How a Teachers’ Rally Made Me Anti-Education
I write this essay with a heavy heart.
I’ve always considered myself an ardent advocate for education. But a recent rally staged by teachers and students in favor of school funding forced me to reluctantly acknowledge an awful truth:
We have to destroy education in order to save it.
Let me explain how I came to this miserable conclusion.
The May 13 “State of Emergency” School Funding Protest
A few weeks ago (on Friday, May 13, to be precise) teachers up and down the state of California protested for more school funding. This mass multi-city “State of Emergency” protest was meant to be a Big Deal, a headline-grabbing statewide walkout, but you probably didn’t even hear about it at the time, since I suppose the media and the public have grown weary of endless political demonstrations.
But not to worry — blogs to the rescue! Fellow photojournalist Ringo of Ringo’s Pictures fully documented the Los Angeles protest, and I myself had camera duty at the San Francisco rally, the results of which you’ll see here (along with a selection of L.A. pictures).
You may be wondering: if these protests happened back in May, why are we only seeing the pictures now? Very, very good question.
These photos have been languishing on my hard drive for three weeks because every time I got the notion to blog about them, something stopped me. I’ve been making fun of protesters for over eight years now, but this time, I felt conflicted. I mean, c’mon, what have you got against poor teachers and young kids pleading for a few more pennies to keep their schools open? What are you, some kind of cruel anti-education knowledge-hating sadist?
I had some serious cogitatin’ to do. And each time I pushed this report to the back burner, unbidden thoughts kept percolating, simmering in the back of my mind. And it was not until today that I figured out why these otherwise unremarkable protests were so disturbing, and why I could only grumble under my breath at what ought to have been a legitimate social complaint.
(Photos and videos from both the S.F. and L.A. rallies are scattered generously throughout the following short essay. When you come to a photo, soak it in but then keep scrolling down — the essay continues all the way to the end! In each caption, “[SF]” indicates a photo by zombie of the San Francisco rally; “[LA]” indicates a photo by Ringo of the Los Angeles rally.)
An unapologetically political teacher leads students in march favoring tax increases. [LA]
For most of my life I was what you might call an apathetic leftie — I didn’t particularly care about politics, but I always voted Democratic and if the conversation came up I would inevitably concur with my friends’ inevitably “progressive” opinions. And that most definitely included education. It was one of the few things I always had a strong opinion about: education was A Good Thing under all circumstances and maximizing everyone’s education level was ultimately the solution to all problems: unemployment, intolerance, ignorance, public health — everything.
In my youthful brain I couldn’t even conceptualize anything other than “public education,” so that’s what I imagined I was in favor of: Making public school, from pre-school up through graduate school, accessible to everyone and of the highest standards. I was like, Duh, how can you have any other opinion?
Elementary public school students learn radical chants from their teachers while posing for the cameras. [SF]
But then 9/11 happened and like many once brain-dead liberals I awakened to a new reality. I didn’t particularly like this harsh new world, but I could see quite clearly that I had been drifting in a haze before, unaware of what was really going on. Mostly, as with most 9/11 Newborns, my new political awareness at first focused primarily on foreign policy and American Exceptionalism, but little by little, once this end was tugged, the fuzzy yarnball of my former political self unraveled entirely.
(Now it just lies in a jumbled heap on the floor.)
I can’t blame the adorable children; most of them probably only had the vaguest grasp what their adult-made signs even meant. [SF]
But one belief never changed: Good education is necessary for a healthy society. This isn’t even a left/right issue: even conservatives will say that an educated America means an economically robust America means a strong America. And I still believe that.
Each one of the three signs depicted here merits a full analysis of its own; but I’ll simply let you the readers deconstruct the underhanded logical flaws in each message. [LA]
But as I walked around the rally in San Francisco, and later scanned the pictures taken by Ringo at the L.A. rally, I found myself thinking uncharitable thoughts about the protesting teachers: I hope your funding gets cut even more! Your demands are futile because the state is bankrupt anyway and there’s no more money to give; but even if the economy were to eventually recover, I would still want to see funding for public education slashed to a minimum.
Horrors! I was taken aback by my own thoughts. How could I be so cruel? What evil right-wing influence was making me think this way?
Class war = class war! Get it? Man, Marxist humor is funny. [SF]
And then I looked around me and realized: It isn’t the right-wingers who are making me think these awful thoughts: It’s the teachers themselves at this very rally who have forced me into it!
Teachers escort their classes from San Francisco’s public schools to the rally. The kids were obviously enjoying their first taste of progressive street politics. [SF]
Indoctrination as Education
Last year I published a massive five-part essay about the miserable state of education in America (and no, I won’t even link to the thing, because it would take you a week just to read it and this essay is long enough all by itself). Part 3 of that essay was called “Indoctrination Nation” and discussed the extent to which public schools have ceased to be places for educating America’s youth but have instead become indoctrination centers where our children’s brains are marinated in political correctness and leftist thought patterns. But a few thousand words were not enough to do the topic justice; entire books have been written about the leftist takeover of education. Yet it’s even bigger than that. Political bias in education is by now its own field of study.
“REPUBLICANS ARE BUIIIES,” spells this Los Angeles-area school teacher. OK — but what the heck is a buiiie? [LA (or should I say "lA")]
Even so, it’s hard to discuss the issue because the general adult public rarely gets a chance to actually perceive in person the kind of indoctrination that goes on daily in our classrooms. And without visual or experiential proof of the detractors’ claims, the indoctrinators always have plausible deniability: You wingnuts are hyperventilating over nothing! The only indoctrination going on is in your fevered dreams.
“Today, children, I want to teach you how to form your own opinions.” [LA]
In fact, the left-leaning teachers’ unions often claim the opposite: that standardized testing forces them to teach rote learning as neutrally as possible, because school funding is now tied to each school’s overall test results.
And that’s what these May 13 rallies were all about: funding. Money money money, give us more money.
And then it hit me why I had such an adverse reaction to the whole thing:
The very act of them asking for money is what made me not want to give them money, because it revealed their political bias.
The real agenda revealed. Ladies — you forget about the school part! [SF]
And here’s why:
• As you can see in the many photos illustrating this essay, their demands for more money were accompanied by many ancillary leftist slogans like “Tax the Rich!” and “Workers’ Power!” and “Cutting Education Is Class War” and so on. So this wasn’t just about requesting more funding for education: The content of the rally itself revealed that increasing school funding is just a component of a larger leftist agenda — school funding is being used as a lever to penalize the rich, increase power for unions, and so forth.
• The demand that unwilling taxpayers fund more government services is in and of itself a cornerstone of liberal ideology.
• The very act of having a street protest demanding handouts is essentially a leftist tactic, so the simple existence of teachers at the rally means that they embrace leftist ideology.
• As at other union rallies documented in earlier essays, socialist and communist groups mingled freely on May 13 with the teachers’ unions, their messages blending into a unified ethos.
• And the clincher: At both rallies, teachers brought entire classes of their students (this was held on a Friday, a school day, remember) to join in this overtly leftist behavior.
Many San Francisco teachers were apparently content letting their students carry signs from socialist and communist oganizations. [SF]
It’s this last point that really turned me sour on the whole thing. Dudes, are you seriously bringing your students from public schools to a leftism-soaked political rally? You’re supposed to be their teachers, not their indoctrinators.
The “United Teachers of Los Angeles” union brought along plenty of students — and Che stickers. [LA]
A close-up from the previous photo. Indoctrination? Where? Stop exaggerating! [LA]
And indoctrination it most certainly is. Check out this video of kids having the time of their lives shouting teacher-led socialist slogans through school-issued megaphones, and try to tell me they weren’t having a memorable and fun bonding experience:
Until attending this rally, I was still a little conflicted about school funding. In the final installment of my five-part education essay mentioned earlier, I even wrote the following:
Break the monopoly of public education, but keep it as a safety net
Public schooling will always have its flaws, mainly because it necessarily must be geared to the lowest common denominator. Even so, we cannot get rid of it entirely, for three basic reasons:
- Most parents do not have the time, patience, expertise or interest to either homeschool or spend a lot of effort choosing amongst a panoply of confusing small-school options. Large public schools will likely continue to be the default fallback option for many students.
- Some parents prefer that their children attend large public schools to help with their socialization and to increase their life experience as early as possible, and to prevent the potential isolation that sometimes accompanies homeschooling or specialty-schooling.
- We don’t want to revert to the era before public schooling when education was restricted to the wealthy elite. Public schools should remain as a safety net to ensure that all American children get an education, however underprivileged or dysfunctional their home lives may be.
That said, we need to break the monopoly of publicly financed mass-education. Attendance at large public schools should not be compulsory, or even encouraged. Charter schools, private schools, small schools and homeschooling should be considered the preferred way to go, and students should only be sent to large public schools as an emergency fallback if no better options are available in that area or neighborhood, or if (as occasionally happens) the local public school is outstanding in its own right.
San Francisco parents: Did you know that when you dropped your kids off at school that day, their teachers would take them to participate in a lynch mob? [SF]
But now, after seeing these rallies and pondering it some more — I’m not so sure. My suggestion goes off the rails in the first six words: “Break the monopoly of public education.” Oh really. How optimistic of you, zombie. And how exactly can that be achieved? As has become apparent over the last several years, the teachers’ unions and the progressive establishment have absolutely no intention whatsoever to release their grip on public education, not even one tiny bit, and they strive with all their might to crush any competition to the public school monopoly. They will continue to control the schools, and use them to indoctrinate children, unless that control is wrested forcibly from their hands.
Shades of the Cultural Revolution. [LA]
I think we’re going to have to let the entire western world destroy itself to save it.
Was having this discussion with a friend recently, thinking it might be better just to let the socialists have their way and then pick up the pieces when society collapsed…the conclusion we came to is that what would arise from the ashes of Western Civ won’t be Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, it’ll be Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il. Totalitarianism being sort of the default state of man. Our freedom is a fragile thing and we need to fight for what we’ve got, especially against fascists like the Teachers Unions and other government worker unions, because if these United States fall, all our hopes for freedom will go with it.
Read Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom” to see what happens if we allow this cancer to grow unfettered. We cannot just let society collapse, because, as one on the previous posters says, we will end up with a Pol Pot or Kim Jong Il.
Rememeber, 2012 is coming, just tell 10-15 friends about this essay, make sure that they read it. They are likely to realize what is the right way to vote at the next elections.
Mike Jonze said:
I don’t think there will be a Pol Pot type emperor after the collapse of Western Civ’s central governments. Emperors after all, need to have money to pay their imperial troops and police. No money, no police, no central authority, period. There might be a petty tyrant or two ruling over a tiny settlement, but there will also be small republics ruling over the remains as well as de-centralized feudal systems ruling over others. Much in the very same way Rome had collapsed. It is not going to be a good place for leftists seeking a world state.
Astounding….I had the same conversation with my brother two weeks and we agreed that we are inching left everyday and frankly I don’t think there is anyway to stop it. It will have to implode and then we can take action and try to put it back together again. And unlike Europe it won’t take 60 years to destroy us, we will go down much faster and in a country this size who the hell knows what will happen. Pray for a good ending, but keep your powder dry. 35% of all small arms (including standing armies) are in the hands of U.S. private citizens, a sad but essential and fortunate truth.
There are 4 million NRA members and 3.8 million teachers. The odds look good for after the implosion. I hope it never comes to this but the system can only be pushed so far and there is an end to how much debt we can accrue and still survive as a first world country.
i ke. Unfortunatly that wont work, what will happen is like what happens in greece. socialism fails so now they move to communism. byt the time it fails all the peopel will have been “pets” for so long they wont know how to survive. And communists/socialist/dictatorships are not known for their retaining of education. only stuff that suits them. Anything and anyone that has to do with freedom or the declaration of independance or constitution will have been mangled and destroyed. but unfortunatly our best bet will be for possible another civil war/American revolution. the communsts will soon enough begin their outward figting to take over. the govt will be complicite and helping them even tho they may try to make it look like they are fighting it. It will be up to patriots like you and me taking up arms, getting out and fighting to stop them. i dont say that with joy and i hope im wrong. but i would rather prepare for war and get peace than the alternative
I just don’t understand how people think socialism is a good idea. What were you doing in history class, smoking weed? Look what happened to russia when communism took hold, north korea, china…I mean cmon, there’s nothing but bad examples of what these leftist people want….I can’t believe people still get the wool pooled over there eyes.
We are already there. Ask yourself what would happen with an EMP event? All of the power grid goes down for an indeterminate amount of time. It could be days, weeks or months. Some guy wrote one called “One Second After” that does a fair job of showing what would happen. Though I think it is a bit overwrought the story sounds and smells true.
How would you survive? City or country? How much food and water of an imperishable type do you have? Any idea how much it takes to feed one person for a year? Truth is that 4 each 50 pound sacks of rice and/or beans per year per person allow you to live. Add canned goods and you may be able to survive. How would you defend you and yours plus the stash from marauders? Could you? Would you?
If the disaster lasted a year or more the die off would be 80% to 85% of total population.
I would survive just fine (I either know exactly how to do what I need to do, or I know where to find out in print form). The question is what would happen to me if I was thriving and others weren’t.
In that situation, I would pray I had enough ammo.
Those pictures of kids being taken out of class and taken on school time to a socialist street rally are beyond belief! Talk about indoctrination!
Imagine the reaction if a conservative teacher had cancelled class and instead taken all her students to a Tea Party rally, or an anti-immigration rally, during school hours. She’d be arrested! We’d never hear the end of it. But stuff like this shown here…silence from the media.
If this is what public education has become, I agree: it needs to wither and die. We might as well be sending our kids to communist boot camp.
It wasn’t to this point when I was going, and the area where I went to HS was a good bit different, but it does not surprise me that this is where it has gotten to.
I remember when I was in middle school, I got into some advanced placement classes, including one on environmental science. I’ve always been fascinated by how ecosystems work, so it sounded good. The teacher was a hard-core greenie back before greenies were all the rage, and like all good greenies, she wanted everyone else to be one too. Problem was, she had us do research papers on all number of things, and I’m a hard-core data-hound. I read everything about everything, even back when that meant digging it out of encyclopedias bigger than I was. (The Internet and Wikipedia have been like a combination of crack and the nectar of the gods for me.)
I did a paper on nuclear power. I dug up everything, “The China Syndrome”, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc, etc, etc. End conclusion, the fears about nukes were way overblown, and blocking it had kept dirtier power online.
Same deal with the logging. The eco-terrorists were killing more trees and more people than the loggers were, and, unlike the loggers, weren’t replacing what the cut down, and were letting what they’d spiked just rot.
What I consistently found was radical environmentalists often doing far more damage to the things they purported to be trying to protect, than the entities they were purporting to be trying to protect against. They were not just failures, they were destructive and dangerous failures.
If you want to convert students to that, you don’t ask them to research it and then set them loose in a major research library.
“radical environmentalists often doing far more damage to the things they purported to be trying to protect…”
Indeed. And let’s not forget that sacrificing humans over a stupid bait fish is part of their strategy. Look at the once productive Imperial Valley…now in complete ruins, with thousands of acres and food out of production and with 40,000 people ruined.
For a a freaking fish!!
It’s imperative that they also ruin the minds and futures of the young and gullible so the class struggle will continue.
The real enemies of America is the party of socialism, secession, slavery, class warfare…the demrats. Lock and Load America.
I couldn’t help but observing that most of these kids were Latinos too. How many illegals are out there carrying signs demanding more from a broke state?
I am completely outraged by the number of students in attendance on this obviously politically biased rally. I noticed you mentioned the number of Latino children in attendance. Likely this is how so many got permission from parents for there attendance. True something needs to be done about schools and the funding issue. But I think it should start with the state and local governments and remove federal involvement all together.
yes Noop I think thats just what our so called educational system has become. an indoctrination center for the kids. wonder just how much TAX PAYER money was blown on this demonstration. every teacher involved in this mess should be fire and have their certification revoked. did anyone pay any attention to all of those UNION MADE SIGNES they were carrying?? this whole show was staged by the UNIONS,
Astonishing. Does it really cost more money to teach basic grammar? I mean, really.
Grammar is racis, you know.
Taxing the rich and the corporations simply destroys jobs and raises prices. The teachers either refuse to understand this or don’t give a damn because of their own greed.
It was not leftists, but establishment “liberals” or “moderates” who are responsible for the current crisis in the public schools. To be sure, once the education establishment caved in to the demands of cultural nationalist movements allied with Leninists, they cut their own throats. For one example, see http://clarespark.com/2011/05/28/who-is-a-racist-now-2/ or http://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/. Or http://clarespark.com/2010/07/15/index-to-black-power-blogs/. It is not surprising that opportunistic leftists have muscled in and taken control of public education, but “liberals” opened the door, thinking that they could co-opt and dispel urban “unrest.”
I can’t agree more. I have liberals who are coworkers and family. As a conservative, I know what we stand for and I would say that when it comes to policy, these liberals agree with me 80%-85% of the time. I think the majority if liberals refuse to inform themselves, fear leaving “the party or they’re in denial.
I don’t call them liberals anymore. They are Progressives. When in our history books Che Guevera is listed as a hero and we have self admitted Communists like Bill Ayres as Profs what can we expect. They have been indoctrinating our children for decades. This is proof of the length they will go to. Taking the children to this demonstration. Creating a bunch of little brown shirts. Van Jones the self admitted Communist is still going around talking to our children. There is a video of him on the net telling a group of school children that they no longer need to respect their parents or Grandparents. Making fun of Grandparents that sometimes ask their children for help on the computer. I saw a video of Gore telling children that they are smarter than their parents. Why are these men even allowed to talk to our children. Especially the communist. I agree it will probably all collapse around them but will it be too late? We have always supported the dictators in other countries with Foreign Aid. When none of us are employed, what country is going to send money to our Dictator. What happens when there is no money for welfare, food stamps, etc. What happens when the illegals are living in a country just like the ones they fled. Where are they going to run to then.
We Americans have fought and sometimes died for every right we have and yet we are forced to give these rights to people who wouldn’t stay and fight in their own country. And now we will have to fight again.
Clare, you make a very powerful point. I believe this is the origins of the phrase “useful idiots”. I agree, that many in the education establishment do not support Marxism. But, when you open your window at night, you don’t have a lot of control over which flying insects enter.
Here in Madison (WI) we recently had a similar episode. A bunch of union-supporters hi-jacked a ceremony for Special Olympics… simply because the hated Governor Walker was speaking.
Sure, many good-hearted Lefties were offended and tried to distance themselves from this tasteless, disgusting, pathetic display. But, sorry! They have to own it; they have to wear it.
Once they opened the door to all manner of protests that over-stepped all manner of social etiquette and civil courtesy (vulgar protest signs, shouting down opposing counter-protesters, barging into private businesses and interfering with commerce, intimidating free citizens, legislators running away from their jobs because they can’t get their way)… sorry, they have no right to plead “innocent” when one of their proteges simply picks up their torch and takes it one stride further into the land of Tasteless.
(Thx for listening; I feel better.)
CJ and others, thanks. I started reading up on education reform, and wrote a recent review of Steve Brill’s book here: http://clarespark.com/2011/08/31/review-steven-brills-class-warfare/. You will see that I criticize him for ragging on Scott Walker. He is such a progressive!
Well, remember the children singing the Obama, Obama, Hunh, hunh, hunh video? I was in a New York City elementary school before the election and the halls had many pictures of Obama…… And take a look at the teachers’ unions’ newspapers. They are very interested in what is going on in Honduras for example.
I have to agree, inre to the way the U.S.A. is headed. Basically, with b.o. and the unions … straight down the tubes. I also realized WHY, these clowns use Che as their hero. NoONE remembers who he was and what he did. MAYBE, if the kids today, were given posters and stickers of someone like kim jong il, idi amin, ali gabon, or some of the other “hero’s” of the left, then maybe the kids would understand, a little better, why these idiots are WRONG in what they are trying to do to America.
“9/11 Newborns,” great phrase!
But I’m surprised at how long it seems you took to come around on education, zombie. Leftist control of education, entertainment, and news media is something we libertarians and conservatives have been lamenting for ages.
Proposals exist out there to untether kids from school districts and re-channel educational funding from public schools to individual kids themselves — an educational allotment would follow the kid, to be applied to tuition at the school of the parents’ choice.
Teacher’s unions across the nation are freaking out as the public gets savvy to all this. Hope is at hand!
As long as our pro-union Community-Organizer-in-Chief is in charge, hope is on hold.
The world economic order is collapsing, the debt burden is crushing everyone, and fear rules.
These people are not so much demanding more money, they are in panic because deep inside they know that the economic train wreck is coming, no matter what.
It will not be a pretty sight, it could even be worse than the Thirties because the social contract in place then, you know, civility and non violent behavior, is no longer around.
“These people are not so much demanding more money, they are in panic because deep inside they know that the economic train wreck is coming, no matter what.”
Very insightful. I’m sure you’re right. When the economic train wreck comes, those who have been scamming the public are going to be dropped like a bad habit. And it is clear parents have had enough. When Black parents in NYC protest the NAACP over the issue of charter schools, you know change is in the wind.
Yes.
The sign should read ‘Tax the corporations, and feed me; I can’t wait.’
That is as close as the protester can get to his true message: ‘Save me !’
The key is the nexus between education and the government teachers unions. To free the children, we must break the unions.
But as I say, the unions will simply not be broken. They will take down the whole society with them rather than give up power (see Wisconsin for a preview).
Unless we get the bravest president in history, who will fire all unionized teachers nationwide and break the unions the way Reagan broke the much smaller air traffic controllers union, then the only alternative is to let the public school system die of natural causes.
And I don’t see a president with that kind of balls/ovaries anywhere on the horizon.
No President has or should have the power to conduct such a mass firing, it isn’t in the constitution. Neither is the Dept. of Ed. in any fashion.
I propose that as long as any money is going to be unconstitutionally spent on public education, that it should be disbursed directly to parents as a voucher for reimbursement for expenses already undertaken in the year, one valid only in the event the school in question meets objectively measured performance standard with respect solely to “hard” subjects–did they get true/false, multiple choice, and mathematical answers correct.
I believe that such a voucher system expenditure should be fixed at 50% of the current DoEd’s budget, and that amount by law declining by 10% per year until it is zeroed out.
Why not just cut taxes by the amount paid for education, and let people pay direct for education? Cut out the middle (tax) man.
