DILLON COUNTY STUDENT CHOSEN TO SYMBOLIZE EDUCATION PROBLEMS DURING OBAMA SPEECH

When President Obama needed to find a student from a tragically failed education system for his address to Congress last night, he knew exactly where to look: South Carolina.

The state’s schools — led by the bureaucrat-in-chief, Jim Rex — are world-renowned for failure, waste, corruption and pretty much everything that could be wrong with public education. So how unsurprising that Obama chose a Dillon County student to be the symbol of the kind of educational decay that his massive spending plan will magically repair.

Ty’Sheoma Bethea became the face of the issue, when she joined first lady Michelle Obama as her guest for the president’s first speech to a joint session of Congress.

The White House invited Bethea, a student at the J.V. Martin Junior High School in Dillon, South Carolina, after a letter she sent lawmakers appealing for help rebuilding her school made its way to the president. [CNN]

Now, had Obama actually gone beyond the metaphor of Bethea’s crumbling school, he would have realized that a lack of spending has nothing to do with the problem. South Carolina spends more money per student than most states in the country. The problem is the bloated bureaucracy that evolves from too much government involvement. In other words, everything embodied by Obama’s spending package.