Posted on 07/02/2022 10:06:13 AM PDT by DoodleBob
The Supreme Court’s decisions this month involving public education have stirred new debate about the future of public, secular education in this country — but such concerns are not new to advocates of publicly operated and funded public schools.
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...Are common schools dying in America? The common school movement began in the 1800s, an effort to create publicly funded schools for all students....Many progressives across our fractured nation embrace the religious right on one issue: burying the ideal of common schooling.
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Desegregation advocates, for instance, created thousands of inventive magnet schools, which to this day attract multiracial blends of children, enticed by attractive curriculums, from computer science to performing arts. It was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who first spawned charter schools with federal dollars in the 1990s, defined as a civil right moment by some on the left, offering liberation of creative educators from a homogenizing schools bureaucracy and suffocating labor rules.
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Cultural diversity and identity politics foster creation of dual-language schools where kids can learn in French or Spanish, or perhaps Armenian or Mandarin. Charter schools serve thousands of poor children in places like South Los Angeles. Then, drive over the Hollywood hills and discover White families hunkered down in their own charter campuses...
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Progressives and mindful conservatives have coalesced to craft a common learning agenda for America’s children. Recall how President George W. Bush joined with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) in 2001 to push for academic standards and to hold educators accountable for better results. Their resulting No Child Left Behind suffered from federal overreach...
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Now the courts and right-wing governors aim to further balkanize society, even allocating taxpayer dollars to further distance groups from one another — through differentiated and unequal forms of schooling....Instead, let’s return to Horace Mann’s aspiration to weave together a more perfect union.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The homeschooled little DoodleBobs saw sights, heard sounds, and met people of all shapes and sizes etc.that they'd have NEVER have seen/heard/met had they gone to "common school." That was, in part, because their interactions were voluntary. Forced "tolerance" never works, and leads to the mess we have today.
And for what it's worth, weaponizing education is an outright communist idea.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
Possible ping of interest.
Go Woke Go Broke..
As long as my school taxes, for schools I don’t S.E. and have never used, did with them I’m all for it.
Home schooled kids do better academically.
If your kid is a good enough athlete to go on to the next level, they’re paying travel ball which is where all the scouts go or they utilize the many video services tailored to athletes.
Ergo. No more need for the behemoth schools anymore to warehouse kids.
It would be wonderful if Texas goes through with its potential lawsuit challenging the 40-50 year SCOTUS decision about forced schooling and having to allow illegal alien kids in schools. Other wise our property taxes are going to explode.
But they probably won’t as Abbott is pretty much your typical RINO. Texas is gonna get real expensive.
The Nation as a whole is dying.
As long as my school taxes, for schools I don’t USE and have never used, DIE with them I’m all for it.
A PPACA style ‘Marketplace” for K-12 education is technically possible.
Pay NYC and Philadelphia metro school taxes and go broke.
The homeschooled little DoodleBobs saw sights, heard sounds, and met people of all shapes and sizes etc.that they’d have NEVER have seen/heard/met had they gone to “common school.”
My 8th grade grammar teacher says “F”!
Tolerance is possible if others are tolerable.
The two-tier just-us system advocates and recipients are not people we should be expected to tolerate.
I never minded paying school taxes as long as they were an investment in the future of America. That changed and I resent the largest portion of my property tax going to finance the destruction of American kids.
They are dying, and perhaps should die, due to a number of factors:
— Leftist Teachers Unions
— Indoctrinating instead of teaching (CRT, LBGTQ+, etc)
— Lack of discipline, except when it comes to use of pronouns
— Genuflexing due to race
The list goes on. Public schools have been taken over by the Left and they don’t serve their intended purpose.
Not dying. Dead.
The largest portion
That’s the problem. When budget cuts are talked…..gonna have to lay off cops and firefighters. Never anyone else.
More and more kids are getting homeschooled.
Numerous on-line programs kindergarten through 12th grade.
A while back, in Walton Cty, Ga, kid gets into a fight with the SRO. In school suspension. Nothing more. We shouldn’t have to pay for that
Ah! Attack the grammar rather than put forth a rational counter argument.
Re: “ Public schools have been taken over by the Left “
I shun government school workers. They are too evil, too stupid, or too much of a Useful Idiot to be a friend.
I shun abortion workers, too.
Let’s abolish public schools. Most of them resemble prisons architecturally and that’s for a reason.
The reason it happened now is that the internet gave them the machinery required to spread their collectivist propaganda into every nook and cranny of American society and culture.
BTW, as I told a friend of mine who insisted this is not about collectivism, but kindness, charity, and tolerance...behind all the finery of kindness, etc. is the ancient idea that society should be based on equality, not merit.
As Will Durant said in volume one of "The Story of Civilization," in the very first village or tribe to ever form, there were 2 opposing cultural forces that emerged: one pushing individual freedom (i.e., meritocracy) and the other pushing the group as a primal unit in which people took care of each other and discouraged individuality (i.e., collectivism).
As is obvious, society can and must make room for both forces but some political extremists latched onto the collectivist idea and pushed it to the exclusion of individual freedom.
And that leads us to where we are now.
“No Child Left Behind suffered from federal overreach...”
For the first three years, it only required something like 25 % proficiency. Every third year the goal jumped a great deal, like an extra 10% or so. On top of that, NCLB required that every school in a district achieve the goals for the district to be considered passing.
On top of that, every subgroup within a school also had to pass. What subgroups? Well, blacks, Latinos, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, non-English speakers, girls, boys, free/reduced lunch, special ed students and others I’ve forgotten, all had to achieve the goal no matter how well the school as a whole performed or else the school failed.
At first, schools ‘taught to the test’. The school looked at the requirements and changed the curriculum to fit the test. Things not covered by the test, like history became unimportant. But as the years passed and the passing score ratcheted up, it became obvious that NCLB was absurd. The only way to pass was to either lower the standard of ‘proficient’ to make it meaningless or for schools to cheat.
Finally NCLB was allowed to die off, because even idealistic bureaucrats have to recognize reality sooner or later, to be replaced by Common Core which is pretty much the same thing but without the requirement that 100% of students have to pass the test.
When you think that Baltimore high schools had ‘graduates’ who on a good day could read at a third-grade level you understand why NCLB was doomed. Yet another gift to America from Ted Kennedy.
“ As long as my school taxes, for schools I don’t S.E. and have never used, did with them I’m all for it.”
A lawsuit by the community who pay local taxes for things they don’t use, like public schools could probably make its way to SCOTUS in 20 years or so.
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