MTheads

The Only Good School is a Union Controlled School

Here's an article from the WSJ about the Chicago school system: Rahm's Latest Union Beating.  It's about the city of Chicago wanting to shut down and consolidate a number of schools in an effort to save money and to make more efficient use of existing resources as student numbers drop.

Of course, the local teachers' union opposes these actions on the grounds that the closings will result in the breakup of neighborhood schools.  CTU President Karen Lewis claims the closings are racist, and:

"sets an example that low-income, African-American children are disposable."

Maybe it's union integrity and honesty that is disposable.

Besides keeping half empty schools open, the unions have an interest in directing parents and students away from the ever more popular charter school movement.  According to the article, two-thirds of polled Chicagoans support opening more charters. Uh-oh.  Not again!  Parents and students fooled into thinking that just because two-thirds of Chicago charter schools outperform regular public schools and their students are highly more likely to attend college they should have some sort of right to demand more of the same.  What idiots.

Luckily the union knows what poorly served students and their parents really need - emptying schools with 60% graduation rates.  It's for the children. 

Public Schools Produce Parents too Stupid to do What's Best for Own Children

Aaahh!  Why do some people who slather over choice in just about every arena in life think educational choice for parents trapped in bad schools is equivalent to destroying public education?? 

NYT's article With Vouchers, States Shift Aid for Schools to Families has garnered the regular fascist/marxist comments from the kind of people without children trapped in bad schools.  We'll get to that in a second. 

But first, one thing about the article that bothers me is the assumption that it's legislators who are redefining education:

A growing number of lawmakers across the country are taking steps to redefine public education, shifting the debate from the classroom to the pocketbook...

It's not the states that are redefining public schools; it's the people who have to live and pay taxes to crappy school systems that are redefining education!  Again, it's that ignorant implication that the State is the only free actor and people are simply statistical aggregates.

Now for some miscellaneous snippets from a proponent and from a critic quoted in the article:

Mr. Komer at the Institute for Justice called for a shift of focus. “We happen to take the view that parents know best,” he said, “and are the best accountability measure to make sure that things are done properly for their kids.” (I love you.)

“This movement is doing more than threaten the core of our traditional public school system,” said Timothy Ogle, executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association. “It’s pushing a national policy agenda embraced by conservatives across states that are receptive to conservative ideas.”(Everything he said is true.  Now imagine exchanging some words and making this statement about same sex marriage. What a bigot!)

And here are some comments from those who assume they know better than parents actually in the now:

There is no doubt that the ultimate goal for Arizona is the total destruction of public education in favor of private schools and charter schools run by corporations. (Yeah, free of doubt like a Stalinist show trial.)

My biggest beef with all of these voucher programs is that they lead to re-segregation of the educational system. Not just by race, but by class, religious, social and intellectual proclivities. (Otherwise, our public schools are so racially, socially, and economically well integrated.  Let me guess, you're from Vermont.)

Currently, many middle class and poor families are not well enough informed to know that they might soon lose one of the benefits that has been granted to American families for a long time. (By ill-informed you mean not passive enough to accept things as they are?)

In my humble opinion, many parents of the neediest (educationally and income-wise) kids have absolutely no clue about what's good for their children. (Go look up humble in the dictionary.)

Conservatives have been trying to destroy public education for decades.(Public education is destroying public education.)

This is all part of the GOP's plan to destroy public education and support church schools. Typically these programs have NO accountability...(Umm, these programs are accountable to the parents and students, genius.)

To be fair, and to be pleasantly surprised, many readers of the article defended the right of parents to guide their own children's educations, to include providing vouchers.  Imagine!  Our very own tax money being given back to us to use as we think best!  God, this must strike fear into the hearts of reactionaries everywhere! I'm all warmed inside to see so many people finally coming around to understanding public education has to be freed from its Medieval guild structure if it is to ever evolve.       

