I went to a lecture a few months ago in the Bay Area (conservative groups do exist there lol), and one of the speakers was a parent told us her journey with her twin girls. How the San Jose school groomed them, prepared them, and then called her and told her that one of her daughters student had something important to say to her. She was nervous, didn't know what her daughter was going to say, until she came out as a trans boy. The mom, blindsided, talked to other family members, friends, and neighbors. What she said was astounding was the SUPPORT. People where like "trust your daughter, she knows." She was 14. The mom wished that someone would just tell her NO. Don't support it. HELP the girl, don't affirm. After a year, she pulled her daughters out of the school and homeschooled till they graduated. The "trans" kid , away from groomer influences, realized her mistake and stopped calling herself a boy after a few months. She's now a healthy 20 something with a boyfriend.
I know of a similar story of an 8 yr old girl in the San Diego area. Parents grabbed their four kids and moved to North East Florida. We met them at church. Go figure. Beautiful kids and all are well now.
The horror is that they are working to make it legal for the state to take your child under those circumstances. Out of state children who come to California can now become wards of the state and be kept from their parents if they claim their parents oppose them receiving gender related treatments.
Washington state just passed this rediculous law that they can take your kid and put them on puberty blockers without informing parents! No vote- nothing from our communities ! Our state goverment is so upside down!!
All I think now when I hear about these initiatives is that there seems to be a very strong desire to sterilize children. All the additional money for psych treatment, meds, surgeries and whatnot seem secondary. Even though they are definitely a path to profit, it doesn't explain the relentless and tireless efforts to push this agenda into everywhere possible.
It is also to unmoor language from any real meaning. If something as fucking simple as male/female is corrupted in meaning, you've already thrown a huge spanner into human cognition. Never mind tracking all those tiresome pronouns.
I agree with the depop, but this is about control on a very deep and anti-evolutionary level.
My crackpot theory of the week is that the Aliens won the Dulce war and our governments are terraforming the planet for their use. The collaborators get Virtual Reality, those nifty bunkers that stretch for miles under Wal-Marts everywhere, and an AI for a best friend. Little do they know that 'To Serve Man' is a cookbook...
I think we need to stop using the word Gender, this nouveau self-identity. It's a Marxist slight of hand, on the common terms. You know you can't question how one self-identifies, because then you get labeled, that bad guy:
Ray Cyst.
He lives everywhere, that guy.
One has a Biological Sex.
So sorry about your feefees and oppressor narratives. That Bullsh*t doesn't work on me. Have a great day 😋😆
How any child would rather be a ward of the state is beyond me. Sometimes in more cruel moods I think to myself: have at it and see how you feel in a few years. Not every child listens when you tell them the stove is hot. Though maybe we should require reading Dickens in schools just in case.
Here's a test: ask those advocating this governmental power if the child should be allowed to choose to stay with their parents in this situation. The answer will be no, they don't have the judgment to know what's good for them. Exposing the argument for what it is. They are arguing that the child has the judgement to choose medical procedures that permanently alter their bodies? There is the fundamental flaw.
Exactly. I see this at my kid's middle school. They treat the kids like adults when it suits them and when it doesn't they are mindless pawns who have to follow the rules because the school said so. Can't get through to the administrators though, it's always the fault of the bureaucracy.
The primary purpose of bureaucracy is to avoid accountability and responsibility. That is why the French invented it ;-).
I point out logical inconsistencies. To suggest a child in primary school has sufficient judgement to make an informed, responsible decision regarding permanent physical changes via surgery or hormone therapies while then assert the same child lacks the judgement to make an informed, responsible decision about what to eat for lunch is a logical inconsistency.
I noticed at a young age (Jr. High) that school administrators do not know how to handle logic. Pointing out the illogical (and irrational) policy assertions got me suspended several times and expelled once. Though at least one of those suspensions it might have been the delivery terminology (when pointing out a logical and/or factual error by a teacher, the term "bullshit" is apparently unacceptable from a 7th grade student, well it was 50 years ago at least ;-).
Ha ha nice!! I am busy pointing out the logical inconsistencies of school desiring my bilingual child to be on campus for a first period English class (when she has already passed the final exam) but then allowing her to sit in the library and study alone, citing that all children must receive a minimum number of hours of instruction. She is not in fact receiving any instruction, so why does she have to be there? She’s a straight A student. Given the time, she teaches herself all kinds of stuff. She is currently learning American Sign Language for her own pleasure, but really so she can talk shit with her friends! She’s following a philosophy course at school that is not required merely because she respected my opinion that it would be much more beneficial to her than English as a second language when she is a native speaker. So she is above the minimum hours of instruction anyway. But getting her excused has been a months long exercise in talking to brick walls who don’t see the lack of logic, don’t see her for who she is and has turned us all off this school. If we keep up the good work we might get expelled too!! One can only hope. Meanwhile it’s perfectly fine for the school to pull kids out of class to evangelize for the sterilization of children. As they say here, even if you beat me to death I could not explain it. I remember the first time I really understood how bureaucracy is a cover for accountability: while reading the grapes of wrath in my twenties. And so an early hatred of bankers was incubated. Even reading such classics would be better for us all than sitting in bullshit classes. I have had to spend a lot of money buying said classics because they don’t read them in school anymore! Sigh
That’s really sad. Of course it must happen. Maybe I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that most kids who want to transition are not coming from that type of situation which is why I made that comment.
