I have no idea who originated this as it was sent to me by a friend, however, considering how dysfunctional public education is in America, I really thought this was not only funny, I think it's insightful.
Our teacher asked what my favorite animal was? And I said, "Fried chicken." She said I wasn't funny, but she couldn't have been right, because everyone else laughed. My parents told me to always tell the truth... I did, fried chicken is my favorite animal.
I told my dad what happened, and he said my teacher was probably a member of PETA, because they love animals very much. I do, too... Especially chicken, pork and beef. Anyway, my teacher sent me to the principal's office. I told him what happened, and he laughed too. Then he told me not to do it again.
The next day in class my teacher asked me what my favorite live animal was? I told her it was chicken. She asked me why, so I told her it was because you could make them into fried chicken. She sent me back to the principal's office. He laughed, and told me not to do it again. I don't understand. My parents taught me to be honest, but my teacher doesn't like it when I am.
Today, my teacher asked me to tell her what famous person I admired most. I told her, "Colonel Sanders." Guess where the **** I am now.
So, while this is only a joke, and neither this teacher or this kid really exist, I do think this is funny, don't you? But I also think it's insightful because this kind of thing goes on and story presents a fundamental truth. Today's educators, at all levels of society, hate truth.
Given the abysmal job public education is doing it's time parents started demanding changes, starting with school choice. Competition brings out the best in any system, and then make public employee unions illegal. These teacher unions are viper pits of everything that's wrong with America. Ending them is a fundamental necessity in fixing education in America, and that will be a very real start in fixing America.
Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality. Everything we're told has historical foundation and context. Everything we're told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. If what's presented to us fails in either category, it's wrong. All that's left to do is develop the intellectual response as to why it's wrong.
The Biden administration has definitely not gotten the memo
when it comes to how parents who have their own children's best
interests at heart know what's better for them. They just keep stepping
in it. Last week, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona tweeted from his
official account that "Teachers know what is best for their kids
because they are with them every day" and "We must trust teachers.
Earlier this month, as Townhall covered,
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made remarks on the red
carpet for the GLAAD awards during which she claimed "these are ourkids"
and "they belong to all of us," specifically in the political fight
when it comes to so-called "gender-affirming care" that is anything but
for children who may have gender dysphoria. She
was widely condemned for her remarks. ..........To Read More....
What is it about Utah and school lunches? Back in 2014, one of their districts famously threw out children's school lunches in front of their faces based on their parents' unpaid lunch debt, wasting tons of food and humiliating the children. Nine years later, they're telling the kids to eat bugs. To save the earth or whatever, and get extra class credit, though let's face it, the humiliation is the same...........Uncomfortable? How about repulsed?...........More disturbing still, kids were told to eat the bug and then write an essay on why bug-eating is good for the planet.............The girl's mother rightly pointed out that the teacher's inability to
brook dissident signaled indoctrination over education, the wokester
agenda in action..........
Greens have unsuccessfully tried to sell us on all sorts of repulsive
things to put into our bodies -- from various versions of soylent green,
to "stewmaking" burials, to human compost burials, to recycling urine
into drinking water to save the earth, to eating bugs. It's one
disgusting thing after another, which these days even
includes attempting to coax people into taking public transit. Not too long ago, a Utah official tried to encourage people to eat wild toads to save the environment. Utah teachers were also recently caught teaching CRT in schools behind the kids' parents' backs..............It's lunacy and the parents are right to speak out...........To Read More...
Vladimir Lenin
allegedly said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I
have sown shall never be uprooted." America's leftists have taken
those words to heart and, since the 1930s, have assiduously winnowed
their way into America's education system. The COVID lockdown, for all
its destruction, may have ended up performing a huge service by exposing
to parents just how bad the leftist toxin has grown in the last ten to
fifteen years. The sea change in parental attitudes toward education is
shown in the fact that, across America, public school enrollment is
collapsing.
In the years after WWII, leftists began
to infiltrate the American education system. They started with the
colleges, but, for decades now, as generations of college graduates
become teachers themselves, and write the textbooks, their ideas have
been drifting steadily down to the lower grades. We've gone from a
public school system intended to create useful, patriotic American
citizens to a public school system intended to create Democrat party
die-hards who hate America, embrace Critical Race Theory, despise free
speech, dream of overthrowing the Constitution, demand unlimited
abortion, and believe that biological sex is an artificial construct.........Suddenly,
parents saw what was really going on in their children's classroom...........Parents also learned that the teachers'
unions, which always insisted they existed for the children's good,
cared nothing about children........... parents had even
more opportunities to see how awful many of those teachers are...........
Well, that second reason is one way of saying
that parents also realized that Lenin's dream was coming true: their
children weren't being educated; they were being indoctrinated...........it's the possible end of a public school system that has long been
inefficient, ineffective, and morally and ideologically corrupt.............To Read More......
I recently took my
twelve-year-old for his annual check-up. The process was rather routine,
except for two distinct differences. First, he needed three
vaccinations, all of which he received and second, I wrote “No” across a
form that the nurse handed him without my permission.
You see, the nurse bypassed me and handed
my son two pieces of paper and a pen. She asked him to answer two
questions on one and then the entirety of the next. She then proceeded
to leave the room. Not once did she ask me to look at the forms prior to
handing them to my son nor even question whether I wanted him to
complete them. It left me annoyed and feeling disrespected.
