I can only imagine the rigorous policy research that went into this piece by Sunny Schubert, a contributor for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute:
It's not that I don't care about K-12 education in Wisconsin. I DO care, very much.
But I have a hard time getting my undies in a bundle over Gov. Scott Walker's proposed education spending reductions because I have this fantasy that maybe if school administrators have less money, they'll have less time to come up with dumb stuff in the name of political correctness.
How big of a problem is this in Wisconsin? Schubert doesn't know or isn't going to bother finding out. It apparently is a problem elsewhere.
Take the Seattle public school administrators who decided that the term "Easter egg" is culturally offensive," and substituted the term "spring spheres" instead.
Then there's the Chicago public school where an administrator banned lunches brought from home. She's enforcing this nutritional version of PC on the grounds that school lunches are more nutritious than the lunches kids bring from home.
Then there was the Rhode Island elementary school that invited its students to decorate hats. An 8-year-old took a camouflage baseball cap and glued an American flag and several little toy army men to it, as a way to honor our troops. But the school banned the hat because the little, tiny plastic guns that the little, tiny toy soldiers were holding violated the school's zero tolerance policy on weapons.
Finally, the moment of truth:
Now, none of this stuff happened in Wisconsin schools. Our administrators seem to be more focused on cracking down on cell phones, dirty dancing and breast cancer awareness bracelets that say "I (heart) Boobies" although a Baraboo administrator once banned the chant "USA!" from sports events because he said it meant "You Suck A--!"
Still, if the governor's budget forces some administrators to cut back on staff to the point where they don't have time to worry about political correctness in the classroom or the lunchroom, that's fine by me.
She might as well have gone all the way and estimated what percentage of the average Wisconsin school district budget is dedicated to enforcing political correctness in the classroom.
In her next column, Schubert will hopefully reference the Seattle Police Department's aggressive enforcement of jay walking and conclude that cuts to Wisconsin law enforcement is nothing to get our undies in a bundle for.
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