Similar to our situation.... our son trans Id @17 during Covid, mostly with think he has been taught all through school that being a white straight male is the worst possible thing to be. The cult has turned him into a good little activist and abhors everything his father and I believe. It’s very sad.
They are absolutely not anti-religious, this search for the sacred Trans child is deeply religious, maybe more totemistic or animist or gnostic than monotheistic, but deeply religious all the same.
Social Justice is an ideology founded on the worship of the pain of "the marginalized", which is why when a child utters the magical incantation ("I was born in the wrong body") the true believers drop to their knees and proclaim the child sacred and infallible.
We are not dealing w an absence of religious needs, beliefs or impulses, these have just been shifted into the realm of the political.
Agree with your comment CP. May I offer a wee suggestion re "these have just been shifted into the realm of the political". Might that not be more appropriately worded, "these have just been shifted into the realm of the stark, raving, fucking mad".
There is definitely a vibe of getting kids to hate the fathers most of all. I watched five kids grow up. Four out of five have serious problems with their dads. All different circumstances.
I’m so sorry for you and your family. Hopefully you have a support network. There is a Substack called Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans that may have resources.
Bay Area native here. I am actually quite leftist and historically I have been quite open to people who are transgendered because I've had a few close friends who are and more or less, I believed them.
Whatever this is, it's completely different. Kids spend tons and tons of time trying to figure out who they are and go through many phases of identity. To try to ideologically capture kids in the middle of their identity formation processes as a product of their own natural development (e.g., figuring out what gender is and how it works) is profoundly sick.
I know some people with a daughter who decided that she was a boy. Her parents were all about "supporting" her. Luckily they didn't go so far as approving irreversible procedures, because the phase only lasted a few months. She is back to "girl" now.
Now their other daughter says she is a lesbian because she is dating a boy who says he is a girl.
“she pulled her daughters out of the school and homeschooled till they graduated” When the girl got HEALTHY attention, she felt better, stronger, and more “whole”. Competing in the Victim Olympics is driving young people crazy, especially girls.
So sad. I thought I was Mr. X (the wrestler) at 5, Spider Man at 6, Batman at 7, Alan from "Space 1999" at 7, and Ken Dryden at 8. Then I kind of grew up I guess. Wanted to be "as good as" Benny Goodman at 13, "as muscular as" Arnold at 19 and so on. There must be something wrong with me because as a male I never wanted to be a mom. We homeschooled and our kids thank us for that approach.
Schools and colleges actually have in their mission statements that they want to create activists, either overtly stated, or through more subtle language.
And let us not forget the small matter of these barbarians murdering some 150 million people just in the last century in their endless quest to "transform" the rest of us into whatever idiotic utopian ideal du jour inhabits the impenetrable, poisonous fog wafting about between their ears.
This lot has destroyed every society, polity and economy they've ever seized control of, from the new world colony of Jamestown to the carcass of Venezuela, and after a century of progressivism, the US is a top contender for next up to bat.
Not so long ago, polls showed that a plurality of Democrats favored once again marshaling the cattle cars to transport "anti-vaxxers" to parts unknown, with a solid majority advocating house arrest for we pesky infidels.
I have Rex kitties and they jump on your shoulders in a snap. No warning ever. So.... yeah. Hubbs and I are just aware of it, but we do warn our friends when they come over.
Our kitties like warm bodies and hairy heads and necks and faces etc
Funny how the madness coincides with massive use of BCP (hormones ... with little research on long-term effects) plus the exponential increases in childhood jabs. Now compare US to another part of the world where those things didn't happen.
Definitely in universities and corporate settings, the masculine form of competition and combat has been replaced by the feminine
form, which while less physically violent are protracted, passive -aggressive and rely upon psychological manipulation and ostracism. Most men can accept losing on merit rather than losing by Kardashian. Rather get punched in the face than die by one thousand administrative maneuvers.
Some decades ago I was a member of the local school board. The administrators never failed to refer to the district’s goal of turning out consumers. Consumers are passive. Clearly times have changed and now they mean to produce activists. Also bad.
