Eyes On Education

Report on School Choice Avoids Facts, Protects Status Quo - Teachers unions and other defenders of the education status quo are terrified of school choice. As a result, they frequently present misleading reports as truthful.…..

 

Does Congress Now Believe that Self-Government Is No Longer Possible?  Two recent phenomena suggest that we have become a nation of uninformed voters led by unquestioning reporters and education officials. The first phenomenon is the reason offered by many in the media for parents opting their children out of a Common Core-based test. The movement is growing to unprecedented numbers.  The second is the lack of inquiry in the reporting on the decision by an increasing number of colleges and universities to accept SBAC’s cutoff score for its grade 11 “college readiness” test as an indication that students who pass are ready for college and don’t need any remediation.  Many in the media, it seems, have bought into the idea that the growth of the opt-out movement reflects a fear by parents of increased academic demands on their children. For example, in an Associated Press story on April 18, 2015, Christina Cassidy, says: “Thousands of students are opting out of new standardized tests aligned to the Common Core standards, defying the latest attempt by states to improve academic performance.”   Although no parents are quoted saying that they want their children to avoid more academically rigorous state tests, that doesn’t deter our judgmental reporter.....

My Take - Strange article, but it does ask a question at the end that needs answering. She asks;

"Does Congress really believe that we would be better off being governed by the staff in state departments of education or the US Department of Education than by locally elected school boards, even if they are all informed by the same uninformed reporters and college administrators?"

The answer is simple. Yes they should! Parents are the ones most concerned about their children's education and will abandon what fails and adopt what works, versus an education that's become tremendously expensive and terribly inadequate. And why is that? Is it because the parents and their local school board were making all the decision or because decisions were being forced on them by the federal government?  If there's a failure here the fault must be placed at the feet of the Department of Education, their myrmidons at the state level and the driving force for maintaining the level of inadequacy in public education that exists today - The teachers unions and their members.  Members, who based on the value of the product they’re turning out,  are overpriced, inadequate, underworked, under smart, pampered and unfixable because it’s almost impossible to fire a teacher. If the teachers of this nation were producing nuts and bolts the manufacturers would reject them. 

Are we Cambodia yet? - Laura Hollis warns against 'steel-booted certainty' of today's speech silencers.  In Roland Joffe’s 1984 film, “The Killing Fields,” we see the Cambodian Communist revolution and its aftermath through the eyes of Dith Pran, the film’s main character. In one iconic scene in a Khmer Rouge re-education camp, Pran looks on while children march in a circle, fists pumping in the air, chanting Khmer Rouge propaganda. Elsewhere, a group of seated adults are encouraged by party leaders to admit their bourgeois pasts and come forward. They are promised a fresh start in the “new” Cambodia. This, of course, is a ruse; having identified themselves, they are then taken out and shot.

Anyone who has studied history will recognize these as signature tactics of contemporary extremist political movements, not only in Cambodia but in North Vietnam, China, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and every socialist republic in the former Soviet Union. Truth and inquiry are replaced by propaganda. Education becomes indoctrination. All speech save that which has been pre-approved is forbidden. Those with opposing viewpoints are mocked, dehumanized and finally silenced – typically by imprisonment or death…… By way of example, college campuses, intended to be bastions of vigorous inquiry, have taken on a vague whiff of leftist authoritarianism……. student comments included, “You don’t question when someone you have privilege over speaks to you about oppression,” and “Don’t tell me what’s oppressive. I tell you; you shut up and listen.”  You can’t say “X.” You can’t speak. You shut up. You don’t question.