Education

I don't have kids.  I don't want kids.  These two things combine to produce a general indifference to educational issues.  It is, as the saying goes, someone else's problem.

But, as I was once a student myself, I still sometimes feel compelled to comment when the school system produces an example of complete and utter stupidity.  It's bad enough when the government forces you to spend 1/3 of your life locked into small, uncomfortable, intellectually-stifling spaces with teachers trying to push propaganda into your head (and maybe, if you get lucky, an occasional tidbit of useful knowledge).  When I was being subjected to the indoctrination sequence commonly known as "high school", even granting that I was not being subjected to the public school system, I was still heavily proselytized to on the matters of sex (don't do it, and here's how), drugs (don't do them), and rock'n'roll (known to lead to sex and drugs).  They pulled some crazy stunts in an effort to "make a point" about whatever social ill was currently highest on their internal priority list.  However, they didn't ever go so far as to tell me one of my classmates had died.

Wait; let me back up.

At one point in my high school experience, a teacher interrupted the class to tell the whole class that one of my classmates had died.  This was a pretty small class, so while I didn't know the person involved very well, they were definitely a known face and a reasonably friendly person.  I was pretty shocked that they had felt the need to kill themselves, as frankly, I hadn't noticed anything wrong.  Everyone has issues, but the issues have to be pretty serious to rise to the level of suicide... and I was hardly the most social type, so the other students were undoubtedly significantly closer to the missing girl than I.

I remember thinking at one point, as the entire school went about it's business that day in a state of mourning, that this whole exercise was a pretty sick joke, and that any time now they would cancel all the scheduled "student counseling" and "trauma management" sessions in favor of announcing to the whole school that the "suicide" was a trick to make us think about the consequences of drinking or driving or doing drugs or something.  Small though it was, the school had it's own designated mental health worker there to keep the students happy and smiling and carefree as they were indoctrinated... which, of course, required playing all sorts of sick jokes like this to "raise consciousness" about whatever seemed lowest that day.

I couild spin tales of DARE videos describing what drugs do to your brain and MADD videos with footage of ACTUAL REAL DEAD PEOPLE from drunk driving accidents.  I won't bother... but you get the idea.  There was definitely a bit of a history of this bullshit.  I suppose that's not unusual.

So I spent a large part of the day waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the announcement that, hey, no one was really dead, we're just trying to make you think about the possibility that maybe one of your classmates is feeling a little depressed and needs some support...

At some point, I realized that there wasn't going to be any such announcement.  That someone I had known was dead.  That the grief counselors were really doing grief counseling.  That some of my classmates, who had known the deceased better than I had, and had probably heard the news the night before, were sporadically crying for a good reason.   That the people who were really close to the deceased weren't in class at all, not because their vegan diets had made them feel less than fresh that morning... but because they had lost a friend they were close to.

What does it say about our educational system that students learn to assume that the authority figures in their lives are deliberately lying to them?

Real tragedies happen.  We don't need to fake them.

Last week's National Education Association conference in New Orleans was cause for concern among social studies teachers in attendance. As reported by CNN, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP) found, "About one third ofstudents in fourth, eighth, and 12th grade could not even show a basic understanding of civics at their grade level." Rather than look upon this news as a sign of failure, teachers should view it as one more example of the state-managed school system's long-running success in taking the youth of this country and turning them into first-class illiterates and ignoramuses.

A legal battle over two home-schooled children exploded into a seven-hour standoff yesterday, when they refused to take a standardized test ordered by the Department of Social Services. George Nicholas Bryant, 15, and Nyssa Bryant, 13, stood behind their parents, Kim and George, as police and DSS workers attempted to collect the children at 7:45 a.m. DSS demanded that the two complete a test to determine their educational level. "We have legal custody of the children and we will do with them as we see fit," DSS worker Susan Etscovitz told the Bryants in their Gale Street home. "They are minors and they do what we tell them to do."

The sheer arrogance evidenced by DSS in this case is absurd.

The teacher unions are a longstanding cancerous influence on the body politic. They are highly accomplished in the art of political pressure, and funnel money into the accounts of whatever political candidates will uphold their monopoly on public schooling. In the 2000 election cycle, $2.7 million found its way into the Democratic Party war chest and was quite useful in promoting the idea that more governmental intervention in our economy is needed as a panacea for everything (the issue of state paid prescription drug coverage is a prime example). This past year in Florida , $3 million was poured into the McBride campaign in the hopes of defeating Govenor Jeb Bush. I am certain that the rank and file of the Florida unions would not be pleased to know their riches were wasted in such a fashion.