The problem is that these administrators are in the position to decide what to "turn out" in the first place. They're engaged in self-interested social engineering at the expense of the public's happiness, health, and stability.
In a local district, always asking for and receiving HUGE donated bucks, I watched it go from one principal per school, to two; plus two added assistant principals; the district went from one head to three. Why? To handle the tech challenges of transforming to a fully online district. Meantime, within every five year span, another vote for another bond to pay for the "poor teachers who will get pink slips if this bond doesn't pass." No joke. And they fool 'em EVERY time. Same district that applauds, and provides police escorts for the kids, as they march through the streets chanting anti-establishment tropes.
I used to make fairly meaningful donations to my alma mater for 20+ years and then they kicked me off campus for being OUTSIDE without a mask on during the summer if 21'.
I wrote a letter to the dean and the alumni association excoriating them and told them they'd never see a dime from again.
I should've done it 6 years ago when they allowed the campus to be destroyed by BLM rioters and elected a Trans as homecoming king!
Our little town built a new high school – sixty years ago. To accommodate 250 students. (When the population was over double what it is today). A gymnasium, a large, very well equipped, woodworking shop, a teaching kitchen, with 18 stoves & sinks, a library, of course, a science lab, and a dozen classrooms. Truly a state of the art educational facility when it opened in 1963.
Our new school was well staffed too! We had a principal, a 'secretary', and a 'custodian'. Our shop teacher did double duty in facilities maintenance. And there were twelve or thirteen teachers, depending on enrollment. (Which varied between 190 and 220 through the 60s and 70s). So the total staffing requirement, for 200 students, was fifteen. Two [2] of whom were administrators. Staff to student ratio 13:1. One staff person for every 13 kids.
Our school is still there. For now. The teaching kitchen is long gone. As are the Home Ec programs it supported. Turned into a breakfast/lunch room so the school can “ensure the children have healthy meals”. The shop is still there. The ten of thousands of dollars of equipment idle, except for the rare occasions when school district workers use it for maintenance projects, or their personal hobbies. The library, inexplicably, is gone. Turned into an unused “computer lab”. Replete with antiquated electronics. (The kids i-pads and phones are MUCH more up to date!)
And the stats are different. Very different. Our school is no longer a high school. Some years ago, we tore down the elementary school and combined everything into a single “K-12 facility”. In spite of which, enrollment, for the last decade, has seldom reached 100. Last year was about 90. Which has resulted in staffing challenges.
We still have a principal, and a 'secretary', (who is now an “administrator”). And who now has an assistant. So we have three [3] full time administrators. Custodial services are contracted. Maintenance is performed by school district personnel, from 70 miles away. When they can schedule it. And there are the teachers, all six of them. And the five “support staff”. So we have a staff to student ratio of 6.5:1. One staff person for every 6 kids.
My experience as an 'educator' was some time ago. At the college level. So I may not be technically qualified to comment on the relative quality of “education” today as opposed to that of 50 years ago. But I am a parent, grandparent, and great grandparent. I have actively participated in home school activities of three generations of children. And I'm not at all convinced that by doubling up on staff in our public schools that we are adequately preparing our kids for an ever less certain future.
After zoom school, attempts to make covid vaccines mandatory for school, and a creepy DEI task force, we decided to homeschool and took our kids out of the local charter school just before they nuked their entire Waldorf curriculum to conform to some anti-racism program instituted by the DEI board. That DEI board was assigning the teachers tasks like "report on your microaggressions over the last week," which sounded to me like a self-criticism session straight out of communism.
We tried online homeschool programs that were able to access state funds, only to discover that they made you fill out checklists to track about 350 learning items for each school year so that they could demonstrate to the state bureaucracy that the money wasn't being used fraudulently. We opted out of that tedious and idiotic nonsense.
So now we have one income and pay for all our childrens' education expenses out of pocket. Still, my children are happy and learning well. I just wish we didn't have to pay into a system that does nothing for us.
Like so many other issues these days, the reform of public school system will not be easy to accomplish. You can't appeal for reform to politicians with the goal of providing a better education since the current system has nothing to do with education, but everything to do with patronage, power, social control and, frankly, demoralization.
I agree that the best bet is to push hard for complete abolishment of public education (especially federal bureaus of education) maybe through constitutional amendments. Any sort of tinkering at the edges will just shift the graft and corruption into a new form.
Weird. I'm not trained in Waldorf-pedagogy as such but I have never heard that it was in any way racist? Far as I recall from the brief mention Steiner's pedagogy got at teacher's college, the nazis hated him/it.
The festivals and much of the teaching material was considered to have been too deeply rooted in Western European culture and not representative enough so they nixed the festivals entirely. The festivals were a core part of the curriculum shared by all the Waldorf schools worldwide.
