Department of Ed is about to get red-pilled: and everyone is losing their minds
No time for subtleties. American teachers, administrators & bureaucrats but teachers more than anyone else… you suck. You have failed generations of students and this nation. There is no dancing around it any longer. Just accept the truth for what it is and maybe WE can fix your mess. I’ll get back to that.
Unless you live in some Unabomber utopia completely devoid of social media over the last week then you missed out on the high-tech lynching of one Betsy Devos. The school choice champion out of Michigan who was lambasted via her Senate confirmation hearing this week. There were some questions she either refused to answer or simply flat out did not know or even have an intelligent answer to. Under normal circumstances in this setting, it would be alarming and naturally, that’s all the red meat the liberals needed to declare DEFCON 5 across Twitter, Facebook and the like.
Suddenly your aunt, cousin or brother who happens to be one of 3.1 million full-time teachers across the country all of a sudden were instantly macro political scientists. People who normally don’t even know who makes up the three branches of government were “WOKE”. Pitchfork in one hand with the other shielding their sixteen students with the steadfast resolve of a mother grizzly bear protecting her cubbies.
Knowing full well, the overwhelming majority didn’t watch the hearing but instead picked up the cliff notes and immediately were enlightened. The irony of teachers taking the shortcut and coming up with subpar opinions/equivalencies is rich. Only in America can you spend a boatload on mediocrity and then have the perpetrators burn a strawman. And not get called on it. But those days are over. If we are to have this discussion let’s put all the cards on the table. If education is really the foundation for our Republic than its too important to mince words any longer.
First of all Devos, she’s a hatchet (wo)man. She was picked to grab the bull ( the education system) by the horns and push it to “school choice” as opposed to the traditional public education model. If and when she makes this a reality; mission accomplished. Devos has been a proponent of Common Core; a socialist/globalist wet dream where everyone at best achieves average. Just smart enough to run the machines but too dumb to think critically outside the box. Thus no threat to the power structure. Fittingly, that kind of sums up Devos here in both regards. Now that we got that out the way and are no longer mincing words…
Teachers? Yeah, back to them and I’m talking to all 3+ million of you. You suck. The results are in. The numbers don’t lie. We are floundering across the board compared to all other 1st world nations by just about every metric. No matter how much we shrink class sizes, no matter how much money we essentially set on fire IN THE NAME OF THE CHILDREN; nothing changes. And not only do you suck, you’re defiant and completely ignorant to your complicity in the rot that is at the core of the US Public education system.
We have seen a bureaucracy of a few powerful unions envelop the educational system like a Burmese python. This control and power so rigid and consolidated, it creates an environment where teachers performance and aptitude mean nothing and outside of giving a kid fellatio in his or her classroom with multiple witnesses… virtually impossible to fire them. Sure, there are some great teachers. Everyone can remember their favorite or most impactful teachers but we forget about the average or poor ones. Just how many poor teachers though are there?
There was an LA Weekly investigation done back in 2010 of the Los Angeles public school system that illustrates this. After a five-month investigation, LA Weekly determined that the Los Angeles Unified School District, with its 885 schools and 617,000 students who educate one in every 10 children in California spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance. The average cost of those cases was $500,000.
Not sure about the averages here but 33k teachers and only 7 were deemed incompetent? Apply those odds anywhere else in the American workforce and get back to me. Think about your drive-thru experiences. Think about contractors. Think about police (whom half are racist anyway, right?). How about priests? Think about watching your favorite football team. Or an MMA bout. You see what I did there at the end?
There are substandard or incompetent professionals everywhere; in every profession. Teaching is no exception. Yet it’s never even in the debate while our educational gains have been marginal if at all – over the last 30 years. We seem to have been inflicted with: Teacher Worship Syndrome. We’ve seen the Department of Education’s solutions for our educational apathy. We’ve tried no Child Left Behind. Common Core. We’ve incentivized teachers and students alike. From limo rides to Visa gift cards for just showing up. That’s right, we’ve resorted to paying for a public (free) education and still… not enough.
It’s gotten so bad and because teachers are so untouchable that Slate ran a story a few years ago on how “bad teachers can be made into good teachers”. It’s just our kids and all of our futures at stake, just capitulate, throw some training at them and viola. Presto, we have better teachers. Except for that doesn’t work. The study the article was built around was a study done in a school district in Ohio in 2001, that centered on Teacher Evaluation System or TES. Despite its success or failure, it didn’t pick up steam as the article points out: “a 2009 survey by the New Teacher Project found that school districts rarely use evaluation for any purpose other than remediation and dismissal”.
So… no oversight. No accountability. Par for the course.
