The Missouri House overwhelmingly rejected the gargantuan education bill, but the main core of the bill (which is just about everything except the positive things) could be resurrected by the end of the week.
Despite all of the controversial portions of the bill, including opening the door for school vouchers, adding incentive pay increases for teachers who are willing to give up tenure, and of course, Sen. Jane Cunningham's witch hunt to stamp all public schoolteachers as perverts and degenerates by adding yearly background checks and keeping teachers from communicating students through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, it was the good things in the bill that turned House Republicans against it.
The primary problem to them was Gov. Jay Nixon's proposal to extend the state's A+ program, which pays for a free community college education, to more students. "Too much money," the same legislators who are in favor of increasing paying more and more money for background checks (which are already being done) and who want to fork over money for drug testing of teachers (something which, thankfully, was about the only thing not included in this embarrassment of a bill).
The education bill is yet another in a long line of examples of horrible legislation crafted by waiting until the last week of the session, lumping everything together into unwieldy bills, and then hoping for the best. No matter how many times Missourians (and the legislators themselves) get burned through the usage of this method, they just keep on repeating their mistakes.
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