Posted on 01/31/2015 4:11:38 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
One of the saddest aspects of American society is how little most people know about education and how little they seem to care. We need to fix this.
In fairness, we have to assign a lot of blame to our Education Establishment. They are great at confusing the public and sapping everyone’s spirit. Even the simplest activities are transmuted into murky mysteries. As many parents have found, they cannot understand the explanations provided by the school when children fail. They cannot help their children with even elementary-level homework.
Secondly, we have to assign a lot of blame to our media. They report hardly at all on education. So how are parents supposed to understand what is being done to their children?
There was a time, more than 75 years ago, when education was a straightforward activity. Almost anyone could do it and anyone could understand it. Meanwhile, the media reported on it in depth. With that kind of transparency, the Education Establishment couldn’t get away with very much. Now they can get away with almost anything. They can mount a PR blitzkrieg, swearing to everyone that X is the future of education and the only way to go. That's what they said about Common Core, and the media jumped right in there to sell this bogus message. I think it’s fair to say a lot of lies were told.
Typically, our local papers will report on the new superintendent, the new test scores, the new school. In other words, the papers do report on the surface matters.
But none of this reporting explains the deep malaise in our public schools. None of these articles go behind the scenes to explain why third-graders can’t read. None of this coverage helps parents deal with the intellectual wasteland that their children confront each day.
I have contacted the editors in my area over the years, and pointed out there’s a lot that parents need to know. Why don’t we explain it to them? I’ve said hello to most of the other media here, the talk show hosts, the educational institutions such as Regent and Old Dominion University, just to wonder what we might accomplish together. All of them showed the same level of interest as the Virginian-Pilot, that is, zero.
Meanwhile, no surprise, things get worse each year. Education officials are always tinkering around with statistics and test scores; but the pattern is very clear that nothing gets better and it probably gets worse. How in the world do they do it??
Bad education is a passion of mine. I like trying to figure out who is responsible and how they achieve their dismal results. As a consequence of this passion, I have 400 articles and videos on the Internet. I could help start a discussion of what’s really happening in the public schools. Most parents would welcome this discussion.
But the media have chosen silence.
They have chosen tacit support for the dumb side of education. Judging simply by appearances, you would have to conclude that the local media want to help keep the public in the dark. They want to help the Education Establishment continue its incompetence and malpractice.
What is your local paper doing? Are they silent? Have you tried to nudge them into becoming more involved? Have you tried to awaken their conscience?
I’m really curious about the mechanism here. Sometimes I think the explanation is simply a lack of professionalism. (Now that they’re all liberals, they have forgotten how to be journalists.) Other times I suspect that our journalists and politicians are ashamed to admit they don't comprehend what's going on. Finally, I think the explanation is a fear of crossing the NEA.
Whatever the explanation, why not consider moving past it?
Why not do what’s best for the children and the community? Newspaper editors have a code, or they used to, that requires them to report the news honestly, and to do what’s best for the entire society.
Education is perhaps the most important single social issue. The schools are dumbing children down from K to 12 and then up through college. We have ignorant teenagers and ignorant adults, and you have to wonder how they can sustain the complex society they have inherited.
Specifically, parents need to know why their children don’t learn to read (there are still many remnants of Whole Word). They need to know why their children can’t learn arithmetic (because Reform Math is an awkward way to teach arithmetic). They need to know why children don’t acquire any basic knowledge (because our Education Establishment doesn’t care much about knowledge and now insists that teachers stop teaching, this being an axiom of Constructivism).
Oh, no question, the entire field of education is a tangled web. The main activity appears to be deception. The media need to rescue us.
If the media won’t do it, then each individual citizen needs to do it. And what would be the easiest first step? Pester your local paper until they start to do their job!
Second, discuss these issues with your friends, until either of you can explain the issue to a third person. We must raise the level of the discussion, one person at a time if that's what it takes.
Here is a short video that sums up all the more obvious problems in 3 minutes: “Nine big reasons why public schools wallow in mediocrity.” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_pzBo6HCfA&list=UU2YPIDPnXI_SVTHo15AB5rQ )
Here's a good article on why we have so much illiteracy: "Reading: the con continues." http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/06/reading_the_con_continues.html
Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org
I directed you to an article at Fordham, I think it was last week. Well, Mike Petrilli wrote a blog asking Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal why they don’t like Common Core. When the two Senators and a governor didn’t respond, he declared himself the winner at went home for the evening.
