Avid newspaper reader that you are, I trust you’ve already read the stories in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution concerning funding problems with the HOPE scholarships.
Yup, running a little short on money. Now the stories don’t exactly highlight this, but the real problem here is grade inflation.
Georgia’s government schools are graduating far too many high school seniors with “B” averages who couldn’t read the back of a Cap’n Crunch cereal box.
You can almost read the thoughts of the high school teachers: “This kid couldn’t do ‘B’ work if, like, his, like, backpack and, like, skateboard, like, depended on it; If I give him the ‘C’ or ‘D’ he truly deserves he might not get into college.
“I don’t want to be the person who relegated this future Democrat to a lifetime of collecting shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot, so I’m going to go ahead and give him his ‘B’ and just hope he catches on somewhere down the line.”
The grade inflation thing isn’t going to change. We don’t have someone to stand up to the teacher’s lobby. This means we have to look at ways to: (a) Get more fools to throw their money away on the lottery (a tax on the stupid); and/or (b) cut the HOPE scholarship costs.
So I’m cruising along dodging holes on Peachtree the other day when it occurs to me that a lot of money might be saved if the kids downloaded their books onto e-readers like the Kindle
How I would have loved to have had my textbooks safely stored on a Kindle. Every book for every course on one little half-pound device I can carry everywhere.
Plus, you have such wonderful features as having your place in every book saved automatically, and creating those wonderful clipping files! You just highlight text you want to save with a cursor, hit the save button and the material is saved to a file you can print later.
Plus, if the light is bad you can simply push a button and the Kindle will read to you! Now come on, what could possibly be wrong with this idea?
Well, plenty, as it turns out.
As is usually the case, I wasn’t the first brainiac out there who thought of Kindle’s replacing expensive school textbooks. A few colleges — Princeton and Arizona State, for example — decided last year to try a little experiment with e-book readers. The motives seemed honorable.
First, it would be a lot cheaper for the student. College textbooks can be very costly.
Then there’s the added advantage of appealing to the environmental sensibilities (if that’s what you want to call it) of the college students by not killing so many trees to print books.
All seemed rosy with the e-book reader until that letter arrived from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Now pause a moment here and see if you can figure out where the civil rights violation might be.
Enough time. Let’s cut to the chase. The problem here was the Americans with Disabilities Act. The National Federation of the Blind doesn’t like the Kindle, you see, because it has buttons. If you’re blind you can’t figure out which button to push. Now bear in mind that the Kindle program at these schools was voluntary.
If you didn’t want to use the Kindle, fine! Buy the book! That wasn’t good enough for the Justice Department. To Thomas Perez, the Obama-appointed chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, it was “the importance of full and equal educational opportunities for everyone.”
The final agreement? Until blind people can use the Kindle, nobody can. So, no money saving opportunity there!
Perez, by the way, now has his sights on the Internet.
Be very afraid.
Listen to Neal Boortz live from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays on AM 750 and NOW 95.5FM News/Talk WSB.
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