I am sick about what is taught in public schools these days -- the politically correct stuff is not good, but it's not the worst. The worst is the abysmal level of basic education -- math, science, history. ALL impacted by educational system fads. I think evolution should be taught -- because in it I see design evolution and a designer. But the hard-line evolutionary attitude has corrupted the teaching of biology and cellular biology especially, by all the "reaching" it does to force designer-free evolution as the standard. It makes the teaching of the cell impossibly confused and confused -- at least in the NJ districts that I substitute taught in. The chemistry text I saw was full of errors, and had a poor flow from lesson to lesson, the teachers taught from their own prepared notes, which were okay, but lack of discipline made lab classes chaos and lack of intellectual rigor made the teaching of useful chemistry beyond most students ability.
In math the students had little ability or patience to reason through problems, and resorted to calculators for even the simplest of math questions. The textbooks were better, but they do not teach fractions much at all, and the method for long division new, and weird -- unknown to parents their is no way a parent could help a child with it. Let's stick with long division, re-emphasize fractions and toss every calculator until high school.
History, world and US, was a dizzying and shallow mix of multi-culturism and cultural relativism, without enough positive emphasis on historical figures of high ethics and character.
Discipline is the main problem, the ability to learn in a class with even one disruptive student is impaired, when you have a dozen -- what can be taught is very limited. It is very sad for those good students -- most students are well behaved, but again, it does not take many at all to ruin a class period.
Why are there so many disruptive students? Mostly broken families. To a lesser percentage - the spoiled kids.
Nearly every argument about the quality of education reduces to the same result - parenting.
Ann Colter had the balls to actually call it - if you re-examine the demographics of any prison population, not by race, but by PARENTAL ARRANGEMENT, remove the single-parent arrangements, and look at JUST two-parent felons, then the number of blacks and whites in prison are EQUAL.
Going back to the single-parent raised felons, what is the racial breakdown? Roughly 80-20% black to white. Number of blacks overall raised in single parent situations is far higher than any other racial group.
Do we have a race problem with respect to criminality? Not if you consider the data. The problem is PARENTING, and the fact that overall black families are a mess. Bill Cosby and Tyler Perry both subscribe to this viewpoint as well.
If either party EVER got on a podium and said, “Education is not fixable. We can throw all the money in the world at it, and the result won’t change until we get the number of single parent families down below 10%. For every percentage point decrease in single parent families, I promise a 4 percent increase in test scores”, I’d vote for them - either party.
Every single societal blight reduces to the state of modern parenting. Every one.
You want a better society? Tax the stuffing out of divorce. You want a divorce? Excellent. Got kids? OK, we will garnish both parents wages to the tune of 30%, since that won’t begin to cover the cost of cleaning up after your offspring once they begin realizing what screw-ups their parents are.
Family law is all wrong. Child support payments should be made to local school districts and police districts.
I GUARANTEE you that if no-fault and quickie divorce were eliminated in the US, crime would go down, and test scores would go up without spending a DIME.