A DEI task force will find problems with anything though. That is their purpose: to sling accusations and force conformity while ritually humiliating normal people, much like struggle sessions or self-criticism sessions.
In short, anti-racism has nothing to do with anti-racism and everything to do with accusing others of racism on pretexts to seize power and authority and moral high ground.
That first paragraph is beyond depressing. Steiner, even when he seems quite wrong, is infinitely more interesting and charitable than our insane DEI tyrants.
Interesting. My eldest son had his high school education at our local Waldorf School. He and a couple of classmates submitted an interesting but benign essay to be read to class examining the impact of his abusive childhood on Hitler's Nazi regime. Were not permitted by the school to present it - considered offensive to Jews.
We pulled ours out in 1987. Now our children are homeschooling their children. Best thing we ever did! We only have them for a short time ... and then they are suddenly grown. We know too much now; we cannot hand them over to others who may lead them astray - and even ruin their lives.
And I made a couple of bucks being a knitting tutor to some Waldorf kids. They seem to be turning out fine, but then, their mom is raising them in a very old fashioned way in some areas.
I'm a little weirded out with some of the really esoteric Steiner stuff, like only introducing colors in a certain progression, etc. I think that borders on cultish, but most kids going to a Waldorf based school won't even notice it and are unlikely to continue with the program past graduation.
I was drawn into a cult at the age of 19, now many decades ago. Your analysis rings true. I left the cult after about three years but stayed in long past the point where I was ready to go because there were others I cared about. Two left with me. I survived intact. Most others didn’t. Despite the pressure I never completely lost my capacity for skepticism. When I reflect on my experience of the last three years I think that this early formative experience has left me largely immune to manipulation. When I first started to pay attention to the events of early 2020 I immediately recognized the deception. I can honestly say that I wasn’t fooled for even a moment, even though I felt completely alone in my assessment. Of course, I am unvaccinated, as are my children and grandchildren.
Gato I watched them deconstruct American Education while I was in it, circa 1970s and 1980s. When that retiring Harvard professor said the kids graduating today couldn't have passed the entrance exams when he started, I knew my nation was in trouble.
Today the kids are so damaged by toxic food, medicine and injections that 2/3rds are unable to do actual high school, let alone college level work. America is done, if we cannot clean up our act! Finally, for full blown insanity, IMHO, take a look at HB 2002 currently being pushed rapidly through Oregon's Legislature; another Pharma feeding frenzy, post covid. Any child can get any procedure they or the school pushes, and parents will be kept 100% in the dark, while we all pay for the 100,000$ gender _____, abortions, etc., at any age at all, through forced taxation.
Insanity reigns.
I personally would not place my child in school in any state that passes such dark laws, but many people simply do not know what is happening or how far from health or normality we have come. I pray more wake up and quickly!!!
You really need to leave the state. Many in Oregon have done so...most of my Florida neighbors are either from Oregon or California. Just because you are home schooling does not keep their tentacles off your children. Escape while you can.
My daughter is grown. And I moved here from Florida in 2012, as I could no longer tolerate the excessive growth and development bulldozing every inch I formerly delighted in. Cities do not appeal to me and Oregon is a stunningly beautiful state with many brave people still fighting to save her rather than choosing to flee the battlefield. I understand those who do however, and if I had children I would also.
But I can fight this agenda and still will, at this time.
Taking down the toxic pharmaceutical corporations, returning medical freedom, parental rights, property rights, and freedom of speech to Americans, here in Oregon, is worth my efforts, I believe, whether or not we win right away or at all.
This corruption, delusion, destruction and callousness cannot the allowed to stand unchallenged.
Oregon stands on the frontline of the International One World Order's plans for all humanity, IMHO. By drawing attention to what is happening here we, at a minimum, can help prepare others for what is headed their way in order to prevent it taking root in their home state.
And I still love Oregon and consider her worth fighting for.
❤
PS- God works in mysterious ways. I always try to listen to that "still, small voice." To date it hasn't steered me wrong.
WA here. I won't leave. I'm in a stable situation, in a small community with friends. Why should I flee to some place that I have no support and would have to return to the city if I did?
I admire you for being a warrior in a fight that, as you point out, may be unwinnable. Thanks for trying. And your daughter is safe, so really you have covered all bases.
Very inspiring to hear this as a fellow Oregonian. It’s really crazy here. I’m especially interested in your take that Oregon is an intentional frontline spot--I’ve felt that too; your naming of it out loud is powerful.
Did it with both my children- wish I had had the money they spend on them I’m school.- but I did it on a shoestring way better than the schools could!!
Bless Up 🙏 sometimes it's hard to see the path outside of the one you knew/went through.
The system is designed to incentivize outsourcing the things the family used to do for the state to do a worse job while also not giving a shit about the job.
