Who in the World is Michael Brickman?

By Jeff Simpson

The fact that the state of education has deteriorated since Scott Walker has been in power can be summed up in two words - Michael Brickman!    Brickman, AKA Rich in retail:






  


Brickman who graduated from an East Coast university three years ago with a Political Science Degree.  Has a  very shallow resume of working for the losing campaign of John McCain and then joining the "Friends of Scott Walker" campaign as press assistant where he had such amazing successes as blatantly racist tweets and a Scott Walker 68 page economic plan typed in 60 point font! 

Brickman then turned his lack of career success and unaccounted for knowledge/interest in education and turned it into a job......Drum roll please......Education Policy advisor!   Honestly, you can not make this stuff up!  

Well Mr. Brickman(@BrickM) was "live tweeting" President Obama's State of the Union speech where he came up with this gem! 

1/2 way through the #sotu and I'm already getting my preschool and mortgage subsidized. IDK about smarter, but defintely bigger gov't
— Michael Brickman (@BrickM) February 13, 2013

It appears that Mike had a problem with this and feels that preschool should not be part of a public education.   As an "education policy advisor" you would think that mike would understand the value and importance of preschool.  

Scores of studies demonstrate that early education can have an enormous impact on a child’s cognitive and emotional development, dramatically improving school readiness and academic achievement. And high-quality preschool is a key reason why Finland now scores at the top in international student assessments.

But the benefits of preschool extend well beyond test scores. Research shows that an at-risk child who doesn’t receive high-quality early childhood intervention is 25 percent more likely to drop out of school; 40 percent more likely to become a teen parent; 50 percent more likely to be placed in special education; 60 percent more likely not to attend college; and 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime.

Thanks to these kinds of impacts, investments in early childhood education generate very large returns. For example, the National Institutes of Health projects that Chicago’s preschool program will produce up to “$11 of economic benefits over a child’s lifetime for every dollar spent initially on the program.” And the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis calculated that a well-studied Michigan program delivered a real rate of return of 16 percent. Indeed, even after excluding the benefits to the children who participated, the rate of return to the general public still exceeded 12 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, the stock market’s annual rate of return from the end of World War II through 2008 was only 5.8 percent.

I get that Mike Brickman is not smart enough to understand economics and return on investment, but I would expect that an "education policy advisor" in our great state should at least get the basics of education.   

Maybe the best way to close the "achievement gap" is to keep anyone who has never achieved anything away from writing our education policy!   

We all know that Scott Walker has a very very bad record of hiring incompetents,  and criminals.  Let us hope that Brickman is just an ignorant and not evil.  Let us hope that Scott Walker also shows us that he is serious about educating the youth of Wisconsin and re-assigns Mr. Brickman to something more matching his qualifications.

Someone has to wash dishes at the Governor's Mansion right?