Bill White for Texas Governor!

He's just so smart, and witty! Been reading about him and some of his brilliant statements. Truly, a man for our time:

Current Texas Governor "Perry's claim of 10 percent dropout rate does not include students who continue in school, switch to home schooling, or have no follow up data. These students are not tracked, and the governor does not know whether or not they ever graduated," says Bill White. We can't just let these students slip through the cracks! We need to track their every move minutely! The governor doesn't know what happened to every last student in the state of Texas once they've left school, one White supporter claims, BECAUSE HE DOESN'T CARE!

Oh, yeahhh. I think the students for whom we have "no follow up data" should be counted as dropouts. Since we have "no data" on them, we KNOW there must be something very bad going on here. "No data" means that we can make the data say all kinds of things that may or may not be true. I think most of these "no follow up data" people are actually Martians who have completed their training on earth and have returned to their home planet. Governor Perry is hiding something there, because there is no "follow up data." Maybe we need to microchip our students to see if there is a "students leaving for Mars" trend.

Um. And I think I need to go back to school myself to figure out how homeschoolers are "dropouts" per se. I suppose (vaguely) that they have "dropped out" of the system, but that hardly necessarily means they are not being educated, or better still, educating themselves. And the 10 percent dropout rate does not include students who "continue in school?" Should the word "dropout" now mean "continuing in school?" Bill White is sure smarter than me to have this all figured out!

I'm so confused! I think I need to move to Texas and vote for this White guy. He has no real data, but he just *knows* the dropout rate is close to 30 percent. I don't know about you, but I would want a clairvoyant governor who can pull numbers out of various parts of his anatomy and then demand that we all TAKE ACTION NOW.

He sure sounds like a take-charge kind of guy! He made sure to "clarify" his remarks on homeschooling in other places on his website. He wants to be sure parents don't falsely claim to be homeschooling, but then not educate their children. Because some public school falsified its records. I wish I were making this up! Read an excerpt from this post in which the wannabe governor declares his "support" (ha!) for homeschooling:

"In recent months, a number of reports have exposed public schools that falsify records in order present a lower than actual dropout rate. In many cases, students who have dropped out are falsely declared transfers or homeschooled students. One account (EEEK! ONE ACCOUNT! Mrs. C thinks we need to act fast on this one!) tells of a student who was asked to sign a paper stating that he was pursuing homeschooling, when in fact he had dropped out and was not continuing in education. Governor Rick Perry needs to hold school districts accountable for false dropout rates, and Texans need to hold Rick Perry accountable for his job performance. (YES! There was this ONE ACCOUNT of a falsified paper, and the governor now needs to be "held accountable" for his job performance!)

"When a public school falsely declares a child who has dropped out as a homeschool student, it hurts the credibility of all parents who choose homeschooling."

YES! You read that right! A public school falsifies records, and it MAKES HOMESCHOOLERS LOOK BAD. Not the public school! The homeschoolers. Kinda like how when there were fires in Rome, it made those Christians look bad. You know it's time to do something about *those* people.