EDUCATION

The economics of teacher quality: "As a result of unionization, pay differentials between high-aptitude and low-aptitude teachers have disappeared over the past 50 years. According to a new study, one unfortunate consequence of this pay compression has been to push high-aptitude teachers out of the teaching profession."

More school failure: "Teenagers from poor households in England are being offered cash payments of up to 30 pounds a week to stay on at school or college as part of a new national drive to 'smash' the UK's high post-16 drop-out rate, the government announced yesterday. But it defended the high costs of the scheme to the taxpayer, in the face of evidence that nearly threequarters of the ultimate beneficiaries would be likely to stay in full-time education anyway."

School vouchers do work: "Caroline Minter Hoxby has just published a paper in the Swedish Economic Policy Review claiming that the performance of Milwaukee's public schools (measured in terms of test scores per dollar of spending) improved quite dramatically during the heat of the battle over vouchers (in the late 90's), and that the gains of that time do not seem to have fallen back... She attributes the gains to the voucher program"

M.E.Ch.A.: "Deliberately teaching young Hispanics that they are entitled to everything American without having to work for it or assimilate into our country's culture is counter productive to everything America stands for and should not be tolerated in our public school system. It is an insult to all legal immigrants who work hard to become Americans and love this land, to watch their adopted homeland tolerate the very tyranny they came here to escape."

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ELSEWHERE

America's 'mercenary' Army: "Thirty years ago, the volunteer army was a great experiment. Today, even the military has embraced it. The quality of recruits is higher than it was, and morale is strong. And the American people seem to like it, too. In a poll last year for ABC News and the Washington Post, 97 percent of the American people said they were either very proud or somewhat proud of the armed forces. Pretty good for mercenaries". The conversion to a volunteer military was of course set up by Republican President Nixon.

"The United Nations has long been a bastion of hope for the naive idealists who seek a Star Trek-like nirvana under a benevolent global government. But recent stories revealing widespread corruption in its Iraqi Oil-for-Food program demonstrate that the U.N. is little better than a third-rate banana republic where bureaucrats line their own pockets and bribery, kickbacks, and pay-offs are the order of the day."

Leftists have different brains: "Did you hear the one about the researchers who did brain scans of people watching political commercials? It's no joke: A team at UCLA is using MRI machines to study the brain's response to political images. Subjects lie down in scanners while campaign spots play on the inside of goggles, and computers map which parts of their brains are activated. Early results confirm what many have always suspected -- Democrats and Republicans have different kinds of brains. So far, for example, they've discovered that Democrats show more activity in the part of the brain that responds to danger". Wimps? See also here

Theodore Dalrymple says that so-called human rights drive out kindness, decency, tolerance and all sense of mutual obligation: "People who stand on their rights are seldom much concerned with the rights of others. There is no logical reason why this should be so, but it is a fact of human psychology. `It's my right!' is a call not of freedom, but of egotism... There is little doubt that the idea of rights has expanded dramatically in the last few years, so that no sphere of human existence is left untouched by them. This expansion is the end product of decades of what one might call resentment studies: the academic view of the human past and present as nothing but oppression, of minorities by majorities and of majorities by minorities.... The principal beneficiaries have been the lawyers, rather than those to whom the supposed rights have been granted".

Mark Steyn on Western support for terrorists: "That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose what side of the war you want to fight on. Just tick 'home team' or 'enemy' when the draft card arrives..." ..and you can even get the dole while you side with the enemy.

A Pakistani journalist writes: "Muslims of all hues and lands protest their so-called image problem, blaming it not on themselves, but on their detractors and perceived enemies, specifically the much-maligned Western media. It does not occur to them that their negative image could, by and large, be a reflection of reality".

There are some good comments here on the stupidity of the Leftist response to the 9/11 events.

My recipe for today is for a mustard sauce to liven up most fried meat. See here or here. That is the end of my recipe collection for now but if any readers have a family favourite recipe that they think should be more widely known, do send it in and I will post it up if I like the look of it.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

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