How Many Are You? The President Wants to Know

By Jill Kuraitis, 7-24-07

Don’t miss Sarrah Benoit’s funny story in this morning’s Idaho Statesman.

Nothing new under the sun here, but it’s yet another tale indicating that education apparently doesn’t begin at home in the White House.

Benoit interviewed Rebecca Greenwell, an Eagle high school student, after a trip to Washington, D.C. . Greenwell had breakfast with President Bush, and one of the questions Benoit asked her was, “So, you talked to him?”

Greenwell said, “Ya.  I said weird things. He was like, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Uh blara uh ecca.’ I don’t know why I said that. It was almost like a movie. 

He talks, well, he doesn’t have a good vocabulary when he talks.  It’s almost like he’s from Idaho.  Like, he asked me how many I was, not how old I was.”

Methinks Rebecca underrates some of us.  Mr. President, in Idaho “How many are you?” is dispensed with before kindergarten, you big doodyhead.

(We do, however, seem to have a problem with less vs. fewer.  For a long time, the speedy check-out lines at Albertson’s said, “10 items or less” until they were hounded with letters begging them to change it.)

Verbal mangling by Presidents isn’t unique to Bush, but he is prolific at it.  My all-time favorite bloopers are, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family!” and the classic, “Is our children learning?”

I’m not sure of President Bush’s reading grade level, but his theories about education funding and programs are hard for me to read.

In February 2006, Bush said: “We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations. We have made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country. … If we ensure that America’s children succeed in life, they will ensure that America succeeds in the world.”

But Bush’s budget for FY 2006 proposed the “first cut in overall federal education spending in a decade.” The administration requested a reduction of a half billion dollars, or 0.9 percent, from the 2005 spending plan.

Despite his speech about children needing to take more math and science, Bush ignores hard statistics, even those provided by federal research contractors.  Mathematica Research, Inc., under federal contract HHS 100-98 0010, recently released its report about the impact of abstinence-only sex education vs. comprehensive sex education.

The executive summary includes this: “Findings indicate that youth in the program group [abstinence-only] were no more likely than control group [comprehensive] youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.”

Those results come in spite of $1.5 billion federal dollars funding abstinence-only sex education.  In the next round of funding programs that his own administration has proven don’t work, the Bush administration has recommended that a total of $204 million be spent on abstinence-only-until-marriage education in FY 2008, up from $176 million in the current fiscal year.

Even math cripples like me know that if you spend $1.6 billion on something and it doesn’t work, it isn’t smart to throw millions more at it.  And if you spend millions on a huge research project and then ignore the results, that isn’t, er, smart either.

Mr. President, please take more math and science. Oh, and grammar.

I’m fifty-many, by the way.