6/19/2005 01:00:00 PM|||Nathan Moore|||

This little nugget seemed to slip by unnoticed in the hurry to end the session and the newsworthy indictment of several betrayers of the public trust.

I already think the lottery is a mistake. Giving a wad more money to a governmental body with the rather generic label of "education" attached to it is a dangerous thing. It is a tax hike on those least able to afford it,and in the alternative enlarges goverment, which is always a dubious proposition. Previously earmarked tax dollars are simply rerouted. It is the opportunity cost of alternate confiscation of the people's money. One would think that the lottery's operation as a truly regressive tax would be something good liberals would stand up and shout about.

The legislature has approved what can only be described as a convoluted second-chance system. Remember, one only has to maintain a 2.75 GPA to keep the lottery scholarship. Now we're saying - no, not really. You can get it back. Boozing away a free education is ok (note that the author did a sufficient amount of that himself, though not with a free ride). And you can get it back by meeting the mean standard of all college students - maintain a B average. If a 2.0 was average, as it ought to be, and grade inflation hadn't made a 3.0 nearly meaningless as to ability, I may have another opinion. But providing a second trip around the government subsidy horn for the nonserious is bad public policy. The City Paper notes


Roughly 4,300 students finished their freshman year with a GPA of 2.75 or below, according to the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR), and another 1,100 fell in the warning zone between 2.75 and 3.0.

Also retroactive will be a rule allowing students to retake a course and drop the lowest of the two grades.

Retaking a course is another gaping budgetary hole. The ability to drop two grades is another. This creates a moral hazard of tremendous proportions. It creates an incentive to intentionally fail a marginal class, where additional work may be enough to salvage a C, or even a B, which would not only be good for the student's GPA, but also a valuable character building exercise. The ability to drop the two lowest grades is simply juvenile. That's what happens in high school. The fact that such a policy is acceptable in any collegiate scheme is unacceptable. Delaying maturity one step at a time.

Then there's this


Other students eligible for the first time are those who chose not to enroll in college immediately after graduating from high school or who initially attended an out-of-state school.

A 16-month window allows students to work or travel after high school without losing the opportunity to take advantage of lottery scholarships.

According to the State of Tennessee, backpacking across Europe, mooching on your parents' for a year after high school graduation, or just generally delaying the ascension to adulthood is now desirable social behavior.

I don't have the time to fully flesh out all of the utterly disgusting parts of this bill, to include the one's I just mentioned. It hasn't been signed by the governor yet, but with our state constitution's requirement that a mere majority vote of the general assembly is required to override a gubernatorial veto, almost all bills are veto-proof upon initial passage.

There you have it. The State of Tennessee is the grand salami in the rush to mediocrity. We sacrifice our state's resources to encourage the subpar to go to college and fail, then give them a second chance to prove that they truly are as subpar as originally thought. Brilliant.

|||111920556859662245|||Arrgh