Common core education has been a bigger failure than Microsoft Office Clippy

One aspect no one will acknowledge is the homogeneity of Finland. I’ve seen the video which lauds Finland’s system. Every teacher and student look alike. And it’s not just racial homogeneity , it’s cultural which I think is even more significant . We do not have that in this country. We went the diversity- is -most -important route... Finland does not have to deal with multiculturalism that we have embraced as more important than actual education.

Lately, for some reason (and oh, it’s near the toilet) I’ve been reading Gates’ now-ancient book “The Road Ahead”, and it seems pretty prophetic.

Well, with one exception - he thought the PC was going to make the phone obsolete.

The Finnish system will never get started here until we get rid of the teacher’s union and the so called Education Degree. Requiring all public school teachers to have masters degrees in the subjects they teach and measuring the competence of teachers will never happen as long as the NEA and the other teachers unions are still running the education of our kids.

Ah. Another broad brush stroke artist, armed with more prejudice and emotion than facts. In NYC, teachers are required to get their masters degree within a few years or lose their position. And then, they are required to take some pretty stiff exams covering their pedagogical expertise as well as their expertise in their license area. News flash: The union has NOTHING to do with these requirements.

The union has NOTHING to do with the curricula used in schools either. It used to be in the hands of administrators. Now it's in the hands of politicians who are blatantly ignorant about the education paradigm, who snap up unproven, usually leftist-progressive "panaceas" and who then force these on administrators who then force it on down the line. Commie Core was music to the ears of both the leftist moron governor Cuomo and his leftist moron counterpart mayor of NYC, Comrade Bill DeBlASSio. They ate that unproven garbage right up and forced it on all the teachers they controlled. Never mind that many states promptly shed that garbage after it proved to be a miserable system, NY had to keep its Commie Core to the bitter end. That's politicians you should be pointing your little finger at, not the union.

The unions have everything to do with getting those leftist politicians in office.

My husband was a teacher for 24 years. Every time the NEA/AFT mag came in the mail was like lemon juice in a paper cut, drove me nuts that were forced to contribute to that garbage. Look at what your dues pay for. IIRC, the largest chunk of the pie chart was political activism. The unions invest heavily in getting leftists elected.

The unions are complicit in turning the education system into an indoctrination system. That’s a goal of leftists.

Look at what your dues pay for. IIRC, the largest chunk of the pie chart was political activism. The unions invest heavily in getting leftists elected.

I, and many of my colleagues, quit paying COPE to the union. COPE was a small voluntary additional payment to the union, ostensibly for political lobbying causes for the teachers' benefit. It's probably like your IIRC. Instead, the union squandered our dues on lavish banquets for themselves, junkets to exotic vacation places on the premise they were "studying the education system there" (ha!), paying for busing people to lobbies for criminals like Eric Garner, and many other non-teacher-benefitting causes. So, I halted my COPE payments, as did many other educators. Our union is totally corrupt, I won't argue that. But, they do not make up these progressive curricula. The forcing of this garbage on teachers is on the politicians. The unions don't do very much to back their teachers up, less and less every year. So glad I retired a year ago and got off the no-win merry go round teaching has become in NYC.

All the time my children were in public schools, I met maybe five really smart and professional teachers. I homeschooled one sons for most of his education and he’s done the best in advanced education.

I think public schools will always be second class because first, the teachers and subject material are dumbed down and second, the classes are too big.

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