Bob’s take on

As I was looking for AIG bailout articles, I ran across this WSJ article about how Billions of taxpayer money may be going down a rat hole. Obama gave a great education speech last week, but now we find that the Stimulus Bill had nothing to do with these reforms in education.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123698751663025791.html

Here is an excerpt from the article:

The stimulus bill throws an unprecedented $100 billion at the nation’s 14,000 school districts, but it subsidizes the status quo and demands little from recipients in return. The Milwaukee school system is receiving millions of dollars for additional school construction though it has excess capacity and stagnant enrollment. Detroit Public Schools, according to a recent Detroit Free Press story, “stands to reap $530 million — $355 million with no strings attached — from the federal stimulus package that will hand Michigan nearly $7 billion over two or three years. . . . In all, the state and local school districts could have at least $2.5 billion to spend as they see fit.” (Our emphasis.)

Detroit graduates a mere 24% of its students and has a history of corruption. Audits in 2001 and 2004 found $2.5 million missing or misspent, and the city’s schools superintendent was fired in December for incompetence. How does shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars more into such a system advance Mr. Obama’s reform agenda?

The President said his Education Department “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.” Voters should hold Mr. Obama to that pledge.

Please Mr President, look into these Billions of bad earmarks and don’t put all your time into only Millions of AIG Bonuses!