I can’t tell you the number of lost young men in our extended family. These kids all had parents and grandparents that graduated from college. And yet they can’t seem to make any purchase on life. One consistent theme seems to be marijuana abuse. The kids all think marijuana is healthy and are essentially taught that in school. They don’t seem to be getting edification anywhere.
One thing that previous Americans all knew instinctively is that work and effort is gratifying and fun. Without obligations and goals life is boring. Most successful people don’t work only to earn money or just to buy brand name stuff. They work because bosses and/or employees and customers/clients depend on them. They work because it’s fulfilling and gives one purpose. They work because it’s intellectually stimulating at least sone of the time. They work also gives you social standing, and it makes you resilient and so forth and so on--even if you are only earning minimum wage. And yes eventually there are also monetary rewards too, and you can decide to use it on brand name stuff or tuition or travel or give it all away.
These kids aren’t learning that. They are too caught up in thinking they want to be rich and that all rich people live in some magical dream world where everything grows on trees and everything is perfect and there are no conflicts or setbacks to overcome.
The System is designed to make more dependents, socially, economically, mentally. By doing this the owners of the system, get to enforce more regulation & control and profit while doing it.
The Corporate Oligarchy is running the show and is now Global. Thus we always go back to the CFR, Bankers, and Billionaires with their fake philanthropy - manipulating all things for their profiteering in profits and control.
Short Attention-Spans interrupt hard work and long-term goals. Cell phones, commercials, sometimes music, contribute to this, and disrupt the natural system. No evidence here, going off gut - though the dopamine response and addictiveness in mobile phones is likely demonstrable.
Cults are similar. They disrupt individuality, questioning, and possibilities. One size fits all. if that's the case, good by meritocracy.
Young men need hardworking, honest role models. nothing more.
Male children are in a tough spot. There's never been a better time to be female, yet somehow we didn't manage these mild gains without falling for the swinging pendulum.
Ten years ago I was saying, "We need to be clear about whether we are doing away with bullying, or just switching up players and who gets to be on top." Now, I'd say the answer is unavoidable.
And: "Challenging our public school district’s obedience to county ‘health’ ‘orders’: My reflections after 2 years of tragic-comic district refusals to answer BASIC and REQUIRED questions, Orwellian lies, ‘official’ obfuscations + colleagues’ ‘taking a knee’ to propaganda = humanity’s need for ‘friends in high places’ to prevent massive child sacrifices to psychopathic prima facie-criminal ‘public serpents’ (59 of ?)" https://carlbherman.blogspot.com/2022/07/challenging-our-public-school-districts.html
Yeah, I'm sure in that case it's very effective. I'm thinking about when they are loudly demanding policy changes, in which case we need to avoid remaining "riders on the subway all trying to stay quiet while the crazy guy who reeks like piss and has this pants on his head harangues them in a glossolalia fusillade that no one (least of all he himself) understands but that no one wants to interrupt for fear of him turning on them."
As a K12 teacher, what you've written here is inaccurate. Please pump the brakes on the dogma and the culture wars talking points.
The public school system is deeply broken, but not for the reasons you've mentioned. Schools are breaking because society is broken. School is not a business where you get uniform input A and produce uniform output B. Every student is different, and increasingly students are coming to school traumatized by the conditions of poverty and want. 10 million children are currently food-insecure, a number that has increased dramatically since 2008. Homeownership and the middle class have been eviscerated. It's really hard to learn if you're hungry, if your parents are too busy working to care for you, if your home is permeated by financial anxiety at all times, if your neighborhood is violent.
All of these things come to school with children. All of these things require more time, patience, and technical skills as a professional educator. This translates to higher costs, and/or lower scores. It makes sense that education budgets have gone up while outcomes have fallen: the inputs are changing. Education does not work like the private sector. Period.
Some of the things you said are true, certainly. Unions are problematic, administrative grift and bloat is a real concern, etc. But the biggest challenge schools face comes from outside our walls: more social problems, and funding/resources failing to keep pace. We don't need shareholder returns siphoning even more resources from students.
The free market would not provide a better education. Charter schools currently pretend they're better than public schools by selecting the best students and pumping out impressive scores, while the public schools have a higher concentration of difficult students. The comparisons are lovely for investor presentations, but the community is worse off. Some charters are great, but the free market model is not a silver bullet for America's education problems. IMHO, you need a mix depending on the needs of each community.
But organizing our education system entirely around profit and a family's ability to pay is guaranteed to entrench power on the one hand, and squalor on the other. We already see it with the college admissions scandals. Rich kids will go to good schools, poor kids will go to schools where the profit margins are thinner, and therefore the quality of schools are lower. "Efficiency" is great for markets, but not everything works like a market. Schools are one of those things.