My son proceeded to answer the questions (the first two of which he couldn’t even understand). This was met with my words “Don’t answer anything until I take a look.” So
he stopped and I read. And what I read had nothing to do with my son’s
physical health at all and everything to do with facets of his life
quite personal to him and me, all of which fall outside of my
pediatrician’s jurisdiction, in my book. So I picked up the pen and
wrote the word “No” across both forms and called it a day.
When
the pediatrician came in, she disregarded the papers and examined my
son, engaging in the usual chit-chat that a parent would expect from a
pediatrician. The appointment ended on an uneventful note but it got me
to thinking how much things have changed since I was small and my mother
was sitting in the pediatrician’s office with me. I was basically a
third-party participant in the visit with all questions traveling from
the nurse or pediatrician directly to my mother. The few that went
directly to me were simple and up for debate with my mother. That’s how
it was. Parents weren’t bypassed. The buck stopped with them and, in
that, everyone stayed in their own lane… unlike today...........To Read More....
The blurred lanes are dumbfounding.
Combine that with the vulnerability and naivety of children. Parents are
now forced to remain “on-guard” at all times simply to keep their kids
out of harm's way… or so they feel.
The battle over the nation’s children – from
flagrant indoctrination to forced masking – has emerged in the national
spotlight during the last two years, becoming a widely-known issue as
parents take matters into their own hands after years of the left
maintaining a monopoly on the educational system, doing their best to
keep the leftist agenda moving forward...........
When you get up there and are elected, you’re automatically part of this
association and they tell you that your job is to support the
superintendent. [It’s] not about protecting, supporting, representing
taxpayers or focus on financial stewardship or … it as very much about
no dissenting, very much groupthink, get in line,” she said, as this
same tactic appears to be the common theme in school boards across the
country. Many people, she continued, subscribe to it, even though they
claim to be “conservatives.” But when they get on these boards, they
“lose their backbone.”..............
And then you have the media that plays that role and protects the
progressive left agenda that are being pushed in there, and also
everyone wants to hide the — you know we can’t say anything negative
about the school because then you’re anti-public school. It’s not about
correcting issues,” she said. “It’s about, your job as a school board member is to be a cheerleader, not to be someone that serves the public,”................However, that could soon change...........To Read More....
My Take - This isn't just about education, it's about corruption and the corruption of the leadership nation wide including corporate boards, industry associations, the military and every element of government. So-called conservatives, like John Kasich, Mitt Romney and Liz Chaney, get there and crawdad, back peddling to keep their jobs or to be "someone". But maybe, just maybe, they weren't really conservatives in the first place. I see that same kind of crawdadding everywhere.
My Rules For Leadership.
Heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart. But it's essential for real leadership. A real leader must be willing to stand up and say, "you're all wrong, and I'm going to tell you why". It's that willingness, and persistence, to stand up to the massed forces against what's right that will ultimately win the day.
Real leadership requires the willingness to be unliked, and for long periods of time in order to overcome these seeming insurmountable forces.
Being "reasonable" never overcame insurmountable obstacles.
So, are you a leader, or merely a manager who's organizing the direction everyone wants to go? I'll have more on this piece later this week, in the meanwhile, here's one of my favorite quotes from one of my heroes, Thomas Sowell.
"Life is all about tides. There are those who catch the tide and those
who row against the tide. Those rowing against the tide will always go
in that direction no matter which way the tide is moving. The rest have
no direction and will simply follow the tide. Those who row against the
tide are in better shape than those who go with the tide. Not only
physically, but intellectually, emotionally and psychologically! When
the tide changes direction, and it will, guess who will be in the lead?" Thomas Sowell
A Sartell-St. Stephen School District student is speaking out after the school required grade-school children to take an equity survey. Some students didn’t understand some of the surveys questions, but
were told by a teacher they couldn’t repeat the survey questions to
their parents, according to a video uploaded by Alphanews.
The survey asked questions that some students didn’t understand. Even
after hearing an explanation from their teacher, some still couldn’t
comprehend the survey questions. But a teacher told the students they couldn’t ask their parents for help, according to student Haylee Yasgar.
“My teacher said that I could not skip any questions even when I
didn’t understand them. One question asked us what gender we identify
with. I was very confused along with a lot of other classmates,” Yasgar
said during Monday night’s meeting.
She said students were told they could not “repeat any of the questions to our parents.”..........To Read More....
My Take - Apparently these "teachers" have forgotten they're hired help, and they work for us, as does the school boards around the country who've been acting like dictators, arrogant and dismissive dictators, who need to find themselves unelected the next election. Then they can go back and concentrate on being good hired help for an employer, and do as their told or be fired.
One more thing. This cartoon exemplifies in my mind just how valuable much of what's being promoted in education today.
As
the mother of a former teenage boy, who has now passed through that
stage, I can say that there are few human beings on earth who can show
rawer, often foolhardy, courage than a teenage boy. In 2021, this is
proving to be an extraordinary blessing because it turns out that it is
teenage boys who have the courage to stand up to crazy teachers. The
latest example comes out of Wisconsin, where a completely out-of-control
teacher lambasted a very relaxed teenage boy for showing his naked
face.
When
you write as much as I do, you inevitably find yourself repeating
themes. One of my themes for the past eight months or so has been that
leftist women, especially young women, have been driven completely crazy by leftism. They are hysterical, shrill, and aggressive.