“No President has or should have the power to conduct such a mass firing, it isn’t in the constitution. Neither is the Dept. of Ed. in any fashion.”
Wrong. The power to form public unions was borne of an executive order by Kennedy(?) and it should die a sudden horrific death the same damn way. Predictably, the types attending this event will revolt and they should all be summarily FIRED. It’s against the law in California to teach marxism and US overthrow in school so it all works out correctly in the end.
Good idea; never happen. The problem is vouchers mean that the government trusts parents to see that their children receive a proper education. There’s no way any liberal would do that, and most conservative politicians aren’t much better. No way they’re going to cede control to lowbrow idiots who might have voted for a Republican in the last election! Smart people know that teachers are wiser than the rest of us, and will do a much better job teaching our children once they receive massive pay increases for less work. Everyone knows this, and only fools think differently. The only other blot on the teachers escutcheon is standardized testing. *All* testing should be abolished, because grades are unfair judgments about students that tend to belittle those children who aren’t brilliant. Besides, without testing, if the children are illiterate when they graduate we’ll never know, and we won’t be able to blame the teachers.
Your headline is wrong. The rally has made you pro education. It sounds like you used to be anti-education just as those teachers are.
The one positive thing I’ll say about the rally is that I didn’t see any misspelled words on the signs.
When the “teachers” rally in Pennsylvania it seems that more often than not there are.
How about “approching” on the “education needers” sign?
The President has nothing to do with it. He could neither conduct such a mass firing nor obstruct it. The Governor, on the other hand, is free to tell the school districts this(ese) strike(s) is/are illegal, and you are free to fire teachers for unauthorized absence, without severance or pension. If you cannot replace them, hire them back as substitutes and pay them as substitutes. Even if they do manage to shut down the schools with their sickouts, they will pay a high price for doing so, as they will lose half their pay or more over the stunt.
It’s worse than ya’ll think. We have 6 kids, educated on three continents, 5 countries, 6 foreign schools, 11 American schools, public and private, plus three universities. We have more primary source experience with comparative education observation, and experience than most Americans, bar none, and believe me, it wasn’t anything we set out to do, just trying to get our kids educated. I can attest that the current American education system is a disaster, and our nation has literally lost a generation because of it. It’s about union jobs and Left deconstructionism, NOT about skills delivery. The enormous expensive textbooks are illogical – on purpose!! There is NO TEACHING. It’s a horror to have an adult generation literally FAIL to pass on their skills to the next generation. AMerica will pay dearly for this for years, compounding into the following generation after this one, for what can an ill-equipped generation pass on to the next?
Meanwhile, other countries did not go this route and still TEACH, with actual TEACHERS who know their subjects. While our education establishment lies and lies, spinning international testing results to downplay the American fail, coaching student through exams, politically pressuring national testing to dummy down, open book, open notebook exams, exam prep that is literally pre-answering every single exam question before the exam, and even tampering with exam results, our students graduate literally UNEDUCATED. 12 years, but they are functionally worthless. Yet schools demand more and more time of students, filling their after school hours with busy work and worthless drudgery – expanding their oppressive control over the students’ private time.
zombie, have NO sympathy for those people, they sold out the children, they hijacked the profession, they chased out real teachers, they lie and they blame everyone else. They demand new buildings, new technology, teaching assistants, smaller classes, computers, exam scanners, so they can drink sodas and eat food in front of students instead of work. They consume money like water and give NOTHING back, but snarls and lies. I have WITNESSED this in school after school, not quoting some study. The results of the Third International Math and Science Test accurately convey how how of step US education is with the rest of the world; ignore the protesting squeals of “educators” who try to argue otherwise. WE’ve had our kids in foreign schools and in AMerican schools – the foreign schools are BETTER at easily HALF the effort: sensible, well-organized curriculum, actual teaching produces what almost seems like miracles to Americans, but it’s what we USED TO DO.
http://sonoranalliance.com/2011/04/27/american-education-miscommunication-esl-and-foreign-language-instruction-fail/
http://sonoranalliance.com/2009/10/09/educating-arizona-adding-up-to-fail/
zombie, you cannot believe what you can see, just sitting the corner of a classroom, quietly watching. The teachers are all perfection for five minutes, then they forget you’re there and then you see – and they actually don’t have a clue as to how bad what they are doing and not doing looks.
Worse, a good education is the ticket out of poverty and the way to upward mobility. The current education establishment is destroying access to that route to achievement by failing to deliver skills that students need to get ahead. The new meme out from the Democrats is to boot out low achievers to raise scores!! A statistical gimmick, that will ruin struggling students. Our local high school has a genuine mix of upper middle class, middle and poor: five years ago, 20% of the class went to college, of that 20% only ONE STUDENT actually GRADUATED with a college degree. ONE out of 100 high school graduates of that class got a college degree. You are right, they will not give up anything, but the system is destroying our nation’s people.
Great comment.
I will also note a devastating statistic that confirms your testimony, a statistic that gets glossed over:
Everyone is now pointing to the new study that showed something like 45% of adult Detroiters are now functionally illiterate. That’s bad enough all on its own, but the worst part of it is:
Fully HALF of those illiterate Detroit adults have a high school diploma!!!
Which means that somehow, these people managed to go through 13 years of daily schooling, and got passing grades, and graduated — and then emerge from the experience unable to read and write!
W…T…F…??!?!??!??!???!
In “my day” — which wasn’t that long ago — you couldn’t get out of FIRST GRADE without being able to read.
Standards must have fallen so low, and teaching has become so atrocious, that one could probably learn more just from sitting at home and watching Sesame Street and Wheel of Fortune.
My husband & I are graduates of the Detroit Public Sewer System and can absolutely attest to those statistics. My own sister was one who went all the way through high school and was functionally illiterate. My husband & I were lucky in that we were in the gifted programs and had more actual education. I started 9th grade in 1988 with about 700+ freshman. When I graduated, our class was 103. My husbands class (1 yr before mine) was ever smaller. Despite spending more money per pupil than the “rich, white suburbs” all we ever heard was more, more,more. As it turned out, there was so much fraud in the system, they actually had every person on the payroll show up in person a few years ago. They had to weed out all of those unable to pick up their paychecks because they were dead, sometimes for years!
If you ever want to see what decades of leftist control, race baiting & blaming, along with every social engineering idea known to man leads to, see my hometown. I am absolutely thankful to the US military for getting us out & our children are not stuck in that cesspool of miseducation.
Zombie I can’t resist:
Which means that somehow, these people managed to go through 13 years of daily schooling, and got passing grades, and graduated — and then emerge from the experience unable to read and write!
W…T…F…??!?!??!??!???!
In “my day” — which wasn’t that long ago — you couldn’t get out of FIRST GRADE without being able to read.
Nota bene how well the Detroit Free Press is doing, the New York Times, The Washington Post. Their political skulduggery has planted the seeds of their demise.
When they have reached the point where NO ONE can neither read nor write, they will have created their own doom.
Why would anyone buy a newspaper save to line the bottom of the cage….?
It is not for the children. When you hear that lie, run.
tom
I am a public school teacher in Texas. First, why are these California teachers allowed to trash one precious day of student learning and take them out of class to indoctrinate them? Our educational system has been in trouble for some time. There is great pressure on teachers to have a high pass rate. If your failure rate is too high, the administration is on you like stink on poop. So, to keep the administrators off their backs, many teachers wrongly have inflated grades. Kids are pretty smart and have figured out that they can do nothing and learn nothing and still pass. I still teach content, I try to ignore pressure for higher grades from parents, students, and administrators. I want my students to be ready for real life and for the rigor of higher education. I am in the minority in this respect. The way to a better job and a better future is education – you can tell I am the product of middle-class working parents who believed that hard work is the road to success. I will fight to my death (or retirement, which every comes first) the right of the students to receive a great-quality education.
The pres dosent and shouldnt, but we the people do, at some point either we are gonna have to start refusing to pat for this via withholding taxes or the system will collapse on its own. people will look at this post and laugh and say “we cant withold taxes” but I ask WHY? if we continue to cough up the cash to pay for this crap, then what reason do politicians have to stop? what reason do unions have to stop? what do they have to fear? old people at tea parties with signs and lawnchairs? ‘nonviolent protests” ? the unions will get their way because of the circular bnature of the animal. the unions scare the politicians, the politicans scare us into paying more and the unions get the money and what they want. and the cycle starts anew. we have the ‘power of the purse strings’ we control the money. So why are we so afraid to use the power we are given. The constitution, the bill of rights…both thoes documents fall under the shadow of the Declaration of independance. It is THAT document which provided the spirit of thoes other 2 documents and our country. Without that spirit, the govt can make pretty much anything it wants ‘constitutional’. with out that document the unions and other special interests can make anything it wants a ‘right’. Thats why the DOI is the key to saving our country. the unions sole job is to stay in power. the govts sole job is to stay in power. its our job to make sure they dont.
I would like to see parents simply refuse to send their kid to public schools. Of course that’s against the law so they would have to do it en masse.
My mom is a very well read women. The other day she said, “Public education should probably be considered unconstitutional. It is like an establishment of religion.”
Robert I agree with you 110%,
Great job Zombie.
Keep shining the light of truth…while you still can. If these people have their way, you could wind up in prison for stating the obvious.
yes, beware the dea sending in their “swat” teams to “reeducate” you
*department of education (not “dea”)
The education vacuum sounds great right up until we get to the point where anyone could step in.
There are some folks who would salivate over being able to influence young minds.
I’m more inclined to fix the engine than throw it out completely.
Not saying nothing is wrong or that certain parts won’t get the shaft (they will!) but the method you propose seems a little drastic at this juncture.
Yes, and they’re teachers, NEA bosses, and DoE bureaucrats now.
As far as I’m concerned, DoE stands for Department of Energy, which at least serves the legitimate purpose of producing and maintaining the nuclear arsenal. The Department of Education is the DEd.
I agree with your thinking that “DOE” stands for department of energy. As for the department of education, I think of an old “Wall Street Journal” editorial referring to it as “DOPE”- Department Of Public Education”.
At this juncture, we are in deep doo-doo!!!
Public employee unions were only allowed by executive order. Nixon, 1971, I think it was.
To fix this, the next President needs to undo that order, and poof, no more SEIU, NEA, ATF, etc….
Reagan revoked the power from the air-traffic controllers. He should have banned them all, but Reagan was a former Dem and Union head.
Neither Bush was willing to do it. Seeing as how these unions funded incredible opposition to them, you would think they would, but “moderate” Republicans play the game as it is. They LIKE the system.
“Public employee unions were only allowed by executive order. Nixon, 1971, I think it was.”
Try Kennedy (D), 1962.
The National Federation of Federal Employees was in existence under FDR. But both FDR and and George Meaney, AFL-CIO boss, were against collective bargaining for Federal unions.
“In 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had signed the NLRA into law, in a letter to the National Federation of Federal Employees, wrote
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service….The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”
http://samschaos.blogspot.com/2011/02/fdr-afl-cio-opposed-public-unions.html
Unfortunately, the states didn’t listen, and the resulting unionization, with collective bargaining rights, of state public employees unions, including teachers, is responsible for the majority of school problems today. I think it was the Republican governor of Wisconsin that first allowed state public unions about 50 years ago.
Comprachico’s.
WOW! What an eyeful. What a revelation of what is at the heart of the Teacher Unions, with their posturing about their care for “our precious children.” Visualize these teachers in their classrooms with their fervor for Socialism.
I think the most surprising thing here was the open and affirming commitment to ‘SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION.” The unions until recently have been very careful to not identify with socialism and communism, primarilly from an awareness that the proletariat may vote for “leftist” Democrats, but will never knowingly vote for Socialism, as Norman Thomas is alleged to have pointed out.
These were out-and-out Communist Rallies. How come none of these photos showed up on Fox News? Get some of them to Sean Hannity. The electorate needs to see them.
Zombie, ALL unions are corrupt and controlled by power-driven dedicated socialists. One hundred years ago, when they were rising, the Unions played a great role against truly oppressive working places. But as they grew to be accepted, the morally motivated leaders wer supplanted by raw opportunists. Their formula was, and remains: demand a closed-shop, get the members some increment in wages or benefits on a regular basis, and take everything out of tje coffers you can get away with. Your members will never complain. In some of the nastiest unions, like the teamsters, I’ve heard decent members say,”Im not about to blow the whistle and get beat up or worse. As long as I get a pay boost every round, I just keep my mouth shut.” That is the evil of the unions.
The noblest cause a free citizen can have is union-busting. If they are so stupid that they are going to aggressively shout their Neo-Communist allegiance, great! The faster the voters realize their true purpose – the- take over of our government by one-party Socialism, the sooner we will be rid of them. What REALLY drives me crazy if the insistence of calling them “leftists” instead of what they are: SOCIALISTS. That refusal lost the Republicans the Presidency in 2008, and it looks like they are going to do it again. The sorry state of our educational system is entirely the fault of the unions
the problem with “socialists” is its limiting factor
to use “socialists” will only invite hordes of collectivist gobbledegook to explain why something is socialist but not communist; authoritarian but not totalitarian and what not
the “left” covers the bases but i think the better term is – statist- or, those who believe in the absolute power of the state
Zombie…now theres an article, articulating points I can appreciate! Most of the women in my family were career educators and most all elementary educators here at home and around the world (American dependents).
Not since the creation of the Department of Education as we all know it today, some 45 years ago and LBJ’s legislation giving birth to the New Society, has America’s educational systems seen such a persistant systemic decline. Social indocrination and perpetual experiementation of education delivery modalities in the name of human equality but for the right delivery modalities, replaced traditional education modalities that raised this nation to its highest pinnacle. Additionally, the over populated ‘cancer-centers’ of America became the focal points to develop a one-size-fits-all approach to education through one experiment after another. Still today, teachers can hardly stay up with the annual and often mid year experiemental changes adopted by the federal government and the States.
Well, I shant ramble on other than to say, that federal government, States governments and union intervention along with poor local boards and parenting support has left our public K12 education systems a politicized shambles. It is little wonder why teacher retention is such a national problem over the past few decades.
Again, a great article Zombie!
These people remind me of the Borg on Star Trek…resistance is futile-you will be assimilated. We do need to stop funding public ed. Let it crash like the author says & then we can replace it w/ something decent!
Your essay points up the fact that education has been a de facto HQ of the Dem Party for some decades now. Political correctness is an ideology that is part of the educational bureaucracy itself and elections don’t effect it one way or the other. Grade schools are like Hollywood movies in this respect.
Generally speaking, Conservatives react to change and the Left reacts to a lack of change and there is always a lack of change. This is because the Left’s view of the world is so faith-based that their solutions simply can’t work.
The Left’s solutions are centered around myths, fantasy, unproven suppositions, a racial lens, cheap psychology and most of all faith in a world that exists only in their imaginations. Since this world doesn’t and can’t exist, it is always in the future and so protests are always in the present.
Our parents and grand parents possessed simply cause and effect common sense that is now a thing of the past in America and so are good value systems. A new trend valued by teenagers in the inner city is to organize “wildings” on social media and go out and cause trouble. Liberals are blaming this on NAFTA and unemployment as if teenagers are all unemployed union workers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/chicago-gang-violence-_b_873200.html
Imagine if these kids instead were so nuts about books that they went on crime sprees, not to mass assault a mall to get loot, but to steal books. One can only imagine the reporting on such an event and the results of such dedicated thieves when it came to their lives. Imagine a society of young people that were nuts for books and not blame. Blame is what you get as the result of eternal failure from stupid understandings of how the world actually works.
You can buy books on Amazon for the price of postage and generally speaking they are worthless in larger society. There is no equivalent when it comes to knuckle rings or cool shoes which are highly sought after and expensive. Kids have the value systems larger society instills in them and what we are instilling in them is that the history of America is a crime, immorality rises with income, law can be ignored at will in favor of moral imperatives, ethnic minorities are innocents plucked from the Garden of Eden even if they’re Hamas and that white people are endemic racists.
“Liberals are blaming this on NAFTA and unemployment as if teenagers are all unemployed union workers.”
Liberals don’t want to admit that, aside from the slow economic recovery due to Obama’s policies, the last increase in minimum wage to $7.25 per hour has much to do with high teenage black unemployment. Wanting to improve the standards of living of low income workers, the “compassion” of the left, leaves very unintended consequences.
Correct.
Now I know why my friends Home School.
BTW, Walt Williams wrote an essay a few years back (around 2007?) in which he said that the lowest SAT scores, by profession, belonged to those who ultimately became teachers and school psychologists. So what does this mean? Some of the worst educated and least competent academically are teaching and counseling America’s future?
See first sentence.
Remember the old maxim:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
(And those who can’t teach, teach gym.)
Or go into climate science.
No, those who can’t teach, teach teachers–or become administrators.
Retired teacher, second career, I actually know how to do something.
zombie:
The charter school here is built to evoke Monticello. The classical curriculum is from Hillsdale College (designed for high schools). To graduate, the seniors must memorize and recite no notes: 29 Principles of Liberty, The Preamble, the articles of the COnstitution, list the Bill of Rights, explain them, read two Shakespeare plays, discuss, recite a favorite poem from memory, and two influential books.
Now, in the entry rotunda, overhead is a quote from Jefferson:
“For a people to be ignorant and free has never been, and never can be.”
That’s what the Progressives know – they NEED an ignorant population.
AS for sports, have you noticed that piss poor academic high schools are very capable of fielding top teams? That’s because it’s not possible to fudge team performance. Parents are very confident in evaluating sports performance, so they demand schools produce. Schools don’t dare hire facilitators for their top teams. Thus, parents are picking schools for SPORTS excellence, and not really for ACADEMIC excellence.
THe fastest way to cut costs now is to cut sports out of schools and universities and go CLUB system like Europe. Everyone would still have their local teams, just independent, eligibility would be moot, tuition wouldn’t subsidize teams, schools would go back to their MANDATE of educating.
The screams and squealing from schools that profit from their teams, would be epic, but it makes much more sense than what we have now.
Coaches/ PE Teachers are often the lone conservative influence in Public High Schools. Athletes are also the most receptive to a consrvative messsage.
It used to be that intelligent women used to teach. They didn’t have many other options back then, so they used to teach. These days intelligent women have more options, so fewer of them get into teaching. That’s one reason the teaching profession has become dumber on average.
Don’t forget the fetish to send kids who don’t have the intellect for college to college. They have to major in something; engineering and pre-med are right out.
Zombie, I feel your pain.
For me, the scales fell from my eyes decades ago, when I attended a major university here, in my 30s. In one history class, the professor would spend quality time doing nothing more than going on and on about his favorite (Liberal) causes.
I finally complained, and said Prof. immediately tried to lowball my grades. I got the department administration to upgrade them back to “fair.” I noted to the administrators that I was a consumer spending large amounts of money to receive instruction in a specific topic, which I assuredly was not getting. And that if they didn’t get the guy to stop, I was going to report the school and the professor to the state Attorney-General’s office for Consumer Fraud, to wit: they were not providing me with the service I’d paid for.
Best laugh I’d had in years, watching them try to figure out how to stymy me, but realizing I had a clear and legal point they couldn’t argue against.
“I was going to report the school and the professor to the state Attorney-General’s office for Consumer Fraud, to wit: they were not providing me with the service I’d paid for.”
Brutally elegant argument. Should be in every student’s handbook, because at 17 this is hard to figure out on your own. Thank you.
Well, what I’d figured out was that the professor’s likely argument of “his academic freedom” did NOT trump my rights as a consumer (numerous lawyers backed me up on that). And that the contract – because surely that’s what it is – with the university was quite specific. Money paid out for a service rendered.
So I demanded they obey and follow through with their own contractual agreement with me – or else.
It didn’t hurt that I was, as noted, in my thirties at the time; I could not be brow-beaten as would an 18 year old.
Hell, I even noted for the department administrator that there were “X” hours of instruction listed as a clear outcome of paying them for the privilege of attending said class – and that if professor “Z” spent at least 50 percent of his time talking about his personal politics, then it was functionally impossible for me to receive those full hours of instruction. And that’s fraud.
Well done. Academic Freedom should mean that your professor is free to do research and write papers on his subject from any angle he wants. It should also mean that he should be free to teach the subject of the class in what he considers to be the most effective way. It should not mean that he can spend your time, your money, and the university’s money, talking personal political BS when he should be teaching.
Unfortunately, many leftists believe EVERYTHING is about politics, therefore politics – their personal politics – is an appropriate topic in every situation, every class, every paper. Every teacher, they believe, should be an activist. There’s little room for anyone who cares about the actual subject being taught. The subject takes a back seat to the task of making the world a better place. I’m glad I got out of school before this BS really took hold.
It was a rare win, Bugs. The Lefties have the entire academic process so jiggered, I’m certain it’s usually impossible to triumph against them. I just happened to find that odd loophole and, I am certain, they didn’t subsequently modify their collective teaching staff’s behavior as a result – they closed the loophole.
Consider the absurdities these people perpetrate on their student body, the mindset: “Speech Codes,” which violate the 1st Amendment. And the universities consider that their own internal rules trump an individual’s Constitutional rights.
I sat in on my son’s math class to find out why an 8 year old was getting 400 math problems a night. (not exaggerating) It’s a story in itself, but after trying to diplomatically pry out of the teacher a syllabus, a lesson plan, a texbook, a notebook, a sketch pad … no … ANYTHING that even remotely resembled a grade structure, he blew up in front of me, in front of the kids who were terrified, his fists were clenched, he was red-faced, shouting 12 inches from my face. I actually thought he was going to punch me, so I tried to leave, but he blcoked my way out.
When I replied that I was surprised he was treating me like that since I was a CLIENT, he screamed, “CLIENT?!!?? What do you MEAN CLIENT??!!!?”
The school backed him up, but lost us as CUSTOMERS.
Private schools hire public school principals and teachers and Voila! It’s the worst of both worlds: crap product with a BIG price tag on it.
The rot is throughout the entire US education system. Private schools compare themselves against public schools, NOT foreign schools, the REAL competitors.
I like the kid holding the sign “Tax the rich and their corporations.” That really is the heart of it. Have Marxism take over the country and destroy what little private property and business initiative there is left simply to give the less productive people in society everything their little hearts desire. Seeing a picture of that idiot wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt only reinforces that idea. Looking at lousy pictures like these gets people like me sad because you see how far this country has fallen over the years. When communism or its weak sister socialism become viable options to the American public, you know something is wrong. You also know that you have a person like Obama as president.