My district is about to open its first charter. Here's what will happen. The kids who can get the best test scores will flow to the new school. The student body at the public schools will decrease, so some percentage of teachers will be forced to go to the new school for lower pay. The public school's scores will decline because we have a higher concentration of difficult students. The charter will use the juxtaposition to market itself and further erode the public school, even though the quality of education isn't actually better. Teacher burnout will increase at both schools (low pay at the charter, tougher jobs at the public), so professional quality and consistency will plummet. It will be harder to convince talented young adults to get into the profession, too, because of lower average pay. And the students lose every step of the way.
this appears to be a laundry list of made up facts and presumed conclusions to defend a failing system from the inside.
schools are not "traumatized by poverty" to some unprecedented degree. recent decades have had the least poverty in american history.
the kids in schools are unsafe there, fail to learn basic skills, and education has slid into indoctrination.
name 3 products that the government provides better than a free market. it would be trivial to do so much better with schools. take the same money spent now, give each kid a $15k voucher, and let them spend it as they like. let schools experiment, specialize, and learn what works. most of all, make them compete and the level will rise massively. competition breeds competence.
charter schools are made to compete on an uneven field with less money and loads of overwhelming regulation and overhead. that's not free market, it's stifling real competition .
education absolutely works like the private sector. everything does. there are no "special cases" immune from the rules of economics and human behavior and if this is what's being taught, you're only further convincing me of the desperate need for change.
sounds to me like you're just invested in perpetuating the problem.
if your system is so good and effective and cannot be outperformed, why does it fear competition?
"schools are not "traumatized by poverty" to some unprecedented degree. recent decades have had the least poverty in american history." I don't know where cats like you live, but there is a poverty problem here in the United States. Blox has hands on experience and makes some very good points. I'm not even a teacher but I could imagine and understand how difficult and sad it would be to try and teach anything to a classroom full of kids where probably half of them live under the constant anxiety of financially stressed out parents. The reason I am pointing this out is because it is always a subject that is overlooked in education.
It's always uplifting to hear about someone that has overcome personal obstacles. I admire the fact that you had the foresight and determination to take a miserable situation and use it as leverage to push your way out of it. That's a wise kid.
Homie. Your entire article is a "laundry list of made-up facts and presumed conclusions." My comment is no more or less academic than this publication. You sound like someone who knows very little about education, and after reading some talking points you've decided you have it figured out. Maybe have some humility? Talk with people who are engaging in good-faith and have more industry knowledge than you do? No one knows less than the man who thinks he has nothing to learn.
I can easily come up with things the government does better. Let's go with infrastructure. Imagine you're building a 5G network. Three companies will build 3x the necessary towers in cities to serve the biggest customer base, and few if any in rural areas with low ROI. A public project would not have those constraints and incentives, and would build the right amount of towers for everyone everywhere. Once built, operation can go to the private sector for higher efficiency and better customer service.
The government is better at mass scale, resilience, and democratization of access; markets are better at efficiency, which often comes at the expense of resilience and broad access. Therefore, hybrid markets do things best.
If you think what schools need is another drain on resources via shareholder returns, you are gravely mistaken.
i love how the people who start by attacking and calling people "dangerous" suddenly call for "humility" when challenged.
i doubt very much you have more relevant knowledge here than i do, but the appeal to you own authority is also fun.
seems like you're just used to being the "authority figure" and are struggling to argue by more than assertion.
you think government cell phones would be better than the incredibly cheap, incredibly effective, rapidly improving and near universally available private systems that provide staggering value for money despite operating under outlandish regulatory constraint? because now you're walking onto a field where you obviously do not understand they systems or the outcomes. if the government had not run the phone company as monopoly, we'd have had internet in the 70's and 80's. you literally could not be more wrong in your claims and have chosen perhaps the most inapt example possible. (and one i know in great detail from end to end)
you also exhibit the classic statist/socialist blind spot of presumed knowledge that does not and cannot exist. you just assume that there is some "optimal" configuration instead of trade offs and that whatever this is can be known by people who have no means to collect such information, no objective structure by which to weigh it, and no incentive to get it right.
"we'll just put smart people in charge and they will decide and do the right thing for everyone" is one of the most failed doctrines in human history.
you seem to have no basic understanding of markets at all and are just vilifying them from incomprehension.
the discipline of markets is what creates consumer sovereignty and producer efficacy. your argument that "shareholder profit" is somehow a net drain on outcomes is wildly wrong. apply that to computers or cars. yeah.
it sound to me like you have swallowed the statist top-down doctrine hook and sinker and fail to understand that your standard of living and the quality of that which you consume comes from markets, not government.
Markets are not disciplined. Economist Steve Keen has proved this decisively, as have many others over the decades.
