WE CAN'T `FIX' EDUCATION WITHOUT FIXING FAMILY

I love it when readers send me articles that they find compelling that were published in some distant publication. This is true whether I agree with the printed material or not.

My friend and retired university professor Dr. Willard Morgan recently sent me a news story from the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, West Virginia, where Morgan's son Craig practices medicine. Entitled "Fix Family to Fix Education", it relates the remarks of West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely, speaking to a meeting of the West Virginia School Boards Association. I was familiar with Justice Neely because he has made a national name for himself in promoting legal reform to curb our nation's litigation explosion. This is a courageous stand that will never endear him to the sponsors of that explosion, the trial lawyers of the plaintiff's bar.

Justice Neely's willingness to take courageous stands clearly is not confined to legal issues. He told the school board members that "all your efforts can't fix education."

To improve education, Neely said society must first address the "bleak family circumstances" that cause students to fail.

".... You will never succeed in doing anything more than presiding over an educational system that gets worse and worse, until we doing something about the deteriorating quality of our students and the progressive transfer of money out of education to bolster ravenous welfare budgets.

"All of these (welfare, Medicaid) programs voraciously eat money only because of the poverty and sickness produced by one entirely avoidable phenomenon illegitimacy and another partially avoidable phenomenon divorce," Neely said.

Neely said that children of never-married mothers are three times more likely to be expelled from school, and children in divorced families are nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school than those in intact families.

Neely said that avoidable circumstances, such as teen-age pregnancy, break down the social insurance system.

"Illegitimacy and divorce are to social insurance, then, what leaving a pint of oil on a burning stove is to fire insurance," Neely said.

Neely advocated state- and federally funded advertising campaigns to reach all age groups with grim facts about illegitimacy and divorce.

He said that $100,000-a-day ad budgets for all major media centers could cut divorce rates in half and reduce illegitimacy by more than half in two years.

After listening to Justice Neely, one approving school board member accurately observed:

"Society as a whole has lost focus of what our lives should be like."

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Lords of the Flies

"The House votes today (Wednesday, 10/20/93) on a Clinton administration proposal to conduct a National Biological Survey. Rep. Gerry Studds (D.-Mass.), the bill's chief sponsor, says the survey will "catalog everything that walks, crawls, swims or flies in this country." Opponents say it will spend $163 million to send bureaucrats on to private land to find endangered species and halt development. Indeed, Thomas Lovejoy, the Interior Department's scientific adviser, says the survey would "determine development for the whole country and regulate it all." Sounds like it could lead to endangered species, rather than people, becoming the biggest property owners in the country."

Wall Street Journal

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Soak-the-Rich is a Bummer

"It had been confidently asserted by various political strategists that public support for higher taxes on the rich could be used to rally support for the Clinton package. But as always in American history, most voters care much less about punishing the rich than about rewarding the middle class and strengthening the economy. Support for redistributive economics has never rallied a majority: even in the 1930s, polls show that Franklin Roosevelt's redistributionism was not a votegetter, and he won in 1936 as a reward for stopping the downward economic spiral of the Great Depression, and in 1940 and 1944 on foreign, not domestic issues.

"In American history, increased taxes on the rich have been capable of generating majority support only in times of war. That rule did not change in 1993: none of the Democratic (congressional) candidates running in the special elections of the first half of the year placed any emphasis on higher taxes on the rich or (with the exception of one who lost his primary) conspicuously supported the Clinton economic plan."

From the authoritative "Almanac of American Politics 1994" by Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, just published by the National Journal.