They
are also the kind of female most likely to get a teenage boy’s dander
up. And when teenage boys deal with women like this, they do so by being
respectfully oppositional. They don’t yell or scream; they just repeat
the behavior or the words that got the woman crazy in the first place.
This first became apparent to me
when a teenage boy was dealing with a crazed leftist teacher in Loudoun
County. The teacher, who was obviously part of Loudoun County’s
Critical Race Theory cadre, so he had an element of female looniness,
was trying to force the boy to focus entirely on the race of two young
women. The boy refused. Instead, repeatedly, politely, and with obvious
delight that he was making his teacher crazy, he insisted (rightly) that
the girls just looked happy in each other’s company..........To Read More....
A group of current and former teachers and
others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents
suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its
teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in
part to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications,
and “expose these people publicly.”
Members of a 624-member private Facebook group called “Anti-Racist
Parents of Loudoun County” named parents and plotted fundraising and
other offline work. Some used pseudonyms, but The Daily Wire has
identified them as a who’s who of the affluent jurisdiction outside
D.C., including school staff and elected officials.
The sheriff’s criminal investigations division is reviewing the
matter — but the group’s activities might be no surprise to top law
enforcement because the county’s prosecutor, narrowly elected with the
help of $845,000 in cash from George Soros, appears to be a member of the Facebook group.
The late-stage result of an experiment in saturating children’s
education systems with the language of torrid oppression looks a lot
like Beth Barts, a white, 50-year old former educator who was elected to
the school board in 2019............To Read More.....
The Truth Isn't "abhorrent", It's Just the Truth Part I
Are black students doing less well than other groups? Yes, and by a lot, and is it being caused by systemic racism? Yes! But not in the way its presented to the public by a corrupt media, corrupt teacher's unions, corrupt politicians, leftists and race hustlers, or for that matter possibly even in the way you think. Blacks are the source of this systemic racism, not whites.
So, I need to prove that, and we'll start with this piece, as the author points out:
"The William D. Kelley School has long been one of the most troubled in the district. The school’s student population is 94 percent black and 100 percent “economically disadvantaged.” Academically, it is one of the worst-performing schools
in Pennsylvania. By sixth grade, only 3 percent of students are
proficient in math, and 9 percent are proficient in reading. By
graduation, only 13 percent of Kelley students will have achieved basic
literacy." .....the teachers and
administrators ....have gradually abandoned traditional
pedagogy in favor of political radicalism."
Okay, that's one school filled with race hustlers, but that's an aberration, right? Wrong! The author goes on to say:
In
recent years, the entire Philadelphia public school system has embraced
the philosophy of “antiracism.”... denouncing the United States....white supremacy and capitalism” ..demanding “reparations for Black and Indigenous people,” and “uproot white
supremacy and plant the seeds for a new world.”
The end result?
"the vast majority of the ten- and eleven-year-olds
marching for the utopia of “black communism” can barely read and write. Rather than come to terms with the pedagogical failure of Philadelphia
public schools, however, educators have shifted the blame to “systemic
racism” and promises of “revolution.”
The fact is educating children is hard work but when one fails in their duties to actually teach, "political fantasy is a useful diversion".
The cartoon below deals with destructive effects of these ridiculous lockdown rules governors have imposed on the nation to children's' education. However, if you substituted "race baiting and social demagoguery" for Covid, the end result is the same, and this pattern is a nationwide disgrace.
All this leftist race baiting destroyed the education of America's black children, and as the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina points out, it's destroying all of America's children's education, and it's the real pandemic impacting the nation, even the wealthy and the elite are embracing the insanity.
How the narrative about white supremacism in math results in delusional policy. The desire to expose underprivileged students to more rigorous math
curricula is noble, but the idea that black and Latino students would be
successful at algebra in the eighth grade at the same rate as the most
successful school districts is delusional.
It ignores the profound
deficits of a large share of students in the most impoverished
districts. In 2013, 142 elementary schools registered
chronic absenteeism rates of at least one-third of their students; only
18 of these schools achieved a Common Core pass rate of at least 20
percent on the math exam. And the absenteeism and exam scores weren’t
any better in middle schools......that only 30 percent
of black and Latino students in traditional public schools were
math-proficient. Thus, a large share of black and Latino students has
neither the skills nor the attendance record needed to be successful in
an eighth-grade algebra course.
And so, going back to Part I, professors are expected to ignore their failures in college or be fired? Did I get that right? Do I understand that properly?
In the 2015-16 school year,
"5.8% of the nation's 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a
student."
In the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary-
and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by
a student.
Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were
physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that
school year.
In the city of Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted.
18% of the nation's schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents
of violence, and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents.
These are schools with predominantly black student populations.
So, is racism systemic in America's schools? Yes, and it all being practiced by blacks, and is a direct result of black culture in America.
Having said that, this lack of focus on real education didn't start yesterday, and public education isn't only impacting black America, this has been a multi-decades festering problem that has metastasized into a national cancer eating away at the very muscle and organ tissue of America.
"The only way for Americans to avoid being pulled down in a vortex of
the self-indulgent ignorance that characterizes our education
establishment is to cut loose from that establishment: to stop funding
it, and to create another, honest one." Angelo Codevilla
During Word War II, only 4 percent of some 18 million draftees were
illiterate. Despite (or because?) of massive expenditures on education
over the subsequent two decades, 27 percent of the Vietnam war’s
draftees were judged functionally illiterate. Between 1955 and 1991, the inflation-adjusted average K-12 per-pupil
expenditure in America rose 350 percent. In 1972, 2,817 students scored
750 or better on each half of the SAT. By 1994, only 1,438 made this
score though the test had been made easier.