Markets are over-exuberant during good times. The private banking system creates massive amounts of new credit chasing high yields, and the speculative feedback loop inflates asset values beyond their productive capacity. Invariably growth fails to keep pace with debt obligations in some sector of the economy (often in finance because they can create their own leverage for securities and other derivatives, which all depend on continued good times). The leverage creates systemic risks, the good times can't go on forever, and down we go. Along the way, much of the capital is misallocated to speculative assets like derivatives and investment properties rather than productive enterprises.
But I digress. You'll never hear me argue that the state is great. Fuck the state. I'm not delusional about government, and I'm not delusional about the infallibility of free markets, either. It's all dogma, and I don't play that.
Unless we can eliminate all hierarchical systems, including the state but also money and property rights, there must be balance. Too much power anywhere is tyranny.
this is a bizarre take so orthogonal that it's not even wrong, it's just non-responsive to the issue. you keep pointing to equity markets (and keen is totally wrong about them, i'm read his work and it's a mashup of bad math and misattribution of central bank and regulatory issues to the private sector, esp around things like CRA and the GSE's) but we're talking about a market for a product. you do not get this kind of bubble there (and rarely in private ones absent gov't meddling as has bee the case since 2000.
assets are not "misallocated" to derivatives and derivatives ARE productive. they hedge risk. someone is using them to generate liquidity and their game is zero sum so it nets out. they do not consume capital on an aggregate basis.
you seem to be getting your takes here from people who have no grasp of capital markets and then trying to presume that capital markets are somehow interchangeable for "a market for goods and services" which does not make any sense.
seems like this is just spiraling into fully irrelevant takes and appeals to "if it's not perfect then planning can make it better" fallacies.
I'm simply critiquing your dogmatic faith in unregulated markets. Reality cannot and will not conform to your ideology.
Here's an on-topic question.
We're not just talking about individuals and their pursuit of happiness with education. We're talking about putting the highest-quality people into the workforce regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, cultivating innovators and leaders regardless of zip code. Investments in human capital pay off at a rate estimated at 7:1, calculating both the addition of a well-educated workforce and the subtraction of costly social issues.
But a long-term investment in the capacity of all citizens -- regardless of circumstances, profitability, or geography -- simply is not incentivized in unregulated capital markets. At least as far as I can tell. So here's the question.
Can you imagine the market mechanisms by which unregulated capital markets would be incentivized to give every child in the country a high-quality education, regardless of geography and their ability to pay? Because $15,000 per child isn't going to cut it. A school is not a business. The inputs (children) have different needs, learning styles, everything.
There might be examples of such things, but this isn’t one of them. Companies will not build “3x the necessary towers in cities”. Companies do not waste money building things that are unnecessary. On the other hand, companies WILL build infrastructure in rural areas if there’s sufficient demand. But the tradeoff when you live in a rural area is that it takes more cost/effort to get things, all else being equal. At the margin, that means some things won’t be available, or will be available only at a higher cost.
Government does the same thing, except it response to political rather than monetary incentives (although the two may coincide). So it will serve politically powerful constituencies. It’s still chasing ROI but measured in a different currency. Granted: this does mean the government is “better” at doing cost-ineffective things, but the fact that they're cost-ineffective is a signal that they shouldn't be done in the first place.
If AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all build towers separately, then yes, you will get roughly 3x the necessary number of towers in urban areas so each provider can deliver good service to the largest block of customers.
The second half of your argument boils down to: fuck everyone who wants to live in a rural area, they should just move to the city. Interesting position.
Most of us who live in rural areas do so at least in part because we don’t want to rely on the government nor to have them dictate every little detail of our lives. I am glad that we went years without internet where I live, because no doubt the government internet would have been unreliable and slow as is pretty much everything the government touches. Now I can get StarLink which is light years better than anything I would have got from government run internet. There was and is a huge market for internet in rural areas and yeah it took some time, but now the internet available in many rural areas is far better than the internet available in our urban areas. So please please please when you are arguing in favor of government control of anything do not drag rural communities into this.
"If AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all build towers separately, then yes, you will get roughly 3x the necessary number of towers in urban areas so each provider can deliver good service to the largest block of customers."
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I love how you assume that you know the 'correct' numbers of towers to build, and that one tower can OBVIOUSLY deliver good service to all customers -- if only government built it.
Glad I’ve got you to tell me what my position is. I thought it was an ordinary common-sense observation about tradeoffs. But it turns out it actually “boils down to” a cartoonish straw man that you can dismiss with a smug handwave. You can imagine my chagrin. (eyeroll)
Companies don’t like wasting money, so why are they building three times the necessary capacity in urban areas? The answer is… they aren’t. They’ve already figured this out. You’re just ignorant of how they do it. We’re not running a seminar on telecom industry economics here, so I’m not going to get into the weeds explaining it to you. But the fact that you don’t know or understand how this works doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, still less that the government would do it better.
