Numbers Don't Lie

My son would like everyone to know that summer vacation has only just begun, but if a certain New Hampshire state legislator had his way, it might go on for a while longer for some of his state's youngest students. Bob Kingsbury recently claimed that analyses he’s been carrying out since 1996 show that communities in his state that have kindergarten programs have up to four hundred percent more crime than localities whose classrooms are free of five-year-olds. Bob's municipality has the only kindergarten program in the county and the most crime, including most or all of the county's rapes, robberies, assaults and murders.
Is it any wonder then that he opposes New Hampshire's public kindergarten mandate? "We're taking children away from their mothers too soon," Kingsbury said. Never mind that essentially every other published bit of research suggests just the opposite, Ol' Bob points out, "In World War I, London was being bombed by the Germans and they sent the children out of the city. That was a disaster for England." If you're having trouble with that train of logic, hold on. It gets shakier. "Children go to kindergarten at the point of a gun," Kingsbury said. "Children go to day care and it's not the same; there is no point of a gun." Day care and preschool are choices. Kindergarten is not. Never mind that for many working parents, having a place for their school age children to go is not a choice, not that anyone is pointing a gun at them. That would be a crime, and would have to be included in those very curious statistics he's espousing.
Did I mention that Bob is a Republican? A Tea-Party-ish Conservative Republican? Maybe the kind of guy who might be able to fathom the relationship between the global average temperature versus the number of pirates over time. After reading all of this, you might reconsider that job as a kindergarten teacher and decide to become a pirate.