New York State School Voucher Amendment

NY State is in a downward economic spiral which keeps the state close to the bottom of 50 states in being attractive to economic expansion. This year again, the outflow of people moving out of NY state is greater than the amount of people moving here. As you know, every 10 years, NY State loses more population relative to other states and therefore has fewer and fewer members of the House of Representatives. People and businesses continue to leave NY State, because the municipal and school taxes are too high. What does this say? It says that relative to the other states, NY State is getting poorer and can expect less clout in Congress. If our state is getting poorer and we will be getting less federal funding, we cannot expect increases in state aid to our local public schools. Therefore, what is the solution? We must consider an open competitive education environment where innovative private, parochial and charter schools are allowed to compete with our present public schools which are dominated and being milked dry by the powerful grip of the NY State Teachers Union. You will continue to see the obvious evidence of this destruction of our public schools by the excessive salary and benefits that our public school teachers receive relative to the ability of NY State homeowners and businesses ability to pay the taxes. What is the evidence? Many school districts are closing schools, increasing class size and laying off teachers. Therefore, we must get busy on a simple amendment to the NY State Constitution which allows our state to fund education with parental school vouchers, which can be used to pay for their children's education at the public, private, or parochial school of their choice. Competition among public, private and parochial schools will drastically lower our school taxes and will allow NY State to become a more attractive and affordable place to live, work and raise a family.

FDR Was Against Government Unions

Regular people, such as teachers, firemen and postal workers do good things for society.  However, as FDR forcefully said that people who work for the government should not form labor unions.  FDR said, "All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management."  Public unions have pitted workers against citizens with the outlandish contract settlements, which include unheard of "automatic pay raises" for all workers independent of individual performance and no layoff clauses.  These public union contracts are currently bankrupting the postal service, cities, towns, counties and yes NY State.

Pseudo Democracy in NY State

The Kingston Freeman published an excellent editorial on Feb.9, 2013 on Pseudo Democracy, where the secret, rushing the enactment of new state gun laws by Governor Cuomo and the state legislature was roundly criticized for violating all normal governmental steps that we learn in school civics classes.  The Freeman expressed the total frustration that many NY State citizens have about our NY State government.  In calling for the Repeal of the Triborough Amendment, we citizens are told by our elected assemblymen and senators that this repeal has no chance, since Shelly Silver and Cuomo are against it.  Again, what happened to legislative hearings where citizens get a chance to push their wishes?  NY State government operations including the way the latest Gun law was pushed through secretly makes us New Yorkers feel like we are living in a state in Communist Russia.  I am sorry, but it is true.

Our priorities are not Obama's priorities

Unfortunately, all 4 of Obama's 2nd Inaugural priorities of (climate change, immigration reform, gun control & gay marriage) do not touch on the 2 top priorities for everyday working people and their children.  Obama seems to ignore the 2 priorities of 1) "lessening the crippling $16 Trillion debt that we are leaving our children and grandchildren"  2)  improving the economy and job opportunities.

Cuomo Silent on Repeal of Triborough

In his State of the State speech, Andrew Cuomo failed to mention the most important NY State government reform available to help failing school budgets and town, county and city budgets.  REPEAL OF THE TRIBOROUGH AMENDMENT.  If we repeal the Triborough Amendment,  teacher and municipal unions would no longer be able to collect automatic step raises after their contracts expire.  In other words, these unions would be more likely to negotiate new contracts quicker if they know that step raises and other clauses of their old contracts were no longer in effect.
This repeal of the Triborough Amendment would save NY State tax payers millions of dollars.  Some of these dollars could be used to keep schools open and children better educated.  No other state in the USA has anything like the Triborough Amendment.  This amendment contributes to the fact that NY State is last or close to last in Economic Growth.

I wonder why Governor Cuomo avoids this reform which a majority of New Yorkers support?  The answer - Cuomo is in the tank for teacher and municipal unions.  Also, it is now very obvious that the NY State press and media are in the tank for Cuomo, because our journalists hardly mention or editorialize about Cuomo's avoidance of the Repeal of the Triborough Amendment.

NY School Commission is Clueless

The commission's proposal is a joke, right?  They are proposing more failure for our public schools.  Do you know that only 3 states require Masters Degrees of their public school teachers (NY, Mass., and Ohio)?  The other 47 states equal or out-perform these states.  Advanced degrees hurt the teaching profession.  We don't need scholars to teacher our children.  We need down-to-earth passionate people who love to communicate with children.  Scholars often are not good at communicating with children.  Scholars often want more money for academic competence, whereas bachelor level teachers are more likely to love the art and results of teaching at a down-to-earth level.  As far as year-round school, this proposal is dead on arrival due to lack of funding.  Ask former governor Mario Cuomo.  The liberal public school elites have definitely run out of solutions for our failing public schools.   Let's try more charter schools and parent school choice via vouchers to allow parents to spend the vouchers to send their children to any public, private or parochial school that they deem best for their children.

Monopolies don't do well in any kind of business or educaton.

Public Education as we have now in the USA is a monopoly.  Monopolies don't do well in any kind of business or educaton.  Public Schools are like the old Ma-Bell AT and T telephone monopoly.  Remember the clunky phones that AT and T sold us year after year.  What happened when the telephone monopoly was abolished in favor of open telephone competition?  We have a vibrant competitive advancing telephone business environment which is selling us the products that we want and enjoy, ie.  Galaxy, Iphone, Ipad, Razr, etc.  This is want we should want for our children........a vibrant competitive advancing education environment .........nothing less.  I don't know about you, but holding back our children's education and paying exhorbitant taxes to pay inflated teacher union contracts has got to stop.  We need competition through school vouchers in educating our young children, just like we have competition at the college level today via Pell Grants.  It is the very same thing.