But affirmative action insanity has made it worse, especially for Asians. In order to get into Harvard Asian males have to score over 1380 out of 1400 on the PSAT. White males can score 70 points less and be admitted over Asian males, and for Asian females it's by 40 points. Blacks only have to score just above the national average of 1000. And they're expected to thrive in that kind of environment? They don't, and often scores are fixed to allow them to survive, not thrive, survive! That's a 380 point difference for blacks to be admitted over Asian men, and 340 over Asian women and 310 over white males.
And this is kind of academic corruption is pandemic throughout the nation.
Group
identity and outrage culture dominate public schools. Children learn
to pose as victims despite enjoying a standard of living unmatched in
human history and by 95% of the world's current population. Instead of
learning to function as unique beings with free choice and that the
smallest minority is an individual facing a mob, they are swapping a
legacy of individual rights for group identities that — unlike
individuals — don't bleed and are manipulated by special interests to
undercut genuine rights.
Latin was a dumping ground for students who already had failed another language; "picking up a few phrases" was the goal.
Many teachers expected little but awarded high grades.
Students were subjected to parental pressure to obtain good grades regardless of performance.
A department head had been demoted for teaching at a pre-college level and refusing to lower his standards.
Senior teachers were dropping out in disgust; younger teachers had no choice but to accept the situation.
Under
parental pressure, the principal was establishing a process to prevent
students from having to take more than one test on the same
day. College prep?
In short, the school embraced grade inflation, propelled by the following dynamic:
Parents
of high-performing students are "satisfied customers." Their kids
study and bring home good grades, so they think they are getting their
money's worth from high taxes. But they don't know that there is no correlation between per pupil spending and student performance. And they never complain.
Parents of low-performing students also want good "results." They hear their children's tales of woe and complain constantly.
Subjected
to this one-sided feedback, administrators tacitly urge teachers to
lower standards, despite proclaiming the opposite in public. Like the
Dodo in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "everybody has won, and all must have prizes."
This video hopefully will make that lesson apparent to everyone.
What a reprehensible person.
Needless to say, I don’t blame Mr. Meyer for putting his kid in a
private preschool. And I won’t blame him if he then sends her to a
private elementary school and a private high school.
After all, teachers in government schools presumably are very aware that private schools do a much better job than government schools.
But it’s total hypocrisy for him to take advantage of in-person
schooling for his daughter while fighting to deny that option for
parents who have no choice but to rely on government schools.
Sort of like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton wanting higher taxes on the rest of us while coming up with a clever tax strategies to protect their money from the IRS.
But I’m digressing (which is understandable since our friends on the left can be very hypocritical).
Let’s get back to our main topic. The Daily Caller has an article about Mr. Meyer’s despicable hypocrisy.
Viral video footage shows a California teachers union
president who led school closures dropping his daughter off at a private
school. …“Meet Matt Meyer. White man with dreads and president of the
local teachers’ union,”
the group tweeted Saturday. “He’s been saying it is unsafe for *your
kid* to be back at school, all the while dropping his kid off at private
school.” …The video was filmed by Berkeley area parents who did not
give their names out of fear of retaliation… The video sparked a
backlash among parents who want their children to return to in-person
learning as soon as possible.
Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with all of them opting to
send their kids to private schools. Indeed, it’s what they should be
doing given the subpar track record of government schools.
But it’s disgusting that they want to deny that same opportunity for parents who don’t have the same financial resources. Especially since minority children are the ones who suffer most.
P.S. It’s worth pointing out that this column is an attack on teacher
unions, not teachers. For what it’s worth, the main argument for school
choice is that it would be better for students. That being said, good teachers also would prosper in a choice-based system.
1. The Placer County, CA person who died shortly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine—As first reported,
the death occurred on January 21, shortly after the person (no
information at all given regarding age or gender) received the vaccine.
The original report does note that “the person had previously tested
positive for COVID-19 in late December.” We are now being told
that the victim was a 64-year-old healthcare worker, who “also had
underlying health issues, and had been exhibiting symptoms of illness at
the time the vaccine was administered.”
The sheriff’s office asserts that “Clinical examination and lab
results have determined the COVID-19 vaccine has been ruled out as a
contributing factor in the individual’s death.” Strangely, though, no
cause of death is specified. It is, at the very least, a bit
disconcerting that only this particular negative finding would be
released, especially since privacy is assured in that the victim has
never been identified.
Certainly, the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy can be invoked, but that is pretty thin gruel in light of the 47% of people surveyed
who say they are either unlikely or very unlikely to get a vaccine.
Clearly, the best course for the authorities would have been to
affirmatively state the cause of death, only they chose not to.
2. Kids should go back to school, says the American Academy of Pediatrics and many others—According to a recent poll,
53% of registered voters surveyed believe classrooms in their area
should be open, while just 31% prefer they remain closed. It is no
secret that teachers’ unions have been against reopening. Besides, neither kids nor teachers need to be vaccinated before returning. Not that it comes as a surprise, but being out of in-person school is damaging our kids.
And, naturally, it affects the disadvantaged kids the most. How does
that square with “It’s all about the kids” rhetoric? Or the “Follow the
science” mantra?
