Parents want to take responsibility, perhaps, but they have (I certainly often did) shirked their responsibility to keep track of the teachers and their good and bad teaching; this new movement is surely restorative, good, appropriate. Our public schools have been examples of the tragedy of the commons – who really was taking care of the children, nurturing their minds? Who respected the students/children enough, the discipline they taught enough, not to give gruel and expect equally watered down responses? For many school boards this Tuesday will be a reckoning – we’ll see how much parents cared, how much others cared.
7 thoughts on “A Note on Votes”
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Schools figured out a long time ago that as long as the kids made it to the next grade every year and the ones still there got that diploma at the end, parents were too busy to pay any attention to whether or not the kids actually learned anything. This allowed the schools to become a major source of political patronage, even in places like Texas where people were quick to notice and object to things like bad roads.
Look at the bright side; how likely is it that the schools will be any better at teaching CRT than they are at math or reading?
A public school diploma is quickly becoming the modern equivalent of the begging permits that medieval cities and town gave to mendicants. The school closings that the educrats were so vociferous in demanding may have been their undoing by rubbing parents noses in just how useless the schools have become.
The schools haven’t been doing the job they’re paid to do for generations, now.
If you contrast the high-school transcript that my grandmother matriculated with, back in 1916, with the one my mother managed, and then mine…? It is to track the dissolution of an institution; nine-tenths of the classes my grandmother had to take didn’t exist by the time I went to school, having been superseded by more “pertinent” subjects. She had Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, English, and more math and sciences than I could have gotten down at the local community college, had I had a way to get down there. My mother’s education was about mid-way between the two extremes; by my time, any and all “real education” that I acquired was on my own time and about all the school managed was giving me a place to go during the day. I’d have been better served by going to work, TBH.
Most of the young men and women I worked with and supervised in the military were not stupid; they were, however, woefully maleducated, unable to properly express themselves in the language of their birth, virtually innumerate, and possessed of an entirely immodest view of their own qualifications to do much of anything. Some of those had college degrees, as well as diplomas from some high school.
The “system” has been decaying for generations, now. We’ve allowed the inmates to take over and dumb down the asylum; most “Education Majors” that I’ve dealt with have been utter dolts, unaware of just how ill-educated they themselves are. I’d wager that were you to go into most classrooms across the country, you’d be horrified at the level of competency demonstrated by most “teachers” in things like basic English. When my mom was still teaching, I’d occasionally wind up helping her do stuff like moving her classroom and other things around during the summers. I’d often run into things coming from other teachers that left me in awe of the fact that someone, somewhere, had given that person a degree and a teaching certificate, because many of them lacked even the basics of what I’d regard as literacy. I remember finding one note to my mom, and thinking “Wow, that’s not bad work, for a second-grader…”. Turned out, that note was from a veteran schoolteacher, whose handwriting was utterly atrocious, whose spelling was egregiously bad, and whose diction and grammar were non-existent. That person later went on to become an administrator in the school system…
Yeah, you want an education? Don’t expect it from the average school in America. You’ll be doomed to disappointment.
The long road back will require school choice with “backpack” funding that goes to the school chosen.
Death6
My first wife was an education major in college. She taught elementary school in east Los Angeles when I was in medical school. No union. Lots of pride in her work. When our first son was born in in 1965, she quit teaching.
When raising our children she was a big advocate for public school.
We eventually got divorced and she went to work for a bank. She ended up a VP and, in the bank mergers of the late 80s, she got laid off. She had a lifetime teaching credential and Pete Wilson, the Governor, was a campaign to reduce class size so LA was hiring a lot of teachers. She applied to be a long term sub and was hired. She had not taught school in 30 years.
She was appalled at what she found in public schools. She taught in a blue collar suburb of LA, not far from where she lived. The teachers were unprepared, did not care about the kids and sometimes ridiculed them in the teachers’ room. The principal told her she was his best teacher, which was bizarre. In 6 months she got another bank job and quit. She used to see him in the supermarket near her house. He would try to convince her to go back to teaching.
She said, if she was doing it again, she would home school the kids.
The debates around schools are so divorced from reality. You’ve got urban schools, that are universally dystopian nightmares. You’ve got rural schools, that are considered cornerstones of the community, where the teachers teach in schools where they went, where PTOs hold events that bring out all the community, and where the school board is pretty responsive, although in many cases they have zero power because they are basically wards of the state.
And then you have suburban schools, where all the sound and fury comes from. Mostly they are more like rural schools, with much less parental involvement and support. But you have a few rich and powerful suburbs, like these DC suburbs in the news. The PMC that live there want their precious snowflakes to learn the fundamentals of their class, which is that they are the elites of a horribly corrupt society. It’s a tightrope that they want walked, to ensure that their kids get all the benefits of the elite society, without being tarred as one the Other, those dirty white folks out in the hinterlands.
Good luck to the sane parents there. Personally, I couldn’t care less. Not my fight. We should be focusing on fixing urban schools, and giving autonomy and control back to rural schools.
All of the discussion here is utterly misplaced. The true rot began at the turn of the last century beginning with the drive for universal government-run education in the early 1900’s. A perfect example of what was then a “progressive” was John Dewey (yes, the inventor of the library classification system) who was a statist, collectivist, authoritarian idiot from hell. His notion of good education for the masses was outright brainwashing them to be good little workers in the state factories.
The Fabian march through the pedagogical system, starting with the colleges that turn out “Education Majors”, is now complete. The leftists have completely won the cultural wars, and even the basis for fighting them is on their terms. The “teachers” who graduate while remaining effectively illiterate and innumerate are legion; rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic government-school system is pointless.
Take off, and nuke the site(s) from orbit. Eliminate the “Department of Education”, and get the federal, state, and local governments completely out of the business of running these collectivist indoctrination centers. Bring schools down to a completely private local level, and let the parents fund them.
Anything else results in the collectivist bullshit we see in the schools today.
lol Dems openly stealing VA right now, the question is if the margin of fraud was too big, given it’s a massively blue state thanks to DC contractors, seems unlikely…