Well, time to change that. The first step is by voting him out of office in 2012. Maybe, just maybe, we can still salvage what this country was founded on, which was liberty from oppressive government taxes and regulations and individual freedom, and NOT some socialist welfare state.
Thank you. You have cushioned the pain of shelling out $1,200 a month for Parochial school for my kids.
Since the 2008 elections, I have studied liberalism. And I came to the conclusion that my kids will never step foot in a public school. We had to rethink some things, like instead of saving for college, spend now to send the kids to a private Christian school. Like you, we decided that it will be worth $6k/year to spare them from the liberal indoctrination camps.
One problem with that … the Catholic Church is increasingly going left. Even many priests don’t seem to see that the day the true left comes to power is the day the priests start being rounded up for “re-education.”
Leftist priest is an oxymoron. Liberation theology was rightly condemned as a heresy, and the Pope has explicitly stated that treating the State as a Savior or means of salvation is demonic. Therefore, any priest who advocates such positions deserves excommunication, and in truth, has already been excommunicated.
I recently started going to a Catholic Church. The leader of the music group is was a part of has Communist propaganda in his living room. The priest (Monsignor) implies that Jesus taught military pacifism. (not proper, traditional Catholic doctrine) The congregation is fully of Obama cheerleaders. The Church has given money to ACORN.
My conscience no longer allow me to attend.
Wow! My typing is really bad! Can I blame that on the public school system?
Zombie: An admirable piece, all around. The photos are telling. However, the government has no business “educating” anyone. Just as there is a separation of church and state, and as there ought to be a separation of economics and state, there ought to be a separation of education and state. In short, no “public” schools. They’ve done enough damage over the generations. Government exists to protect individual rights, not violate them because someone’s “needs” require that those rights be violated. Public schools are no longer “schools,” but indoctrination centers governed by politically correct boards and thuggish teachers unions (I noticed the SEIU jacket in the one photo). Come on, Zombie, follow the reasoning, and concede that the government ought to get out of the education racket. Why rob Paul to pay for Peter’s kid’s brainwashing?
You won’t see me disagreeing with any of that!
Zombie,
Thank you for your documenting the educational child abuse occurring in California.
I strongly disagree with the notion that the answer is to abandon public education. The fact that public education in many districts has failed, does not mean that we should return to a strictly private system. Public education was once enormously successful. It has been wounded by leftist ideologues who control much of academia, by political interference from politicians beholden to teacher’s unions and by cultural environments that place too little value on their children’s education. California, unfortunately has all that in spades.
There are examples where public education has been improved. Massachusetts saw significant improvement from 2000 on as its students became the top performers in the country on standardized tests and its urban students saw the most improvement of all. What Massachusetts did was the following:
Developed rigorous no-nonsense curricula, establishing a body of knowledge in each of the major subjects – math, science, language and history, that every school system in the state had to successfully teach to their students. Require schools to demonstrate their success through standardized tests at various grade levels. Schools that failed to meet the standards faced disciplinary actions, including having schools systems taken over from incompetent local administrators. Teacher’s unions and the academic establishment opposed these reforms fiercely and are trying to undo them through the current Democrat governor who is close to the teacher’s unions. Parents need to understand that teacher’s unions work for the benefit of their dues paying members, not for the students.
A second success is in Texas. The Texas school board rewrote its curricula to include credible, scholarly content, eliminating much of the radical ideological content that pollutes many school systems. They were able to do this because reform was driven by elected officials on the State school board whose views reflected the largely conservative public. They forced textbook publishers to revise their textbooks if these publishers want to sell into the second largest academic market in the country. In both cases, Massachusetts and Texas, it required people outside the academic establishment, but with strong scholarly credentials, to force the change. The reformers continue to encounter fierce resistance from 60′s radicals who dominate the academic institutions and teacher’s unions.
There are still some fundamental issues that resist solution:
1. Money is not the answer – heavily funded school systems just dump more money into expanding administrative functions. Despite what teacher’s unions claim, there is no compelling evidence that class size determines the quality of education a child receives.
2. Teachers – in general – tend to be drawn from lower academic achievers among college students. This is especially true of those who get degrees from Teacher’s colleges.
3. The surest way to improve schools is for parents to get involved with schools and demand better education for their children.
4. Schools must be given the authority to remove disruptive students from classrooms. A few disruptive students can ruin the education of an entire class.
Many of your issues were discussed at length in my earlier five-part education series. And yes, I agree with a lot of your points. But in this essay, I didn’t want to repeat myself, and instead decided to mostly concentrate on this specific rally.
Here in PA, from the Pittsburgh Gazette:
“Reps. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Cranberry, and Todd Rock, R-Franklin, have introduced a package of bills that would outlaw teacher strikes and impose hefty financial penalties for teachers who violate the proposed law. Striking teachers would lose two days of pay for each day of an illegal strike, and those who incite the strike would be fined $5,000 under the legislation. Meanwhile, their unions would forfeit dues check-off privileges for a year.”
That last statement is especially significant, forcing unions to collect from members directly, instead of having the state do it automatically. The power of the teacher’s strike has to be broken, for they invariably hold the “children” hostage during the strike. After all, it’s all for the children.
There is a simple solution to this mess. Dismantle the government run system. Allow people to educate themselves as they (or their parents) see fit. We live in the information age.
Zombie: You said in your 5-part essay “We don’t want to revert to the era before public schooling when education was restricted to the wealthy elite.” I submit we are already there.
“We have to destroy education in order to save it.”
What has to be destroyed is the Education Cartel and its band of professional Leftists who claim to know best in all things.
Those who would hold our children hostage for their own very selfish purposes are to be seen for what they are – A toxic combination of self-serving narcissists and power-hungry politicians eager to play Leftist “hero” with other peoples money.
Why would anyone be surprised at how these same selfish, self-serving scum use our children as pity-props in their campaigns for power and money? One thought I would like to get across to these Leftist scum that they can take to heart – Act as my enemy and I will treat you as my enemy.
There is a difference between education and government schooling. The former is something one acquires for himself, the latter is a process with the purpose of creating compliant citizens.
It is in the best interest of the government that you do not make this distinction.
Your proposal’s nice… but it assumes parents want their kids to get a good education. Sure, mine did… but I’ve been a teacher (in a low-income parochial school, where there’s a lot of back-and-forth flow with the public schools). I know that there’s a heck of a lot of parents out there who cared not one bit about their children’s education (often it was a grandparent who put the girl into my school, since the parents found it a waste of money). They wouldn’t even send them to public school if it weren’t the law, and they stop paying any attention once they reach the age to drop out. There’s no parental input or assistance. (I tried to get the girls in my economics and world history classes to find out something about current events outside of the classroom; the parents generally don’t have a newspaper, won’t let them put on the news (because MTV is on!), and think it’s a waste of time to do that on a computer (if they even have one), because the computer’s for games or porn. The students – especially those who actually did want an education – would openly tell me that.) Good luck getting that kind of parent to care enough to change schools! (Or vote for it – most aren’t registered or involved at all.)
They don’t care, they don’t vote? Dude, you shot your own argument in the foot! That means THEY ARE OUT OF THE WAY. Stop being so negative!
I wonder how many of the children had parental permission slips for participation in a political rally. I bet the parents were feed some BS about observing the political process in action. If I were a parent of one of these kids and I had not given specific consent, I would swear out a criminal complaint against the teacher and the school system for kidnapping.
Actually, I have the suspicion that no permission slips were involved at all: The kids were likely taken to the rally with no parental notification. The assumption being (and it was probably a correct assumption) that if the parents ever found out about it later, they would be greatly pleased.
Wow. I’m appalled. I’m a teacher in a rural county south of the Ohio Valley (how’s that for being vague and specific at the same time!). Anyway, I simply can’t believe that teachers had the audacity (of hope?) to take their students to a political rally. This was my first year teaching (I’m a retired Army veteran with 21+ years of service) and I can’t count how often I got into arguments with other teachers about teacher unions and busting the state union (which is thankfully being dismantled). I teach in a very small alternative school and so our staff is small and the other teachers are either conservatives or moderates. I don’t think there is a left-wing radical amongst them. But even these teachers have been indoctrinated and brainwashed into believing the nonsense spewing from the unions.
Thankfully, during our state’s struggles with the teacher’s union, there were no large scale protests down at the Legislature and no students were pulled from class. No teachers called in “sick” to go down to protest. (I believe protests were held on Saturdays).
Teachers want to be seen as “professional” like doctors and lawyers. Indeed, they take great pride in the fact that teachers were among the first occupations “professionalized” back in the early 20th century along with doctors and lawyers. The difference? Lawyers and doctors aren’t unionized and they police themselves. When you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
I’m all about busting the teacher’s union. I simply can’t understand how teachers don’t understand that public unions strangle the local and state budget, blackmail the taxpayer, and destroy an economy. They don’t want to see the cause and effect or they just don’t care.
Look, I’d love to make twice what I’m making now (full disclosure: I make roughly $58,000 a year with retired military pay and teacher’s pay. Wife doesn’t work, I’m 44 and my family, of six, receives health care through the military since I’m retired – but we pay a paltry sum for it quarterly). But I knew going into teaching I wasn’t going to make a lot. I did it because that is my calling.
I never, not once, have tried to indoctrinate my students. I had a student furious with me because I wouldn’t tell him if I was Christian, Muslim, or Jewish! haha! I won’t allow students to insult Bush OR Obama. I want students to judge presidents and administrations by the merits of their actions rather than personal feelings. So when they do insult one of them, I tell them to shut up or back it up. They usually shut up.
For the record: I teach U.S. history, government, geography, and economics to 9-12th graders.
You, sir, are one-in-a-million. Out here in my neck of the woods, teachers are amongst the most politically radical members of society, as a general rule.
Eric, your naivete is touching! Years ago out here in Southern California the illegal immigration lobby staged a “strike” to teach us pro-law-abiding types a lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics, legal and illegal, walked out of school and off the job that day, along with a few non-Hispanic sympathizers. Kids were bused by the schools to busy thoroughfares in Los Angeles where they demonstrated, shut down traffic, and got a day’s classroom credit for participating in an historic political event. Cops had to manage the throngs. One enthusiastic reporter called it “a party like no other.” Taxpayers took the hits all around, of course.
Naive? Hmm…not been called that in a while. I’m not naive about teachers using students. At 44, I’ve seen that often enough in my lifetime. I’m simply appalled by it. I find it offensive, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and manipulative. I’m not naive about teachers and the education system. I am offended at the inappropriate use of time. I am paid to teach my students about history, government, geography, and economics. If I’m not doing that, I’m wasting the taxpayers time and money. Taking them to participate at a political rally is a waste of that time and money. Now, if I thought it would be beneficial to take them to a political rally to OBSERVE it, that might be different. I lived in Monterey, CA for about 5 years (luckily at the time I was single w/ no kids) and so realize the political climate in that state. I’ve been thankful too that where I have lived, my children have not been used as political pawns in this game. I’d be furious and likely pull my kids out of school.
I’m sorry, but this response is weird to me…what the heck is Eric naive about? What does your story have to do with anything in that post?
1) I too am a Rebub who entered into education after my previous career in business. Also most of my collegues are Republicans and I teach in a public middle school. Here in CA there is a subgroup in the CA Teachers union (CTA)of Republicans, although weak: yet able to have a voice. The point is: not EVERYTHING in education is bad. True these protestors were naive (i.e taxing corporations is what is hurting CA, carrying ANY political party sign is just STUPID)but they were narrowly focused on the issue at hand: CA has had deep cuts in Education and the public is apathetic (lowest funded in the nation). However, unions themselves are not ALL bad. You must remember who are in charge of schools: if education is so “liberal” as you say, then liberals run the schools. Unions allow a balance of a “team” approach where teachers and administrators can have some dialogue. Bust a union and you will place liberals fully in power.
2) Read #20 Adrianne’s response about parents. It is getting much worse each year. American society has changed. Teachers are expected to teach and socialize their students. Most are good and do not show a bias towards political beliefs, religion, race, economics, etc. There are exceptions, but to stereotype all teachers as the same is not the solution. Focus instead on the specific issue at hand and have precise surgical activism. If a teacher is showing any bias in a classroom- report it! The alternative is a slippery slope!
3) Finally, your logic is flawed: Charters receive public dollars. They are not privately funded and therefore have the same accountabilty. The new educational “theories” keep popping up, such as “charters”. Many are ran without unions (some are unionized) and those without are ran as tyrannies: breaking Labor Codes and with no accountability. All it takes is ONE ultra-liberal administrator to run that system, and the educators have no recourse. Is that really a solution as you propose?
“…..(some are unionized) and those without are ran (sic) as tyrannies: breaking Labor Codes and with no accountability.”
Now you are parroting union myths. The National Labor Relations Board has a procedure to report abuses. You can file a report on the web. No union required. Or you can contact a lawyer. My company, non-unionized, collected information and proof for 3 months on an employee’s transgressions before he was fired. Stop using the “if you are not unionized, you will be abused and payed slave wages” argument. No one believes you.
http://www.ehow.com/how_6782458_report-employer-labor-board.html
An atty here who is an adjunct at a local 4 year college – I teach American Exceptionalism, tell these kids take off the blinders, throw up the kool aid and be aware – source, source, source and trust nothing, save for the US Constitution and western jurisprudence. Let’s bring ‘em back to basics and then let them fly – I tell them I’m a red diaper baby Jew, former liberal who has no label anymore – want to insult me? be my guest – 1st Amendment – who cares? I teach them insults are the flavor of the day – welcome to America!! Teach them Founding Fathers (and Mothers – do not forget Abigail) and the Federalist Papers – uses of “nomme de guerres” by our most brilliant Founders – all to attack and ridicule the others – what a country!! Segue this stuff in ALL the time – always bring them back to the Constitution and argument and secular belief – IT’S TIME to really RE-educate da’ yutes! So every teacher out here – make this count – we have precious little time left
Very interesting tidbit about the founder’s name-calling and insults. I have found that if you are truthful about modern leftists, it is extremely insulting. “… and the truth will set you (me) free.” Thanks, I won’t feel bad about it anymore.
Very well done, Zombie, photos as well as text. Stuff like this is what makes PJ worth visiting.
The city I live in, we spend about $20k per student, which is reflected in my rather onerous property tax bill. Even the huge tab property owners pay, it only covers 15% of the budget. The rest is made up via state aid, which is funded largely by income taxes. NJ lost billions in its income tax base as higher income earners have left the state. What do we get for all that $$$? Well, one high school geared towards advanced students, performs really well. The rest.. not so much. They are basically very expensive daycare centers where the students are as ignorant leaving the school as when they were first enrolled.
I maintain that you could completely do away with public education. The parents and guardian who give a damn, regardless of income, will make sure their kids receive an education. Either at home or via a private educational institution. And I guarantee you, it will cost a lot less than $20k per student. Those who are getting an education now will still get it. Those who go through twelve years of school to graduate as a complete dumb-ass, will still be a dumb-ass. But at least those of us who pay the bills won’t have to pay $240k+ for the twelves years of waste.
Of course, I don’t expect this to happen. Though making such comments in mixed company normally brings out gasps and shrieks of horror.
All of the education funds in the world cannot change the fact that most of the population doesn’t have the mental capacity to pursue an advanced education in modern math, science, engineering or medicine. It’s simple biology. For every American who could use $10k in public funding to become a seriously competent STEM contributor to society, there are at least 20, if not 50, in the same school who are more suited to working in a factory, in retail or on a farm.
Having lost our Christian culture, the left must now scramble to avoid a future society like Gattaca where the common isn’t worth !@#$ because he doesn’t have the mental horsepower to even be a risky investment.
Thanks for the photos. Indiana legislators just passed a school voucher program for lower income families so they too can afford to send their children to private schools when the government schools are receiving an F. We have two high schools close by that the local government floated almost $200 million in bond issues for renovations of just these two high schools. After 5 years of declining test scores the state is looking at a takeover which only goes to prove that throwing money at the problem just doesn’t work. And the Indiana legislators had to be saying to themselves when they voted for school vouchers; if you do the same thing over and over again but expect a different result what does that make you? They had to try something, anything while the teachers unions block any attempt to rescue our future generations.
what you’re proposing is, ironically, a pure socialist solution: destroy completely what exists, and build utopia on its ashes.
I know — that’s the irony.
Except a key detail: The “destroying” part is really being done by the socialist teachers, who had made public education an atrocious and pointless experience.
All I’m suggesting is turning off the life support, letting the system survive or die on its own. I suspect it will die — not because I actively “killed” it, but because my ideological opponents killed it, and I stopped rescuing it.
Actually, that’s an interesting point. I had 7 years in schools as a teacher, and 3 years at a Big Ten university teaching future teachers. I finally got fed up with it and went into business. I would propose that we open the flood gates and allow every form of competition to government schools known to man to flourish. There will be some bad attempts, but it will have the final effect of forcing an improvement to education in general. If this were not true, the unions would not have fought these efforts as hard as they have, (charter schools, vouchers, home school, online, etc.). Competition is at the heart of American exceptionalism. And rather than destroying something in order to rebuild, I am positive that transition to a “multi-venue” delivery system would allow the best and brightest to thrive. A truly free-market alternative to the socialist influence you mention here.
“Competition is at the heart of American exceptionalism. And rather than destroying something in order to rebuild, I am positive that transition to a “multi-venue” delivery system would allow the best and brightest to thrive. A truly free-market alternative to the socialist influence you mention here.”
YES, YES, YES, and YES! You have nailed it.
Wow. Someone who agrees with me. I’m not sure how to handle that! Seriously, thanks for your encouragement!!
Big,
How about just the simple “competition” of allowing government school students freedom to choose their school from among all those of a given system? There are many fights about redistricting, when students are forced to change schools because they are on the ‘wrong’ side of the street from their compatriots and so on, but there is also the desire of some parents for their children to get the best education available from the current system. They should be allowed to exercise a little freedom of choice, and the schools that lose attendance should close. They pay the freight, they should be able to influence their childrens’ education.
tom
tomw,
Competition is competition. Choosing within the system does not push the system to improve other than moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. But if you bring in other “ships”, and other configurations, the improvement will take place almost overnight. This is about degree, and I raised my sons to believe: “Good is often the worst enemy of Best”. Allowing choice inside a system is a small step, but in my book, virtually impotent.
The only reason the corrupt governmentally sponsored diploma mills can stay in business is because the power of the government is used to coerce people into sending their children and their money into the system. This coercive system has destroyed education in America.
In the private sector incompetence and poor decision making is usually realized by immediate destruction. Only government coercion can force this sort of misery on the unwitting and unwilling.
If money produces better education than America would not have the problem we do. It isn’t money. It is a social issue clearly. There are many causes but I will site only two. Firstly, it is caused by a break down of the American family, particularly in the Black community. Secondly, it is interference by the government into education that should be the job for state and local governments and school boards.
When children are parented by a single parent the chances of successful learning is greatly reduced. People have to take responsibility for their actions including fathering children. Sadly this is not always the case. People are not getting as involved in the education of their children as they once did.
The government has increased it’s influence on what to teach and how to teach. The NEA is destroying our education system with it’s emphasis on being politically correct. We no longer teach the three Rs. We no longer teach individual responsibility. Every thing is group think, the collective. If our values offend a small group we penalize the majority. Our teachers are being indoctrinated at our liberal universities not to think for themselves but to adopt progressive group think. What has made America exceptional, our values is now scorned by progressive educators.
Please don’t misspell “it’s”!
alright I’m going to lay out my thoughts simply:
1. Separate testing from schools. Testing should be administered by private companies, like College Board, or ACT, but on a larger scale. Tests can be done at a convenient time for the student, during or outside of school hours. There could be walk in testing centers at strip malls, etc.
2. So What does this mean? It means the students can use every resource at their disposal to study for these tests, take them whenever, and cut out the ‘middleman;’ the teacher. Students can use the internet, tutors, books, guides, study groups, friends, family, whatever.
3. To take a test, the student must pay a fee. I imagine with growth and competition, the fee will be low, and the qualitiy will be high. The process we use to test students is ripe for innovation.
4. Students can take the tests as many times as they want.
As it stands now, a class usually takes a test, students do well or poorly, then everyone moves on. This makes no sense. A student should be encouraged to take a test as many times as they want, until they get it right; until they master the subject. Tests which simply gauge rote memory should take a back seat. And the test obviously should have different questions each time.
This sounds odd, but I believe tests will be so well made, that it should not really matter how many times the student takes it; eventually the student will reach a upper limit of their abilities, and that is what we all want to know: The point where they cannot get a better score.
Another idea is a student should be allowed to retake only a portion of a test they did poorly on, for a smaller fee, so they save money.
papers, reports, etc, can also use this model in a way. Students could write their papers in cubicles at these centers without outside help or notes, to prevent plagiarism.
I think this is a brilliant idea. Separating the teacher from the test removes the monopoly, and frees the student to learn anywhere he wishes. It will open up an entrepreneurial niche for people who really can help students prepare. You can learn math from one source, history from another, and science somewhere else. No one need be crippled for life in a failed school.
Do you know if this is being tried anywhere? Have you investigated the possibilities?
I disagree with the premise. When I was teaching future teachers, I said over and over that tests reveal more about the teachers than they do the students. So if kids continue to fair badly, (not on standardized national tests, but that is not too far off), then it’s clear the teacher is not testing what he/she is teaching, or he/she is simply not teaching!! It sounds stupid, but before a student can learn a lesson, the teacher has to teach!! (that does sound simplistic) Standardized test pose a different set of issues. But as to day to day in the class room, this is very important. And I was very much aware of what teachers were doing in my boys’ classrooms until they graduated from high school. It always points back to the teacher(s).
“It sounds stupid, but before a student can learn a lesson, the teacher has to teach!!” I agree with you completely and, no, it doesn’t sound stupid. It is precisely the entrapment in one school, where the teachers have complete monopoly over the process, and parents have to hope their kids get what they need, that dumbs the system down. End that monopoly, force the schools into competition with other sources of education, force teachers to excel or disappear. Competition hones quality and forces improvement.
Of course, there are other factors, like indifferent parents, that contribute to declining education. But if a child and his/her parents really want a chance and are willing to put in the effort, all of us gain from providing that chance.
-Well we have the SAT, ACT, GED, LSAT, MCAT, etc. And for this to work the student must be motivated. And I think this will actually motivate them more, because they can’t just make excuses and sail through classes and blame the teacher. The tests represent a stark assessment of their abilities, and they can retake them until they ace it. There is no excuse.
