IF I HAVE TO PAY IN, I GET TO WEIGH IN Being quite deliberately childless myself, I have historically kept my big mouth shut on the subject of child-rearing.  However, now that I realize that the biggest chunk of my ever-increasing taxes go toward the education of other people’s crumbsnatchers, I’ve decided I’m fully qualified to wade into the fray. First of all, enough with the simpering about children being our greatest resource while funds are cut right and left from childcare, healthcare and early education.  Federal and state bureaucracies play a never-ending shell game with dollars meant to reach poor children, slashing budgets and crippling existing agencies while loudly touting new “programs” of questionable merit and vague oversight. The Florida school voucher system is a prime example.  Though the state Supreme Court recently ruled it unconstitutional because it discriminates against poor children, the program’s advocates are busy plagiarizing the original plan into a new bill to present to the Legislature in a blatant effort to overturn the court.  Meanwhile, Headstart’s proven early-education programs struggle for funding and working parents struggle to find affordable, safe childcare. (Next time your babysitter’s sick, try dropping your child off at your state representative’s office.) Here’s a huge untapped source of funding for children’s services: all right-to-lifers should be charged a child-support tax.  They’re all about everyone else’s obligation to reproduce, so it seems only reasonable that each should pony up for the care and education of at least one of the fetuses that they’ve harassed or legislated into being.  This measure should keep cash in the coffers to help raise all these little accidental miracles. And there’s no reason for DCF to be whining about a shortage of adoptive homes.  Shut up with that!   There is a felon-free, safe, loving, financially secure family for every child in Florida who needs one, just waiting for government officials to get off their sanctimonious high horses and recognize the healthy and qualified gay families who petition the state every year to adopt a needy child.  Instead, the Department of Children and Families mutters inane nonsense about how much better off kids are when they’re raised by a mother and father.  This from the bureaucracy --made up of people, some of them mothers and fathers--that routinely loses children and hands kids back to abusers.  Abusers who identify almost unanimously, I might add, as straight.  Most of them, furthermore, are mothers and fathers, which suggests that the shining hetero family model might be a little overblown. And while we rehash the same arguments about kids’ welfare in the abstract, real live kids are shuttled between foster homes of dramatically varied quality and duration, often separated from siblings who are their only link to that revered biological family, their lives playing out in real time while politicians postulate. And then there’s the teacher shortage, a condition perplexing only to the administrators and officials charged with correcting it.  The compensation for teachers is absurdly and, it must be said, artificially low, relative to the value our society insists it places on that profession.  It’s a wonder they can find anyone willing to even attempt to educate the little heathens at all.  The classified ad reads something like this:  YOUTH WRANGLER NEEDED.  YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR TWICE THE NUMBER OF STUDENTS YOU ARE ABLE TO DEAL WITH.  YOU WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR ALL OF THEIR FAILINGS, ACADEMIC AND BEHAVIORAL.  YOU WILL BE CRUCIFIED IF YOU ATTEMPT ANY FORM OF CREATIVE, OUTSIDE-THE-BOX DISCIPLINE OR CREATIVE, OUTSIDE-THE-BOX TEACHING METHODS.  WE ARE INTERESTED ONLY IN STUDENTS’ ABILITY TO TAKE A STANDARDIZED EXAM.  OUTSIDE-THE-BOX THINKING OF ANY KIND WILL BE DISCOURAGED.  WE ARE NOT BIG ON OUTSIDE-THE-BOX.  WE PREFER TO REPEAT THE ROTE METHODS WE’VE BEEN USING WITH MEDIOCRE RESULTS TO DATE. NEW HIRES MUST PROVIDE THEIR OWN BALLISTIC VESTS, PAPER, CHALK AND ABOUT A MILLION OTHER THINGS NOT PROVIDED FOR IN THE BUDGET. FOR THIS YOU WILL BE PAID LIKE AN ILLEGAL FARMWORKER, WHEN YOU FACTOR IN OFF-THE- CLOCK HOURS OF PAPERWORK. Still somehow a few amazing, altruistic people come forward to take on the awesome task of enlightening the unwilling, and lo, we have schools--and sometimes even education, in spite of FCAT- wielding administrators. Teachers should therefore be paid at least league minimum—National Football League minimum, that is.  So you don’t have to explain to your kid that his teacher’s not really as valuable as that third-string Bucs cornerback. Now if we can just keep the fundamentalist fringe from inflicting its revisionist history and pseudo- science upon the nation’s kids, we’ll be pointed in the right direction.  To that end, any such people who approach a public school with a recommendation to edit a history text, or rewrite a science text, or censor literature based on some personal spiritual conviction should be beaten with a ten-pound fossil.   (Note to Kansans and other literalists: fossils are those funny-shaped rocks y’all keep tripping over on your way to “intelligent design”.  Mind your step.) By the way, a decades-long study reported in the Journal of Research into Personality has found that whiny, insecure children generally grew up to become rigid, conservative adults uncomfortable with ambiguity and novelty.  Independent, outgoing children more often grew up to be liberal, open adults with wide interests.  UC-Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block admitted their test sample of 100 1960’s Berkeley nursery-school children was far from random, but other studies have corroborated their findings. Just something to think about when you’re considering whether to strangle the sniveling, whining monster kicking the back of your restaurant booth throughout your dinner. ###