Oh heck: Hell hath no place in American primary and high school textbooks. But then again you can't find anyone riding on a yacht or playing polo in the pages of an American textbook either. The texts also can't say someone has a boyish figure, or is a busboy, or is blind, or suffers a birth defect, or is a biddy, or the best man for the job, a babe, a bookworm, or even a barbarian. All these words are banned from U.S. textbooks on the grounds that they either elitist (polo, yacht) sexist (babe, boyish figure), offensive (blind, bookworm) ageist (biddy) or just too strong (hell which is replaced with darn or heck). God is also a banned word in the textbooks because he or she is too religious.

School is where you let the dying society put its trip on you. Our schools may seem useful: to make children into doctors, sociologists, engineers--to discover things. But they're poisonous as well. They exploit and enslave students; they petrify society; they make democracy unlikely. And it's not what you're taught that does the harm but how you're taught. Our schools teach you by pushing you around, by stealing your will and your sense of power, by making timid square apathetic slaves out of you--authority addicts.

This is an excellent, insightful essay on what is wrong with the school system.

When President Bush signed into law his "No Child Left Behind" legislation Jan. 8, 2002, the White House and the Department of Education assured the American people it would cure what ails our public education system. Trouble is, what "ails" our system can't be fixed with this legislation.

"Something's eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual," Mr. McCullough, who wrote the best-selling biography of the United States' second president, John Adams, told The Washington Times. "I mean, it's really bad."

The No Child Left Behind education act was touted as a way to raise standards, improve teacher training and prevent America's schools from sliding further into mediocrity. But the Bush administration undermined the effort by failing to fully finance the new law at a time when the recession-ravaged states are laying off teachers, shortening the school year and cutting education budgets. The No Child Left Behind education act was touted as a way to raise standards, improve teacher training and prevent America's schools from sliding further into mediocrity. But the Bush administration undermined the effort by failing to fully finance the new law at a time when the recession-ravaged states are laying off teachers, shortening the school year and cutting education budgets. The states are especially desperate for construction money that would permit them to renovate crumbling school buildings coast to coast. A General Accounting Office report in the mid-1990's estimated that putting the ancient buildings in working order would require a new investment of $112 billion ý a figure that the states were unable to raise on their own even in flush times, let alone during a recession. Many Republican lawmakers now understand that federal education initiatives are destined to fail unless the states and localities are able to shore up collapsing school buildings and provide children with safe, well-equipped places in which to learn. Two bills that would prime the pump ý and begin the flow of construction money ý have been introduced in the House by Representatives Nancy Johnson, Republican of Connecticut, and Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York. One sponsored by John Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, has been introduced in the Senate. The bills, which differ only slightly, would allow the localities to finance school construction and repairs by issuing inexpensive bonds, on which bond holders would receive a federal tax credit instead of collecting interest. The bonding initiative attracted wide bipartisan support in the last Congress, but failed because many lawmakers viewed the bill as too costly or viewed education as an exclusively local matter. In the interim, however, deterioriating schools have become a pressing national problem that cries out for leadership from Washington.

Ms. Jhingory is a 22-year-old black woman from Washington, D.C., who went off to college a few years ago. "One of the connections I had with my friends back home was that we had always been sort of aspiring hip-hop artists and things like that," she said. "But we were young, you know, and I eventually woke up from la-la land and realized that I would have to get an education and a job, something a little more concrete than fantasies about the hip-hop underground." She noticed that when she came home on visits from school, some of her friends treated her differently. "I don't know if it was out of jealousy or resentment or whatever," she said, "but they would actually say to me, `You're acting white now.' They'd say that. They'd say, `You act white.' Or, `You act proper.' "

I'm currently reading an extraordinary novel. The book's protagonist is a man who, as far as the other characters are concerned, is insane and delusional. His madness was fueled by the popular entertainment of his age. He traveled about his land carrying deadly weapons and committing acts of violence resulting from his lunacy.

So severe was the man's psychosis that neighbors and town officials burned his personal library of materials they believed to have predominantly influenced his deviant behavior.

This book I'm referring to is none other than Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It was first published almost 400 years ago and is acknowledged by many scholars to be the finest piece of literature ever written.

... mainly because I don't have kids, don't intend to have kids, and am not (yet) in a position to pay property taxes to educate other people's kids.  But when there's something worth mentioning, I'm rarely shy.  That's why I'm pointing out this post at The Smallest Minority, which is mostly reprinting an editorial by State Senator Tom McClintock of California. 

McClintock is a friend of gun rights, too.  Why isn't he running the place?

