Jerry Houseman opens mouth and inserts foot (again)

In today’s Bee, Melody Gutierrez, writes about teacher’s raises this fall amid a sea of pink slips. In the piece Jerry Houseman goes on the record, yet again, with his anti-teacher bias. Someone, perhaps a high-paid PR consultant, should tell him it’s inappropriate to use the term “everything” when debating a complicated issue.

“(Teachers unions) hang on to it real tight,” said Jerry Houseman, trustee of the Sacramento City Unified School District. “They think of it as their normal compensation. Everything involved in teacher compensation is difficult to negotiate.”

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Houseman’s Tax Harangue Goes Viral

Out of the mouths of (seemingly unnoticed) elected officials…

Jerry Houseman’s tax tirade apparently has gone viral with the anti-tax-tea-party crowd. The video has been posted by Blogger Joshua Trevino who describes Houseman this way:

Per Dr. Houseman: “They don’t want to pay for kids — your kids!” Well, no: the low-tax movement, and small-government ideology in general, is not actually about “not pay[ing] for kids” so much as it’s about being able to pay for one’s kids. We shouldn’t be much surprised at his outburst: in addition to being a lifelong education bureaucrat, and thus prone to the hammer/nail problem on these topics, he represents SCUSD’s Area 2. This affluent area includes Sacramento’s Fabulous Forties, the sort of urban bastion of well-to-do conventional white liberalism, with all its thoughtless reflexes, that plagues California politics — and hence California education.

The video has also been posted at these blogs: SacRag, Three Sources and Club for Growth

Jerry Houseman’s Tirade

Over at the SacRag, author Cool DMZ, makes an excellent catch about Jerry Houseman’s tirade at the last school board meeting. In case you missed it, (Item 10.4 part 2 near the end of the video segment) the outburst was nothing short of surreal, complete with browbeating and finger-wagging, about how Californians are tax-averse and unwilling to pay for public education.

In other words, Houseman berated audience members, with all the sanctimony he could muster, that we’ve brought this school-closing problem on ourselves.

Cool DMZ nails it when he writes:

The prospect of an elected official — charged with spending millions of taxpayer money — browbeating his constituents to cease their resistance to higher taxes while they have the gall to take advantage of a public service like education, is pretty frightening.

Why wasn’t Roy Grimes’ gavel hitting the table repeatedly on Houseman’s conniption? Grimes has no problem silencing the public when a timed, public comment minute is up. Houseman was completely out of line last Thursday and he needs calling on the carpet. Consider it done now, twice. Thanks SacRag.