James Marshall Crotty, who wrote a flaming deposition for Forbes back in 2012, came across some facts that only further compound my case, consider:
How do we fix this mess? McKinsey & Company, an independent consulting firm outside of the education lynch-mob has made some rather compelling arguments on just how and why our teachers are to blame for our education ineptitude. From the Asian model, more specifically the Singapore model the proof is all in teacher selection and retention. How to select them and how to keep them is the largest indicator from boom or bust. Take Finland for example, the leading nation in education the world over:
As I said, in the beginning, these are not the normal circumstances. Yes, the setting is the same with the hearings on Devos but this is a scene out of the Matrix. Where the bullets are in slow motion. Where you are fending off multiple enemies with martial arts while admiring the wall decor. Trump, is trolling anyone that got upset by this nomination or any of his other nominations for his cabinet. His selections for their respective posts are almost all adversaries of their cabinet position. Devos is no exception. She has been on record saying “government truly sucks” and called public education a “dead end” because, well because the results speak for themselves. Trump wants to burn a lot of these agencies to the ground and the Department of Education created only 37 years ago is at the top of his list. I mean how did we ever learn without it for 200+ years? But our cotton candy soft populous couldn’t handle that approach, there would be enough safe spaces and cuddling corners around academia for that fix. So the trojan horse method looks like the softest landing for what needs to be done.
Education here in the states via the federal communist monopoly is spinning its wheels, so why not try something completely different? Why not put it back into the hands of those very states where the advantage of a republic can take hold like its supposed to? Where a city or state can adopt a different pedagogy. Over time the cream rises to the top and all the states can learn from each other. Collaboration instead of capitulation, globalism, and communism. School choice being an enemy to education is a farce. If public schools die as a result so be it. Having fewer choices and competition is a close minded, scared and a fatally failed perspective. Not to mention completely un-American. There is a lot of you and of course, most of you don’t suck. However, if we keep pretending those around you or even you, yourself, is not the solution but conversely the problem; then keep blaming Trump and continue arm chairing senate committee hearings. Or in other words, shit in one hand and complain inside the other and get back to me.
Post Script:
Hero’s don’t get a summer vacation.
No time for subtleties. American teachers, administrators & bureaucrats but teachers more than anyone else… you suck. You have failed generations of students and this nation. There is no dancing around it any longer. Just accept the truth for what it is and maybe WE can fix your mess. I’ll get back to that.
Unless you live in some Unabomber utopia completely devoid of social media over the last week then you missed out on the high-tech lynching of one Betsy Devos. The school choice champion out of Michigan who was lambasted via her Senate confirmation hearing this week. There were some questions she either refused to answer or simply flat out did not know or even have an intelligent answer to. Under normal circumstances in this setting, it would be alarming and naturally, that’s all the red meat the liberals needed to declare DEFCON 5 across Twitter, Facebook and the like.
Suddenly your aunt, cousin or brother who happens to be one of 3.1 million full-time teachers across the country all of a sudden were instantly macro political scientists. People who normally don’t even know who makes up the three branches of government were “WOKE”. Pitchfork in one hand with the other shielding their sixteen students with the steadfast resolve of a mother grizzly bear protecting her cubbies.
Knowing full well, the overwhelming majority didn’t watch the hearing but instead picked up the cliff notes and immediately were enlightened. The irony of teachers taking the shortcut and coming up with subpar opinions/equivalencies is rich. Only in America can you spend a boatload on mediocrity and then have the perpetrators burn a strawman. And not get called on it. But those days are over. If we are to have this discussion let’s put all the cards on the table. If education is really the foundation for our Republic than its too important to mince words any longer.
First of all Devos, she’s a hatchet (wo)man. She was picked to grab the bull ( the education system) by the horns and push it to “school choice” as opposed to the traditional public education model. If and when she makes this a reality; mission accomplished. Devos has been a proponent of Common Core; a socialist/globalist wet dream where everyone at best achieves average. Just smart enough to run the machines but too dumb to think critically outside the box. Thus no threat to the power structure. Fittingly, that kind of sums up Devos here in both regards. Now that we got that out the way and are no longer mincing words…
Teachers? Yeah, back to them and I’m talking to all 3+ million of you. You suck. The results are in. The numbers don’t lie. We are floundering across the board compared to all other 1st world nations by just about every metric. No matter how much we shrink class sizes, no matter how much money we essentially set on fire IN THE NAME OF THE CHILDREN; nothing changes. And not only do you suck, you’re defiant and completely ignorant to your complicity in the rot that is at the core of the US Public education system.
We have seen a bureaucracy of a few powerful unions envelop the educational system like a Burmese python. This control and power so rigid and consolidated, it creates an environment where teachers performance and aptitude mean nothing and outside of giving a kid fellatio in his or her classroom with multiple witnesses… virtually impossible to fire them. Sure, there are some great teachers. Everyone can remember their favorite or most impactful teachers but we forget about the average or poor ones. Just how many poor teachers though are there?
There was an LA Weekly investigation done back in 2010 of the Los Angeles public school system that illustrates this. After a five-month investigation, LA Weekly determined that the Los Angeles Unified School District, with its 885 schools and 617,000 students who educate one in every 10 children in California spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance. The average cost of those cases was $500,000.
Not sure about the averages here but 33k teachers and only 7 were deemed incompetent? Apply those odds anywhere else in the American workforce and get back to me. Think about your drive-thru experiences. Think about contractors. Think about police (whom half are racist anyway, right?). How about priests? Think about watching your favorite football team. Or an MMA bout. You see what I did there at the end?