As to the AAP,
according to president Lee Savio Beers, M.D., FAAP, “Children
absolutely need to return to in-school learning for their healthy
development and well-being, and so safety in schools and in the
community must be a priority. We know that some children are really
suffering without the support of in-person classroom experiences or
adequate technology at home. We need governments at the state and
federal levels to prioritize funding the needed safety accommodations,
such as improving ventilation systems and providing personal protective
equipment for teachers and staff.”
The CDC says that schools can reopen safely during the pandemic. So, do we follow the science or the union-driven politics?
3. The failure of the technocrats in the COVID-19 pandemic—Parker Crutchfield and Scott Scheall posted an article
entitled “There Are No Experts On That for Which We Really Need
Experts.” They make several good points, but the key takeaway here is
that there is more involved in handling the pandemic than simply
health-related issues.
“The best policy approach to the pandemic would not have prioritized
health to the exclusion of economic, psychological, and sociological
considerations. The best policy would have minimized human suffering,
all things considered. Unfortunately, though there are epidemiological
experts and economic experts, and psychological experts and sociological
experts, there are no scientists whose expertise encompasses
epidemiology, economics, psychology, and sociology.”
Moreover, most “experts” develop their knowledge under highly
controlled conditions. And even when they are forced to deal with the
real world, they often resort to models, which are often wrong because
those models are based are all sorts of assumptions—and not an abundance
of data. As to supposed experts in health, reliable hard data is sorely
lacking. The National Health Interview Survey has a small sample size
(30,000 sample adult and 9,000 sample child completed interviews), and
again, must rely on statistics and modeling to arrive at its
conclusions. As with all surveys, there is little provision made for the
subjects who flat-out lie.
The authors cite F.A. Hayek’s essay entitled “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
“Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is
not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that
there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized
knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of
knowledge of general rules: The knowledge of the particular
circumstances of time and place.”
But, perfecting technocracy may not be the answer. As the authors
state: “The other possible answer is to give up on technocracy and
return to democracy, individual rights, and popular sovereignty.”
The Dalton School, an elite school in New York City, is reportedly experiencing a "race meltdown" over anti-racist demands by teachers that some are calling "extreme" and "insane."
The Dalton School is an elite K-12 preparatory school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that has an exorbitant tuition of $54,180,
but also prides itself on being extremely progressive. Jim Best, the
head of the school, declared that he has "committed Dalton to becoming a
visibly, vocally, structurally anti-racist institution."
The school's website has a "Commitment to Anti-Racism"
page, where it outlines it's "anti-racism vision." The objectives
include: "All Dalton students will have a deep historical understanding
of racial and structural inequities in the U.S., and particularly the
history of anti-black racism."
Despite the prep school already committed to anti-racism, the
teachers at the Dalton School are allegedly demanding the institution be
even more committed to anti-racism. The New York Post reported on the eight-page "anti-racist manifesto signed by dozens of faculty members with a sweeping list of demands."
The purported demands, some based on critical race theory, include:.......To Read More....
My Take - Well, it looks like another leftist insane asylum masquerading as a school is going to close. Good! Maybe the next school that's going to commit itself to social justice issues will realize there's no end to the appeasement. At some point these fools are going to learn that groveling, crawling on their stomachs, begging forgiveness, denigrating and debasing themselves, will never be enough to appease these sewer trout.
The Los Angeles Unified School District spends $18,788 per student. Its
goal is to up that spending to $20,000. The mammoth LA school district
is 7th in urban spending and has around half a million students. And the
costs only went up after a United Teachers strike extracted a 6 percent
raise.
Last year, LAUSD approved a $7.8 billion budget.
Governor Newsom demanded federal aid during the coronavirus and proposed
moving over $4 billion in federal pandemic relief to the
non-functioning schools.
"Cuts to funding at schools will forever impact the lives of children,"
Superintendent Austin Beutner warned. "The harm children are facing is
just as real a threat to them as is the coronavirus."
Apparently cutting the budgets of closed schools is just as lethal as a pandemic.
"The notion that schools can continue to operate safely in the fall with
a decreased state budget is not realistic," deputy superintendent Megan
Reilly complained after a proposed 7% budget cut.
The schools are aren’t opening in the fall. Instead, LAUSD is staying
closed. But it has piled up $200 million in "emergency coronavirus
costs" from handing out free computers and internet.
What are those billion-dollar budgets buying now?
The Zoom classes managed to have only two-thirds of students logging in
on any given school day. 40,000 high school students were not
participating after school closures. That’s not surprising because the
teachers’ union had reached an agreement that would avoid any pay cuts,
would allow teachers to set their own schedules, free them from video
lectures, and require them to work only 4 hours a day.
Meanwhile millions are being spent on protective equipment, not because
LAUSD schools are teaching students, but because they’re open only to
illegally use federal funds to serve food to the homeless.
And the situation at LAUSD is typical of the broken Democrat school model across the country.
It’s bad enough when taxpayers and parents were stuck with
billion-dollar bills when there were at least functioning schools. Now
struggling families are paying a fortune to subsidize Democrat activists
who make their own schedules and might condescend to spend a few hours
handing out class projects.
Don’t ask them to turn on their video or actually monitor the students they’re “teaching”.
“If schools aren’t going to reopen, we’re not suggesting pulling funding
from education, but instead allowing families ... take that money and
figure out where their kids can get educated if their schools are going
to refuse to open,” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos suggested.