Post Update:  I take it back.  The comment section is now awash with spittle spewing stooges.  Yes, the face of public education.                                                                                                                                      

Part I Where LFHC Goes Head to Head with LCHF

Just for fun, I've been reading up the LFHC diet, the one completely opposite from my LCHF diet.  LFHC is promoted by Ornish, Mcdougall, Esselstyns, etc.  This is the kind of diet Bill Clinton is on now.  Hey, guess what!  These low fat high carb guys also claim their diets will cure you of death and unattractiveness!  And just to prove it, they too have millions of personal testimonies on their sites from formerly diabetic fat people with rashes who are now thin, healthy, and rash free.  Just like on LCHF sites. 

How can this be?  One diet advocates fat as 75% of your diet and no carbs, the other no fat and mostly carb.  Yet both claim to be the perfect diet for humans!   Ahhhhh!  Let's look very shallowly into some of their claims and see where they differ.

1)  Both claim science is unequivocally on their side. 

LCHF: Man descended from the trees carrying tongs and hickory wood chips, ready to grill. 

Agriculture wasn't a thing until 10,000 years ago, when man was snookered into high interest mortgages, attending early morning religious functions on his one day off, and monogamy. 

Obviously, we were better off as hunter gatherers.

LFHC: Ha! Man shares 99% of his DNA with apes, and apes love whole grain pasta with butternut squash.  What, you think you're betta than an ape?  Get outta here.

Man lived nasty, brutal millennia eating grubs, bark, and grass seeds while hiding in caves from predators until someone finally figured out walls and industrial farming. 

Thank God.  Now man could stop skulking around in fear of being eaten and instead learn to fear other men.

 

Pre agriculture LCHF man

 

Pre agriculture LFHC man

I Defend My Right to Keep Teaching Children I Admit I Can't Teach!

Let's see.  According to striking Chicago teachers, some children cannot be taught.  Teachers are unable to impart knowledge to such children.  Therefore, teachers should not be held accountable if students do not improve under their instruction. 

We have some addendums:

1) Students' attitudes to learning are responsible for their success or failure in school.

2) Parents are responsible for their children's success or failure in school.

3) Societal conditions are responsible for children's success or failure in school.

4) Teachers apparently have no responsibility for children's success or failure in school.

According to many teachers, they are beating their highly educated and professional heads against a Biden-literal wall.  And no one respects their efforts, either. 

What are their demands? Higher pay and continuing control over every aspect of a public education system they admit they are powerless to improve. 

If they are admittedly powerless to teach a subset of children, let someone else try.  Let the private sector have a chance.  Or let's try vouchers or start more charters.  What would Chicago have to lose other than some teaching positions which would be made up with the new positions from the new enterprises? 

But we all know this is not what the strikers and their sycophants want.  They do not want to give up one single child to any outside organization, no matter how badly they themselves are doing, no matter if the parents want more choices, no matter if it means defending an anachronistic status quo against all real attempts to innovate.  It's not about educating for a new era.  It's about defending yesterday's moribund educational establishment.  It's not about finding what will educate those children in less than optimum situations.  It's about using them to leverage money from the tax payer.  It's about the power of the monolithic teacher unions. 

As I usually end my arguments against the current rigid state of our public education, I can only warn that change is coming.  Parents and students are the bosses and not those we employ as area specialists.  Teaching is not nearly as difficult to pull off as many would like us to think.  Wait until we see how well some people manage to teach the unteachable.  Wait until the clever children who were trapped in bad schools become parents.  We're slowly dismantling the bureaucratic and legal obstacles that have been erected to prevent real parental involvement. 

Striking Teachers Make Public the Incredible Deal They're Getting, Tax Payers Doing Some Serious Thinking

Are those striking teachers in Chicago and their ridiculous groupies actually for real??  What??  Demands for no national testing, no charter schools, no teacher evaluations, no closing of failing schools, no laying off of teachers, more subsidiary employees, more pay, more job security, and, funniest of all, more respect. And, we have no right to doubt their collective efforts despite the horrendous statistics of their students' achievements. 

I've spent three glorious days reading comments and posts on various news sites debating the teacher strike.  And I'm actually, not Biden-literally, disgusted by the morons who support the strike. 

Moron positions:

1) Public schools are underfunded.  Ah huh.  A classic, for sure. Only stupid women and weepy, hippy men could possibly believe this.  The rest just want more money, or want you to have less for various lefty ideological reasons.