As kids head back to school, a poll of kindergarten teachers shows that they are nearly unanimous in the belief that more children would succeed in school if all families had access to quality pre-kindergarten programs. At a news conference releasing the poll results, law enforcement leaders will cite research showing that denying quality pre-k programs to at-risk kids greatly increases the risk they will become criminals.

Gee, can you get any more "SAVE THE CHILLLLLLLLDREN!" vibes into this paragraph? We must provide all children with pre-kindergarten programs or our children will grow up to become criminals!

So what's wrong with this piece of tripe? Well, to start with, it's based upon a poll of kindergarten teachers. Polls are occasionally useful to measure opinions, but they are emphatically not useful as replacements for actually doing analysis. Even narrow polls of experts in a field -- and whether kindergarten teachers are experts in anything more than babysitting is debatable -- do not necessarily reflect reality.

In this case, the poll is also inherently biased; of course teachers want more pre-k school programs paid for by the government. More pre-k programs will make their task easier, employ more teachers, and generally reinforce their perception of importance. So the results are hardly unexpected. And speaking of results, they don't bother to report any; we can't tell if the poll said 51% of teachers thought that more pre-k programs would help, or if 100% said so. But I expect they would have reported the numbers if they were subtantially greater than a majority, because it makes a better soundbite.

What else is wrong here? Well, the language itself is biased. Who wants to "deny quality pre-k programs to at-risk kids"? But we're not talking about denying anything, we're talking about funding a new government mandate, and taking children from their parents a year ahead of time. There's a large gap between denying kids from entering into pre-k, and paying for them to enter pre-k.

You gotta love the way they claim that research will be cited at the press conference. I guess people reading the press release should just take it on faith rather than checking the research, hmm?

In at least half the classrooms across the country, one out of five kids were inadequately prepared when they started school last year.

This doesn't surprise me, since our public schools are generally known to be failing miserably at anything resembling education. I'm curious to know how putting at-risk kids in a pre-k program at government expense will change things, though. How "unprepared" can you be for kindergarten?

This is another way to lie with statistics: you state multiple poll results as if they were related, when in fact the only relation between them is that they happened to be on the same poll. Note that the poll refers to "when they started school" -- which could be a kindergarten program... but is more likely to be read as "started the school year".

Most teachers said the time they spend dealing with disruptive behavior by poorly-prepared students, and helping them catch up, negatively affects the progress of well-prepared students.

Well, no shit. But how will a pre-k program do anything more than shift the burden of socialization to pre-k teachers? What indications do we have that pre-k programs will improve the situation? How do we know that pre-k programs won't be completely ineffective at solving the problem, leaving us with yet another government mandate and nothing to show for it?

It's interesting also to note the implied subtext here. If kindergarten students are unprepared without a pre-k program, the Democratic Indoctrination Wing (eg, the teacher's unions) is essentially accusing the Democratic Proletariat (eg, black inner-city residents) of being unfit to raise children. Without addressing the truth or falsehood of that question, which is really a determination that needs to be made on an individual basis, it's interesting to consider the attitude that implies.

I'll spell it out for you: "You are not fit to raise children; give them to us." Sounds inflammatory when translated out of government-speak, doesn't it? And so it should. It doesn't help that the nation's public schools aren't exactly models of success at the raising-children thing.

This past spring, the Illinois General Assembly passed a new bill requiring compulsory mental health screening for children and pregnant women; it was signed into law by Governor Blagojevich. This program will require all pregnant women and children through the age of 18 be tested for mental health needs.

Public forums are now being held in different locations throughout the state and many alarmed parents are attempting to get the word out: get to those forums and voice your opinion. "We're moving toward social training over academic training with this program," says Larry Trainor, a Mt. Prospect parent of four children and a contact for Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

This is extremely scary. Whatever happened to the right to choose your own mental health treatments? To have the right of privacy within your own mind?

There are public forums for this issue. Anyone who lives in Illinois, get your ass to those forums! Even if you're out of school and not planning to become pregnant, it's only a short step from this to mandatory testing for everyone.

Under this new, compulsory mental health law, pregnant women will be screened for depression and following her baby's birth, evaluation would continue for up to one year. Follow up treatment will also be provided under this program. All children ages 0-18 years will be provided screening under this mental health program. "Mental health centers" at schools will handle the process to "ensure appropriate and culturally relevant assessment of young children's social and emotional development with the use of standardized tools."

Can't you just feel the political correctness oooozing out of the program?

The Illinois State Board of Education is the agency targeted with the responsibility to develop appropriate tests that assess both mental health and academic standards. The current task force hosting these statewide public forums is scheduled to send their recommendations to Governor Blagojevich by the end of the summer in accordance with the Act (HB 2900).