That suggestion has been met with howls of outrage from the teachers’
unions. How dare the country’s top education official suggest that
education funding should be used to teach children.
Under the current regime of pandemic closures, the entire system of school districts makes no sense.
If students are going to be taught online, then their geographic
location only matters when they hit a time zone change. The massive
burden of property taxes on local homeowners that has been used to fund
the public education system through sweetheart deals with union
activists has no reason to exist.
Those contracts were for teachers who showed up in classrooms to teach
students. Democrat activists have negotiated with Democrat politicians
to pay them a fortune to only occasionally teach online.
That’s not a good deal for anyone except the unions and the Democrat officials they’ve bought off.
Secretary of Education DeVos is correct. Education funding is meant to
fund education, not homeless soup kitchens, which LAUSD considers more
essential than functioning classrooms. That money doesn’t belong to
unions or political bosses. It was extracted from taxpayers through a
broken promise.
Parents have the right to pull that money from school districts and use it to educate their children.
That can mean finding private schools that are willing to open up for
in-person learning, it can mean competitive distance learning at private
and public schools around the country, or it can mean homeschooling
through pods. Or any learning that meets curriculum requirements.
The public education system was broken badly before. Now it effectively doesn’t exist.
The system, at every level from elementary through college, has shed
what few standards it had, while maintaining ridiculously inflated
expenses of tens of thousands per student for teaching zoom classes.
Competitive alternatives could easily offer individual students more
instruction time, more access to teachers, and more personalized
instruction for a fraction of the money that is being spent today.
School districts react hysterically to both budget cuts and proposals to
reopen. But they can’t have it both ways. They protest that the
infrastructure must be maintained, even as they insist that they have no
idea when they’re going to be able to use it again. They argue that,
unlike every other profession, it’s vital to keep teachers employed,
even when they’re really not doing anything useful.
While so many people who want to work are losing their jobs, why should
some government employees who won’t do their jobs be immune from
economic realities because of their political power?
The answer is political corruption.
Municipal unions have gotten away with murder because they’ve had their
fingers on a vital service. Mess with them and they can turn out the
lights, stay home when the fires break out, or force you to keep your
kids entertained at home. Pandemic closures have entirely neutered that
last threat.
The pandemic emergency has created an education emergency. And the
public school system is unable and unwilling to meet that crisis because
of its cronyism, corruption, and general incompetence.
President Trump has the opportunity to help parents meet that education
emergency by taking executive actions that will empower private schools,
homeschoolers, and the more functional elements of the public school
system to step forward and competitively meet the needs of students and
parents.
The public health emergency has created an education emergency that President Trump can solve.
If a public health emergency can be used to confine millions of people
in their homes, to close countless businesses, to suspend the Bill of
Rights, and even to ban husbands and wives from sharing a bed, it can
certainly be used to redirect education funding from systems that aren’t
teaching to those that are.
It’s either that or go on giving billions to broken districts like LAUSD
where the teachers might show up for 4 hours of work and some of their
students might occasionally tune in to do the work.
In the old public school system, teachers pretended to teach and
students pretended to learn. Now no one is pretending anymore. The
teachers aren’t teaching and the students aren’t learning. The big
expensive buildings are standing empty, the school supplies are going
unused, and the endless layers of administration serve no function
except to draw six figure salaries. It’s time to end the charade.
The billion-dollar boondoggles were not created to maintain themselves which is all they’re doing now.
America’s students deserve better. So do the taxpayers who have funded
this mess. The public education system has shut itself down. It’s time
to build a new flexible system that can handle the stresses of the
pandemic and deliver results without holding students and parents
hostage to unions.
President Trump can take the first step by breaking parents and students
free of broken districts and shuttered schools by putting federal
education funds at the disposal of parents during this emergency.
Voucher programs have already been successfully implemented in many
states, especially in districts with underperforming schools, and a
pandemic voucher program would offer flexibility and results.
Parents would be able to enroll their children in the distance or
in-person learning options that work for their families. A competitive
educational environment would adapt to the challenges much more readily
and provide better value for students. And the failing public school
system would have an incentive to improve. The alternative is wasting
billions on schools and teachers who refuse to teach their students.
The pandemic has left everyone with lots of give and take. In educating
our children, however, don't let teachers' unions take from our children
to give to themselves.
As the Wuhan virus pandemic persists and wild rhetoric along with it, teachers unions are threatening to strike if schools reopen, but they’re also pushing to limit online teaching. These unions have long incentivized all the wrong things in education, but demanding teachers be paid to do virtually nothing is a new low. As a New York Times headline announced this week, teachers are “Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction Too.”
Public school teachers around the country are fighting for schools to remain closed longer, to implement more expensive safety measures, and to limit teachers’ responsibilities with online learning, the article explains. These same teachers are threatening job walkouts if they don’t get their way and protesting at state capitols and on social media.
The second-largest teachers’ union in the country this week permitted
its state and local chapters to strike if their school districts don’t
take satisfactory precautions, such as revamping ventilation systems and
instituting mask mandates, before the kids come back to school.
While teachers’ unions play politics, parents are trying to make
game-time decisions amid constant uncertainty. Whether getting back to
work themselves is a factor in their education strategies, parents need
better options for their kids, who were so grossly underserved in the
spring. After schools started shutting their doors in March and parents
began reeling, rearranging their lives to accommodate at-home
instruction, countless young people across the country fell behind..........To Read More....