2) Charter schools are destroying public education.  Enemies of charter schools are filled with hate at the idea of any child escaping the grasp of the collective, borg-like public schools.  They have an overwhelming fear of anyone anywhere having educational objectives not in lock step with the ones that were imprinted on their souls during college.

3) Parents are to blame. It's not the public education system, it's the parents.  You know, the parents with little choice on which school their children attend; the parents with no say on curriculum; the parents with no way to avoid bad teachers; the parents who already have full time jobs so they can pay property taxes to pay teachers' salaries which are often higher than their own.  It's the parents' job to shut up and make it work.

4) Teaching is the hardest job in the world. We're lucky anyone wants to spend time with our horrible children, much less try to impart the wisdom of the ages to them.  Besides having to associate with our children, they have to put in long hours, bring work home, and pay for continuing education.  Wait a minute...so do the rest of us!  Next.

5) Teaching as a profession is not given any respect.  Become a profession, earn respect.  They look like angry bus drivers rather than college educated professionals. Hints: Stop chomping on gum, tuck in your matchy matchy t-shirts, brush your hair, and leave the drums in the music rooms.  I know tax dollars paid for those drums.  And it hurts.

The Council on Foreign Relations Embraces School Choice

WSJ has an interesting essay on yet another group who espouses school choice and competition: School Reform's Establishment Turn. Eventually, school choice will be adopted by everyone and no one will remember why, or admit, they were against it. 

What's Old is New Again, But with a New Blurb on the Dust Cover

Another interesting article calling on progressive people to send their children to local public schools (ht to Joanne Jacobs).  Yes, they claim it's out of principle.  But, dang, they sure can save a lot of money.  They can put that extra money towards a good State school.

Sending My Kids to Public School: Why being a part of the system is how to fix it By Rhiana Maidenberg

Yeah! for these recent essays making the case for upper-middle class/progressive kinds of parents to enroll their children in local schools and to become part of the solution.  It's a better argument than going after people for not putting their children into the local schools.  Put your own children into local schools before criticizing other people for not doing so.  Anyway, arguments against choice and vouchers lack moral umph when made from people whose own children attend stellar public schools or private academies.

But fair warning:  For those who think their decision to opt in is revolutionary, fixing the system from the inside has been an on-going and thankless process pursued by parents for decades, and no more likely to be effective without real choice for all parents.

Funny world when progressives and Charles Murray all agree on something:

Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Such priorities can be expressed in any number of familiar decisions: the neighborhood where you buy your next home, the next school that you choose for your children, what you tell them about the value and virtues of physical labor and military service, whether you become an active member of a religious congregation (and what kind you choose) and whether you become involved in the life of your community at a more meaningful level than charity events.

 

A Life Lived Differently and Its Enemies

When young, I was greatly intrigued by the lives of children whose parents chose to live in unusual ways:

- Children who accompanied their scientist parents rather than attend school. What's not to love about growing up on a yacht?

- Children of missionaries who grew up in Africa, running wild with the natives, and doing school through mail-ordered texts.

- Children whose parents raised them on communes. Again, little formal schooling and lots of running around in nature.

- Children who were sent overseas to boarding schools.  Sounded like heaven to me, cavorting in the Alps.

- Children of diplomats who travelled the world.  Some children have all the luck.

- Parents who dragged their children around in an old RV in the search of good surfing and odd jobs. While this may not have suited every child, I highly suspect I'd have embraced it.  Surfing and no school....If I get a second life...

I love the idea of shaping life to suit oneself rather than conforming to society's norms. 

Many of us love the idea of a bohemian or unusual lifestyle.  NPR and the New York Times constantly highlight unusual people and jobs and lifestyles.  Children's television loves to use that sing-songy voice to slowly explain that not all children live in a brownstone town home in New York City like little Noah or Emily.  Some children actually live on ranches or in arctic villages and they are just as good as you and me.  Didn't have to convince child me of this!  They had it made!

