Does anyone really think that lowering the passing grade for students in the Baltimore City school system from 70 to 60 will lower standards?
Does a school system with a culture of excellence or a city that aspires to one tolerate a 50 percent high school graduation rate?
Or one where basic reading and math skills elude generations of graduates?
Or one when where parents would rather send their children to school in Kenya, as the documentary “Boys of Baraka” so eloquently shows, than let them study for a life of crime in city schools?
It?s hard to understand why the city school board spent the time or energy to enact the change, which reversed a 1999 decision.
Or why Baltimore Mayor Martin O?Malley and Gov. Robert Ehrlich have traded barbs over the topic.
It would be better for them to let us see their detailed plans and budgets for how they would lead the transformation of Baltimore schools into places where children learn to read, write, compute and, importantly, succeed.
The myth of civil “servants”
It turns out our federal government workers are more like masters than servants when it comes to pay.
According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis released this month, the average compensation for federal civilian workers was $106,579 in 2005.
That measures twice as high as the average for private sector workers, noted Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, writing in the Sunday Washington Post.
The Edwards? analysis shows federal employee pay rose 38 percent over the past five years compared to 14 percent for those of us working in the private sector.
He also found that federal jobs are also secure ones; one quarter as many people are fired as in the private sector.
Are federal government workers really that much better than those in the private sector based on performance?
And in a world where workers regularly hop jobs searching for bigger paychecks and better benefits, federal workers don?t leave. Edwards found they voluntarily resign at one-quarter the rate of private sector workers.
Regardless, it means that the more than 2 million of us in the private sector in the state toil for the nearly 126,000 federal civilian workers in Maryland to pay for generous health care benefits, pensions, vacations and less rapid pace of work that most of us do not share.
The “servant” nomenclature in civil servant doesn?t seem to fit anymore.
