Posted on 02/13/2017 6:45:17 AM PST by Lorianne
By her public utterances, Betsy DeVos seemed spectacularly unqualified to lead the bureaucratic enterprise called the US Department of Education. But you really have to wonder: could she do any worse than the exalted mandarins of educational bureaucracy who preceded her?
There is so much not right with public education these days that it could be the poster child for institutional collapse in America. Certainly in terms of the money spent per student, it illustrates perfectly Joseph Tainter’s classic collapse dynamic of over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns. Young adults are floundering in high school, or “graduating” as functional illiterates despite the vaunted widespread application of computer “technology.” They can do Instagram on a cell phone, but they can’t read an application for a driver’s license. And the mania for “diversity and multiculture” has left kids without the armature of an American common culture to successfully mold a life onto.
That common culture, by the way, is exactly what allowed waves of immigrants from the early 19th century until the Second World War to find a place and thrive in an American life that was new to them. It also enabled the sons and daughters of former slaves to enter professions and business, even despite Jim Crow segregation. Today, according to the official diktat of the Department of Education, and the propaganda of the politicized teacher corps, the very mechanisms that made previous success possible are essentially outlawed or banished beyond the pale of a functional consensus. For instance, instruction in speaking English correctly.
I have said this before to the scorn and derision of my auditors: it should be the primary mission of schooling to teach kids how to speak English grammatically and intelligibly. Without that capability, they may not be able to learn much of anything else. That this is not regarded as important anymore is a spectacular disgrace. It also brings us to the horrifying issue of race in American schooling. (Yes, this is part of that “conversation about race” that the professional race relations establishment calls for incessantly but doesn’t really want to have.)
The failures of education are especially vivid among the children of the so-called inner city — polite code for black. The school troubles of this group may be attributed to an array of other problems, starting with a social services system that pays teenage girls to have babies without a father present in the house, and the inept parenting that follows in chaotic homes. You could argue that children produced in those conditions are so damaged by the time they get to first grade that they can’t recover.
Under Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, a policy called “racial equity” was devised to mitigate the embarrassing problem of black students being suspended or disciplined disproportionately for atrocious behavior in the classroom. The “solution” to that was to just stop enforcing behavioral standards. The policy placed the blame for students’ disruptive behavior on the “cultural insensitivity” of the teachers and staff, and more generally on “white privilege.” The result, naturally, is greater chaos and dysfunction in the classroom. It is worth reading the piece by Katherine Kersten in City Journal on how this worked out in the St. Paul, Minnesota, district.
Arne Duncan was also responsible for mis-applying federal “Title Nine” law on college campuses (originally drawn up to balance funding of men’s and women’s sports), where it was used to promote the extra-legal prosecution of rape allegations in what amounted to campus kangaroo courts run by ideologues unconstrained by due process. This has produced a star chamber climate of persecution across the country, nicely in-step with the officially sanctioned coercions of the cultural Maoists who are destroying the intellectual life of American higher ed.
American schooling from kindergarten to post-doc has entered a phase of epic failure under the watch of several generations of federal policy “experts.” It suffers from several other illnesses than the ones I’ve already mentioned, namely the tragic over-centralization of school districts into giant schools; and the odious racketeering in loans that drives college education. Betsy DeVos has a lot of damage to undo engineered by her exquisitely qualified predecessors.
So she was unable to wax eloquent on arcane, failed policies of the past. I could care less.
Her game plan of vouchers and school choice is revolutionary and is the best plan I’ve seen in 50+ years.
>>Her game plan of vouchers and school choice is revolutionary and is the best plan I’ve seen in 50+ years.<<
Her game plan should be to shutter her department.
Nowhere in the USC does it say the Federal Government has any role in education.
Nor should it.
I think what he is saying is that she could hardly do a worse job than those who preceded her. And he goes on to note the many social ills which a Federal Department of Education cannot remedy.
I’m glad to see mention of that birdbrain Arne Duncan. As far as I can tell, he is a basketball player who used his mother’s connections in the educational community and his family’s Chicago political connections to get himself appointed to various school-related gigs. He has had considerably less-than-spectacular performance all along the way, more a part of the problem than a solution.
I agree. The best thing she and Trump can do is close down Department of Education. There is no reason the individual states and communities can’t run their own school systems, as they have done from the beginning.
Government schools are socialism, so, whatever is in the curriculum, they teach socialism.
They are turning out illiterates on purpose. That’s what they were intended to do.
No, YOUR public school is NOT the exception.
“...from the beginning...”?
No! Only since 1918 has every county in the U.S. had government school. It was the first major triumph of the Prussian/German/British globalists in their march to destroy the Republic.
This is just another example of a new sheriff in town. It’s a new paradigm. The TRUMP paradigm.
If you want to change things you don’t continue to do things as they have always been done. You don’t appoint carbon copies (dating myself) of past administrators to positions where you intend to make serious changes.
The left just doesn’t comprehend this new paradigm.
Who CARES? F them! (”F”orget). We don’t need them to get it.
Trump just needs to keep moving ahead with his policies. The “people” are with him.
True, I’m sick of hearing about your kids teacher and how great teat particular teacher is. What happens next year when you kid gets warehoused with a union thug interested mainly in what the shop steward tells them to protest?
My brother is a high school teacher who actually has an engineering degree. The nonsense he goes through is insane.
His experience in one of the “good” schools in a rich area have ensured that his kids have never darkened the doors of a public institution.
A few years ago, I helped coach a high school robotics team. The team was regional and made up of home, private and public school kids. Most of the public schoolers were from two highly regarded STEM academies. Honestly, most were just playing the game of being on the team because it got them credit and not giving their all.
Soccer, dances, and whatever else came well before robot, even though the robot team demanded 100% dedication for the six-week build season. We didn’t get it, yet they got to check the box.
I can see certain, limited, roles for the federal government regarding education. For example the setting of certain standards, in cooperation with the states, so that a HS Diploma from a school in Montana has the same value as one from Texas.
Unfortunately, our federal behemoth is never satisfied until it has sucked the life out of every free thing it encounters. So elimination is often the only cure.
Government involvement in education = indoctrination. Government will never teach the Constitutional limits of its power over the citizenry. If Government was truly motivated to educate our kids the public schools wouldn’t be graduating such idiots.
It’s Kunstler. You forgot the barf alert.
Obviously you did not read what I posted for content, but simply react with a rant because I said that there COULD be a limited role.
He is right a lot of the time.
Cloward and Piven developed the model that was introduced, in a Teddy Kennedy education bill, into our now current school system in the seventies. The desired result is to overwhelm a system until it collapses. Then the Marx philosophy is implimented, as designed by Cloward and Piven. We are at the collapse stage. Betsy DeVos needs all the support we can give her.
I support her.
I don’t have any reason not to support her.
I don’t see how she could do a worse job than previous secretaries of education have done and I like some of her ideas ... she will be fought tooth and nail over them.
I do think education should be a State duty, not Federal.
The latest figures I've seen, the US has fallen to 35th in the world, right behind Zimbabwe or Kenya or some such places.
In other words, we suck now, as far as educational skills of our kids go when compared to the rest of the word.
Two words describe this disgusting, degrading, disappointing disaster: Teachers unions.
>>I can see certain, limited, roles for the federal government regarding education. For example the setting of certain standards, in cooperation with the states, so that a HS Diploma from a school in Montana has the same value as one from Texas.<<
As a coordinating body for Interstate Education I could see and agree that is an important role. No need for an entire cabinet level department for that. A small committee would suffice.
I read it just fine, expat. There should be no role in education for government.
Not could, not should ... not anything.
And you have no idea what a rant really is.
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