I hold that, for some of us, this attraction to the uncommon is part of the reason we home school.  We don't see why we have to do things the way everybody else does.  Sending kids off to school while both parents commute to dull jobs where they complain to each other how stressed out they are doesn't hold much appeal to me.  If I can avoid living like this, I will.

Even if.  Even if every other person in America thinks we should all conform to one kind of life in order to create societal cohesion through shared experience.  Even if my peers think my children will be at a disadvantage because we have opted out of the college bound rat race.  Even if people who embrace just about any edgy lifestyle think home schooling goes too far. Thank God we live in a free society.

 

 

 

Now That I Home-School, I Support It

While I was composing my last post on various arguments against homeschooling, I came across this article, Liberals,  Don't Homeschool Your Kids: Why teaching children at home violates progressive values at Slate.com.  Hat tip to Joanne Jacobs for bringing the article to my attention.  While the actual arguments made by the author aren't particularly new or clever, the responses are very enlightening.

Not so long ago, leftists, liberals, progressives, democrats, or whatever people on the center to left of the political spectrum call themselves, were fairly consistent in their disapproval of home schooling.  They wanted to outlaw it, regulate it, test it, restrict it.  When homeschoolers proved too legally savvy to defeat in court, liberal types instead mocked it.  "Conform!" was their rallying cry.

But things have changed.  Despite the author's appeal to progressives' innate sense of duty to enlighten and improve the rest of us by setting good examples, most of the responses to her article were in favor of home schooling! Self-declared liberal after liberal skewered her arguments and defended the rights of parents to do what they consider is best for their children, not what some ideologically driven members of society think is best.

And best of all, they recognize the totalitarian nature of assuming society, or anybody, has a right to demand we give over our children for the good of society. We do not have a moral obligation to support public schools by turning our children over to them.  Public schools serve us, not the other way around.  Let's not mix up educating our children with social engineering and redemption. 

Anyway, it's great to see a greater swath of our society accept home-schooling. 

 

Home-Schoolers are too Cool

Unfortunately for those who hate the kind of people they imagine are homeschooling, the truth is quite different.  Home-schoolers come in all sorts of flavors, to include hippy, secular, progressive, and free-thinking.  And many of these iconoclasts are well educated and able to write.  And don't forget the lawyers.  Home-schooling is legal and mostly unregulated in all 50 states because of constant vigilance and judicial activism, not because we're a country which values educational choice.

Home-schooled students also do as well as or better than, depending on which set of figures you check out, traditionally schooled students.  So, if home-schoolers aren't all aesthetically unappealing bible thumpers, how can self-appointed, authoritarian types crush homeschooling's sexy non-conformity while pretending it's all in the name of diversity?  Why, charge sexy edgy homeschooling families with letting down the team! Call us privileged and selfish!

We're privileged because some one in the couple has to be making a selfishly large salary to allow the other one the luxury of staying home and lavishing huge amounts of effort on their spoilt children's education.  That's not fair for those who do not have that option or who prefer to put their money elsewhere.  In fairness, all of our children ought to meet on a level school yard.  Well, unless, of course, one can afford to live in a good school zone or pay for private school.  Let's not talk crazy here! 

We're selfish because we are not meeting our social obligations to be shining examples for all the less enlightened parents and students.  We're also stunting our children's ability to empathize with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds by not having them mix it up in public schools.

Here are my counter arguments:

1) Homeschooling families are economically diverse.  Many of us make material and career sacrifices to keep one of us home.  The statistics bear this out.  Critics ought to let us know where they live and how much in property tax they pay, so we can determine whether they are being socially responsible citizens or not.

2) I don't care who you think I ought to know or who you think my children ought to mix with.  That's our call, not yours.  We all choose our social groups -- to include all the people who struggle to land a house in a good school zone.  Go after their commitment to a diverse schooling experience.  There are so many more of them.

3) I'm interested in the intellectual development of my children, not in hardening their class consciousness with cliches about the moral importance of sitting in the same room as other children assigned to be there based only on property taxes and location.  Feel free to pretend your children are better people simply by being in proximity of what you label "diversity".  Or that your children enrich the lives of others  because you consider yourself enlightened.