There are substandard or incompetent professionals everywhere; in every profession. Teaching is no exception. Yet it’s never even in the debate while our educational gains have been marginal if at all – over the last 30 years. We seem to have been inflicted with: Teacher Worship Syndrome. We’ve seen the Department of Education’s solutions for our educational apathy. We’ve tried no Child Left Behind. Common Core. We’ve incentivized teachers and students alike. From limo rides to Visa gift cards for just showing up. That’s right, we’ve resorted to paying for a public (free) education and still… not enough.
It’s gotten so bad and because teachers are so untouchable that Slate ran a story a few years ago on how “bad teachers can be made into good teachers”. It’s just our kids and all of our futures at stake, just capitulate, throw some training at them and viola. Presto, we have better teachers. Except for that doesn’t work. The study the article was built around was a study done in a school district in Ohio in 2001, that centered on Teacher Evaluation System or TES. Despite its success or failure, it didn’t pick up steam as the article points out: “a 2009 survey by the New Teacher Project found that school districts rarely use evaluation for any purpose other than remediation and dismissal”.
So… no oversight. No accountability. Par for the course.
James Marshall Crotty, who wrote a flaming deposition for Forbes back in 2012, came across some facts that only further compound my case, consider:
- Despite high U.S. unemployment and far higher under-employment, major U.S. employers cannot find qualified American applicants to fill their job openings (skills gap). For instance, 63% of aerospace and life science firms report shortages of “qualified workers.”
- 75% of U.S. citizens ages 17-24 cannot pass military entrance exams because they are not physically fit, have criminal records, or because they lack critical skills needed in modern warfare, including how to locate on a map military theaters in which the U.S. is fulsomely engaged, such as Afghanistan
- According to a recent report by the not-for-profit testing organization, ACT, only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for Hispanic and African-American students. This means that, upon graduating high school, more than 50% of college-bound students need to take remedial classes in one or more subjects, though a far lower percentage actually do.
- In 2009 PISA, U.S. students ranked fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other developed countries.
How do we fix this mess? McKinsey & Company, an independent consulting firm outside of the education lynch-mob has made some rather compelling arguments on just how and why our teachers are to blame for our education ineptitude. From the Asian model, more specifically the Singapore model the proof is all in teacher selection and retention. How to select them and how to keep them is the largest indicator from boom or bust. Take Finland for example, the leading nation in education the world over:
- Students don’t start school until they are of age seven. In the first two years of school, they spend 4-5 hours per day in it. Yet at the age of 15, Finnish students are atop of the world’s testing at math, reading science and problem-solving.
- PAYS PRIMARY EDUCATORS MORE THAN SECONDARY EDUCATORS. Seems to logical.
- They recruit from the top 10% of college graduates in education to become teachers.
- Finland has a two stage selection process just to get into university to train as teachers; here in the states all you need is a pencil and piece of paper and you can be a teacher.
- Finland frontloads salaries. By starting at a higher salary either money isn’t an issue anymore as the gap from a teacher with 1-year service to a teacher of 30 years service is at most 18%.
- Finland also requires all teachers to have a masters degree.
- They also require teachers to assemble together in groups. Collaborating on lesson plans, reviewing each other’s lessons thus helping each other improve. They even off time off (one afternoon each week) to accommodate this to happen.
- Special Education is destigmatized. Finland has an average of 1 in 7 teachers are for special education as many as 30% of its students while need some assistance in a school year.
As I said, in the beginning, these are not the normal circumstances. Yes, the setting is the same with the hearings on Devos but this is a scene out of the Matrix. Where the bullets are in slow motion. Where you are fending off multiple enemies with martial arts while admiring the wall decor. Trump, is trolling anyone that got upset by this nomination or any of his other nominations for his cabinet. His selections for their respective posts are almost all adversaries of their cabinet position. Devos is no exception. She has been on record saying “government truly sucks” and called public education a “dead end” because, well because the results speak for themselves. Trump wants to burn a lot of these agencies to the ground and the Department of Education created only 37 years ago is at the top of his list. I mean how did we ever learn without it for 200+ years? But our cotton candy soft populous couldn’t handle that approach, there would be enough safe spaces and cuddling corners around academia for that fix. So the trojan horse method looks like the softest landing for what needs to be done.
Education here in the states via the federal communist monopoly is spinning its wheels, so why not try something completely different? Why not put it back into the hands of those very states where the advantage of a republic can take hold like its supposed to? Where a city or state can adopt a different pedagogy. Over time the cream rises to the top and all the states can learn from each other. Collaboration instead of capitulation, globalism, and communism. School choice being an enemy to education is a farce. If public schools die as a result so be it. Having fewer choices and competition is a close minded, scared and a fatally failed perspective. Not to mention completely un-American. There is a lot of you and of course, most of you don’t suck. However, if we keep pretending those around you or even you, yourself, is not the solution but conversely the problem; then keep blaming Trump and continue arm chairing senate committee hearings. Or in other words, shit in one hand and complain inside the other and get back to me.
Post Script:
Hero’s don’t get a summer vacation.