I barraged him with tweets which he never responded to because who the hell am I? And around and around it goes. Until parents start giving more of a damn about their kids, the fight is lost before it begins.
Until those in charge of the public schools want to teach children to think rather than indoctrinate them socially, nothing will change.
Until we break the social mantra that everyone’s outcome must be the same or it isn’t fair, education will continue to slide toward the lowest level of education possible (zero).
Until we can again expel students who show no desire to learn and only desire to disrupt the classroom and harm other students and teachers, we can’t have an environment where real learning will happen.
We can’t reform the disaster that currently exists. It’s way too far gone. There are only a tiny handful of people in public education that actually are able to and/or want to teach children properly. Even less know what that actually means considering the measure of success we have been applying to public schools for decades.
Public schooling is going to have to be abolished for some period of time so we can break the cycle of both the people and the curriculum that permeate the entire education system. Both need to be forever removed from existence.
Good luck with your quest. Mere media awareness isn’t going to make any of that happen. People don’t want what you are selling. They parents don’t want to hear that their kids need ten times the education they are getting and that they are hopelessly behind already. The kids don’t want to hear that they are not doing well because they have not been raised with enough self-esteem to handle a little proper criticism or with adequate work ethic to want to succeed.
I’m one of the last products of classical private schooling. I learned on phonics, individual pace workbooks and reading/audio comprehension tests for most of my grade school years. I was taught to print and write in cursive and graded on neatness. Everyone, and I mean everyone, completed basic math at least up through fractions and some well beyond that by grade 4. I could read beyond a college level by sixth grade. So could most of the students I studied with.
Are we willing to push students to complete these goals today? Right now the answer is absolutely not. No one would stand for it. Some kids would need a lot more help than others to keep up with that pace of learning. And we can’t have that today, can we?
So what really needs to change? Education awareness? Or is it something a whole lot deeper and more fundamental in society?
In my county, the government school system is the largest employer with the largest payroll. No other business comes close in the number of employees or salaries paid. Then add those private business owners and employees whose livelihoods depend on school contracts. The county's budget is overwhelming directed to supporting this educational-industrial complex. What local newspaper owner in their right mind would offend an institution that so directly ( and indirectly) provides a paycheck to so many of the county's citizens?
On the state level more than half of the state's budget goes toward supporting the states K-12 educational-industrial complex. On both the state and county levels the actual money going toward the government's educational-industrial complex is far more than reported since retired government school employees’ pension and health benefits are merely counted as government worker retirement expenses and not tallied as a cost to run the schools.
Again, with so much money flowing through the community by way of the government schools, few in the media have the courage to attack this price-fixed, monopoly, and socialist middle class entitlement.
Bruce, I fully share your alarm and concern. I, too, believe that the abysmal education of our nation's citizens is our **MOST** important and urgent threat. We differ in what we consider to be a solution. I firmly believe that it is impossible to reform a schooling system that is fundamentally a price-fixed, single-payer, and socialist-entitlement. We must begin the process of privatizing the delivery of K-12 schooling. Tax credits, vouchers, and charters can be a start. Eventually, the best system would be for all K-12 schooling to be completely privatized with charity schools educating the poorest. ( I am realistic enough to recognized that such a state of a completely privatized nirvana is not likely.)
One more thing:
We often look to the schools of our parents and grandparents generation as being functional and rational in their practices. They were ( for the most part) . Why?
Answer: Because of the values and professionalism of those running the schools. Even though the schools were a price-fixed, monopoly, and single-payer socialist entitlement, these principals, teachers, and superintendents could overcome the socialist drag on the system since most of them came from families that were still closely reliant on rural living and farming. At the time of my grandmother's birth ( 1894) large parts of America was just emerging from the struggles of pioneering the land. Three to five generations later this glue is missing.
We will see the same pattern emerge in socialist medicine. In two to three generations, concerned editorialists will look longingly back on the relatively good medical care of the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s. Medical care will remain fairly good for a time after the introduction of socialist-entitlement medicine due to the values and professionalism of those trained in the old system. In time, socialist-entitlement medical care will deteriorate as these doctors, nurses, and administrators retire. In time, caring editorialists will wonder why it takes a year to get a light bulb changed in their local hospital's operating room.
By the way, Glenn Beck on some Fridays has a segment where he randomly calls convenience stores and asks the employee answering the phone a few simple questions. The questions are extremely simple. For example, “How many days in the year?”, or, “What does the O in H2O stand for?”
