Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Minnesota Taxpayer’s League President Phil Krinkie, also known as “Dr. No Heart and No Brain”, made some pretty controversial comments at a recent educational conference.

Among the ideas he discussed, was high school class sizes of 100, 200 or more. It would make them similar to college and would remove special needs students from the regular school system.

“There are hundreds, thousands of children in our public schools today that we are babysitting, we are warehousing them,” said Krinkie.

Krinkie would move high need children to special schools.

“Let’s not forget the purpose of the K through 12 system: to benefit the majority of the children in terms of their educational progress,” Krinkie said.

You know, Phil Krinkie is right. Our should strive to benefit only the majority of students. Given that premise, I have a great new school financing plan. We’ll identify the smartest 55% of students in our public high schools (using standardized tests of course, everyone LOVES standardized tests) and then ship off the other 45% to government run factories where they can make furniture and licence plates. We’ll use the money from the factories to fund our schools (which will require significantly less funding now that 45% of the students are not attending anymore).

Think of how much we could cut taxes! In fact, if we follow Krinkie’s advice and make the average class size something in the neighborhood of 100-200, we would save so much on teacher salaries that we might even make a profit off the whole system.

Imagine a school that currently has 1000 students and 30 kids to a class. Lets assume that each teacher makes $40,000 a year (just for the sake of argument). That works out to over $1.3 million in teacher salaries. What a waste. If we employ the Krinkie plan, the school now only has 550 students and 5 teachers, bringing the cost down to $200,000 a year. If we further assume that each kid in the factory can make 4 licence plates a day (if 4 seems low to you, remember, these kids aren’t that bright, thats why they are in the factories in the first place) and that each licence plate generates a profit of $5. Those kids would be generating $9000 a day, which would pay for their school’s annual budget in just 23 days. Brilliant!

But seriously folks, Krinkie’s remarks prove two things (both of which many of us have known for a long time)

1) Phil Krinkie is crazy.

2) The Taxpayers League advocates a positively un-Minnesotan agenda which seeks to undermine the very things that have made Minnesota a great place to live and raise a family.

Now back to my 20 page legal memo due tomorrow…