Is Greece the international version of New Jersey or is New Jersey the American version of Greece? Is New Jersey the national version of Chicago, or is Chicago the the local version of New Jersey?
The answer is yes, regardless of how the question is phrased because – in all cases – we’re talking about examples of how politicians (and short-sighted voters) create “Goldfish Government.”
Let’s examine Chicago to see how this process works.
The Washington Postnoted early last year that the new mayor was going to face an enormous fiscal challenge because of the reckless choices made by previous generations of politicians.
The city has been underfunding its pensions for decades, with dire results. Chicago’s pension plans collectively have only about a quarter of the assets they’ll need to pay benefits, one of the worst funding ratios in the nation. To put that hole in dollar terms, Chicago is about $28 billion short of what it needs, even under relatively favorable assumptions about future returns, or about $10,000 for every man, woman and child living in the city. …radical surgery still needed. Within a few years, pension contributions are projected to suck up more than 20 percent of the city’s budget. And Chicago can’t count on much help from the state, which is dealing with its own, equally severe case of pension underfunding. …what’s happening in Illinois is merely the earliest and most extreme manifestation of a quandary that will soon be dominating the public conversation in many states: how to pay for retirement promises to public employees without entering a fiscal death spiral. …shoddy accounting allowed generations of politicians all over the country to curry favor with public-sector workers by offering them ever-fatter pension packages, gaining immediate benefit while deferring the political cost of paying for all those benefits until much later. Later is now arriving. …Chicago has been losing lower- and middle-class residents for years, in part because of its heavily regressive tax burden. And when Chicago and Illinois both start raising the rates on upper earners — as they will have to, and soon — they run the risk that those people ,too, will start trickling away, either to smaller cities without the burdensome pension-legacy costs.
Megan McArdle pointed out that Chicago is a mess because of “public choice” – i.e., politicians make short-sighted and irresponsible decisions in order to maximize votes and power.
Throw in a recession sometime in the next couple of years, and Chicago is going to be in a full-blown crisis. …it’s the fault of generations of politicians before them who promised an ever-richer array of benefits to government workers. Particularly, they liked to raise the retirement benefits. …The whole point of giving workers pension benefits instead of cash was that you didn’t have to pay for them; you could promise the benefits now and gather up the votes that the grateful workers tossed at your feet, all without costing current taxpayers a single dime. …Future taxpayers mostly weren’t voting in 1982 municipal elections. …Chicagoans, welcome to “later.” The municipal pensions only have about 25 percent of the assets they’ll need to cover projected benefits, a shortfall of roughly $28 billion. …If you use a more cautious method, you come up with a shortfall of more than $40 billion. …Moody’s Investors Service rates the city’s general obligation debt as junk bonds. …Chicago is now approaching the point where the growth of its obligations will outpace the growth of any possible revenue stream it might use to cover them. It’s a few steps from there to municipal bankruptcy.
Unsurprisingly, Chicago’s relatively new mayor wants to keep the scam going.
As reported by the Chicago Tribune, she wants to extract more money from taxpayers.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot…said there’s “no question” residents will need to pay more in taxes or fees to plug a looming city budget shortfall… “There’s no question we’re going to have to come to the taxpayers and ask for additional revenue.” …Lightfoot did not specify what sort of revenue she expects to raise — whether it would come in the form of new taxes, a property tax hike or increased fees. …referring to her campaign promise to seek cuts before asking taxpayers for more money, Lightfoot added, “I meant what I said on the course of the campaign: We have a lot of hard choices we’re going to have to make regarding city finances.”
Like previous mayors, she’s buying votes with other people’s money.
The Wall Street Journalopined last year about her surrender to the teacher unions (a Chicago tradition, as illustrated by the adjacent cartoon by Lisa Benson).
Except it wasn’t really a surrender since she was already on their side (as perfectly captured by this Ramirez cartoon).
So the net result is a combination of bad fiscal policy and bad education policy.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers Union on Thursday struck an agreement to end an 11-day strike, and by the looks of it the union was bargaining with itself. The mayor is touting the new contract as the most generous in Chicago history, and she’s right. …The new contract includes a 16% raise over five years (not including raises based on longevity), a three-year freeze on health insurance premiums, lower copays, …and more than 450 new social workers and nurses. …you can bet it will be expensive. Last week the mayor proposed a slew of tax increases including levies on ride-hailing services and restaurant meals. This week her staff suggested that property taxes may have to increase . . . again. Michelle Obama the other day complained that white people were leaving the city to escape minorities who are moving in. No, they’re fleeing Chicago’s high taxes and lousy schools—and so are minorities.
This story from Reason is a powerful (and nauseating) example of how a money-hungry city is making life miserable for ordinary people.
Chicago police pulled Spencer Byrd over for a broken turn signal. Byrd says his signal wasn’t broken, but that detail would soon be the least of his worries. …Byrd was giving a client, a man he says he had never met before, a ride… Police pulled both of them out of the car and searched them. Byrd was clean, but in his passenger’s pocket was a bag of heroin… Police released Byrd after a short stint in an interrogation room without charging him with a crime. But when Byrd went to retrieve his car, he found out the Chicago Police Department had seized and impounded it. …The program impounds cars when the owner beats a criminal case or isn’t charged with a crime in the first place. It impounds cars even when the owner isn’t even driving, like when a child is borrowing a parent’s car. …Byrd calls his car his “livelihood,” and he has been fighting for close to two years now to recover it. He says he has $3,500-worth of tools locked in the trunk, and he can’t retrieve them. …Like tens of thousands of other Chicagoans, Byrd was a victim of years of the city’s fiscal negligence. …to try and nickel-and-dime…out of these massive budget gaps. …The result is a uniquely punitive impound system, in which Chicago profits off restricting the ability of its residents to drive.