-Having a progression of tests will give students clarity and purpose. It will show them where they are, and what they need to know to achieve their goal, job, career.
-I also read an article from NYT about how testing cements knowledge really well.
-And when I use the word test, I do not mean only standardized tests. You can test people in a variety of ways; ways not even thought up yet by the market.
In my day, taking the SAT over again was the quickest way to get laughed out of school. In fact, I didn’t even know it was possible to take it a second time — I thought it was a one-time only event. I think most other slackers at my school thought so as well.
But when one girl then took it a second time, to improve her score, we were at first shocked that such a thing was even allowed, and once the shock wore off, we mocked that girl relentlessly for “cheating.” She hung her head in shame in the hallway.
(On the other hand, she did later get admitted to Dartmouth. A few months of shame paid off in the long run.)
Strange how attitudes can change so radically in such a short period of time. “Do-overs” was perceived as something reserved for cheaters and the handicapped. I’m not saying that our attitude was good or “nice,” but that’s just the way it was. Same applied to any test or homework: Those kids who got a second stab at it seemed to have been given an unfair advantage over the rest of us who only took it once. That’s why we took it as “cheating.” I’m quite sure that if we all took it again, we’d do better too.
I love this idea.
The thing I like so much about this is idea is that it wouldn’t necessarily change a thing, but it would effectively change everything. Public schools could continue their charade of grades and even graduation, but no one gets credit unless they pass the tests which are administered outside the public educational establishment.
It’s great, but to warn you: WE HAD that.
SAT, ACT, ITBS .. etc etc. Lots of states have their own tests designed to segue students into their own state universities, like AIMS for Arizona.
But the SAT was showing embarrassing annual DECLINES. The education establishment, instead of cleaning up it’s experimental act and going back to traditional skills teaching, pressured the SAT to dummy down the test. It’s been dummied down at least twice since I took it decades ago. When I was in high school, a perfect score was national news, today, universities get multiple applicants a year from students with perfect scores. Schools run, not solid classes, but “how to take the SAT” classes. Stdueten take it 3-4-5-6-7-8 times. In stocks, that’d be called “chuirnignhte account.” CollegeBoard forces students to naviagte through a MASSIVE nosey marketing questionnaire BEFORE allowing students to register to take the SAT. Despicable.
Take a look at the ITBS score reporting graphs. They torqued the graph! Instead of equal spacing between 10%-20%-30%, the spacing for the lowest percentiles and the spacing for highest percentiles is narrow, while the spacing for the middle percentiles is wide. This gives the visual trick of making low scores appear to be close to middle range scores, while minimizing the achievement of the high scores. A 35% at a glance doesn’t seem out of line. If the graph was built HONESTLY, the 35% score would LOOK as LOW as it IS. I have right here at my desk another test for one of my kids, different company, SAME graphing mischief. I am NOT happy.
The standardized tests, like AIMS are deliberately constructed so that even an ignoramous has a higher than average chance of GUESSING correctly, artificially massaging the scores upwards.
Today’s curriculum is textbooks, lessons, quizzes, exams, answer keys, all in one package. There are no “classroom teacher-written exams”. The union facilitator tears out the sheets, photocopies them and hands them out, then sist at the desk and snacks, sips Diet Pepsi and plays on-line solitaire. A student has a question and it’s “Go look it up.”
The standard textbooks are sneaky cheats, too. Our kids’ math teacher, a retired engineer, was all okay with the standard texts, he saw instantly they were LOADED with concepts – they’re ALL there. He was impressed. I KNOW what they are, and worked high-stakes diplomacy for a private deal to have our kids working on independent study in SAXON Math. One school year later, he said just last week, “The standard texts introduce too many concepts at once, and don’t allow the students to master any of them before moving on. SAXON is good. It delivers in small bits, reinforces and provides lots of opportunities to master each concept before moving on to the next.” NOW he KNOWS what I was trying to tell him last year. Because of a different textbook, our two kids are TOP in the school in Math, and they haven’t even finished the book – and we ARE finishing it this summer on our own time and our own dime – working to be SURE they have the math they will require to go on to higher study. All the state high schools use the same standard textbook, so that means our kids are TOP math performers in the entire state. The staff walks around calling our kids brilliant, but they too struggled with the standard texts, getting nowhere until we walked backwards, retook the entire math year over last summer, but using SAXON Math instead. It’s not coming by mental powers, it’s plain old work. The kids were astonished that math seemed EASY with Saxon. hmmm.
Now, HOW SLY is that? A engineer, browsing the standard state texts, concocted by a team of “experts” thought they were outstanding, for he SAW all the math in them, and he KNOWS his math. But after WORKING with them, trying to TEACH students with those texts, he discovered they were just big TEASES. They were NOT written to deliver math skills to the students.
Progressives strike again. They have graduated a generation of students who think they aren’t good in math because they couldn’t “get” it. We have a generation of parents who have never seen a good math curriculum so they have no background in recognizing a good one, easily swayed by useless fancy texts, with color graphics, that weigh a TON. SAXON is cheaper,so is Singapore Math, best in the world. Well organized, well explained.
SAXON is easily available online, popular with homeschoolers, but public schools want nothing to do with it, toss it out as soon as they can and go back to the losing curriculum. Facilitators don’t like it, and what they want is more important than what the students NEED.
ct,
I believe your proposal is very important and causes one to ask some serious questions about the fundamental purpose of schools. Or rather, what schools be should accomplishing and what they are actually accomplishing.
Why do we value education? If a person from another planet were to read your post and the responses to it, he might assume that the purpose of going to school was to pass tests. Why? So one could brag about their score at the local pub? Or go to a good college and take more tests?
Many people go to school so they can get a good job. Either a job in a desired field or a good paying job. Maybe employers should evaluate people to determine their skills, not schools. I think there is a place for private companies that evaluate peoples skills and knowledge.
Our educational system is too insulated from the consequences of failure that everyone in the private sector has to face. This cancer has been allowed to fester for several decades and now we are seeing the consequences.
I have a friend who is an electronic tech. He repairs electronic equipment at a hospital. He says that there is a man who works where he works who has a PhD in nuclear physics. His job is to test for radiation in the nuclear medicine department. He takes a swab and dabs it here or there around his area, puts the swab in a machine, the machine tests the swab for radiation and returns a number, he puts the number in a book, along with the date time and place. The average third grader is capable of doing this job.
Maybe the purpose of educational institutions is to provide jobs for teachers? Or indoctrinate students? Or sell expensive text books?
Learning a skill takes dedication, work, and persistence. Teachers should not be given too much credit or held accountable for the hard work or lack of work of their students.
Good teachers can be a great benefit to their students. This is usually because the teacher has learned through years of experience. Our current system eliminates a valuable group of potential teachers from the system. These are retired people with valuable job related experience. Most retired people are not willing to go through the years of schooling required to become a credentialed teacher.
Government regulation is the cause of many of our current problems. Not just education, but national debt, unemployment, healthcare, housing. The free market has not been allowed to work.
As for the leftist hate-mongers, I believe they may become violent.
Glad you have woken up. Watch this video on the dumbing down of America:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezTIYd5UFRY
Then also watch this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYCBfmIcHM
What you have noticed, is a generation+ of INDOCTRINATED youth to move the United States to a one world government and world communism.
This is why life has become so confusing and why so many people do not understand what the government is doing or why.
Public schools impose oppressive taxes wherever they exist. They are expensive and inefficient, and destroy prosperity. Public schools become teacher temples. The public educational system is a lot like the medieval church/tithe system. What we need are smart, private, budget schools. Education is a service, the students and parents need choice. There needs to be competition.
I’m just wondering if my comment from earlier is going to stay in moderation hell or going to be posted.
Sorry, you submitted it at 5:22am! Even moderators gotta sleep sometimes!
In any event: It’s been posted now, and even replied to!
Sorry. I realize sleep is a premium. Feel free to delete this thread at any moment. I suppose after 20 years of getting up at 5am for the military and 5am to get ready for school I *still* can’t sleep in late. Late for me is like 7am.
ugh.
Now Zombie, sleep is an inadequate substitute for caffeine.
I would say you can sleep when you’re dead, but zombies….
Lessee now, we had a Renaissance, a Reformation and an American Revolution without public education. I think the world can survive without these idiots.
Visit the Khan Academy to learn how to disintermediate all these fools. And reduce your taxes, if we can lose the education administrations….
http://www.khanacademy.org/
“While this certainly doesn’t apply to all schools, the indoctrination that I’ve seen in one elementary school shocked me. If you really hear what eleven-year-olds are saying to each other you’d be amazed: accusing each other of being racists at the drop of a hat; thinking man-made global warming is the world’s biggest problem, viewing America as evil.
If that happens in an educational system–especially in universities–indoctrination means that the more “educated” someone is, the more “stupid” they become.”
(Barry Rubin, What I have learned in my long visit to America, June 8, 2011, The Rubin Report)
Zombie, you said, “Will it mean chaos for a generation of students? An unstable and ever-shifting educational landscape? Maybe.”
I submit to you that there already has been a generation of chaos in some public schools – the ones protesting and clamouring for more funds! It already IS unstable for a great number… I can’t imagine that “unstable” for the status quo in some areas would be a bad thing.
And you said, “And I’m placing my faith in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand: that by creating a vacuum in the educational marketplace, new competitive solutions will organically emerge to take advantage of this unfilled need.” Yes, yes, yes! This is already going on to some extent in this country. But, it may happen on a grander scale very soon.
Notice how the signs the protesters are holding demand what they want and attack people / groups? What you don’t see are the statistics / evidence that show public schools deserve the money they are demanding. Typical liberal antics.
It’s cool to read your evolution from liberal to more conservative… thanks.
Zom, thank you.
If you really want to prove how rotten the public school system is, you need to build a collection of recordings of actual classroom moments showing students being indoctrinated into things that taxpayers would find appalling. I can’t think of anything that I would find more compelling and energizing than hearing teachers actually brainwash kids against all the values I hold dear or telling lies about factual matters.
For instance, I once came across a thread on a history newsgroup where a student was asking for more information on why America entered World War II. His teacher had told him that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor over their outrage at the internment of Japanese-Americans and the student wanted to know more about this. Everyone hastened to tell him that internment of Japanese-Americans was a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, not the cause. I still wonder how any educator could actually teach such a blatant falsehood.
Investigative journalists have long used hidden cameras to capture video of shocking things. Concerned citizens need to take a page from that book and find proof that many teachers have gone off the rails and are working as leftist indoctrinators and propagandists.
While showing pictures of teachers at rallies that have many leftist hangers-on tends to imply that many teachers lean to the left (or far left), they might claim that their personal political views are not espressed in the classroom. While we might have our doubts about that, we can’t be sure they are indoctrinating students in the classroom without proof. Actually hearing them tell outright falsehoods to students IN the classroom would prove that teachers are brainwashing students rather than educating them. And that would provide the impetus we need to get these people out of their classrooms. Eventually.
And how would that information be disseminated? By ABCCBSNBCPBS? Or by that lying faux news organization, Fox News? I’m afraid that on the internet, only those who already understand the situation would bother to read the reports or watch the videos.
Or how about word-of-mouth?
My world is fairly small but I found during the run-up to the 2008 election of Obama that any conversation pointing out Obama’s flaws only proved–to my darned well-educated friends–that I was misinformed, mal-informed or prejudiced, if not racist. One pointed out indignantly that Jimmy Carter’s CRA, made law in 1977, could not possibly have caused the housing crisis in 2008; the many addition steps it took to completely undermine the housing market went in one ear and out the other, as they were obviously fictions invented by a paranoid mind. And these people fancied themselves conservatives (though they could not vote for McCain, given the chance that the unqualified Sarah Palin might someday have to assume the presidency).
I cannot help but approach the conclusion that WE’RE DOOMED!
And how would that information be disseminated? By ABCCBSNBCPBS? Or by that lying faux news organization, Fox News? I’m afraid that on the internet, only those who already understand the situation would bother to read the reports or watch the videos.
Or how about word-of-mouth?
Excellent point and one I should have anticipated. How about this: live streaming of what happens in the classroom sent directly to the parents’ computer as it happens, where it can be viewed later by the parents?
Police officers typically often have cameras in their cruisers now so that we can watch their actions in real time or after the fact. If the police officer has, for instance, abused a citizen, the camera will prove it and be used to punish the officer. The camera can also disprove citizen allegations of abuse or mistreatment.
Cameras in the classroom would have the same effect. If the teacher is teaching appropriate material in an appropriate way, the camera will prove that. If the teacher is engaging in agitation and propaganda – or sitting in the corner of the room playing solitaire and telling students to find their own answers for questions – the computer will show that.
Cameras, of course, would also show us what the students are doing. If they are attentive and co-operative and making an effort, that should be clear. If they are disruptive and disrespectful, that would be clear too.
This would go a long way to dispelling myths and suspicions that arise when we only have the words of teachers and students to tell us what is happening in the classroom. Both teachers and students sometimes have reasons to distort what is happening. A live feed of what is actually happen would eliminate that very quickly.
The key thing is that the teachers should not be able to edit the recording before the parents see it. That’s why I propose that it be sent out as it happens and sent directly to the parental computer.
That’s a great idea. Public schools should be accessible to the public. We have a right to know what is going on in our public schools. The unions will have a fit!!!
“His teacher had told him that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor over their outrage at the internment of Japanese-Americans and the student wanted to know more about this. Everyone hastened to tell him that internment of Japanese-Americans was a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, not the cause. I still wonder how any educator could actually teach such a blatant falsehood.”
Hey, when the only history book you’ve ever read is Zinn’s agitprop, you’ll buy anything.
In this case, I think the teacher was probably just an idiot, and honestly thought the internment preceded the attack.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
Several years ago I had a friend who was working in the editorial office of a daily newspaper. I was visiting her one day, while she worked, and at one point, while she was editing a story as I putzed around waiting for her to finish, she leaned over and asked me, “Which came first — the Vietnam War or the Civil War?”
Her question was so far from making sense, that I asked back, “I’m confused: The Vietnam War was at first an internal civil war, before the French and Americans got involved. Do you mean did the civil war aspect of the Vietnam War precede the part in which foreign powers were involved? In which case, the answer is yes.” (And I thought to myself, how could she be so dumb as to not know that?) But she came back with, “No, I mean the American Civil War. Confederate flag and all that. Was it before or after the Vietnam War?”
She was not joking.
This woman had a MASTER’S DEGREE in journalism and was an EDITOR at a newspaper.
There is still a dent in the floor of that office from where my jaw hit it at full speed.
I think we are in the eye of the hurricane, in a deceptive calm. The unions are getting violent, trying to grab the deck chairs, but the ship is going down.
You mentioned the Detroit fiasco. Last May, our daughter graduated High School. Felt ill at the graduation. I knew for a fact the class valedectorian got to chapter 4 in Algebra I and Chapter 3 in Algebra II, Chapter 3 in Geometry.
Looked good on that transcript: A-Algebra I, A-Algebra II, A-Geometry. A 4.0 in NOTHING.
These are NOT poor families. They are solid, middle, and upper middle class. The schools have LONG figured out that parents NEVER ask for conferences if their kids have As and B+s. They make every effort to make sure parents GET what they want to see – it’s not about skills and knowledge, it’s all about NUMBERS. It’s become an elaborate Nigerian 419 scam.
This is evidence that what our educators are actually doing is credentialing incompetency.
What, you don’t remember videos of students singing Obama songs after the election?
Excellent piece, but what we in Georgia are finding out is that this battle is being lost in the courts. Recently a court ruled that legislation we had allowing for creation of charter schools at the local level was unconstitutional which has now resulted in a couple of dozen charter schools being shut down. The ruling permits only the state to authorize the creation of charter schools, but that too is being fought in court. The reason the case was brought in the first place was because with charter schools in Georgia the tax money followed the student not the school, so for each public school student who began attending a charter school they were losing that tax money.
The second case pending in Georgia has to do with residents being able to claim a tax deduction if they give to a education fund that disburses the funds to various private and charter schools. A lawsuit is pending to revoke this tax benefit.
So much like your argument for cutting funding for the public schools, the public school teachers and their supporters are already doing to the private and charter schools. Very effectively I might add.
The argument that befuddles me the most is the one that teachers put forth that these private and or charter schools take away teaching jobs. Are they in essence saying that a college educated teacher who teaches at a public school is not qualified to teach at a private or charter school? The students aren’t going away they are simply switching venues and the need for teachers is still there.
I recently moved to California from Maryland, and was raised in Texas. I am intimately familiar with the school systems of all three states.
There is very little wrong with the State of California that can’t be fixed by 1) a right-to-work law and 2) leaching the volatility out of the state income stream.
With respect to the right-to-work law, I have observed that the teacher’s union in San Diego Unified School District has been making demands that are not in the best interest of the children, the school system, or the younger teachers. Further, they have repeatedly spread information to their membership that they knew was false. They also made huge contributions to the last round of election campaigns. If union membership (that is, payment of union dues) were to become voluntary, you would see a substantial change in the positions taken by the teachers’ union.
And that would be a good thing.
Excellent point.
9/11 was the wakeup call for a lot of us, Zombie.
I spent years at a university dealing with graduate students from the university’s college of education (most of whom were working teachers), and that’s what soured me on teachers in general. Outright communism is not so much a problem in our midwestern area, but knee-jerk political correctness, self-importance (“I’m a teacher, I know everything”), and a smug sense of entitlement suffuses the profession. These are people, after all, who have spent their entire lives in a classroom. I came to believe that no one should be allowed to teach until they have spent at least two to five years working in the general economy, and learning the basics of a free market system.
A question Zombie doesn’t address is “What will schools look like after public schools implode?” I submit that they will be well-rounded, i.e., not just head-cramming fact factories. The teachers will know how to motivate kids – schools won’t be daycare/penal institutions. Already, there are excellent models – they’re operating on shoestring budgets, parent-supported, and doing a wonderful job of helping kids achieve academic success. A good example is Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto (http://www.livingwisdomschool.org). No question, the teachers had good SAT scores: the last two math & science directors had/have advanced degrees from MIT… Grassroots education rules; so-called “education for the people” is a scam.
I’m not sure. The teachers colleges have a monopoly and graduate process people, not teachers. We have a generation of people who haven’t ever actually been TAUGHT. They don’t have any experience with TEACHING. We aren’t creatures of instinct, we MUST be taught. It’s critical that one generation transfers their skills and knowledge to the next, because it can be LOST, never to be recovered.
The genuine TEACHERS we’ve found are FEW and older – retired professionals from other fields, NOT “teachers.” They are the ones who had the LAST years of traditional education in the USA and teach the way they remember being taught.
Two former engineers literally salvaged our kids’ math educations here in the USA, yet both were JUNIOR in pecking order to the union “math teachers” who did NOT KNOW MATH DEPITE TEN YEARS OF TEACHING IT. They hand out photocopied worksheets, not the LEAST bit interested in looking at what’s on them.
A lot of people fell for Whole Language fraud because they couldn’t remember learning how to read, it seemed so natural to them. Phonics was tossed out for a fraud and practical literacy rates fell thru the floor.
The Progressive Left or the Progressive Sinister has by these things actually altered the mindset of many people. It’ll be very very hard work, rebuilding on a muyriad of levels to recover education excellence. The degradation is worse than you realize. I know what I’m talking about, nearly twenty years living in Third World countries has opened my eyes to fragility of human civilization. Liberia, Sierra Leone used to have banks, and schools and businesses – they lost everything as rebels swept through like the Vandals that destroyed Rome. It took Europe over 600 years to scratch out of the abyss because of the knowledge and skills that were lost. Right now, knowledge is sheltered in other countries and can be brought back in, as has been done in Liberia with returning exiles, but the duplicitous Left has created a sullenness and insecurity amongst poorly educated American students that fosters jealousy of the academic abilities of foreign students, their competitors. Not a soul we’ve talked to about this has taken active steps to address the holes in their kids’ educations, it’s “those kids are “smart,” mine aren’t.”
It’s very hard to bring about change when the people have been conditioned to not accept it.
In 1965 I was in the 5th grade at Vista elementary school in a Salt Lake City suburb. My teacher was a nice man named Mr Dalton. As good a teacher as any I had in grade I guess. But one thing sticks out to me, once he was talking about America and our make up from many other races, creeds nationalities etc. He said that people refer to America as a melting pot where you bring traditions from many places and melt them into America. But that’s not true , he said, America is more like a salad bowl where you put many things in, and they make a salad, but they retain their original characteristics. A tomato is still a tomato, a lettuce is still lettuce. That’s how America is, A German is still a German, a Dutchman is still a Dutchman, Mexican is still a Mexican etc.
I mentioned this to my Grandpa (a Dutch immigrant), and he told me no, once you come to America, you are an American. Otherwise, America will not exist, it’ll be just a whole bunch of people living in the same place.
That’s how long this socialism has been taught in public schools.
Is there anything more despicable than pim[ping children?
Those selfish, greedy bastards- and of course economic illiterates. “Tax the corporations”- have they no idea that is one of the principal reasons WHY California is broke and has to cut budgets????
Later in a more pedantic manner I will innumerate the disingenuous list of fallacies you have (with a heavy heart) posted here.
Until then just let me say that destroying something to save it seems no longer to be the mantra of just the idiot on the left.
Can’t top the fallacy that those so-called “teachers” are doing anything even remotely academic with the students since they’ve dragged them out of the classroom, where they are SUPPOSED to be BY LAW, away from their math, grammar, science, geography and history books and were making them hold signs for adults, parading them all around some street downtown for something that is meant to directly benefit the TEACHERS.
It was a SCHOOL DAY so the TEACHERS are being PAID, but the kids AREN’T.
That’s CHILD SLAVERY. Reportable to the United Nations and UNICEF as a violation of the RIGHTS OF THE CHILD CHARTER.
Stinking, greed-driven hypocrites.
How does one destroy or save something that is rotten to the core?
Zombie, thank you for this valuable warning report. I am forwarding it to my own high-schooler who wants to become a teacher, and to everyone else I can think of. I can see why you were depressed and took your time dealing with this material–because it is clear evidence of how young the children are who are now being thoroughly, blatantly co-opted and indoctrinated into far-left radicalism by public school “teachers” –on the dime of unsuspecting or apathetic taxpayers acquiescing in their own decline. When I was young it was college and high school students being recruited–now it’s elementary school kids. The evil Marxist rot now goes straight to the core.
