WASHINGTON, D.C. – When President Bush returns to Washington early this week, he is expected to name Jessica Simpson as the face of his newest educational initiative: No Child Left Unpaid.
Desperate to claim any success before his administration is consigned to the shitheap of history, and to demonstrate that he, too, can nail celebrity endorsements, Mr. Bush has decided to wager the last of his political capital on the crapshoot of bribing children to do well in school.
“It’s such a simple idea the president is surprised no one’s thought of it before,” said White House press secretary Tony Snow on CBS’ Face the Nation today.
Actually, other people have thought of this idea before. School children in Chelsea, Massachusetts, are slipped $25 in unmarked bills for perfect attendance each report period. Some schools in Dallas, Texas, pay children $2 for every book they read. One school district in western North Dakota pays students $12.50 for every black-tailed prairie dog they bring to biology class for dissection.
The unique component of President Bush’s No Child Left Unpaid initiative is its generous payment schedule.
“Two dollars per book is an insult to a student’s intelligence,” said Mr. Snow. “Most kids can make twenty-five times that much selling pot in the same amount of time it takes them to read a book. Under the president’s plan children would be paid $200 per book. You dangle that kind of money in front of a kid and he’ll be spending more time in a library than a pedophile spends in the playground area at McDonald’s.”
In addition to being critical of the “sweatshop pay scales being imposed on children,” President Bush is said to feel that the “educational outcomes” being rewarded are sometimes misdirected.
“Paying all children to attend school is like saving the bath water and the baby,” said Mr. Snow. “In many districts we should be paying the majority of students not to attend school, and that’s what the president intends to do. If you give a high school kid $10,000 a semester to stay three hundred feet from any school in his neighborhood, pretty soon you’ve got thug-free school zones.”
Jessica Simpson, who is scheduled to appear at a joint press conference with President Bush on Friday, spoke to THEM Weekly reporter Rod Bender by phone from an undisclosed room in the Chateau Marmont.
“I’m just thrilled to be part of this here educational effort,” said Ms. Simpson. “If they’d a had something like this when I was in high school, I might of got a diploma instead of a certificate of attendance.”
Not surprisingly conservatives are dismayed over No Child Left Unpaid.
“Is there no idea so vile, no abdication of responsibility so pernicious that educators will not embrace it in a attempt to cover up the landfills they have allowed our public schools to become?” asked Pat Buchanan.
“One supposes the old maxim ‘those who can do, those who can’t teach,’ will now be amended to read, ‘and those who can’t teach bribe their students to learn.'”
Teachers, however, are more enthusiastic about the president’s initiative.
“There’s only so much quiet you can buy with lavatory passes and computer games,” said Heather Martingale, a ninth-grade remedial alphabet teacher in Atlanta. “If we had sufficient funds at our disposal, we wouldn’t have to resort to using our own money or, worse yet, sexual favors to keep students in line.”
In related news, the president’s mother, Barbara Bush, told The New York Times that she “wished we had paid the idiot more to study when he was at Yale.”
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