The libs often quote Eisenhower’s warning on the, “military industrial complex”. Conservatives ought to focus on the media-education conglomerate which serves only to indoctrinate. The first step in remedying the problem is school CHOICE; a favorite liberal term, “choice”.
That likely includes most people here on Free Republic.
Not satisfied with just insulting kids you don't know,
you now wish to badmouth the parents as well.
And you wonder why you catch grief.
I will not be responding to the content of any of your posts to me. Of course, if you continue to ping me, others may conclude that you are a stalker.
Likewise if you continue to make absurd broad-brush insults
about people you don't know, others may conclude you're an offensive nutcase.
The crap my grandson brings home would challenge the vision impaired, the print is so tiny like 6 pica.
His granddad is a math major, taught it 40 yrs, and says the procedures in Common Core are STUPID and to complicated when a simpler way is to preform the problem exist.
God bless the little children.
They go 14 years or more to government run schools and come out edumacated.
And now Obama wants to get to them even earlier.
Gonna get them into godless government run pre-school and away from parents during their prime formative years.
No Jesus-talk for these children.
Gotta get a head start on indoctrinating them into Marxist Darwinism!
I doubt the young useful idiots have any idea of the overall Marxist goals.
They’re just going along with the flow, completely ignorant of the fact that they’ve been totally brainwashed by government union goons, aka public school teachers.
Have anything to say about them?
Not specifically. Do you?
My beef is with wintertime painting all public school students AND parents
as a bunch of communist dumbasses putting condoms on bananas.
Fact is a lot of folks here have been to public schools and
ought to be at least a bit put-off by unfounded generalizations.
But hey.. you just go ahead and have a problem with that.
Our government schools are the way they are because teachers and principals make them that way.
No one is holding a gun to the heads of teachers as they open the doors to their classrooms and then implement teaching practices and school policies that hurt children. They **willingly** do this for a paycheck, pension, and generous vacation time. They certainly aren’t hurting kids because they “love” them.
And....Yes, it is entirely possible for teachers to change careers. People do it all the time but it would mean giving up generous vacation time, generous pensions, and benefits not seen anywhere in the private sector. But...Hey! It’s for the children! /s
Didn't see any unfounded generalizations in her comments either.
Didn't see any insults to FReepers either.
I have a relative who was a college professor and gave it up to go into industry, he got tired of the liberal crap and forced political correctness.
Lot happier now that he is out of that environment.
I also have two other relatives and the wife of a friend who left public high school teaching for teaching jobs at private schools.
Wintertime's account of what's happening in public schools and colleges is pretty accurate from people I know.
Why not admit it L'il Buckaroo, your only purpose here is to stalk and attack Wintertime rather than discuss facts about our dismal public education system.
Nah, that wouldn't do at all.
But you go ahead and think that if it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
But you go ahead and think that if it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
Yeah, sure thing crackpot.
Like I told you before, the Free Republic archives ain't your friend, liar.
Whatever you say, pop.
Since you’re so keen on these archives, maybe you ought to drag something up and just get me booted off.
Otherwise.. I’d guess you just like doing a bit of forensic stalking.
And further.. since you’re here...
You accuse me of “stalking” wintertime.
Presumably because when I come across one of her comments
that rubs me wrong, I respond to it with a bit of unpleasantness.
Which is really funny, because that’s exactly what you do to me.
We could be twins, you betcha!
BWAAHAAHAAAAA!
Oh hell, that can't be done, everyone knows you're the "Teflon Freeper" under the protection of management, bleeding obvious as a matter of fact.
I don't stalk you L'il Buckaroo, but when I'm reading a thread and up you pop with your usual egregious crap, I'll call you on it.
Which is really funny, because that’s exactly what you do to me.
Nice try Alinsky, you actively stalk two lady Freepers and others, people notice it without even viewing the archives.
I do notice that referencing the archives seem to bug you, they do show your true colors without any doubt.
Most of your really "bad" crap has been sanitized, but some does remain.
If I was a crackpot disrupter like you, I guess it would bother me also.
We could be twins, you betcha! BWAAHAAHAAAAA!
Oh hell no L'il Buckaroo, we would have had a Romulus and Remus moment long ago.
Oh yeah, I lose lots of sleep over it.
Why not drag some of that stuff into the open, since it's so damning?
Show what you got, if you think you got something.
It would be a waste of time "Teflon", nothing can touch you and you strut around knowing that.
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