Because the Illinois State Board of Education is doing such a good job with the public schools in Illinois, I suppose, we should entrust care of our children's minds into the hands of the state as well. No thanks!

The Supreme Court decided one year ago that racial preferences at public universities are legal, as long as they aren?t too mechanically applied.

I think this decision was a cop-out. It ducks the issue. It says you can't have racial preferences unless they are informal, non-quantitative racial preferences. That's sort of like saying it's OK to rob a bank, just so long as the police don't catch you.

But this has proved cold comfort to affirmative action supporters besieged by evidence that preferences can?t deliver the results desired. With the constitutional issue resolved, Americans are asking whether affirmative action helps students in the first place.

The only thing affirmative action does is lower the standards. If you actually want to improve results for minorities, then the extra assistance needs to be applied before the college admissions stage -- that is, help minorities to succeed academically, instead of lowering the standards so they don't have to.

The reason that more minority students don?t get college degrees has nothing to do with competitive admissions policies. The truth is that most minority students leave high school without the minimum credentials necessary to attend any four-year school, selective or not.

Minority under-representation in college is the direct result of the public schools? failure to prepare minority students. It is a failure that affirmative action does not remedy ? college-ready minorities already attend college just as often as their white counterparts.

These two paragraphs should be the death knell of affirmative action in college admissions. That's unlikely to actually happen, of course, but that's because colleges are liberal bastions and affirmative action is a religious issue.

Now, the argument can be made that it matters which colleges those minorities attend, with the assumption that going to college doesn't actually mean going to a good college. And maybe the Ivy League schools are somewhat vulnerable on that point. But they are vulnerable because, overall, some minorities find it very difficult to meet their standards -- not because of inherent racism.

Now, it's possible that the testing system is somehow biased, and lots of college-age minorities who really are qualified are being artificially blocked from scoring their full potential on those tests. But any bias there would need to be subtle indeed, and there are other minorities (primarily Asians, for some reason) who don't seem to have the same trouble. So think the burden of proof is on those claiming bias in the admissions process (which they want to correct with affirmative action), and I think they have failed to muster such proof.

(Note: This does not necessarily invalidate the case for past discrimination. But I suspect that, by now, anyone in the university-level educational field who honestly if secretly believed in segregation or racism would long ago have been exposed and forced out).

I don't have a ready explanation for why some minorities do very poorly in public schools. I think there are lots of different reasons, and a lot of blame to spread around. But Bill Cosby seems to have the right idea.

Parents of high school students would be well advised to look at We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, the federally mandated text for what students learn about the founding and fundamental principles of this nation. When you do, you will discover that the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence have been magically transformed into mere "ideas" from the eighteenth century. The message is that they can be cast aside or changed in our times.

It gets much worse. When this textbook looks at the Bill of Rights, those ten amendments that are the very heart of the protections extended to individual American citizens, insuring that government cannot run rampant over them, neither the Second Amendment, nor the Ninth or Tenth are even mentioned!

Any text on the Constitution that ignores vital components of the Bill of Rights is on-its-face inadequate.

President Bush plans to unveil next month a sweeping mental health initiative that recommends screening for every citizen and promotes the use of expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs favored by supporters of the administration.

The New Freedom Initiative, according to a progress report, seeks to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," the British Medical Journal reported.

Here we have the rare opportunity to blast this idiotic proposal using references to two different dystopias: Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.

Let's start with Orwell. The title of the program, New Freedom Initiative, is doublespeak at its best. One of Orwell's premises was that the language affected how people think; if you make a statement impossible to express in words, most people will be unable to think it. Words act as a kind of mental shorthand, allowing a complicated concept to be referenced by a much simpler name. They are the foundation of persistant and communicable rational thought. Without the words to express a concept, it is much harder to think it -- and it cannot be expressed to anyone else, remaining locked into the mind of each person who invents it.

The basic idea of political correctness is the idea that names have power. The Geek with a .45 called it Magical Thinking when he applied it to a school's dress code. Although modern society is not generally disposed to believe in any form of magic, language and symbology do have a certain influence over human behavior. And this is exactly what the Bush administration is seeking to exploit with this program.

They call it the New Freedom Initiative. They are associating the program with the word "freedom", when in fact there is little freedom involved, and the whole concept behind the program is reducing freedom. But, simply by naming it, they attempt to associate the program with freedom -- in most minds, a positive association. How can anyone oppose freedom?

Here are some of the wonderful new "freedoms" recommended as part of this program:

1. Comprehensive psychological examinations for all citizens, including children
2. Treatment of everyone, including children, found to have "mental disorders"
3. Drugging as a treatment

With that list of supposed benefits, can anyone doubt that the drug makers are behind it? Here's proof:

Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General says in his whistleblower report the "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that developed the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."

