Posted on 11/06/2011 9:27:15 AM PST by FreeKeys
Edited on 11/07/2011 4:47:33 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
School spending has gone through the roof and test scores are flat.
While most every other service in life has gotten faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy -- education -- has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started measuring it in 1970.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...
Education will improve exponentially when you de-unionize it and bring more high-tech to the classroom.
Abolish public schools altogether. Solves a lot of problems.
The unionization of teachers started the fall of education in America.
The solution is not in fighting them. It is in using our energy and time and money in presenting better alternatives. When parents are allowed a choice, they will leave public schools in droves and the public schools, aka, government warehouses/endoctrination camps for our kids, will collapse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt3I0OmL1A4
http://www.newt.org/solutions/21st-century-learning-system
ed break through
http://www.edbreakthrough.org/
What no one is talking about here is the role of PARENTS. Parenting skills have declined enormously. The kids arrive in the classroom with absolutely NO respect for authority. They have no discipline to work hard to achieve their goals—they want instant results for minimal effort. I’ve even had students tell me that I should pass them (when you could drop a dime down their column in my gradebook and it would fall unimpeded by any checkmarks for work...) because “they were here every day”. So were the desks and chairs. In fact, the furniture was MORE deserving to pass because it actually performed some work. These same students are usually the ones disrupting the class so that kids who really want to learn can’t concentrate or are led astray into those non-productive behaviors. If a teacher attempts to discipline the students robbing the others of their education, it is THEY who are written up by their supervisors and increasingly, by the STUDENTS THEMSELVES. Yes—administrators who have it in for mostly conservative teachers who aren’t “with it” and don’t tolerate students listening to iPods or texting while they should be taking notes actively solicit statements against teachers by students. What fun! You get to “f__ up” the horrible teacher who made you put your cell phone away or who gave you a completely justified failing grade. The vast majority of these statements are completely made up stories by students and even if proven false, NOTHING happens to the students who submitted them. But teachers can lose their job from these vicious lies.
And then you have the LIBERAL POLITICIANS who want stats to look good on their watch and the hell with what comes after. They dumb down courses to the point where they are at an elementary or best, junior high school level and then wonder why “graduates” of the high schools have to spend their first year, two years, three years taking remedial courses costing taxpayers mucho moolah to acquire skills they should have gotten in high school.
Whenever I see stories like this here, I know that many people will have the knee-jerk response of “Get rid of unions!” or “Fire those teachers!” From what I’ve seen, teachers are not free to just teach what they want or how they want. They must follow curricula given to them by their supervisors, who receive the curricula from central administrators, who often receive the curricula written by leftist “educators” from the local politicians.
I would say examine the lack of discipline in the home and the horrible problems it causes in the classroom before I would simply use a buzzword like “teacher” or “union”. I know that I personally don’t dumb down anything (and therefore have the poor but honest passing stats for which I am lambasted by supervisors) and that many colleagues in various departments who also try to teach and grade honestly are slammed and threatened.
Government teacher interests often react with the fallacy of blaming parents in general for lack of progress or misbehavior in their children, although teachers have taught their romanticist (”progressive”), counter-culture beliefs to each generation of parents. Susan B. Anthony and her anti-family, socialist friends pushed for government-funded (public) education to bring the results that you see in parents, children and teachers today (more wealth and power for teachers and other government employees, feminism, divorce paradigm, service regime, etc.). Susan and her friends were followers of Charles Fourier—maybe the first communist.
Abolish public schools. Privatize them all. Stop federal funding to local governments. Starve the b. Avoid unnecessary personal purchases, and become more self-sufficient each month. Start a hobby (for now) of making or manufacturing something necessary or at least useful.
This is a good Stossel program. Of course, it was hard to miss last weekend...must have been run a half dozen times on FNC. I try to catch his show on FBN Thursday nights.
I was amused with the guy he had on (some DC school bureaucrat) who said he didn’t like to rely on test scores to judge how the pupils are doing...he could see it in their eyes.
Agree with the first part of your statement, but what's missing in education isn't high tech. The problem is that our schools are failing to teach the three Rs, science, and history.
Prior generations of Americans were much better educated than those of today, and high tech had nothing to do with it.
That's what we did in our house.
We took our eldest out of public school after just one semester of kindergarten, and started home schooling. That was ten years ago. My other three kids have never stepped foot on a public school campus.
The unionized NEA workforce is one of a few reasons why education is failing.
The primary reason is the parents, and the infuriatingly large number of public school kids (disproportionately to the population) who are born to parents who themselves have little regard for education. That, and the lack of a father in the home.
A secondary reason (probably trumped by the union issue) is that education has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
Parents who value (and have) good education have kids who do the same.
The problem is deeper. The more educated someone is, the less likely they are to reproduce, and, when they do, they fewer kids (on average) they have. Those most likely to have kids are of a lower education level. Don’t even get me started on the “fatherlessness” problem.
So, you have a school system filled with a larger and larger percentage of kids from “rough” homes, homes without a dad, homes where neither parent graduated from high school, or, if they did, they couldn’t even point out their home state on a map.
Homeschooling works for many, but not all.
Go browse “www.peopleofwalmart.com” and come back to me, and tell me if you think those people are qualified to homeschool their children.
The problem is that those who would homeschool their kids, raise them well, to where they’d probably be above average students even in a traditional public school.
Those parents whose children would most benefit from homeschooling, are those who probably couldn’t tell their a$$ from a hole in the ground, or identify their home state on a map.
On now
I’m with you. Show me a kid who is failing his classes and 9 times out of 10, I’ll show you a brat who doesn’t make his bed, talks back to his parents, leaves his dishes on the dinner table for Mom to clean up, lays around watching TV with his mouth hanging open, grunts when spoken to, has to be nagged for hours to get him to do the simplest household chores, and is a swaggering, arrogant disrespectful little snot. How I’m supposed to combat this, I do not know. Must be the union that made him this way.
I hate to pick on somebody for a physical feature but...what made that really hilarious is that he had these eyes with no spark of intelligence in them, looked less intelligent than the glass eyes on a taxidermied squairrel.
“Prior generations of Americans were much better educated than those of today, and high tech had nothing to do with it.”
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Absolutely, we have high school graduates who can’t do simple arithmetic without a calculator, can’t write a coherent paragraph and don’t know the history that fifth graders used to know. We have university graduates who could not pass a high school final from sixty years ago and in some cases could not pass an eighth grade final exam from sixty years ago. We have graduates from our local university who majored in history and don’t know the most elementary facts about how this country came into being. They don’t know the history that used to be required in grade school.
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