Posted on 02/14/2003 5:36:40 AM PST by George Frm Br00klyn Park
WBAL/AM Radio 1090 - Baltimore
Ron Smith's "Something to Say" Commentary
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The Worm in The Apple {EDUCATION}
February 13, 2003 Ron Smith's Something to Say
(February 13, 2003) The revelation that the beleaguered Baltimore City public school system is paying 34 staff members more than $100,000 per year in salaries, overtime and bonuses ties in rather neatly with a guest appearance tomorrow (Friday, February 14th) on my show by Peter Brimelow.
Brimelow, a longtime financial journalist, has examined the monopoly government schools enjoy in the U.S. has written a bombshell book, The Worm in the Apple: How The Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education. In it, he argues that American taxpayers, desperate to educate their kids, have poured trillions of dollars down a rat hole over the past several decades without any improvement being shown in student achievement. He lays the blame on the huge education establishment epitomized by the teacher’s unions, which have used their political clout to forestall any competition.
The result is observable all around us: bloated school budgets, lackluster results, and, ironically, a situation that renders schoolroom teachers themselves impotent to achieve the ostensible goal of education – well taught kids. His research makes clear what many of us have come to realize about the government schools: that while they are failing to better educate their wards, they are extremely successful in their actual goals, which are to build their influence with politicians, ever expand their honey-pot of taxpayer dollars, and construct a system strong enough to beat off any attempts to subject it to market-driven forces that would reward success and punish failure.
Brimelow doesn’t just kvetch about the sorry state of American public education, he also lays the groundwork for real reform, “including allowing teachers real choice in representation through collective bargaining reform, giving teachers a voice in the allocation of dues through Paycheck Protection, and marketizing education through school choice.
Join us Friday afternoon at 3:05pm to hear more from Peter Brimelow. This is not teacher bashing, but rather an argument against an educratic bureaucracy that’s dumbing down the kids it’s supposed to educate while dedicating itself to rent-seeking parasitism.
THIS article at WBAL/AM Radio 1090 Baltimore
Join us Friday afternoon at 3:05pm to hear more from Peter Brimelow. This is not teacher bashing, but rather an argument against an educratic bureaucracy that’s dumbing down the kids it’s supposed to educate while dedicating itself to rent-seeking parasitism.Guys, Another expose about the deliberate dumbing down of YOUR offspring. This is 3:05PM Eastern, and 11:05AM PST. Peace and love, George.
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Unfortunately, that's likely where this thread will wind up.
Sine qua non (without that, nothing).The parents of the children being educated are the adults most affected by that education. They are the only adults who are, in that sense, responsible for that education.
It is fundamental justice and fundamental practicality that responsibility and authority must not be seperated. The parents therefore have a natural right to control the education of their children and their children's pro-rata share of the revenue from taxes justified to we-the-people as being earmarked for education.
People who are religious, and view education as a religious duty, have the natural right to bid for education funding on a level playing field with the antireligious. The recent Supreme Court case upholding the Cleveland law allows, but unfortunately does not mandate, that that obvious logic prevail.
More importantly, they have to compete. They have to sell the school in order to survive and if they don't deliver a good product they go out of business and the teachers and administrators lose their jobs.
However, I think that we have hog-tied the teachers and administrators with frivolous lawsuits and forced political correctness. How can any teacher be expected to maintain a classroom atmosphere conducive to learning when he/she cannot even discipline unruly students without fear of being sued by angry parents?
We are in agreement.
Well, there's plenty of blame to go around. The NEA should be illegal (as it was when I started public school in 1955).
However, the hoped for "improvement in student achievement" may be a mirage.
In 1941, when we began WWII, about 25% of eighteen year olds completed twelfth grade.
The hypothesis that a significantly larger fraction of 18 year olds than this can under any circumstances complete twelve academic grades (assuming that they get real courses) is unproven, and is implausible.
Money can't teach algebra to someone with an IQ of 85.
My grandmother taught in NYC Public for 50 years. She would say when asked about the latest programs to "improve achievement", "Somebody's got to clean the subways".
I think she was on to something.
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The union that killed education
by Paul Craig Roberts
If you have a child in public school, you need to read The Worm in the Apple: How the Teachers Unions Are Destroying American Education, a new book by Peter Brimelow.
Public schools are run by the National Educational Association. They are not run by people you can hold accountable, such as teachers, superintendents and school boards. The NEA opposes merit pay, charter schools and any decision by any school administrator that has not been determined in advance by collective bargaining. Simply put, the NEA opposes everything except its own power.
In Connecticut, the teachers union filed a grievance demanding pay for an extra two minutes a week that the union claimed teachers worked. In Pennsylvania, a grievance was filed because coffee and doughnuts were not provided during a teacher training day. Jaime Escalante, a teacher whose extraordinary success in teaching calculus to inner-city Hispanics resulted in a Hollywood movie, was run out of his California school district by the teachers union. Escalante, it seems, violated union rules by complaining about teachers who used the teachers' lounge as a real estate office and called in sick to extend their weekends. A high school principal who requested that teachers write daily objectives on the classroom board was denounced by the union as a "draconian zealot."
Meanwhile, kids aren't learning. The vocabulary of the average American 14-year-old has dropped from 25,000 words to 10,000. San Francisco Examiner reporter Emily Gurnon asked teen-agers to identify the country from which America won its independence. Among the answers: "Japan or something, China. Somewhere out there on the other side of the world." "It wouldn't be Canada, would it?" "I don't know; I don't even, like, have a clue." "I want to say Korea. I'm tripping."
Brimelow next introduces the teachers. Sara Boyd, a recipient of many awards and accolades during her teaching career, experienced difficulty passing a mathematics competency test. She sued the state of California, claiming the test was racially discriminatory. But at her deposition she was unable to answer the question: "What percent of 80 is 8?"
Teachers can't teach because the union won't let them. Perhaps it is just as well. Here are some course listings in the education department at the University of Massachusetts: Embracing Diversity, Diversity and Change, Oppression and Education, Introduction to Multicultural Education, Black Identity, Classism, Racism, Sexism, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Oppression, Jewish Oppression, Oppression of the Disabled, Erroneous Beliefs.
Schools of education have turned teachers into agents of the therapeutic state, a new form of government analyzed by Paul Gottfried in his recent book, "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt." Indoctrination and social reconstruction have replaced the traditional emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic.
When you can stop laughing or crying, pay attention. Brimelow is serious. He knows the NEA inside out. But the media do not. Brimelow has a chapter describing how the NEA bribes the media for favorable stories by handing out "media awards." The Dallas Morning News won three awards for promoting a trip by area teachers to the state capital to lobby for money for teachers raises. In 2000, when NEA delegates voted to strengthen their policy against merit pay for teachers, The Associated Press reported the opposite. Newspapers across the country then editorialized on the basis of the erroneous AP report.
The problem, says Brimelow, is that the NEA is the backbone of the Democratic Party and public education is a government monopoly. Brimelow asks Lenin's question, "What Is to Be Done?" and replies with 24 reforms.
One senses that Brimelow believes reform has little hope when it is opposed by NEA lobbying. If the NEA is to be undone, its undoing will come from parents and teachers deserting the schools. Homeschoolers, without benefit of fancy facilities, science labs and huge expenditures of money, outscore public school students.
Teachers themselves are dropping out, demoralized by lack of professionalism, chaos and crumbling educational standards. As readers recently pointed out to me, teachers are being imported from India and other Third World countries under the H-1B visa program to take the jobs that American teachers are abandoning.
Brimelow uses the wrong tense when he writes that "the teacher unions are destroying American education." They have destroyed it.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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