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Oregon Bureaucrats Play Politics with School Ratings
OPB on Oregon school ratings:
The full summaries of Oregon school ratings are out, after attempts to delay their release until after the November election drew public outcry this week.
Gov. Kate Brown was accused of playing politics with a potentially damaging report on Oregon public schools ahead of a tight election battle. Education leaders said Brown was not involved in the decision to delay the reports’ release, and they’ve now shared the full reports.
Brown likely did not have to ask Oregon education bureaucrats to delay the damaging reports because they voluntarily use their power and influence to help her and other progressives of their own accord. These bureaucrats know that Brown would want them to help her and that they will not face any meaningful consequences if they do.
Likewise, Obama probably did not have to ask the IRS (and other agencies) to harass conservative groups because they eagerly did that for him on their own. This is what the deep state is. Not some massive, organized conspiracy, but dishonest and corrupt bureaucrats at every level of government willing to use their power and influence for the benefit of their tribe.
The deep state supplants the fair and equal application of the law with the tyranny of mini-despots. As Christopher Freiman notes:
Published in ElectionsWe have a dilemma. If we assume that people act justly, the state isn’t needed in the first place. On the other hand, if we assume that people act unjustly, then we should assume that the state itself will act unjustly, too.
Which is exactly why we have Constitutional seperation of powers. That’s why it is so important that Congress be forced to cease devolving it’s legislative power to the agencies it creates and take back the power they have given away; power to promulgate rules having the force of law including enforcement via fines and penalties and ajudication of guilt via agency hearings and findings.
Congress persons have given these powers away in order to avoid facing voters who would be rightly incensed about actions contra citizen Liberties at election time. They use this unconstitutional charade to both increase the power and scope of governmental power beyond the bounds set by our Constitution and to escape the consequences of doing so. This can only be remidied by voters who understand what is going on and act on that knowledge.
Not only that, but they gain when they empower administrative agencies to abuse the people, because they can offer constituent services to help voters in seeking redress from them.
For many years I had a leftwing Congressman who did well for himself by working both sides of that street.
One more reason we need term limits, one way to limit the damage done when these folks get comfortable in their protected positions.
@okiesailor
Yeah this is where my hope for classical liberal democracy falters. We do not seem to have a critical mass of informed, freedom-loving citizens to sustain our project. We may not be capable of self-government, at least of the kind that the Founders envisioned. Towards the end of this podcast Kevin Williams says, in response to Jay Nordlinger asking whether limited government is politically viable, that “freedom has always been a minority taste. … Freedom was forced upon the world by classical liberal elites.” Classical liberalism seems to depend on conditions that it can neither sustain nor reproduce.
We are perhaps witnessing the full force of the capability of the Deep State to thwart the effectiveness of separation of powers and even to do the same to the POTUS. It is well known that the House oversight committees have been trying to declassify documents from the DoJ and that is what resulted in the recent meeting of Rod Rosenstein and President Trump. Suddenly the President’s order to declassify has been tabled. It looks as if Rosenstein has done some maneuvering to threaten the President with new obstruction if he forces declassifications requested by the House. I hope Trump acts after the mid-terms.
Having clicked through to the story, I find it rather perverse that the response to a failing school is to give it more funding. Talk about your counter-productive incentives…
I’m all in favor of term limits, but this guy announced at the beginning of his first term that he was going to emphasise the role of “ombudsman.”
If we had a ban on congressional constituent services, that would help. A full ban might be difficult, but there might be ways to restrict them, and thereby get Congress back into its job of legislating and to withdraw some of the powers it gave away to the administrative state.
At the time the constitution was ratified, the franchise was pretty limited, and in many states, you still had to own a minimum amount of property (usually limited to land) to be able to vote. Not to mention women couldn’t vote.
When you limit the franchise to people who are well off, a higher percentage of those voters will be informed citizens.
I’m not advocating this limitation, but many of the founders did, as they “envisioned” it.
I’ll add that when you have a government that is so big, sure it’s harder to track.
The original post starts out talking about an issue involving the state of Oregon, whiile ending the post talking about a federal issue. Most of the posts address federal issuest.
If you want to make citizens capable of self government, one way to do it is to push power back to as local a government as is possible. And that includes funding those organizations with as local taxes as possible.
The federal government or state governments shouldn’t be funding local governments. Each government unit should pay for its activities by raising their own funding through their own taxing authority.
At that point, citizens will start paying more attention to what their local and state governments do.
And that’s probably closer to what the founders envisioned.
Why are public schools or the bureaucracies and elected officials over them, rating themselves?
We already have several private media outlets that are ranking colleges nationwide. Wouldn’t it be better if Oregon citizen groups got together and set up a private non-governmental rating of each public (and even private) school in the state?
Those types of groups are often referred to as citizen watchdog groups. Which mitigates Oregon’s administrative state.
If they would almost completely atomize the whole education system, there is no way in hell the aggregate value of it wouldn’t go straight up. It’s primary purpose is parasitic graft. Education is second. The Minnesota teachers union is just embarrassing in this sense.
We are so screwed.
You want to restrict the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances?
Better for who?
Milton Friedman said, with a sly grin, “You know, it’s funny, but I’ve never heard of a failed government program that wouldn’t have worked with more time and more money.”
Completely agree, but now that power has been concentrated at the state and federal levels, how does it get devolved back down without a critical mass of informed, freedom-loving citizens demanding that devolution over a sustained period, perhaps tens to hundreds of years? And after it has been devolved, how can we prevent it from being concentrated again? Again, classical liberalism seems to depend on conditions that it can neither sustain nor reproduce.
Absolutely not. I want people to petition their Representatives for redress of grievances. And I want Congress to use its constitutional tools to redress them: legislation and budget. It should fix the system and defund the wrongdoers rather than working both sides of the street. But if Congresscritters interfere in the corrupt agencies that they created and funded in order to do special favors for specific clients, that just makes our government corrupt and corrupts the citizenry as well.