All because too many people (including me and all the other parents who have sent their kids to public schools without making real waves about it) basically wanted something for nothing, or wanted to receive more services than they personally paid for. Like those who want government-provided health care or Social Security or anything else, they wanted somebody else (the faceless, budgetless, government Sugar Daddy) to pick up more of the tab for the benefits than what they paid in. What an education we adults are getting, having reaped what we’ve spent 40 years sowing. Now I see what a cleaner solution it would’ve been to pay our own way in life instead of funneling our hopes, support, efforts and taxes through the collective government grinder administered by politicians and expecting any good to come of it. We’ve been suckered, but good, and our kids will pay the price in what we’ve lost.
You are right, the only solution is to shoulder more responsibility for ourselves and our own and work to starve the current government beast and its corporate chrony-sycophants (including the unions) in every way possible. Sometimes that’s done by keeping your kids in the public schools and fighting at the neighborhood, school and district levels; sometimes it’s done best by taking them out. My hat certainly goes off to those who have done both.
Wow – This is like a home run that cleared the bleachers and is still travelling. All I can say is “Great Work” and many thanks for exposing this appalling situation.
One of the greatest problems with teachers is that they believe their own propaganda. (Police are the same way.) Since the work that they do is so self-evidently “good” then they must all be “good” as well. Since they are always “on the side of the angels” they become convinced of their own infallibility and indespensability. Naturally people who are “good” and indespensable should get whatever they want regardless of the situation that exists outside of their own hot-house environment. (Such as, for example, the California state budget.)No wonder the ancients put such a premium on the virtue of humility.
I trained to be a secondary-school teacher and am now glad I never actually went into the field. Public school teachers see their students less as human beings and more as raw materials that they need to control to keep their business flourishing. (Sort of like the monopolists of the Gilden Age.) Whenever a public school teacher’s union whines about charter schools it is because they are losing control of some of the resources on which their power depends. Whenever you hear most teachers talk about “the good of the student” it is their own welfare that they have in mind. The fact that the “teachers” pictured above had no qualms taking their own students out of school to act as props at their demonstration is truly disgusting. Where the hell were the principals and school administrators in all this? Oh wait – I forgot. The administrators have their own greedy unions.
Teachers want it both ways. They want to be able to act like Johnny Friendly’s crew in “On the Waterfront” but they also demand the love and veneration usually reserved for a Reader’s Digest “My Most Unforgettable Character” profile. Teacher’s unions have to go and maybe Zombie is right. In order to accomplish this we may eventually have to destroy public education to save it.
You wrote: “I trained to be a secondary-school teacher and am now glad I never actually went into the field.”
Because you know that it would have changed you more than you could have changed it? All employees act and vote in their own perceived self-interest. It is telling that the actual teachers who have posted here, despite their conservative tendencies are the most realistic posters.
I have posted so many times that if you want to change the system, join it and change it from within. It is doubtful that you could blow it all up because it is one of the core values of our culture. Changes and reforms are needed, but it is one thing to fire and replace a few thousand air-traffic controllers, quite something else to set how-many-million? teachers loose and “figure something out” when you can.
If someone shows convincingly how our current model of teaching no longer works economically, one might proceed from there.
But earth to most of you, the public schools, bad as they may be are a core element in most of the communities of this country. When you propose getting rid of them, you will find out just how central they are. The multiple venue route, wisely pursued has possibilities, but when communities have to dig deep to fund their school buildings, athletic teams, etc., the ensuing chaos of building or not building a new school, having five or six options in one neighborhood for sports teams, enrichment etc. will again provoke firestorms from the community that seem to be unknown or simply denied here. It is one thing to spout on the internet, it is quite something else to have a plan, or a candidate with a plan, who can withstand the barrage, or nuclear attack which WILL ensue.
” If someone shows convincingly how our current model of teaching no longer works economically, one might proceed from there.
But earth to most of you….”
Seems to me California legislators have been shown “convincingly how (their) current model of teaching no longer works economically”, hence the past and future school funding cuts, and they are “proceed(ing) from there”. If you intend to comment on what is occurring on earth, don’t do it while observing from the moon.
I believe that you are straining at the wrong point here. The problems we have with our public schools are so frustrating and so intractable that it is difficult not to wish that they would suddenly all go away. I suppose we all know that isn’t practical but one can dream.
The core problem with our schools centers on the teacher (and administrative) unions and the stranglehold they have on the system. When I graduated from college I found that school districts with unionized work forces had virtually ceded every aspect of hiring, evaluating and retaining teachers was in the hands of the union. You pretty much had to kiss the ring of the local union officials if you wanted to have any chance of getting a job. I said “the hell with it” and eventually went to law school.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record we have to recognize that the chief obstacle to regaining effective public schools are the entrenched teacher and administrator unions. (Colleges of Education at our nation’s universities are no help either.) Their presence has politicized the process of K-12 education beyond all reason and made the political objectives of union leaders their paramount concern.
The U.S. spends more per-child for public education than any other nation in the world except (I believe) Switzerland. The results have been increasingly depressing. Perhaps I would not destroy all public schools but I would sure want to destroy most (if not all) of the administrative and union apparatus that currently exists. Teachers would like us to swallow the propaganda that they are all warm, compassionate, inspiring and qualified individuals who care only about “the children.” (Sort of updated versions of Mr. Chips.) In fact they are much more like the folks picutred above. The only reason that they can get away with this behavior is that they understand the realities of political power and are ruthless in their uses of it.
I guess the question is what is the definition of “public schools”. What we have now are corrupt, governmentally sanctioned diploma mills.
The problem is “power corrupts……”
I think the free market could easily solve this problem. There are lots of qualified people that would be willing to teach for small amounts of money, for example retired people. A person with expertise could give a lecture to 300 students at $10/hr/student and make $3,000/hr. Compare that to what is costs to go to college.
Government regulation has created this monster.
My mom recently said that, “public education should probably be considered unconstitutional. It is like an establishment of religion.”
I live in Virginia, where the teachers are not unionized. Nonetheless, with manadatory funding of public education, the county-level school systems still manage to suck up every dollar of tax income that they can. In my county the cost per student, adjusted for inflation has exceeded population growth combined with inflation for at least the last 20 years. The indoctrination is less extreme that that found by Zombie in California schools, but is still there. The problem, in my view is allowing monopoly public education. When the money doesn’t follow the student and goes to the local public school monopoly, there is no incentive to spend wisely for the best results for the student.
You dont even have to cut education funding, and screw poor kids. Just attach the funding to the student, with individual vouchers, and let parents and the market do the rest. You would probably also need a way to direct extra funding to special needs students, but make sure that any student has the option to transfer to a private school. If they homeschool, they get full funding for school supplies and materials up to the voucher amount. Have some standardized tests that all students take, to measure quality among the competing schools.
Good public schools will attract students, and succeed. Bad ones will lose students to private alternatives. Since leftists are not capable of prodicing good schools, they will soon be gone, except possibly in leftist communities, where the parents WANT leftist indoctrination for their kids.
Why not just pay the kids (or parents). You learn your multiplication tables up to 10×10, we give you $100. That would probably be cheaper that what were doing now. It might be more effective as well.
It’s even worse than this. Children are being used as human shields in the war for progressivism. We’re not trying to destroy education. We’re trying to save real education – and thereby – our children!!
The lefties use children as a way to invalidate and neutralize any logic used in an argument. It’s all about lefty jobs – NOT NOT NOT about education!
These people want more money in spite of the fact that the rest of us must do with less in this economy. This is hateful and should not be tolerated. Fire them all!
Let us analyze the “tax the rich” slogans.
First, it NEVER turns out to be a tax on the rich, it always hits the true taxpayers, the middle class. Second, teachers derive their income FROM taxes therefore do not contribute to taxes. Third, when I pay taxes I am actually paying time. I earn money from work, work that consumes hours from my life, therefore taxes are a piece of my life. These teachers are demanding that I give up more of my available life so that they can have more! What are they doing to improve the situation? Are they working overtime without pay? Are they creating better ways to educate? Are they designing new improved ways to covering the same material with fewer resources? NO? Well boys and girls that is exactly what we TRUE TAXPAYERS have to do on a daily bases just to keep our jobs. Teachers and ALL government workers need to shut up and get back to work. PERIOD.
Once you grasp that the public education system is run for the teachers, for their benefit, and that any good it does children is purely incidental and secondary, you will be sufficiently appalled but wiser. That and the fact that teachers are among the most poorly educated people in the strata of employment.
The battle for privatization and home schooling continue. Meanwhile millions of children exit the system ignorant of history, literature, and culture in general. Why not, look at what’s teaching them.
I’m a conservative currently transitioning out of education after nine years in the classroom. If you think it looks bad at rallies, you need to have a gander at what it looks like from the inside. What’s being passed off as curriculum is nothing but flapdoodle and humbug. Skill levels in math and reading in my district frequently lag 4 to 5 grades behind where they should be by high school. And the answer from administrators is always the same: More money! More programs! More innovation! The entire sector needs to be dismantled and privatized through vouchers. Our national survival depends on it. No exaggeration.
“flapdoodle and humbug”
I got an A in both of those. I didnt’ do so well in my senior Flapdoodle class though.
I would expect that anyone that dared to criticize the leftist group think would be dealt with swiftly. Did you ever observe or experience abuse, harassment, etc.?
All of what you’ve shown is exactly what O’s buddy, Bill Ayers, and his charming wife Bernardine, have been working on all these years since they failed to blow themselves up (more’s the pity) in their bomb-throwing days: the radicalization of “the masses” in the “belly of the beast” through unionized public education. Welcome to a system that would encourage kids to wear T-shirts showing the face of a murderous psychopath like Che Guevara.
You are exactly right. Ayers/Dorne, and Obama helped delivered the math-killing likes of odious Chicago Math and Everyday Math which replaced traditional curriculum. It was stunning to realize those very people and their fellow travelers have been busy for DECADES purposefully undermining our education system – and so far succeeding at degrading it.
The only way we can ever expect to take education back from the socialists is for more of us non-socialists to become teachers. We’ve relegated teaching jobs to those, as stated above, who cannot “do.”
In short, we need more Erics. (And, BTW, thank you , Eric.)
Ironically, it IS going to take more money to do this. Teaching remains, in most non-big-city places, a low-pay career. Most of us capitalists have set our minimum sights higher than what teaching will pay us. Eric tells us that he can do it because he can combine his military income with his teaching pay, but most people won’t have that supplement.
The irony is this: once we raise average teacher’s pay to where teaching becomes a profession that competent and valuable people can afford to enter, then the union activists, the Che-wearing revolutionaries, the tax-the-evil-rich malcontents – they’re going to be dismayed to realize that they’re the bottom of our society’s barrel, and we no longer have to hire our teachers from the bottom of that barrel.
I’ve been homeschooling and I am happier than ever to have made that choice. It’s not just LA or Calif. it’s the whole system even in conservative states. We must get rid of unions, their Democrat lackeys, tenure, teaching to the lowest denominator. Do those things for a start and maybe we won’t have to scrap the whole thing. But, parents need to stop settling and ignoring the facts. This “protest” is a disgusting display.
First, we allocate immense amounts of money on “education” — and it gets spent on teachers’ unions.
Second, why is it that the districts with the highest spending per pupil are some of the lowest performing? Could it be that education success is not correlated with the amount of confiscated wealth you funnel to malcontents?
another big problem in much of the Southwest is the rise of so called “ethnic studies” programs in public high schools, also know as “la raza studies”.
http://www.ringospictures.com/photos/20110513/056.jpg
These programs teach U.S. “history” from a Mexican perspective, basically teaching students that the American southwest was stolen from Mexico, that white people are racists and the all of the other neo-Leftists, social justice BS. Essentially filling young kids, mostly immingrants or the children of immigrants to hate America, and filling their heads with mush. Take a look at the video of students in Tuscon, AZ taking over a school board meeting that had planned to hold a vote to make ethnic studies an elective rather than a required course.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3ZUH_xSmC4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eYfKE_X_Hw&feature=related
This protest and others like it were orchestrated by the ethnic studies teachers themselves. This is what we are up against.
Sad.
I wish I didn’t have to share the same country with these people.
Welcome to the dark side, Zombie.
I don’t think that the method of “starving” the schools is sustainable, principally because it’s not defensible to the mind of the “reasonable man.” Why even sustain them if the purpose is to treat them badly? We may default to that method, but arguing for it explicitly isn’t likely to make headway.
But I don’t despair of enough voters waking up to what they really need to understand, which is that mobs shrieking about “education!” are not the true advocates of education. It’s OK to disagree with them and vote against what they demand, because doing so is not opposing education.
Once people realize that, they understand that the socialist mob frenzy has no power over their consciences, and rightly so.
The mob isn’t even the ultimate problem. It’s the power we have ceded to ever-higher levels of government, over more and more aspects of life. But this has all been accomplished through the deception that those who want to use government to transform society have our best interests at heart.
Admitting that that has been a lie all along is the first step. Socialism is weak and rotten at its core. It relies for its survival and perpetuation on anger, ignorance, and deception. It can be defeated, and it should be. Nothing is lost until we give up.
Yeah, I know that’s true.
I purposely phrased my position in the bluntest and most unpalatable terms possible, to drive home the point: I’d rather have no schools at all than schools run by the malignant bozos depicted at these rallies.
But of course, as I say later in the essay (and as I said in much greater detail in my earlier five-part education series), my true goal is to have a free education marketplace, in which public schools not only don’t have a monopoly, but have to ship up to compete with superior smaller schools — which parents can choose at no extra expense through the “money follows the student” voucher system many have proposed.
I have no taste for an educationless society, any more than anyone else does. I’m just fairly confident that my proposed education vacuum would be filled by fresh alternatives.
Think of my essay as the equivalent of having the death penalty on the table at a murder trial: Often enough, if the DA throws down the gauntlet and says he will try to seek the death penalty in a particular case, the defendant will plea bargain — I’ll plead guilty in exchange for merely a life sentence. The fear of a worse outcome is a great bargaining chip.
Zombie,
I see that situation as the result of corrupt system of power and control that must be dismantled. Education is not really the issue. The issue is fundamental fairness and morality. Not education. The current system must be dismantled. Or fundamentally reformed, the same thing, different words.
People have the right to freedom of association, which means that if they don’t want to be in a union, they don’t have to be in one. The constitution does not give the government the right to force children to go to school. Or to spend tax dollars on education. For good reason, you have the pictures to prove it.
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
Zombie? That’s easy to believe. “Heavy heart?” “Reluctantly acknowledge an ‘awful’ truth.” Ostrich, sucker, thoughtless, perpetual do-gooder, and blissfully ignorant also come to mind. And now, here you are sharing all your wonderfulness and insight with us. Disgusting.
But it gets worse. Now, you’re anti-education! We’re being told that we must “…destroy edcation to save it.” Go figure. Add cliche dropping to the list above. Thanks for the pictures, but really, cut the BS, lose about eighty percent of the words, go home and have a tea. You’re not telling PJM readers anything they don’t know. But none of us are anti-education and none of us want to destroy education. Add blow hard to the list. You still don’t get it.
Note to Roger Simon, can’t your editors keep these clowns off PJM?
Duck — incoming fluster-bomb!
Translation: “I don’t like what Zombie wrote. My feelings are hurt.”
Was it hyperbolic? Yes, but your rebuttal is devoid of substance.
If you’ve got a case, make it. Here’s a start: Zombie is wrong. Public education is better than it has ever been because…
It’s your argument. I’m not going to make it for you.
I think we should treat trolls like Granus with rules from tennis: first stupid comment, a warning; second offense lose a point, …oh, wait, they never HAD a point!! Yeah, Yeah, I know it won’t happen, but at least they could be flagged for being non-thinking!!!
Please excuse the goofy grammar in my post above, after adding the links I was too quick on the ‘submit’ button.
“The very act of having a street protest demanding handouts is essentially a leftist tactic, so the simple existence of teachers at the rally means that they embrace leftist ideology.”
I would bet you dollars to donuts that 90% of the actual teachers in that crowd cannot articulate the philosophical difference between the collectivist paradigm they support and the superior system of individual rights.
In other words, this is an exercise in blind groupthink and these teachers aren’t smart enough to teach your children.
“if one were to seek deliberately to devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, he could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structures…”
m friedman “capitalism and freedom” – the role of government in education
Love milton Freidman!
Please tell California to tax their corporations more so they move to my state Wisconsin. These teachers are really ignorant in basic economics.
“But none of us are anti-education and none of us want to destroy education.”
– - -
Looking at a few contextual clues and utilizing some critical reading skills would tell you that he’s advocating a dismantling, not of “education”, but of the entrenched teacher-employment industry.
Note to Roger Simon, can’t your moderators keep these clowns off PJM?
We like to keep a few around, so the rest of the commenters can light their torches and have someone to chase out of town.
Think of Granus as the goat in a game of buzkashi.
1) My therapist told me not to think about goats anymore.
2) Said it before, say it again- Zombie da man!
3) I wonder wonder wonder how many crosses are worn in that rally?
Where is our John Brown?
This reminds me of a teachers’ strike years ago in the small town I lived in previously. I needed to go to the school to register my son and had to cross their picket line – which I disliked doing but had to get business done – I took time off work to get it done. One striker holding a sign that said ‘Don’t cut my benefits’ and another sign that said ‘Its for the children’ came up to the window as I slowed to a stop. I asked her how the hell it could be for the kids when the other sign made it all about her. If I’d been in a convertible I would have been crowned with one of those signs judging by the icy stare I got from the few that heard me. When I left I did so at higher than normal speed – I think a few of them would have liked to imped my progress but thought better of it. Big pickup trucks do that to people.
The teacher silliness is premised on a different notion than you think, i.e. the notion that we are all equal.
This is pure drivel. We are not equal. 50% of us are average or below (and in the almost pure bell curve of human IQ range, you can accurately say that 50% of us are below average) and nothing but nothing will ever change this. That means that the educational system that used to be reasonable for an agrarian society (one needn’t be Einstein to grow corn) or reasonable for a manufacturing society (one needn’t be Einstein to put a bolt in a hole on the assembly line) has changed due to the economic reality of a more technological society.
Being brief, little Britney can’t be a physicist because she has the IQ of a factory worker, and nothing is going to change that. But… there aren’t many more factories, and teachers are screeching that the answer is for Britney to have a world class education thus preparing Britney — we’re all equal ya know — for a position she can never be qualified to hold.
Meanwhile the fright wing nutjob “conservatives” seem to think that the problem is that Britney needs to go to a parent chosen school paid by vouchers and this is the magical silver bullet. The underlying assumption isn’t really any different than that of the teachers.
The flat out truth is Britney’s a f**king imbecile and we don’t have enough jobs going around she can qualify to do. This is what needs to be addressed. All else is mental masturbation.
“The flat out truth is Britney’s a f**king imbecile and we don’t have enough jobs going around she can qualify to do. This is what needs to be addressed. All else is mental masturbation”.
This isn’t about “qualifying” anyone to do anything. This is about getting getting “Britney” a decent education on the taxpayer’s dime, without being indoctrinated in political correctness or politics. This isn’t about teaching her engineering or computer science grades 1-12 so she can compete with you in finding a job. Otherwise, nice rant.
This is about getting getting “Britney” a decent education on the taxpayer’s dime, without being indoctrinated in political correctness or politics.
This is not what is broken in the education system. What’s broken is the concept of equality. Fix that and the rest fixes itself soon enough.
The far right rails about teaching kids about homosexuality, making absurd claims that it isn’t a choice, etc. Many in the far right seem to think that sex ed or reproductive biology should not be taught. This is the far right’s version of “correctness” based on bible thumping idiocy. Even if PC were banished the far right would try to assert it’s own brand of same.
This says the problem isn’t PC at all, but the EXCUSE the far right uses to try to force their will.
There are certainly things broken in education, but to claim PC is one of them is absurd.
Public schools in LA are terrible. People who speak English, namely white people, as a rule don’t send their kids to public schools. What you see in the pictures are Spanish (or Spanglish) speaking kids kept on a reservation.
I think Big Bob has it right. I am a trained teacher. I have never taught other than Adult Education and Sunday school. I became a supervisor working for the government and found I had to train my incoming new people to bring them up to standards. My method of teaching was to give them an assignment, tell them to work together on it, and help the infividuals who didn’t have a good idea of what they wanted. Then I would leave the classroom.. I learned quickly to shut the door when I left. The studeents got to talking together and helped each other with their ideas.
When I re-entered the clasroom after about 20 minutes or so the din was almost too much. People could hear them all over campus because the windows were open. So we all quieted down and they went to work on their assignments. I helped when I was asked. This was an art class. At the end of the year we had a joint show with the College students. The high school kids did such a wonderful job their show out-shown the college level stuff. Needles to say, the staff heard about that from the department head. I overheard some of that discussion as I went over to the office to see what the comments on our exhibit were. As I entered the outer office I heard the department head talking to the staff. I wasn’t seen, so I decided it was time for a strategic retreat. My critic teacher was wearing a big smile when I saw her later. She never said a word about the dressing down the staff got.
Zombie:
That was truly eye opening and frightening to see the blatent indoctrination the part of the communist party, err, the teacher’s union. What a brilliant piece of photojournalism. I have always enjoyed your work, but this was a stunner.
Living amonst the guilt ridden, upper middle class liberal elites (where else in the world could Lynn Woolsey be a United States Representative), you can only imagine the reaction I get when I bring up the topic of the corrupt teacher’s untion and thier total commttment to spout thier liberal socialist agenga to our children.
The teachers are the sacred of all sacred cows in our society, and if you have the gall to point out actual facts to these people, you are called a “right wing nut”, “child hater”, “racist”, etc. I never get a reasoned intelligent respone, only ad hominem attacks from otherwise intelligent affable people.
Keep up the great work, and I will send this article to all of my liberal friends that will actually have the guts to read this piece and see these incrminating pictures.
Yeah, but as soon as your liberal friends see my purposely inflammatory headline, they’ll start blowing gaskets and become too outraged at my wingnuttery to even perceive what’s in the photos.
I have some relatives in Sonoma County, and they’re all far-lefties as well. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to vote there.
