They say that one major mark of intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. If that’s true, then N.C. House Speaker Thom Tillis must be one of the smartest guys in the state. Either that or he has a serious case of Reality Disconnect. Or maybe he’s drunk. I don’t know. What I do know is the Cornelius moderate-turned-Tea-Partier is showing a knack for saying things that completely contradict his own actions. Case in point: For weeks, Tillis kept insisting, despite being contradicted by, you know, actual facts, that the huge cuts made to state education funding would not result in thousands of lost education jobs. He repeated this bit of nonsense so often, some pundits started calling him the Double-Speaker of the House.
Now he’s come up with another doozy. NC PolicyWatch points to a Tillis interview in the Wednesday edition of Raleigh’s News & Observer in which he stresses the importance of early childhood education. Here’s the interview segment in question:
“He said some children who haven’t received the education they need early in life are being wasted as productive members of society.‘I’m absolutely certain that some number of those people who are being lost were lost before they ever get out of third grade,’ Tillis said. ‘They didn’t have early childhood development opportunities. They didn’t have the core ability to read by third grade. They didn’t have the skills they needed to be educated past third grade.’”
The problem, of course, is that Tillis helped ram through a budget that eviscerates early childhood funding. As part of their wholesale gutting of anything education-related, Tillis & Co. fundamentally changed the state’s acclaimed pre-K program, More At Four. Now, what was once a free, education-intensive program will basically just consist of child care, i.e., warehousing. On top of that, fees are going into effect, making it impossible for some of the kids who need it the most to attend. Apparently, Tillis either doesn’t think any of us noticed what he’s been up to, or his brain has no idea what his mouth is saying. Or he’s drunk. Your call.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2011.
Uh, what were you saying about “facts”, John?
“We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program’s effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.
According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, “I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn’t.””
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2081778,00.html#ixzz1RZyg394L
That’s great, Joe, but unfortunately irrelevant to the blog post, which mentions Head Start a grand total of zero times. Problems with Head Start have been known among education advocates for some time, which is why we’ve seen other programs such as More At Four, which the Cornelius Flash helped to wreck.
Yeah, that’s why Head Start and More At Four (as well as Smart Start) are all lumped together in Forsyth County:
http://www.learningbytheyard.com/pdf/PRMiddleFork1.pdf
and Wake County:
wakesmartstart.org/uploads/docs/partners/moreatfour/mat4facts2.pdf
and New Bern:
newbernnow.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-at-four-pre-kindergarten-and-head.html
and Chapel Hill & Carrboro:
www2.chccs.k12.nc.us/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectionid=3245
and Macon County:
http://www.mppnhc.org/child_care.php
and Guilford County:
http://www.guilfordchilddev.org/index.php?option=com_2j_tabs&Itemid=300
A failure by any other name…
You have to be a Republican to see logic in seriously slashing the funding for numerous programs resulting in thousands of layoffs and then shout “So where are all the jobs?”.
A) Republican
B) See logic
Choose one DLP.
Thom Tillis gave half his staff fat raises while he was pushing through these cuts to education. What’s more, he gave these raises (as high as $30,000) five months after pledging to cut the amount of money spent on salaries in the speaker’s office. Go to http://www.telltillis.com to tell him what you think and sign a petition telling him to give that money back to the taxpayers!