Just to remind you, they are talking about doing this to your kids at school. I doubt they plan to ask the parents, since the whole idea is to get the government to pay for it. The social forces behind drugs in school are already well advanced -- just ask the parents who have been jailed for refusing to give their children behavior-modifying drugs.

And that leads us right into Huxley's Brave New World, where everyone is drugged all the time. What are the results of a society on drugs? When everything you do feels good, it doesn't matter what you do. Murder? Rape? General laziness? They all feel the same; the drug overrides everything else.

It's one thing to choose that existance, when you can be held responsible for your choices and their consequences. Most of the time, you're only hurting yourself. But who can be held responsible when the government is drugging you at the behest of drug manufacturers who have discovered that they can pay the government to buy their product with your money.

Connie has a lot to say on education, America, public schools, and... the Mark Twain Epiphany. If you're interested in any of those things, give it a read. I did so, and fired off an email to Connie Du Toit, since some of the things she had said bore their own connotations in my life, and I wanted to share. As I wrote, I had another thought, and that one is worthy to share here:

Today's adults often act like children. Tomorrow's adults, presently children, often act like *monsters*. What's causing this? Well, we keep kids in school 8 hours a day until they are 18, and the smart ones are usually 22 before they are "adults" and have to go out into the world.

This event -- leaving school -- is often the first time that these children are required to interact with *adults*. They have spent their entire lives, up to that point, interacting socially with people the same age and submissively (in theory) to an "adult" teacher. Their peers, at most a year or two up or down the social scale, are their primary behavior guides. They are all, collectively, figuring it out on their own -- and backsliding further and further from civilization each year.

They may, debatably, be getting an education -- but they aren't learning what it takes to be an adult. Can we blame them for acting like spoiled children when they have never had to interact with another *adult* as an equal? Can we blame them for continuing their life pattern by submitting to supposed authority?

Can we blame their children for being monsters when those monsters were raised by spoiled children? Certainly that doesn't apply to everyone, but it does apply to a terrifying large number of today's youth. We don't blame a rabid dog for its rabies, but we do still shoot it -- at least, here in Texas. In California they may offer it life imprisonment and pet counseling.

UPDATE: After a few minutes of thought, I figure this probably should use some clarification. I'm not suggesting today's children are rabid dogs that should be shot. Some of them act like it, and should face justice with the same rights as any other human being.

Lunchtime at Tigard High included students getting their bags searched for explosives. It was a measure that was taken shortly after classes started Monday morning because a school secretary checked the school voice mail and discovered an angry sounding message.

So, someone leaves an "angry sounding message" and everyone gets their bags searched? No warrants? Shouldn't surprise anyone -- children have no rights according to this government.

Destructive 'zero tolerance' policies in the nation's schools are leading students off the academic track, sometimes straight to the jailhouse, critics say. In what's billed as a "first-of-its-kind" report, a public policy group called the Advancement Project noted, "In school district after school district, an inflexible and unthinking zero tolerance approach to an exaggerated juvenile-crime problem is derailing the educational process."

The report's recommendations for reversing our national failure included hiring better-educated and -qualified teachers, regularly assessing teacher and student performance, and performance pay--higher pay for better teachers. Then lengthening the school day and the school year, more homework and a much stronger curriculum, particularly in math and English. So, 20 years later, how have we done in meeting the challenge that was threatening "our very future as a nation?"

Peter Jennings and the New York Times couldn't get enough of the looting stories out of Iraq. But they couldn't care less about a massive, systematic looting scheme here at home that is robbing America's schoolchildren and rank-and-file teachers blind. These homegrown plunderers have been accused or convicted of siphoning precious educational resources to pay for homes, hotel bills, mink coats, crystal, fine art, furniture, vacations, car repairs, football tickets, limousine service, their children's private school tuition, and Democrat Party lobbying.

Last Tuesday, an amazing thing happened. A college professor told the truth about grade inflation. Writing in The Washington Post, Stuart Rojstaczer of Duke University admitted he no longer gives any grade lower than a B. If he were to do so, he wrote, fewer students would sign up for his courses and his teaching career would suffer. Not wishing to be deemed a failure, Mr. Rojstaczer simply gives students what they, their parents and the university all want: high grades regardless of merit.

Student-athletes subject to random drug testing at an Oregon high school were almost four times less likely to use drugs than their counterparts at a similar school who were not tested, a study shows.

Well, of course, using unConstitutional searches to prosecute victimless crimes gets results. That doesn't make it right.

Ever wonder what your children might be learning when they hit the books in the New York City public schools?