Zombie,
I can’t believe it took you this long to observe the intransigence of the teacher’s labor unions. They believe in less work for teachers, more taxpayers money to support earlier retirements for teachers, smaller class sizes for teachers so that more teachers and administrators will be needed, indoctrination of students to the teachers union agendas. This has been going on since, ironically, the Wisconsin legislature voted to allow unions for public school employees in 1961. I got out of high school in the 60′s and even then the negative impact of public employee labor unions was being felt in the school curriculum even then. In college, the worst minds on our campus were roaming the halls of the education department. They were actually a campus joke. Even then I wondered how in the hell education was ever going to improve? I hated our entire public school system for the entire time I had to put my own children through it. The worst was interfacing these pompous asses, the worst of whom were the administrators. I was constantly correcting misconceptions that my kids were bringing home from the classrooms of our labor union dominated schools. But at least you are correct in your prognosis for the patient and the need for a radical treatment regimen. Thanks for exposing the fact that conservatives have long since given the public school system to the leftist labor unions to run.
“…..smaller class sizes for teachers so that more teachers and administrators will be needed…..”
And also less work for teachers – grading fewer tests, etc. There has never been any proven correlation between class size and student performance.
California chased this rabbit down the rabbit hole for about the last 15 years, people can easily research it via Google if they wish. They got class sizes all the way down to the low 20′s in the lower grades, and the mid-20s in the upper elementary grades. Test scores never went up. In fact they still haven’t yet matched 1992 high school test scores in California ever since, and it’s almost 2012.
The only ones really benefitting are the teachers. If you can’t figure out a way to teach 28-30 students per class, you probably shouldn’t be teaching.
In Tocqueville’s nine months touring America, he declared Americans to be the best educated people on earth, where almost no one was highly educated. He marveled that common men provided answers to questions which aristocrats had never even contemplated. He revealed the secret to this education to be literacy, pure and simple, applied to an early and constant working experience. Literacy was gained though a few years of schooling, reading the bible, and the odd volume of Shakespeare. People read periodicals, debated issues, and participated in debate. Instead of the stupifiying twelve year experience that now dulls minds and provides a platform for ideas which do not need to work to survive, their attitudes were shaped by the experience of work.
This poisonous brew is not something that will simply die of its own accord. Like a lethal virus, it will die when the host is dead, or we kill it first.
Heritage, or Cato, I do not remember which, arranged for a true audit of LA county schools–presented on Pajamas Media. Officials admitted, under pressure, to 10k a student. 300k a classroom by my Tocquevillian reckoning. But the true number was slightly north of 25k.
We do not object to a great education, to the contrary. They do.
I would be furious with my son going to socialist demo, and would treat legal action for taking my son to demo without my consent. Would probably settle for taking the class to Tea Party as a counterweight.
If you really want to get to the heart of the matter when it comes to government schools, search the history of government schools on the web. It’s always been about controlling the thoughts of the children and it isn’t really a left vs. right agenda. You make some excellent points about the indoctrination of the children and how absolutely horrible it is to take children to such a rally! I don’t think you go far enough. Any taxpayer funded education plan will eventually end up this way. There are as many ways as there are children to learn and no one person can plan the mode of education for everyone with any success.
How to eliminate public schools in one whack – without closing any schools or laying off any classroom teachers.
1) The state assumes all responsibility for existing school district debt AND takes over all the taxes the schools were formerly collecting.
2) Each individual school campus – and this includes administration-only campuses and support-only campuses such as school bus barns – gets moved into a private corporation, and bundled with sufficient debt payable to the state to give it a book value of zero.
3) These corporations, one per campus, are then GIVEN, no charge (because they have no book value) to the teachers and staff who work there. Let those people work out who owns how big a chunk. (And watch the teacher union scream that teachers are not competent to run a school…)
4) Initially, each student gets a voucher with a maximum value of whatever the old school district would have gotten for having that student enrolled. Ongoing, each student is guaranteed a voucher sufficient to pay the full ride, up to a certain percentage of the state’s average per-capita income, at a school within a certain distance that has sufficient capacity to take that student and would be willing to take that student including all considerations EXCEPT individual discipline problems. (If no school is willing to take a student with a significant history of being disruptive… can you blame them? Perhaps the other students will have a better chance at a good education if that kid isn’t in school?)
4b) Oh, and repeal compulsory-schooling laws. Students can’t have an obligation to be in school if they don’t have a right to be in school, and I’m deliberately making it possible for them to lose that right.
5) Schools will be free to charge any fees they choose. There will be no state-administered reward or penalty for charging more or less than the voucher amount. They will NOT be free to kick back any portion of the voucher amount to parents or children under ANY circumstances. Penalties to be determined – and nasty.
6) Schools which want to be voucher-eligible must participate in standardized tests – administered by people who do NOT work in that school – and their student body average must be in the top 95%. Failing to be in the top 95% for three consecutive years means they are ineligible until they meet that standard for three consecutive years. However, schools are not obligated to seek voucher eligibility. Note: these schools, while the tests are being administered, must also permit non-students to take the tests, but the non-students will not be included in the school’s aggregate score.
7) If a student gets passing grades at a voucher-eligible school, or does above state average on the standardized tests, half of any unused portion of the student’s voucher will be paid to the family in cash. This payment, like the portion of the voucher used to pay school fees, is 100% tax-exempt.
Scrolling through these comments, I was wondering if anyone would ID the 10-ton tyrannosaur at the heart of this whole mess. But you got it with point 4B.
Absolutely nothing will change until all compulsory-attendance laws are scrapped. Those laws effectively mandate govt. schools (if you’re going to require kids to go to school, then you’ve got to provide the school) and guarantee them a virtual monopoly. All monopolies — whether it’s govt. schools, the post office, the domestic automakers (before foreign competition took hold), whatever — have zero incentive to improve or reform. Kill the laws and you’ll quickly see a forest of free-market education bloom. If govt. schools want to survive, they’ll have to compete on both price and quality with the private alternatives. No more PC indoctrination!
Repealing compulsory-attendance laws will also put an instant end to all the social engineering that uses kids as human guinea pigs. After the SCOTUS’ totally unconstitutional Brown decision in 1954, several school districts responded by attempting to shut down. Great idea, but they forgot about those danged attendance laws, so the schools had to reopen (see previous paragraph). Lesson learned: first kill the attendance laws, then shut down the schools.
Obviously there would have to be a transition period, given the overwhelming dependence on govt. schools today. The solution is to phase them out a grade at a time. Declare that no new enrollment in govt. schools will be allowed (other than in-state transfers). After the next school year, abolish 1st grade. The following year, abolish 2nd grade, and so on. Within 12 years, govt. schools would be nothing more than a bad memory, and their history a warning to future generations.
Even if govt. schools were already abolished and educational freedom reigned supreme, compulsory-attendance laws are still evil and need to be abolished because they are founded on the evil assumption that children are govt. property.
Blah, blah, blah, lefty, lefty, socialist, blah blah. This is not the perspective of all liberals or all teachers. My GF is a teacher and she is open to solutions that make education actually better even if it means sacrifices on her part. I (a liberal, yeah, i’ll admit it) believe that we can construct beautiful, common sense solutions that make education better in this country. It will involve sacrifices from all parties. I’m sorry but increased effective tax rates and a simplification of the tax code may be a part of it. The public employee pension situation will have to be re-approached and teachers will have to be held to higher standards and losing their jobs if they are not fit should be a reality.
We can keep snapping photos of the fringes of our respective ideologies and write fitting captions and offer no attempt at solutions to the problem OR we can come together and solve this problem that we both agree is necessary to solve…..I’ll grab my camera.
I think the first step then is for people like you and your girlfriend to police and put and end to the open indoctrination that goes on in public schools. You’re turning a blind eye to the one main sticking point which turns former liberals like me against public education: the fringe-y far leftists whom you poo-poo are the ones setting the agenda (whether you realize it or not). And a wagon-circle of other liberals protects them from criticism or demotion. And so you get reactions like you see on this thread: People would rather opt out of public schooling altogether than see their kids brainwashed with political sewage.
It doesn’t mater whether or not YOU see this as a problem; what matters is that the general public is increasing seeing this as a problem. And so it is up to the liberal Security Team, which heretofore has prevented any beneficial change, to switch sides and toss out the ideologues who have poisoned the soup.
Otherwise, most people don’t want your dream to succeed, because it will result in beautiful schools that are still indoctrinating people.
Buddy I hate to be the one to break it to you but the folks pictured above are not “fringe” by any means. They are mainstream members of the “unionized public employee.” I’m glad that both your girlfriend and yourself are open to change but it is the people above who are driving the “conversation” (such as it is) and not you.
Perhaps your girlfriend could try this. (Asuming that she is a member of a public teacher’s union.) At the next large-scale meeting of her union she should stand up and say something like….”You know I have been thinking and we have it pretty good. But we are also looking at a fiscal crisis that affects everyone at the federal, state and local level. Maybe we should give up some of our benefits to balance the budget and also give up collective bargaining because all it does is protect bad teachers who then make us all look bad. We should set an example to our students of self-sacrifice in order to help our community. After all if they don’t learn from us by example then what are we doing here?”
Be sure you are sitting near the exits with your car outside and the motor running.
“believe that we can construct beautiful, common sense solutions that make education better in this country.”
I read that and I was just gonna say – as a liberal, you’re incapable of doing this otherwise you wouldn’t be a liberal. beautiful? And then I read this
“It will involve sacrifices from all parties. I’m sorry but increased effective tax rates”
aaaaand I was proven right. You have to be smarter than a doorknob to know that increasing taxes to throw more money at an already HUGELY expensive failure isn’t gonna fix it. Congrats, you libwits never fail to fall below reasonable expectations of critical thinking.
Most Public School teachers who have school-aged children send them to Private school! Think about that for a minute! It’s time that poor families had that option, too. Going to a voucher system would enable all to have a choice.
Private schools can promote good teachers and fire bad ones. The Public Schools can’t do that because they’re hampered by union rules.
Private schools can suspend unruly studends who disrupt class and make it harder for the motivated students to learn. Public Schools can’t do that because nanny state rules forbid any meaningful discipline.
Keep the better Public Schools open if enough parents are willing to use their vouchers to send their kids there. If education were truly compettitive, how long would the Public Schools last? Ask the teachers where they send THEIR children!
I don’t believe for one second that you’re a former leftie.
Can we say “Blogger been bought”?
Who is paying you to write such ridiculous garbage.
Koch brothers? Andrew Breitbart?
Your arguments are full of a false-unbiased mentality, and most of your supposed points are full of holes.
Slime
(Really folks, that’s the user name he gave himself — I didn’t change it.)
As to your allegations, FatUglyNerd: Yes, I am in the pay of The Great Right-Wing Conspiracy. My checks are co-signed by Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, Andrew Breitbart, and Satan himself (in the form of a red hoofprint).
I also commend you for commenting honestly as who you are, rather than posing as either a violent redneck or a supposed conservative who’s disappointed that we don’t like Obama. You’re a rare non-Moby, and for that we salute you!
I wants me some of that Koch Brothers money too!
Bwaaa haa haaa! Silly liberals. We former lefties (I grew up with SF hippie parents in 60s & 70s SF) must all be paid off by the Koch brothers, right?
We can’t possibly be pissed by the manipulation of our children by tax-funded government employees.
For all the screaming the left does about the evil rich, no “evil” rich person or corporation has demanded I put my child in a gang-infested school due to the zip code I live in. But the government has. The government takes my money by force through myriad taxes, tells me where I must put my child for school, teaches my child what THEY want to teach her, guses my tax dollars against me by collective union funding of liberal politicians… but I’m too fear corporations?
I had a bitchy school employee call me on the phone and demand I get my kid in the gang-infested school ASAP. Instead, I spent months learning all the loopholes of the education system to get her into a better school (which was only relatively better due to less gang problems).
One of the loopholes? Well, I was told by one lunkhead LAUSD employee if my daughter was any race but white she could transfer on a specific permit. Stupid me, being born white.
Nah, I shouldn’t be pissed by any of that. I’ll parrot the lefties: Corporations are evil! Eat the rich!
Silly liberals. I can’t believe I was ever one myself.
Your arguments are full of a false-unbiased mentality, and most of your supposed points are full of holes.
Then it should be very easy for you to refute those arguments. Strange, I see no refutations, just ad hominem attacks. That generally means that the commenter has no actual valid arguments to make….
Government systems resist change and any change is slow to come.
Sometimes you have to realize what is possible and strive for that, even though a better (but impossible to implement) exists.
When a State is not “right to work” as far as Teachers go, the unions are guaranteed a HUGE income by the dues that even non-members must pay. They use that money to support Progressive/Democrat/Socialist/Marxist candidates who promise to back the union once they’re elected. That is corruption at the highest level and must be stopped. The most important step that we can take is to follow the lead of Scott Brown and end collective barganing for anything execpt wages, and to stop the automatic State collection of union dues. The chain MUST be broken or the whole country will end up like Detroit with an illiteracy rate of almost half.
Thanks for the extensive photos. Time to whip out Gimp, for a little image improvement. I think some of those signs would look better with more accurate slogans – like “Save Our Schools – Ban Teachers’ Unions”. The ones with Che? “Murderous Thugs for Public Indoctrination”!
Why not have private schools and homeschools not public schools. Why do I have to pay for this crap. I know what a public education is, I got one, wish that I had a private one or been homeschooled. They don’t teach what they should teach in public schools, but they do teach Communism. Also Why do I have to pay money in taxes for a system that I do NOT believe in AND I don’t have any children. If I did, they would be homeschooled.
all legitimate questions
just another demonstration of how screwed up things become when the constitution is ignored/bypassed
most problems in education stem from the federal government’s involvement
if the political/social temperament shifts enough to the side of liberty and demands the reduction of the government’s intrusion into our personal lives “education” would improve almost overnight
I’m preplexed at Zombie’s “agonizing” and being “conflicted” over education. It should have been obvious to him a long time a go that the system sucks.
An idea from flyover country: Howard County, Indiana, schools are competing for students.
http://www.indianaeconomicdigest.net/main.asp?SectionID=31&SubSectionID=187&ArticleID=58359
De-funding the public schools won’t work because they won’t lower the taxes. If they raise taxes enough, the people won’t have any other option, no matter how bad the public option is.
I think of the education system as a canary in the coal mine–and it’s already lying down not moving.
I think the problem with public education is not that it is public, but that it is interstate. This is not solely a function of the Dept. of Ed., but also due to interstate unions. Even though they’re purported all local and in state, in practice they are not. The left decided not to wait for the federal government to get around to centralizing schools and did it themselves through unions.
The reason we spend so much money on school is to fund all the excess and mostly useless people in education. Here in AZ they spend just over half of all education dollars on administration, and over half of all public school employees are not teachers. An amazing feat, if education is the goal, but then it isn’t. It’s simply providing a sinecure for the like-minded, so they’ll be allies–vote buying, plain and simple.
Instead of waiting for public ed to wither, I think the better idea would be an alternative. I don’t mean a return to a classical liberal education, either. Instead, using classical methods as a base, we ought to completely rethink the subject matter and methods of education. Instead of grouping children by age, do it by ability in different areas. While it’s true that kids are cruel and will ridicule those in lower ‘grades,’ they do it now–forcing a one-size-fits-all approach hasn’t changed a thing. And changing mentally challenged from retarded from imbecile hasn’t changed anything either, as some kids are just as cruel and will always mock the undeserving.
Some things every citizen must know–the basics of economics, how government works, American History etc. Can’t get away from them. Everyone needs reading and mathematics. What we ought to do, however, is structure education to isolate the strengths of each child, find out their talents and penchants, and then fit the education to the child. The idea of a fully rounded education is history already. Specialization has simply gone too far. Instead of fighting the tide, or as the libs do ordering it to retreat, we should get into the boat.
This would be of great benefit to teachers as well, allowing them to teach more directly, and children would obviously be more interested in school if it gave them more scope for their own abilities, and they were learning things they liked, in addition to the rest. It’s no easy matter, of course, and not something that can be done all in a moment, but instead of trying to turn back the clock (to 1950s public school) or resurrect ancient methods (trivium etc) we should actually think it through, and build a system that guides kids to a successful life. Instead of pushing everyone toward college where they can get a useless ‘X-studies’ degree and then learn a new career on the job, we ought instead to let those with talents for needed skills finish up and then practice those newly acquired skills.
The lecture style has been around for a really long time, and though it has worked fairly well, it isn’t the only way to teach. There are plenty of ways to improve using technology, and we ought to try to take advantage of them. The fact that it will make the rent-seeking teachers obsolete is just another bonus.
Here in Michigan, I showed up to a MEA rally as a 1-man counter-protest. Basically I am offering to pay $1000 to any tenured MEA teacher who can indeed prove they can make more money by working at another job. They way they will prove this is producing a written job offer by Labor Day.
I am serious — the $1000 is real.
Greedy teachers and their unions are bankrupting the city, county, state and nation.
Our children globally test in the middle or lower range where we used to be Number 1. Remove private school educated kids and the public educated kids would be lower than a one room school in Africa.
This is PROOF that all the money we have thrown at the schools have just make the kids dumber.
Reduce funding to the level it was when the kids tested Number 1.
This could be fixed in September with existing top quality curriculum. Throw out the current expensive curriculum and put in Saxon Math or Singapore Math – world’s best, and CHEAPER. Practically teach themselves they’re so good.
Put in Calvert school – for $750 they have a year in a box and it’s solid, skills-driven curriculum. We HAVE already outstanding curriculum, yanked out of public schools in the 1960s but still being preserved in the homeschool market.
So, we could actually do something FAST for the incoming first graders. What do we do about the last ten years of high school grads who have no skills? We need remedial adult education – as if America was a Third World nation of adults who had no access to any education at all. There’re a lot of going back ten steps in order to bring people up to speed to function at an adult level. Much of the fail of students is no mastery of skills, so they cannot build on anything, so they are dismissed as “dumb” or “difficult.”
It’s to the point where it’s practically missionary work – lifetime commitments to teach discouraged adults the skills they should have had, to restore their sense of self-worth – that was destroyed by “Progressives” – a terrible twisting and devious corruption of that concept.
a good article and a lot of good comments.
thank you.
Agree with you completely. I am growing more and more disgusted by the public education system and its members. Most of these people have no educator’s ethic left. They care little about educating the children, only their job security and increasing pay. The system is plagued with bureaucracy and dirty politics. I would rather keep my tax dollars and pay for my kid’s education the way I see fit myself. We are letting our children be brainwashed by other people whose values differ from ours. We fancy that ours is a society that nurture free thinking when it is the opposite.
The Los Angeles Times has been running stories recently about a study that attempted to measure teachers’ quality. Here is a link to a story that deals with one aspect of the study that is of interest to me:
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-schools8-m,0,435352.story
This deals with monies spent based on teachers’ continuing education, which may very well be a useless factor in what makes a teacher effective. The unions where I live (in the SF bay area) often have automatic raises baked into their contracts based on taking these continuing education classes. In the recent funding shortfalls (due to state finances), many parcel taxes were placed on the ballot. If there still wasn’t enough money in the pot, what got cut? The automatic raises – or programs and jobs?
Three cheers if you understand the unions well enough to have guessed the correct answer.
zombie:
Here’s what public schools look like when there are ZERO controls on spending:
http://sonoranalliance.com/2010/01/16/public-schools-on-steroids-what-happens-when-those-setting-the-prices-dont-have-to-pay/
I plan to update in a month or so it for the coming 2011-2012 school year so taxpayers who are struggling to pay their mortgages can see what State Department employees get for their kids for FREE!
The overpriced US Oversseas schools are what forced us into the French educational system, where our kdis actually got educated for a FRACTION of the cost, steadily worked ahead of their American peers and to this day, STILL use their French-taught study and classroom decorum skills to keep them achieving. Thanks to our kids’ experience as foreign students working in another language, they were quick to discover HOW the Chinese and Korean CHEAT on their exams in class. Stupid union facilitators wax poetic about how BRILLIANT the Oriental students are – a veritable race of genuises – while students openly talk in their language in front of them, swapping test answers. Well, how about that, they’re HUMAN, just like everyone else.
In MY day, NO ONE was allowed to SPEAK during an exam. DUH! Even THAT common sense is GONE in schools.
Now, how many of our local rednecks got beat out of scholarships by cheating CHinese students who snagged the top spots, not questioned because of a blatent racial bias harbored by Liberal Lefties that assumed all Chinese are geniuses and that the local redneck kids are dumb?
We’ve SEEN this. The subtle bigotry of the education establishment has all sorts of unexpected permutations.
Well, good for you zom. It is similar to realizing the whole peace-leftism thing is bs.
But it is already very bad (ie, public education). I’m ready to move to just get my kid into an ‘ok’ school system (vs. the F- one around here).
Outstanding effort, Zombie. If nothing else, it further demonstrates how government isn’t the solution, but is the problem. And, if we could export this type of unexceptionalism to places like China and India, we might be able to hold-our-own in world affairs.
Sadly, that may not happen, and this structural deficiency will only add to the others we’ve contracted (big debt, cap-n-trade, health-scare) to pull us handsomely into last place. I don’t go to the races, but is there a bet for the last three horses to cross the finish line? A ‘tri-defecta’?
Don’t let the RINO’s keep funding these ‘people’.
You left out one reason that deters some parents who might otherwise home school – and it is economics. Home schooling will often mean that one parent stays home instead of working outside the home, giving up that income. School works as a free baby sitter. The push for universal compulsory pre-school seems to me to be a way to create free daycare – something some lower income families who are currently paying for working hours day care of their pre-school age kids might appreciate.
We are a home schooling family, and we do with less to enable that. And every day I am grateful.
However about home schooling John Holt said it best (I’m paraphrasing) that home is better regardless of how good schools might be.
The secret to starving the public sector unions and fixing the state budget is as follows;
Pass an initiative that gives bonuses to everyone in a department, sub-department, regional branch…ect. The bonus would be dependent on the amount that the particular department comes in under budget during a fiscal year.
If a department has a yearly budget of $100 million and they end the year having only spend $70 million, then lets say a third or half of the money saved would be given as a bonus to the people in the department. Let department heads get three or four shares, everyone else gets one share, kinda like an old pirate crew.
I suspect that the money saved in just the first year will be like a tidal wave rung out of Gods biggest sponge. The unions will fight it all the way. The screaming will be epic. Yet the state drones and department heads in the trenches will scrape and save in ways we couldn’t even guess at. After all, they know where all the bodies are buried. We can’t expect the jerk politicians to fix it. Just dangle some cash in front of the tax wasters and they will pull the wagon for us.
