of God's provision for assuring them of a place in Heaven when they die. Evangelicals believe that faith without works is dead, but they also believe that works without faith are even deader.

If the objective of the Bush Administration is to provide financial help to people and organizations with the best chance to change their lives because of the message they preach, giving vouchers to people who need help is not going to get the job done.

How many of the neediest are likely to seek assistance in places where they are required to hear sermons? If such people wanted to hear a sermon, they would long ago sought out a church or a faith-based program. Isn't it more likely that because of their addiction, they will seek programs that provide only food and shelter so that they might continue their addictive behavior?

Is the problem with charitable work a lack of money, or a lack of laborers? Even Scripture notes that while the "fields are white unto harvest," there appears to be a shortage of laborers. Is that because of too little government money, or too little base in the faith? Will more money solve things, or is it likely to produce a conservative version of the welfare state in which fewer laborers can be found because people will come to see the government as responsible for work?

The best way for the government to be involved in religiously based charitable work is to make it easier for people who already are, or might be persuaded to be. If government wants to encourage charitable works so it can reduce its own role, let it give additional tax breaks to individuals and companies. Then they can choose their own "faith-based" programs in which to invest. This puts the choice in the hands of the donor, not the recipient, who may not make the wisest decision.

Government will then not have to discriminate among religions. People can. Any faith-based program that accepts government funds will, like the early Christians, be required to pay an even bigger price then the loss of their primary message.

Source: Conservative Chronicle, 3/21/01

As America's First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton was dubbed "the smartest woman in the world," but as a newly elected Senator, she literally wants to take your breath away! Recently mocking President George Bush, she said, "In less than eight weeks in office, President Bush has gone from CO2 to 'see you later.'" Her unscientific assertion is that politicians could control the climate by labeling carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas her constituents breath out, as a pollutant.

Breathing out does add CO2 to the atmosphere, which is a major greenhouse gas that some believe causes global warming, but it is too soon to place blame on humans since it is a fact that there has been no significant change in earth temperatures taken from satellites since measurements began in 1979. Worried politicians need to be patient as scientific research continues.

President Bush tried to allay their anxiety when he acknowledged that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and he assured them that it is NOT a pollutant and thus does not affect clean air standards. As a matter of fact, horticulturalists artificially increase CO2 in greenhouses to encourage plant growth. As plants take in CO2, they expel oxygen giving us the air we breathe. The exchange of CO2 and oxygen is a life-sustaining cycle!

Reacting impulsively to global warming claims could create a dilemma like California's energy shortage in other states. When lawmakers in CA deregulated electricity, they capped the price of electricity thereby upsetting the supply and demand in the marketplace. The result was an increased use of electricity while the supplies decreased. While calling it deregulation, policymakers regulated some power companies out of existence, as other regulations so delayed start-ups for new power plants that the state has not built a major power plant in 15 years. They have resorted to "rolling blackouts" that turn electricity off for a time in a sector, and then restore it and move to the next sector and turn electricity off, and so on. The "rolling blackouts" are predicted to worsen as summer approaches and citizens turn on air conditioners.

Limiting greenhouse gas emissions, by and large CO2, caused the "rolling blackouts," and the same thing would happen in every state if America ratifies the United Nation's 1997 Kyoto Protocol (treaty) that prescribes the same measures in order to assuage the same scientifically inconclusive problem: global warming. The former Clinton-Gore administration committed to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions by 7% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012, about a 35% reduction from current levels.

While the treaty has yet to be submitted to the Senate for ratification, UN conferees continue to meet multiple times each year to build momentum in support of the unproven "crisis" of global warming.

It seems that Senator Clinton has a lot of environmentally extreme friends in the UN, and as they take up the issue again in Bonn, Germany in July, it is reassuring to know that sound science will be America's standard, because implementation of the Kyoto Protocol would reduce America's gross national product by between 30-40% and force millions of jobs to move to third world countries. President Bush is right to advocate clean air measures and separate CO2 as a non-polluter, because limiting CO2 would ravage America's economy while having almost no affect on the air we breathe. President Bush has endorsed our freedom to exhale!

Editor's Note: Texas Eagles Cathie Adams, Pat Carlson and MerryLynn Gerstenschlager will be attending the UN Climate Change conference in Bonn in July in order to report on the Bush administration's "alternative" to Kyoto that is to be presented. Thank you for your prayers for wisdom and discernment in this regard for our President and his staff.
 

Eagle Cliff Notes

PORNOGRAPHY & CHILDREN
Concerned that children might not be able to view pornography at school, the American Library Association and its allies sued to halt the implementation of a federal law that was supposed to take effect last month. The Children's Internet Protection Act would prohibit federal technology grants from going to schools and libraries that do not install filters that prevent minors from seeing obscene material.
Source: Human Events, 4/2/01

U.S. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT FAILS THIRD AUDIT
For the third year in a row, the Education Department has failed to receive a clean audit, according to the latest reports of the General Accounting Office and Education Department Inspector General. At least $450 million was misappropriated during the those three years, including $250 million in duplicate payments to local and state education agencies and $200 million in lost payments. The results of the fiscal 2000 audit were revealed at a hearing of the House Select Education Subcommittee causing Chairman Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) to say, "In many ways, it looks like we are dealing with a Third World Republic." Education Secretary Rod Paige has indicated that he is making it a priority to fix these problems, but until the Education Department can balance its own checkbook, Congress should proceed cautiously with plans to increase the Department's budget.
Source: Ed Facts, 4/6/01

LONGER SCHOOL HOURS WON'T MAKE SMARTER KIDS
Few education specialists see any merit in lengthening the hours, days or weeks students spend in the company of substandard teachers. They say it's not how much time kids spend in school, but how the time is spent. Advocates contend countries that outperform the U.S. on international tests have longer school days or months. But that's not necessarily true. Children in Sweden, Iceland and France spend fewer days in classrooms than American children and outperformed U.S. students in the Third International Math and Science Study. "Advocating more time in the classroom before teachers who aren't well qualified or in schools that are unsafe is certainly not going to solve our education problems, "said Matthew Brouillette, director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Source: Investor's Business Daily, 4/3/01

NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER, MAY 3
On this 50th anniversary of The National Day of Prayer with its theme "One Nation Under God," citizens in every city and state are encouraged to pray for the our nation and its leaders. Prayer does make a difference! "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord…." Psalm 33:12.