Amazingly, Chicago’s politicians want to dig an even deeper hole.
The Wall Street Journal has a new editorial examining a scheme to borrow even more money in hopes of keeping the gravy train rolling.
Chicago has been seeking to take advantage of historically low interest rates by refinancing debt—even as its credit rating has deteriorated amid swelling budget deficits and pension payments. …In 2017 state and city politicians contrived a shell scheme to lower the city’s borrowing costs. The city essentially sold off sales-tax revenue that it receives from the state to a corporation specially created to pay creditors. …Voila, Chicago’s financial magicians spun junk into gold. …Chicago’s budget woes are mounting, and financial alchemists are diluting the claims of existing creditors. If the city were to renege on its $8 billion in GO debt, those bondholders would surely demand a slice of the sales-tax revenue now pledged to other creditors. This is what happened in Puerto Rico. …Chicago’s population has declined for each of the past four years, and taxpayers are getting tapped out. On top of a $50 million increase in property taxes this year, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has imposed a new “congestion” fee on Uber and taxi rides, doubled the tax on restaurant meals, and raised a special personal property tax on computer cloud software. Yet a recession would probably blow a gigantic hole in its budget and could cause its pension funds to run dry. Does anyone think that city politicians wouldn’t prioritize public workers over bondholders?
So when will this house of cards collapse?
I have no idea. There’s a famous quote from the late economist Rudiger Dornbusch, who observed that, “In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”
The people buying bonds from Chicago are betting that the collapse won’t happen in the near future. But that was the same mentality of the people who bought Greek bonds in, say, 2005.
Their whine never stops. While I and many others have been writing about the enormous sum of money spent on education for years, the “investicrats,” those who constantly demand that even more must be allocated, show no sign of leaving the building. Perhaps the most deeply entrenched of this genus is one Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
A few weeks ago, the union leader penned “Investing in the schools our children deserve,” an editorial for the New York Times in which she rolls out the usual bushwa. She claims that in 1998, California’s Prop. 13 ushered in an era of “educational austerity.” Weingarten also trots out another golden oldie that education is being starved by politicians who are “deliberately siphoning off funds for privatization” or to “finance tax cuts for corporations and the superrich.”...........To Read More....
On June 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government workers no longer had to pay dues to a union as a condition of employment, and the ensuing hysteria was a sight to behold. Loopy headlines like “How The Supreme Court’s Janus Decision Could Cripple Public Sector Unions” and “The Roberts Court Protects the Powerful for a New Gilded Age” were commonplace. But one year out, the apocalypse-is-nigh scenarios have failed to materialize. In fact, the unions are crowing that they are in fine shape, thank you. More commonly now, headlines read, “So much for the labor movement’s funeral.”
The teachers unions, especially, have barely suffered as a result of the Janus ruling. While the fee payers – those teachers who had quit the union but were still forced to pay dues – are gone, few others have left the union fold. According to Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has actually had a one percent increase in membership in calendar 2018. Part of the reason for this is that, suspecting the Supreme Court would decide for worker freedom, the unions made a concerted effort to hang on to members by trying to get them, prior to the Janus decision, to “recommit.”
There is a much bigger reason for the non-drop off in membership, however. As revealed by a stunning new national poll commissioned by the Teacher Freedom Project, 77 percent of teachers have never even heard of the Janus case and 52 percent don’t know that they are no longer required to pay a union to keep their teaching job.
Additionally, for teachers who have decided to leave, the unions have thrown up roadblocks............To Read More....
As anyone who’s been a public school teacher can tell you, plenty of false messages circulate about union membership: whether it’s required, why it exists, and whom it benefits (or harms). Free to Teach wants you to know what’s up. Below are six of the most common issues the major state and national teachers’ unions don’t want you to question.
Fact #1— Teachers feel a lot of pressure to join a union......
Fact #2: Dues are used for politics......
Fact #3: The Janus case is NOT an attack on unions......
Fact #4: Workers who no longer pay the union are not “free riders.”
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Fact #5: Your local union gets little of your dues to negotiate your pay......
Fact #6: State and national unions don’t always advocate for teachers’ best interests......To Read More...
Finnish schools are unionized. American schools are unionized. The similarities end there.
Randi Weingarten, Lily Eskelsen GarcÃa and other teacher union leaders have on many occasions extolled the virtues of Finland’s education system, and, at every turn, they remind us that their teachers are unionized.
They are right. Finland does have a highly regarded education system and the teachers are indeed unionized, but then there are the details.
Unlike U.S. teachers, Finns do not have iron-clad job protections. As explained by economist Barbara Bruns, they are hired by individual schools – not school districts. “If a school director asks a teacher to leave – and it does happen – the teacher alone is responsible for finding a new position. Just reflect on the incentives for performance that this creates.” Finland doesn’t have ongoing school choice battles either. As Bruns notes, Finland runs a national school choice system in which parents can choose freely between the 2,600 municipal and 80 privately-managed schools, with funding following the student..........To Read More....
By Rich Kozlovich 