I left teaching public high school due to politics. I decided not to return because of politics. I am so glad that my oldest graduated because I’m tired of dealing with the politics of education. I homeschool my youngest daughter so that I don’t have to deal with the biased politics of the education system.
WOW ALL THOSE PICTURES AND ONLY 4 WHITE PEOPLE!
???
Moby sensors tingling.
Only 4 white people?
Yeah. What’s with taking so many brown kids out of school where they were supposed to be learning academics, and making them sit outside downtown somewhere holding signs for all those white teachers?
Those kids by state law are supposed to have so many SEAT HOURS per SUBJECT. Don’t look like they got subjects or seats, just “Stand there and hold this sign for ME.” No pay. Did the kids have to bring their own lunches or did the tightwad union teachers buy them something nutritious for all their efforts? Given that they didn’t pay the kids anything for their LABOR, what’re the odds they were gonna spring for lunch?
Like holding signs for greedy teachers instead of doing their math is gonna get those kids a better score on the SAT and help them get into a decent college.
They have NERVE calling corporations greedy. Corporations actually PAY for work done on their behalf, and abide by local laws.
DEMOCRAT LEFT EXPLOITATION on DISPLAY.
Ha ha. Thanks for a good chuckle in a depressing read.
Excellent pictorial essay! You are right. The Public education system must be dismantled, remove the unions and the communist influences. Only then can it be rebuilt into an institution that will benefit the children.
When the public schools are destroyed, there will be a time of deprogramming for the children. they will need this time.
When I took my children out of the public school to homeschool them I had to give them about three months to get “it” out of their heads.
I totally agree with you, we need to destroy it so that it can be rebuilt properly. And I can’t imagine people willingly wanting slavery(socialism)!!!!
I know this is happening all over the country, but I’m actually happy to watch as California implodes. They deserve it. When all of the productive people leave and the people in your pictures are left behind to fend for themselves do you think they will figure it out at that point? I doubt it. Screw ‘em.
“No taxes for workers and exploited farmers!”
I guess we just tax the unemployed. I’m sure that will work.
Do you think that using the California education system as an example is fair? I lived in California and volunteered in the schools there. They’re horrible, the teachers were flaky and taught based on the latest fad, not on the data.
I’m back in the Midwest, in Chicago in fact. We have some bad schools, a lot of that is poverty and the “generationally poor” (Welfare Moms!), but we have some awesome schools.
My son goes to a school where 45% of the kids are Hispanic and 69% qualify for free or reduced lunch. But they are still achieving suburban results on their tests. The teachers are savvy and will fight the few rich parents who want to completely remove things like phonics from the curriculum. It’s a math/science magnet school, but my son is learning Spanish too. I think it’s awesome.
The only hope I see for America is another “Great Awakening”, like the first one before the Revolutionary War and the second one before the Civil War.
If we don’t have the majority of the country seeking after the heart of God, then we will be seeking after the person who will be revealed to be the Antichrist.
This is child abuse on a scale greater than any “molester” could do. The ramifications of this indoctrination will shape these poor kids actions throughout their lives. How can we hope to survive when there is no logic taught to our children. Living on emotions leads to the psyche wards. (or congress).
I think Zombie is going overboard.
This isn’t what education is like, this is what the People’s Republics of San Francisco and Berkeley are like – I don’t know about LA, but come on, Orange County is as ridiculously right wing as the democratic areas are ridiculously left wing. And instead of protesting what out of control conservatives do are things like (and this happened to my friend who just died of cancer):
In a rather complicated scam, gay men are targeted by a cop who picked them up, tried to have sex with them in a forest then arrested them for the crime of sex in public… Then they’re extorted, (in his case denied medicine) and after money has been extorted they’re told they have to stay out of the county or they’ll be prosecuted and put on the rolls as sex offenders. Sweet business by a judge and police department eh? And it runs out the queers, everyone is happy.
You’re living in a state where people are grouped in to camps of extremists who hate each other and you’re just switching sides… That’s not the same thing as being objective.
My experience is that Republicans are people who know what all the crimes of Democrats are and Democrats are people who know what all the crimes of Republicans are.
But people avoid knowing their own side.
Perhaps it’s time that you stopped trying so hard to be comfortable on the right, and joined the always uncomfortable middle. Other than Michael Totten, Pajamas media a bad place. It’s a place where formerly sane, slightly right leaning thinkers go to seed and start ranting like Rush Limbaugh. I hate watching Victor David Hansen lose his edge and say things far too stupid for him. I hate watching Richard Fernades turn into a crank. I hate seeing idiots like Barry Rubin stink up the front page every day.
Those teachers up there were going overboard a bit, but they have points too, and they’re in a culture that finds what they’re doing acceptable.
This isn’t about Public education vs. private. There’s a long argument about why government funding private schools and other not really private businesses are just a conduits for corruption and politicians making their rich friends richer, creating fake businesses that make a guaranteed profits off public money, creating businesses that are structurally incapable of guaranteeing the rights (of students, patients, employees) that the old system protected…
If you’re gonna say we need government funding of private schools then you better take as hard a look at what you’re asking for as you are at what you’re rejecting. Being lazy and only looking at one side is what makes a winger, left or right.
Don’t be a winger.
Most countries will not accept American course credit for any of their nationals going to American high schools for their foreign exchange programs because the US system is about 5 years behind foreign schools.
Most countries will not accept American course credit for any of their nationals going to American high schools for their foreign exchange programs because the US system is about 5 years behind foreign schools. If the come, it’s SOLELY to improve their English, nothing else. I KNOW this because we hosted TWO exchange students, two different countries, this year, no credit and they were four years academically ahead of their classmates.
By second grade, American kids are already BEHIND their foreign peers. I KNOW this because we transferred our kid in sescond grade to the European system. He had to get his chunky baby printing down to adult-size cursive in a week’s time or die trying to take notes – the Europeans teach adult size cursive from day one, but union teachers told everyone in the USA that that was HARD and that PRINTING BIG BABYISH was better for little kids. It is nearly IMPOSSIBLE now for American students to transfer into any foreign schools succesfully. They DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS.
You sound like an IDIOT, trying to excuse the fail of our unionist, expensive, Democrat Party controlled schools by invoking radio talk show hosts you don’t like. You can go to France or Spain or China or India and try that and they won’t know what the HELL you’re talking about, but they will SHOW you the FAIL results on the entrance exams of American students. I would LOVE to show them your insightful explanation that it’s all fine and it’s just some radio talk show host’s misconception just to watch them LAUGH OUT LOUD at what a MORON you are. In fact, I will have an opportunity to do JUST that in a few months, so I’ll copy your post so I can spread it internationally for some multi-culti LAUGHS.
I was arguing against privatizing education and your rebuttal is to say that American schools are inferior to other countries where… the schools are not private.
Face-palm.
Also I grew up going back and forth between American and Canadian schools.
I went to the second highest rated high school in California ( the highest was only a couple miles away too – very good neighborhood ). It was about the same as the high school I went to in Canada. The Students in the California school were much more motivated than the one in Canada, but the Canadian school did have one advantage, lessons were twice as long, which is MUCH better. Then there is time to give a lecture and have the students start work, and check to make sure that the students really understand what they heard and can apply it.
Actually I think it was 50 minute classes in California, 1 hour 20 minutes in Canada.
I’ll put my private school educated children up against your publicly indocrinated kids any day of the year.
Hey, how come no one has asked about all the big evil corporations that the teachers California Public Employees Retirement System (otherwise known as Cal PERS) invests in? I believe it is the richest pension system in the country, if not the world. Isn’t it a delicious paradox that those same corporations the teachers want to see taxed more would then lose the big profits their very pension system requires to fund their generous retirements……generous being in comparison to the vast majority of private workers in California.
I’d also like to know if any of the California students know how many “workers” Che Guevara is responsible for murdering – oh wait, the teachers probably don’t know the answer to that ones themselves. Ignorance apparently is bliss.
If you’re a fan of egotistical beggars and censorship, perhaps visiting a black market liquor store in Gaza is what you need.
Wow, not one sign demanding more food for teachers, apparently they aren’t starving.
Next time you two guys go out into such a crowd, take signs suggesting all teachers fast for one day a month and send the money to pay for the schools. All the kids should turn in their cell phones for six month and send the money to pay for the schools, etc. You could probably borrow a megaphone to be sure you are heard.
Just kidding. It would be better to get together and purchase some ad space in the newspapers, there would be less blood and you guys could live to report again.
Join the fight!.
I love this idea – but I’ll go you one better.
The next time these … stellar public servants… are out on the lounge – one should join them and pretend to be a supporter – even a fellow teacher. But… perhaps just a touch… clumsy?… with one’s verbage. I can envision a sign saying “I want more money!” or “Your Taxes are too low! Pay teacher more!” or “Who can live on $75,000 a year! Teachers need more!” (Adjust, of course, for your local average pay.) or “Shorter day! Longer vacations!” Then – if at all confronted – play super-stupid. What? Isn’t that what they want? Aren’t you just being helpful?
If you can keep a straight face – you win!
Look at all the comments here. I feel a political counter-revolution stirring. The crisis in public education is the perfect battleground. The left can’t give an inch here and that proves their bad faith.
They can really lose the people over this. I would never have thought so in the past, but now, things have gone way too far. This issue can unify the conservatives and the “common sense” center and crush the hard core left. Since they have no room for tactical retreat in this domain it could be their Waterloo.
Guess why I didn’t become a teacher, as I originally intended? (Hint: The unions played quite a role, the european teacher’s unions, to be precise)
What’s funny is that Zombie is toeing Bastiat. Bastiat believed that education should not be in the hands of government (and was against “free” education), preferring letting the free market determine how education was handled. His basic belief was that Government’s only legitimate function was to protect the life, liberty, and property of the individual. Just about anything else, like the “right” of education, requires that the government take money away from someone to serve the needs/desires of somebody else, essentially legally robbing Peter to pay Paul.
For years home-schooled children have out-paced public schooled children in every subject. This without taxpayer money and usually with parents who are not trained as teachers. Lately, socialists have been trying to stop home-schooling and require all children go to public schools. Why would that be, if home-schooling produces such educated students? Why, it is that those children have not been bent in the direction of the public union and teachers who have forgotten why they are in the classroom.
It should be against the law to drag children under the age of 18 to a protest rally. To poison their minds with your rhetoric agenda when they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about is definitely CHILD ABUSE.
I submit that it is not one bit better to subject children to brainwashing in schools than it is to drag them to political rallies off school property.
Most of these pictures were not taken on any schools’ property, but out in the streets of downtown SF or L.A. So we’re definitely already there. Not only should all of the teachers involved with removing their students from a classroom for an unsanctioned, unapproved “field trip” be fired, they should be tried for child endangerment and misuse of state funds. Then they should have to plead guilty and pay restitution, and make up the teaching time plus perform community service for at least the number of student-hours lost (i.e. 30 students in a class x 4 hours = 120 hours).
Are students are being short changed, and it isn’t the taxpayers or Sacramento that are doing it.
Dismantle the Dept of Education and give the power back to the states! States are mandated above what should be forced upon them!! Our education should be limited to those in this country legally so our legal immigrants and citizens get the most out of what they are entitled to and the future they deserve!
Overcrowded classrooms, food programs unable to keep up with demand, jobs after school and summer, teachers too! Families are struggling to make ends meet and it’s not fair that they have to compete with illegals and their children!! We cannot educate the world and it’s time to focus on OUR people so they can compete throughout the world instead of living a life of poverty!!
The school’s getting “x” amount of money for each student, right? So if all the concerned parents would go remove their children from the schools, the schools would close. No students=No funding.
Unfortunately, there are not enough concerned parents. There is no question that the school systems have failed. The question is why the parents continue to send their children to a failed system?
With a bit of determination and research, you can homeschool for free. If money is not an issue, you can find an endless supply of curricula to purchase, or pay for private schools and tutors. I will continue to homeschool my children, because public school just isn’t even an option as far as our family is concerned.
In most areas of California, parents can only afford to live, feed, and clothe their kids while paying taxes and every other expense if they have two incomes. Many other parents are just lazy.
However, if roughly half half our income taxes go toward public schools (as they currently do) and all of their property taxes go toward these schools (yes even renters pay their fair share of these), then they’re essentially throwing all of their hard earned money away by not attempting to at least use some of these schools.
The real answer is vouchers, but teachers unions in CA would never allow this to pass or even make it to the ballot most likely. Why, because then they’d actually be held accountable, whereas right now they are beholden and accountable to no one.
Thanks again Zombie for letting the fly-over country see the madness without have to smell the rot. Keep up the good work.
If money was the answer, native Americans and Washington DC students would be the smartest people in the country.
A friend told me about this essay, but I was not prepared for the conclusion. Zombie, the education establishment is rotten, but schools often avoid a lot of the trouble thanks to being locally controlled. My schools in small-town Illinois and Iowa were not in the least way political. My high school had one liberal and one conservative teacher – the rest didn’t beat you with their ideology. (The conservative was the civics / modern US history teacher.)
I could see a few other angles on this that I think would work better. Eliminate the department of education, and stuff student loans under the treasury department. The less federal involvement, the better. Also, repeal the executive order allowing public workers to unionize. (For any republican president, it is pure common sense to break union power. It’s money being pulled away from your opponent!) This moves the battleground to the states. The key point in the states is to allow local school districts more freedom, especially in the area of teacher qualifications. Get some people who have actually worked in the field as teachers, as opposed to just people with a college degree in education.
Have you ever been to a homeschool bookfair/conference. There is an amazing number of vendors who sell curriculum to homeschoolers. The vacuum is being filled.
There is a very ironic aspect to the comments to this article: the vast majority of them have at least one or two spelling or grammar mistakes!
Given that the almost all the comments decry the appalling quality of education children are getting today and many commenters say that they had much better educations that what young people get today, I was surprised that there were so many errors in the comments. Maybe commenters weren’t quite as well educated as they thought they were….
“There is a very ironic aspect to the comments to this article: the vast majority of them have at least one or two spelling or grammar mistakes!
Given that the almost ”
LMFAO!!!! MORON.
Did you mean “multi ironic?” Did you mean “Given that the multi all the comments…?” Did you mean “than what young people…?”
You don’t by any chance smoke a corn cob pipe and wear a straw hat and live by a giant river do you?
Way to attempt to divert from the issue at hand — with your own grammar mistakes to boot.
The fact that there are occassional misspellings, punctuation errors, is evidence that there is no spellchecking involved and most people have never taken a typing class. And yes, itt also reflects on the educational system at large. It’s the Internet, not a published newspaper, nor a spelling bee. A bigger issue is how many of our California students graduate at or below a 10th grade reading level.
There is a very ironic aspect to the comments to this article: the vast majority of them have at least one or two spelling or grammar mistakes!
Given that the almost all the comments decry the appalling quality of education children are getting today and many commenters say that they had much better educations that what young people get today, I was surprised that there were so many errors in the comments. Maybe commenters weren’t quite as well educated as they thought they were….
Whoa! Talk about irony: I did the exact same thing I attributed to others
Here is what I meant to say:
There is a very ironic aspect to the comments to this article: the vast majority of them have at least one or two spelling or grammar mistakes!
Given that
thealmost all of the comments decry the appalling quality of education children are getting today and many commenters say that they had much better educations than what young people get today, I was surprised that there were so many errors in the comments. Maybe commenters weren’t quite as well educated as they thought they were….–
Please note that I meant no offense to anyone with my comment; it was simply an observation. It looks like most of us were so energized to comment on Zombie’s article that we let the odd mistake slip out.
Fantastic article. The purpose of the public school system was never to educate people to the limit of their potential. It was originally to create workers with only enough education to perform factory jobs. It is now to indoctrinate people and turn them into the useful idiots and sheeple that the democrats and liberals need to elect them to public office to control the country. The Department of Eduction is not needed and should be terminated. More money to education is not the answer. vouchers may be – so that parents can choose the education for their children that is best for them, and not have their children forced into a failed system of indoctrination.
Kids, get your own education. Don’t depend on others to do it for you, after all, only you really care about yourself. Go to the library, forget about the local school. All you are doing here is wasting time and spreading stupid propaganda for the school’s “teachers.”
May 13th was the day that our schools had a protest in towns and some of the groups took their students to protest at the capital in Harrisburg, PA. I also know some parent denied to allow their children to be pulled out of school that day. Some parents kept their children home because there would be no supervision at school for the kids. And if there kid or kids were considered absent for the day they would take the school board and others to task. It was not a scheduled day for the teachers to be out of the schoolroom.
I am all for school reform if it brings in competition. Here in PA we have charter schools, cyber charter schools, a state run cyber school and private schools (as well as home schooling). But the public schools teachers union fights these “privatized” schools with ever fiber of their being. It is sad to see especially in the Philadelphia school district.
There are schools out there that are filling the gap. And the best thing is these schools are getting the best ratings in the state. Public school has the worst rating with only a few stand out schools.
Thank you for taking a stand against the indoctrination of public schools. And the photos are quite eye opening.
I am a teacher who has attempted not to be dragged into supporting the “hive mentality”. I agree with Zombie that this teacher mindset does exist. But, I don’t know what to do about changing it. Frankly, the union leaders won’t leave you alone, even if you don’t openly argue with them. Anyone resisting the union’s constant maneuvering- to push their school’s environment ( parental involvement, student safety, teacher political advocacy in the classroom, merged or ranked learning levels, grading or no grades, discipline, textbooks, curriculum and so forth) towards a direction which supports student advocacy of radical leftwing goals– is marked for extinction. Again, any teacher refusing to go along with their left-wing political agenda and teaching ideology will find that they are the target of constant threats and attempt to isolate them from other faculty. I watched this process occur multiple times and it is not subtle. The end result has been a steady steam of particularly over-30 “too traditional” teachers who have been encourage by the unions to leave the profession. The parents protest for a few weeks and then everyone moves on until the next victim is targeted. The end result is that many of us feel afraid to speak up and risk losing our careers. The system is too large, too powerful and all the key positions are controlled by the people who march in lockstep. It is an ugly thing to confess that I’m afraid to openly fight back. I hate admit it Zombie, but I think that the system is too corrupt at this point to turn this situation around.
However,in my state I haven’t seen quite the level of student manipulation as shown by your photos. It would be interesting to find out if students are hijacked to attend union rallies in other states besides California. Personally, I refuse to even state what political party or candidate I back in a classroom. it stifles free expression from students who believe they have to kiss your backside to get a better grade. Moreover, it is an abuse of my authority. Yet, I am
alone among my peers in that belief.
You have raised some legitimate points but I am not convinced that leaving public schools to those too poor to afford an alternative is the answer. How many potential good minds could we lose if poor children are left to intellectually wither inside decaying and underfunded schools? I’ve taught in schools in rich and poor neighborhoods. Wealth does not guarantee talent or intelligence and affluent students other types of problems. However, a private school can provide stronger opportunities to those with the income to afford it. Are we going to throw students lacking money to the educational wolves?
The higher education bubble: http://nplusonemag.com/bad-education Evidently, I was lucky to graduate from college in 1967 and not 2011.
Realizing that this post will, in all likelihood, be lost in the torrent, I nonetheless offer it up.
I was once a genuine, certified Math Genius for one year. Why? Because in third grade I lived overseas, and was taught my multiplication tables by rote, from “Once one is one” to “Twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four.” We chanted this in math class until we knew the whole “times tables.” And, when I came back to the US, where “new math” was the soup du jour, I was the only person in the class who knew how to multiply. Or divide.
During that overseas year I also learned poetry by rote, as we did—still—in the US when I came back. It taught me rhyme, meter, rhythm, memory—and even some poetry. It was a superb (and enjoyable!) form of learning, which I understand has gone out completely nowadays.
I currently teach college students one semester a year. I collect English instruction texts from elementary and high schools of bygone eras—mostly 1920-1950—to aid me in formulating my instruction, since most of my “college” students have a grasp of reading, thought, and logic which would have been considered risible in my sophomore highschool classes. Also, I want to preserve textbooks which have patriotic verse and cogent questions.
Back when I was learning math overseas, I was astounded to learn, halfway through the term, that the answers were actually printed in the back of the book. It had never occurred to me to look—and it was only years later that I realized that the answers were there because we were expected to learn the concepts, and the correct answer was merely so we could check our own grasp of the material.
Excellent.
But look at how badly your personality has been warped by knowing those concepts. (Do I really need a sarc tag? (-: )
As a retired public school teacher I am convinced that our only hope is to rescue our children from the public (government) schools and raise a godly generation. Please see “Call to Dunkirk” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRGZLSVph3A.
Public schools cannot be redeemed. Saying we should not abandon them is like saying the passengers of the Titanic should have stayed aboard because the band was playing good music and the captain was a good man.
Please also see http://insectman.us/exodus-mandate-wv/index.htm.
I find it extremely disturbing that these “teachers” were bringing heir students. Did the parents give permission?
I firmly believe that our public schools are trying to create socialist zombies. Since the beginning I was a part of my oldest son’s education through volunteering and being right in each teacher’s face daily. The good ones welcomed me while the ones who tok the job thinking it would be easy couldn’t stand me. Then I discovered home schooling! Enough said?
Believe it or not my children do not just learn the “blocked” vrsion of history, science,etc. they are taught about the many differences of our past, present and future.
Our children need to learn the truth about our past so they do not repeat those same mistakes, but public school terachers want to blame the government, rich people and even parents!
When I was in school my teachers were there with their heart and souls. They truly wanted to make a differnce. Now, they want to be paid big bucks for being slackers!
Such a mess!
Are you sure this Rally was in the US? Were those real teachers? Does this horror show of ant-American freaks have a justification for keeping children from a day of education for their greed?
Your idea could be dangerous but at this point something drastic needs to be done.
If you continue your interesting series on education,i request you look into E.St.Louis,IL.The state recently took over control of the school boards and schools.The cost per student is insanely high.The state and goverment have poured billions into the system.Graduation rate is below 50%,minus the 3000 students they lost last year.I mean literally lost.The president of the school board said” I don’t know where they are.” She earns $100k a yr and is being investigated for tax evasion.The entire town is a government funded failure.The FBI and DEA are here permanently and citizens have asked for Marshal Law to be declared.
And it gets better.Some are calling for seperation of the county and succession from the state of IL. This school district has pumped out hatred,social system dependency and criminals, all barely able to read since the 1970′s.
