Walker And Jindal Racing To The Bottom In Education

We've seen how current Republican wunderkind and Koch brothers employee of the year Wisconsin Gov. Scott "Koch Head" Walker (R-Kochland) proposes to burnish his wingnut credentials by slashing funding for the University of Wisconsin to the tune of $300 million while attempting to change the "Wisconsin Idea" that forms the public service mission of the University. He's also been going after primary and secondary public education during his entire tenure as a way of undercutting the teachers' unions, and he's not done yet:

Shortly after Scott Walker was first elected as governor of Wisconsin, he set about attacking the state's education system to prepare it for privatization. His first act was to cut more than a billion dollars from the education system. The effects of this massive cut were devastating, so much so that even the school district that Walker championed as a "success story" is failing horribly. 

This year, Walker and his Republican cohorts in the state legislature have upped their attacks on the public education system. Walker wants to eliminate the requirement that teachers actually know how to teach. Meanwhile, his cohorts in crimes against humanity are trying to mandate that the public schools they deem to be unworthy have to become private schools - all at the taxpayers' expense, of course.

His attacks have been so egregious, they've gotten the attention of media in "Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy country.  This is from an editorial by the Appleton (WI) Post-Crescent (h/t Crooks and Liars):

If you’re a fan of education, Gov. Scott Walker’s 2015-17 budget plan is a travesty. [snip] 

Walker is neither adding to the revenue limit nor including a per-pupil increase. For the next two years, districts will get the same money they have this year. If their fixed costs — like fuel, electricity or heating — go up, tough. Since a district’s budget is 80 to 90 percent personnel costs, the cuts will come from personnel in some form. 

And then, it gets worse.

And the Post-Crescent's editorial details how it gets worse... and worse.

Now turning to another Presidential hopeful, talibangelist Louisiana Republican Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, a man with a bleached-out self image, we see someone so desperate to attain something he will never attain that he's willing to sacrifice his State's already failing wellness (it is 50th among States in Politic-ho's annual review of education, health and well-being).  In addition to (like Walker in Wisconsin) doing a 180 degree reversal on Common Core, Jindal is taking aim at funding for the State university:

Jindal’s reality-avoiding rhetorical pose is his means of deflecting attention from his failures as an executive.  Louisiana now faces a $1.6 billion budget shortfall, some $300 million of which (the same number Walker has identified in Wisconsin) is meant to come out of higher education.  With the figures Jindal is proposing, Louisiana State University might well be required to cut up to 40 percent of its operating budget.  LSU is already near the bottom of flagship state universities in the amount of spending per student.  It is probably unreasonable to hope that the governor will consent to some invisible form of tax increase (in the most undertaxed of states) that can be called something else so that his pal Grover Norquist–who wanted Mitt Romney to make Jindal his running mate in 2012–can sleep easily.

Jindal, like Walker, is simply a stalking horse for the right-wing anti-teacher union/ charter/ private school industry (e.g., "American Principles Project") that ultimately wants to gut public education and replace it with schools that teach such concepts as American Exceptionalism and creationism, and that do the bidding (as they do) of corporate benefactors.  Mostly, however, they want to destroy one of the pillars of the Democratic Party, and if that means students and the nation suffers, so be it.