Getting Out The Vote Doesn't Require Writing Skills

Drive near a road construction site in Illinois and you'll notice that there are a phenomenal number of workers not working.

There's one state worker to drive each truck. There's the guy who operates the steam roller. Neither one of them is allowed, according to union rules, to do anything else productive like shovel hot asphalt out of the back of a dump truck.

So it makes perfect sense for the State of Illinois to find savings by reducing education.

You don't need to know how to diagram a sentence to operate a concrete saw, do you? All you have to do is know how to vote for the right somebody's somebody and you've got that high-paying job.

Students in public schools won't be required to take writing tests when they sit down for their standardized exams. That means that the teachers won't be compelled to teach writing because it's a waste of effort when student performance (and the teacher's perceived competence) won't be assessed.

The State is pleased to announce that $2.4 million will be saved. That goes a long way towards taming that multi-billion dollar shortfall.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is also going to come out ahead.

For years, the university has tried to increase its crop of out-of-state students who pay a much higher rate for the privilege of attending. With Illinois students not knowing how to write, it will be much easier to deny them access because they'll make a mess of the application essay and that will ease the burden on the bottom line.

That will leave slots open for the children of privilege or those who attend parochial schools where grammar is still taught the old fashioned way. The numbers are limited and manageable.

Assuming that the budget crisis is solved before 2014, testing will resume.

And then we'll be reading about Illinois students who can't write coherent sentences, while fingers of blame point in every direction.