If you vote, you are democrat,it doesn’t matter if you vote for peter pan,it comes out democratic.Every year they arrest a few for voter fraud and ignore the 1000 others.They have day care for Jr and Senior high school and at voting time cantidates have handed out turkeys and hams to voting age student mothers.
Many of the poster said “tax the rich.” To me, these teachers and adminstrators are the “rich”. $47,000.00, gross income, in CA puts me in the TOP tax bracket. At $47k, can’t afford retirement plan because I pay for health insurance (don’t get me started on Obamacare, no benefit for me!) I pay for these “teachers” and they bleed me and make more than me..AND now they want more. At this point I’d rather quit work, take welfare (money teachers can’t get) and then move out of state, than give more to the unions. If “rich” is the “guide”, teachers owe me money. On top of it all…I DON”T HAVE ANY KIDS!
The conservative teachers I know tend to group up in small groups. We do not need the constant self agrandizment that the leftie teachers need. This probably stems from from the fact that we are a minority, but we also steadfastly believe in our principles towards education vs indoctrination.
Here in Canada, (Ontario especially) the emphasis has shifted from educating the subject material to expanding on “Social Justice”. The teachers colleges, (especially York, OISE, and Trent University) look upon teaching now as a form of social work, and social engineering. This will only perpetuate the problem as each generation that follows will know less and less of the subject matter being put forward in class. Education now takes a back seat to touchy feely self esteem. I have students showing up in grade nine classes with grade 3 reading and writiing abilities. They can’t be held back because this would hur their self esteem. But doesn’t falling further and further behind damage them even more?
This is EXACTLY why I HOMESCHOOL now! No Teacher has the right to shove their own political agenda down my child’s throat. If I had a child in a public school and my child was taken to a rally/lynch mob like this I think I would sue the living —- out of them!
If I was on the school board Every teacher who took a student there would have been fired.
It is clear to me that funding education has nothing to do with reading, righting, and arithmetic or history but much more about funding the greedy teachers union bosses. It seems the more we give to education the dumber the students become. I also question the way the teachers use the kid to lay a guilt trip on the parents and community. “Indoctrination as Education”. We have this problem in Ariz. with la raza and the rewriting of the history books. You would think the school system is being run by the marxist.
Yes you are 100% correct, and vouchers would 100% solve this problem. Otherwise, people have no choice but to pay for, and are being extorted into enrolling their children in a broken system they don’t remotely believe in.
California doesn’t rank 49th in education because we don’t have enough money or all the parents don’t care. The system is broken and needs an entire overhaul.
I am a teacher in a high achieving, “minority majority” high school with a large ESOL and special education population in the metropolitan, D.C. area, a highly politicized part of the country. We have many students from all walks of life, attending the nation’s finest colleges, military training programs, vocational schools, community colleges or gainful employment. We work long hours and struggle mightily to set each student on a course for success of his or her own making. That said, I need to make a few points:
*No public school teacher has the right to impose his or her own political/social/religious, etc. values on students. This is unethical and irresponsible. Pressure to remove or retrain these teachers must come from the parents/community. Too often they are silent.
*No public school employee….in fact, no advertising firm, corporation, etc. has the right to exploit children for the purpose of advancing a political agenda, making money, selling a product. This, too, is unethical and irresponsible. Once again, the public needs to impose pressure on the school system for having these teachers removed.
*Tenured teachers CAN be and ARE removed from their jobs. It involves administrators and parents speaking out, the documentation of poor performance and attempts to impose improvement plans, but it happens every day. The notion that tenure and teachers’ unions make it possible for bad teachers to be removed is a fallacy.
*Our biggest problems in educating children in these times (I have been an educator for over 30 years) are the byproducts of much larger societal concerns: poor attendance, children’s lack of accountability to community/family/parents, limitless time and focus on technological devices such as ipods, phones, computers, both in and out of school, little to no discipline and/or social skill instruction at home.
There are surely more than a handful of poor teachers that need to go; this is true in any profession. But we have the talent pool, the ability, the strategies and the enthusiasm to educate kids. We need the earnest, constructive involvement of parents and community, the resources to ignite curiosity and the administrative/legislative teeth to require students to be IN school and to receive the respectable educational and social foundation of a productive citizen. Public education is a necessary component of a civil society.
Thank you for this dialogue and for the passion of these readers and writers.
What she said!
This happened in California…the rest of America by and large is not anything like this !!!! I know that where I live taking those kids to that rally or any other POLITICAL demonstration on school time would not have even been considered. On the subject of abolishing public education I would agree with Newt’s opinion on the Medicare Reforms of Ryan…Right wing social engineering is just as bad as left wing social engineering !
This whole situation reminds me of another true education story from California about 40 years ago. Todd Strasser wrote about it in his book The Wave.
http://www.amazon.com/Wave-Laurel-Leaf-contemporary-fiction/dp/0440993717/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1307814722&sr=1-4
How very sad for children to be taught by their teachers, whom they respect and admire, that ALL Republicans are bullies, that socialism is the answer and that ALL corporations are greedy.
Yet one more reason why we have homeschooled for the last five years.
Does “any Profession” have a record like this?
For West Virginia, the data is indisputable regarding the area of sexual abuse. See the SEXUAL ABUSE PLAGUES SCHOOLS (10-21 -2007) headline. Also see Abuse is No, 1 Reason Teachers Lose Licenses in W. Va (10-17 -2005 ). Others, of several, are 10-3-2007 and 6-1-2008).
The problem is nationwide according to Sexual Scandals in Government Schools, Bad, Bad Teacher, and Sextra Credit.
I have been a (mostly) public school teacher for forty two years now, and I am appalled at the children taken out of class for such a rally (rather telling that there are more than a few pictures of Che Gueverra (like the one briefly in the news at an Obama campaign office in Texas)), and further, more than appalled at the liberal professors turning out liberal teachers to indoctrinate our children!
I find it ironic that Police and Firemen keep getting budget cuts and furloughed and have to deal with it. But when it’s the teacher’s, it’s a whole different story. The police and firemen are there to protect me and keep me safe, they should be the last to get cuts and furloughed. My life does not depend on a teacher. I was in the public school system in the late 60’s and 70’s when it started to decline. I lived through court ordered bussing. The theory of that was to give those in a bad school a better education in a good school, but instead they had to lower the standards. So instead of them getting the education I was getting I ended up getting the education they were getting. They need to fire those teachers that don’t make the grade. Over crowding isn’t a problem. I had to deal with that also. I had a good teacher in a over crowded class and was learning and was taken out of that class and put in a class by an instructor that was only a babysitter and didn’t learn a thing. If we lived in a truly fair world policemen and firemen would make what actors and athletes make and actors and athletes wouldn’t even make minimum wage. But I live in the real world and realize life is not always fair. Last year Gov. Christie of New Jersey had a sit down with some teachers and one said she teaches because she loved it. If you truly love what you do money shouldn’t be an issue, and if you are truly good at what you do money is a reward. I neglected to include one other group that are under paid and that is our Soldiers. To all you Policemen, Firemen, and Soldiers I thank you for keeping me safe.
I am a school teacher and I support public education, but I will admit and am very surprised that the protest was on a school day and it appears whole classes of students were in attendance. If that was the case, that was inappropriate. I also believe it is inappropriate to label Republicans as anti public education as many have historically favored an educated workforce, and even the author noted” – Most parents do not have the time, patience, expertise or interest to either homeschool or spend a lot of effort choosing amongst a panoply of confusing small-school options.” I might add $ to this list and to his credit the author noted ” We don’t want to revert to the era before public schooling when education was restricted to the wealthy elite. ”
People need to realize a few things. Virtually any alternative to public school, private, charter, parochial, alternative, corporate model, etc, get to pick who walks in the door and, if they get it wrong, they can kick them out w/out consequence and their testing is not as stringent in most cases.
Public schools have to take (and test) all comers, regardless of their primary language, mental abilities, home life or attitude. To help deal with this they need more resources, not less, and it is in your best interest that this happens because most students who ultimately do drop out have few options and some will break into your car or house and we taxpayers will pay at least 30k a year to lock them up instead of them paying your social security. There is a connection, 65% of incarcerated prisoners are illiterate.
Also, Teachers did not cause the economic collapse nor are they the greedy power mongering bastards as has been portrayed in the media. They did not get whopping raises when the economy took off, but they are being forced to take whopping cuts to their already meager salaries now (and loss of rights)
I am looking forward to a 20k pension annually when I retire. good luck living on that!
While I support public education I do not support how public education has become responsible only to itself (or to its Unions). Everything in education is funded by taxpayer money. The buildings (and their upkeep), equipment, staff, psychologists, teachers pay and benefits. And educators are put in a position of responsibility over people’s children(again while only responding to what Unions tell or allow them to do). The children’s education, well-being (not only physical but also mental), and the accuracy of what is being taught. Right now educators answer only to their Unions. Unions determine who keeps their job and who loses it (last hire, first fire). Unions set up idiotic, lengthy, and costly procedures to dicipline teachers who commit crimes or behave badly. The New York City “rubber rooms” which cost millions each year (while doing very little to actually fix why the teachers are there to begin with) come to mind, along with a teacher in my area who had a relationship with his underage student, admitted to it and got paid to not work for 2+ years while the school tried to fire him (and the Union dragged its feet). To get schools working they MUST be put back under the leadership of the taxpayers, not Unions (who have shown far too often that they only care about their own position in power).
“People need to realize a few things. Virtually any alternative to public school, private, charter, parochial, alternative, corporate model, etc, get to pick who walks in the door and, if they get it wrong, they can kick them out w/out consequence and their testing is not as stringent in most cases.”
Public schools also can kick students out (expulsion, suspension, or BOCES “alternate” education). Under privatization there would also be “alternate” schools, like those for children for “difficult areas”, “special needs”, ect. It is a sad situation that people in a moderate to low income area like Harlem NY are having to fight the school Unions to allow private or charter schools to open which a vast number of the residents want.
“Public schools have to take (and test) all comers, regardless of their primary language, mental abilities, home life or attitude. To help deal with this they need more resources, not less, and it is in your best interest that this happens because most students who ultimately do drop out have few options and some will break into your car or house and we taxpayers will pay at least 30k a year to lock them up instead of them paying your social security. There is a connection, 65% of incarcerated prisoners are illiterate.”
Public schools didnt always need to teach in all languages, there was a time when English was mandatory. Maybe the US needs to get back to English as the primary and only language used in schools. Schools used to take children from all types of backgrounds and did very well for many decades, why is it that it takes more and more money to solve the same problem? We need to stop looking at how we can spend more money on a problem but on how a problem can be solved in a different, possibly less expensive means. And why are 65% of inmates illiterate? Illegal aliens? Drop outs? Schools failing to do their job in actually providing an education? You will find that the last one factors into extremely heavily. Why are the educators failing to do their job?
“Also, Teachers did not cause the economic collapse nor are they the greedy power mongering bastards as has been portrayed in the media. They did not get whopping raises when the economy took off, but they are being forced to take whopping cuts to their already meager salaries now (and loss of rights)
I am looking forward to a 20k pension annually when I retire. good luck living on that!”
I think teachers leaving school on fake premise of being “sick” so that they can protest, closing down the schools and forcing the students to go home and not recieve an education, while at the same time they chant “We do it for the children” shows absolute hypocrisy and that the teachers are looking out for only one thing: themselves. Every year teachers recieve raises, some times multiple (even if they are not “big”). Right now teachers in Wisconsin (as recently shown) as well as many other states get paid on average at least 10k MORE a year than the average private sector worker (note: dont include school admin nor private sector management or CEOs who skew the pay in private sector up). At the same time teachers pay next to nothing for their benefits AND get 20k a year(?) pensions while private sector workers get…none. All the while teachers expect the private sector workers to pay more, while the children get educated less, and the teachers CRY about how little they get paid (but they do it for the children!).
((For full disclosure I work as a Environmental Consultant and make ~36k a year, minus benefits (health, dental). I WILL NOT get a 20k a year pension when I retire (though I will get Social security if it survives). I own my own car, which I bought new, and a condo, which I am paying off the mortgage all with my own money. If teachers cannot do what I am doing on 10k+ more a year and with a pension then I think they need to decide why they are wasting their money, not on how much more others should pay them.))
I would encourage you to think about how we define “public education”. The current system takes away the right of the public to support educational systems or to withhold support if one chooses not to support a given teacher, school, etc.
If I don’t like a restaurant, I simply don’t go there anymore, with our current system, we all have to pay for what is clearly an abysmal failure. Maybe you don’t think things are so bad everywhere. You may be right, from what I have seen, and that is quite a lot, this system needs fundamental reform. There is no excuse for what is happening in much of our public schools. This poses an existential threat to our society.
These unions and bureaucrats have too much power. Education is not the issue. We are spending way too much money for the idiots to destroy our society. We want our money back and we want these lazy no good traitors out of our schools!!!!
This article proves that the line was crossed along time ago and the overseers are not doing their jobs.
The link for the stories I posted in comment 141 is
http://www.insectman.us/exodus-mandate-wv/wv-news.htm
The problem is that you are still going to need public schools. Look at post-secondary education. How many private colleges are cheaper than your average state school? Even piece of crap diploma mills designed to rip people off like the University of Phoenix cost more than comparable state or community colleges.
You honestly think that private schools are going to be affordable?
In my town, we already closed many public schools and constantly slash education budgets. We don’t see crap for private schools because they aren’t workable: they are the refuge of either an elite, or designed for religious education. All you will do with your ideas is make education worse overall.
Everywhere is not California. We can’t take much more in terms of cuts.
There are plenty of non-parochial schools that are not elitist. And how do the parochial schools do it? Besides, the U.S. is a religious country, so the parochial schools can handle at least half the population.
If we go to a complete voucher system, no public schools, do you think that we could fibally stop this religious discrimination and allow parochial school secular education to be funded?
My opinion is that education is almost free. Get a library card and a computer, buy some books. It’s the diploma that people think they need. If employers stop giving these worthless pieces of paper so much consideration, people could be about the business educating themselves.
There is a problem here. My wife worked on DC, and there is a certain element (and no, I do NOT mean a particular ethnic or racial group) that has habituated itself to go to the emergency room for every illness, no matter what.
This element can probably not wean itself off the idea that someone else should be responsible for their kids’ education. We have indeed created a monster.
We can turn around socialist/communist indoctrination in one school year. All we have to do is require that class grades go “communist”. Everyone will be assigned the class average as their grade. History has shown that preventing high achievers from enjoying the fruits of their labor (by “sharing” those fruits “equitably”), they stop achieving. As the average score drops, more and more people (everyone who’s score is above the now depressed average) will learn this lesson and stop achieving as well. It’s a downward spiral that results in the collapse of everyone’s grades. By the end of the year, when even the worst performers are getting grades far lower than they were getting before the communization of grades, only the dimmest won’t get the message (just hold them back until they figure it out).
I recently talked to a sweet elderly woman. She said that, “the obvious response to this situation is to shoot these hate-mongers. Too bad, it’s not that simple.”
I have read several comments of disgust that kids were taken out of schools to attend the rally. How do you know that the kids were not there with their parents? Did the school system put loads of students on busses and take them to the rally with out parental consent? I don’t know how things work in Cali, but where I live, that could not happen.
I, too, am appalled by our public and private school systems but for reasons other than political party lines. One must always first break free from the chains of blame before seeing the truth and finding solutions. Just as soul searching brought you to this bitter and angry place, maybe a bit more soul searching will find you peace and, therefore, effect real change.
I remember saying almost 10 yrs ago to my then fiancé that I saw nothing wrong with public schools I turned out okay and I had attended public school all my schooling. Ten years and 3 kids later I have totally changed my view. My oldest attended a private school for Kindergarten, which was almost worse then the public schools. First grade she attended 2 different public school as we had a job required move mid year. During 2nd grade she was in yet a different public school as we had moved yet again (in the same town this time just to a different side of town). Everyone kept telling us she is smart and more than capable of doing the work, BUT she is always in trouble, causing trouble etc. Bottom line she was bored out of her mind. The way they decided to solve this was have her see a “social worker”. That was when my husband and I said enough is enough. We pulled her out tightened our belt straps and now for almost 3 years have been homeschooling. It makes me sick to see these protests… I am a tax payer, no matter where my children attend school, private, homeschool, etc, my tax money still pays for the public school system. Which really makes me mad that they have these huge “per child” operating budgets and I am limited to what my husband brings home and what is left after the bills are paid. Also I see these issues increase our funding for classroom supplies… well the last 3 schools my daughter attended we had a huge shopping list of supplies we had to provide the first day for school down, to Kleenex and a ream of construction paper. Also my children are getting a better education at home with the limited funds we have and it is proven every day when they play with friends or we have company. I really think America needs to go back to some of its old ways. I don’t think education is just for the wealthy but I also think many parents use “school” as a babysitter. Oh good my kids will be gone for the next 9 months 5 days a week for about 7 hrs a day… in some cases longer. It is scary how much of our children’s lives we turn over to someone else once they reach school age. I am sorry I ever choose to send my oldest to public school. My younger ones will never enter that doorway as long as I have a voice. We are enjoying having them home and we will continue to teach them how our country was originally founded and why the voice of the minority isn’t really best for the majority!
Late to the party, as always.
The school system is destroying itself. Your photos are all the proof anyone needs.
We home-schooled our kids precisely to break the cycle of mind-f*cking your photos document.
“The very act of them asking for money is what made me not want to give them money, because it revealed their political bias.”
This pretty much sums up the extent of your cynical stupidity in one sentence. Of course Teachers who request more money for the school has nothing to do with them not being able to afford things like paper, or new supplies, or computers – It MUST be a political agenda! & Of course when Teachers say their curriculum and the way they teach are the way they are because of pressure from ‘people above’, they’re just lying and hiding their real intentions!
You’re so damn delusional, to me it sounds like you think of politics so much now – things have been warped to accommodate this new need of yours to think of things in political terms. To categorize them into a black / white, left / right thinking.
I think you’re overdue for another reality check.
Again the ignorance shows itself – your brain again trying to accommodate what you see with your warped beliefs.
The extent to this stupidity is astounding
“• The demand that unwilling taxpayers fund more government services is in and of itself a cornerstone of liberal ideology.
• The very act of having a street protest demanding handouts is essentially a leftist tactic, so the simple existence of teachers at the rally means that they embrace leftist ideology.
• As at other union rallies documented in earlier essays, socialist and communist groups mingled freely on May 13 with the teachers’ unions, their messages blending into a unified ethos.
• And the clincher: At both rallies, teachers brought entire classes of their students (this was held on a Friday, a school day, remember) to join in this overtly leftist behavior.”
…. Really? I mean… really? You think by them being protestors they are some evil leftist? That really is your first thought? It isn’t, you know, that they probably write politicians as well, but take to the streets as merely another form of getting their voice out? They are no more ‘evil left trying to destroy our America’, than the old protests for free speech, or for equality. If you say street protest is leftest, does that mean all street protest is leftist?
And them wanting to tax the rich more, that is them trying to suck America dry huh? That’s really what you think? Not anything relating to the fact that a guy working minimum wage is getting a huge % of his check taken, yet the Rich guys tax is a pretty unremarkable dent? Nothing relating to how that promotes even more of a class gap? That doesn’t occur to you at all? (Also I love how you nitpick that, but you don’t bring up the fact that they also want to tax corporations more. Hah, I bet you probably think corps should have LESS tax.)
You’re 100% fucking delusional so I’m sure this post will be warped just like everything else your see has to be warps to accommodate your views.
This is disturbing. Thank you for posting photos. All my friends are very liberal, so when I tell them about my experiences with public schools and the blatant pushing of socialist/verging on communist propaganda, they think I’m some whacked out Kool-aid drinker, just paranoid and making things up.
But my daughter’s school was so blatantly socialist that it (along with 9/11) helped turn me from a passionate liberal into an independent/conservative/Libertarianish sort. The school based their “teaching” on John Dewey’s(a big time socialist)philosophies.
Basically, competition was so hated that when my daughter and her friends cheered “We’re number one!” at a soccer game they were playing, the school director came out and reprimanded them, because they might hurt the other team’s feelings; the students graded themselves; kids sat in circles talking about their self-esteem, and rowdy students weren’t reprimanded (again, due to self-esteem).
I pulled my daughter out quickly before she became a dumbed-down robot. Then I began reading about John Dewey and education. That’s when I got scared. I thought the school was just hippy-dippy and clueless. Nope. Everything that I saw going on in that school was planned, and is what many teachers are being taught in college.
They’re being taught to form nice little robotic socialists.
Interesting stuff. Andrew Kerns of the Circe Institute refers to a quote from the Hobbit “this isn’t natural.. it will have to be paid for…” Find the talk he did at a teachers conference called “Contemplation of Nature” – incredible.
My kids and I do home-based education, we are NOT isolated, we participate in many outside activities, but our home is our base. Who better to teach my children than ME?? I know them better than anyone else.
Change the children and change the world… goes for both sides of the argument – but I am teaching my children to THINK and LEARN and REASON and WRITE so that they can stand up for what they believe in and make informed decisions, not coerced, peer-pressured ones as you show in your photos and videos.
Well done article – thank you.
Whooo Brian-So why is it you bother watching American football? You should be busy updating Wikipedia on the virtues of Marx and Engels.
For anyone who actually cares enough about the subject to read this far, and wants to improve their own education or that of their children (or at least get it to the point that it qualifies as education):
The Khan Academy was founded in 2004 (by Salman Khan, a second-generation American of Indian ancestry) and is now quite possibly the world’s largest direct-education institution with over 6 million current students around the world in quite a few languages. Probably most of those students are using it substantially voluntarily, but some entire school districts have adopted it as the foundation of their curriculum. And it’s free at http://www.khanacademy.org – all you need is an internet connection fast enough for YouTube videos to be bearable, and a computer with a web browser. Currently it’s mostly being paid for by Bill Gates, Google, and a bunch of other rich people and foundations.
If you decide to study something there, no matter how much education you’ve previously had in the subject I strongly suggest you start with square one – interpreted as broadly as possible (which very often means single-digit addition). Because if there is ANY weakness in your knowledge of the subject, their system will probably find that weakness… and fix it.
(No, I am not affiliated in any way. I haven’t even signed up as a student yet, although that’s going to change in a few minutes. I *am* reading Mr. Khan’s book where he explains the personal and intellectual history of Khan Academy. I recommend this book. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-one-world-schoolhouse-salman-khan/1112447480?ean=9781455508389 )