People in rural areas with lower population density generally have less access to goods and services, or pay more for them (in economic terms it’s the same thing). This is just physics. Stuff has to move farther in rural areas, and that doesn’t happen by magic. Someone has to pay for it somehow. So yeah, if you don’t like that, then move to the city – where you get to deal with a whole different set of downside costs. As a great man said, in real life there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. (And since people value things differently, there's no one right tradeoff for everybody.)
What your position boils down to (ahem) is that people in rural areas shouldn’t have to make tradeoffs, and everyone else should subsidize their choices by covering their downside costs. This is an intelligible position, I suppose. You haven’t begun to make an argument for it, but that's the argument you have to make. Or you can stick with childish emotionalism and barely-disguised special pleading. Readers, in the unlikely event we have any, can judge for themselves.
Your public school takes money out of my pocket to pay for other people's kids to utterly fail at learning while I have to pay for my children's homeschool where they do quite well. There simply is no justification for that.
I experience a second version of that: I have no children, yet I am forced to pay for the school system used by other people's children. To my knowledge, there is not a single location I could choose to live that does not have a school district that is funded by tax money -- I either pay it or I lose my home.
Yeah, I'm not trying to write a book in these comments, but much of your misunderstanding can be boiled down to the fact that you seem to forget you live in a society.
Homeschooling tends to work well in homes where one parent can stay home, when that parent is well-educated. It does not work well when both parents must be employed to pay the bills, and/or have poor educations. Homeschooling as a solution therefore entrenches power at one end, and squalor at the other: rich kids have a great experience, poor kids suffer.
If it works for you, great. I'm not saying homeschool is bad, just that it won't work for everyone. Now we get back to my point about living in a society. The children getting a poor education now -- be it at home, or at a public school -- will soon be voters, neighbors, citizens. Refusing to invest in an education system that serves all means you're going to have a bunch of dumb, shitty neighbors that will make your life miserable.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of public ed, but divesting from it is not a good solution for a society. We should try to figure out how to FIX the problems.
We are happy to invest in children's education. Throwing money at public schools is throwing money down the drain. A failed, politicized, unresponsive monolith. Since you dont know that, YOU are the one who doesnt understand what it takes to have a healthy society
The free market can't solve the challenge of education in the 21st century. Market-based education means that poor neighborhoods will get worse schools. That exacerbates inequality.
Inequality does affect you. If talented kids get trapped in bad zip codes, bad schools, etc., the economy loses countless potential innovators and leaders. Instead they become criminals and cost society through policing, incarceration, broken families, productivity loss, etc.
We need to fix public education because we need a system that cultivates talent regardless of zip code.
Abraham Lincoln went to a small, private school sporadically and largely educated himself through reading and the encouragement of his mother. He was a day laborer in an extremely poor family that spent an entire year living in what was essentially a lean-to. Since he didn't attend a public school, he must have been a menace to society by your theory. I'm sure we could have expected more of him if he had attended a modern public school.
Your entire argument for the benefit of public schools to society would make a lot more sense to me if the public schools achieved any reasonable academic goals for their students. Instead, they focus on politically correct issues and empirically failed ideas like whole word reading. From your other comments I see that you have a lot of excuses for this and lay blame on any students who manage to escape for lowering the quality of their remaining peers education-- as if public school education were some sort of mutual suicide pact. In that at least I agree with you!
You will NEVER hear me make an "always" argument, so your claim that "Lincoln must be a menace by [my] logic" is a strawman. There are always exceptions. Lincoln was one of the great men of history. We are all fortunate for his success, but it's not a model for education.
I have stated it before and I'll state it again: public education IS broken. But that doesn't mean we should abandon public education, because societies without public education are terrible. We need to fix what we have. Leaving it to markets is basically creating a caste system, whereby people who can afford a good education get credentialed for high status, and everyone else languishes in bad schools and lifelong poverty.
Funny. I'm sitting here laughing at how one-dimensional and short-sighted one's thinking must be to believe that a mass of individuals pursuing maximum self -interest makes a good society, to believe that one tool (markets) are the best solution to all macro problems. It's hilarious. Just blind, stubborn, quasi-religious zealots.
Actually, it's not easy to bring a 5-year-old's understanding to a complex and nuanced understanding. It seems you misunderstand the challenges of education, as well.
This is just a compilation of union talking points -
You have not addressed the woke indoctrination nonsense like CRT, gender theory, and relentless social activism. The dumbing down of standards. Discrimination in the name of "equity."
Schools provide breakfast and lunch to children who don't get enough to eat at home.
Charter schools mostly use lotteries. They don't select the best students. Why can't you tell the truth?
The free market and competition are the only way out of this horrible monopoly
After they use the lotteries, they systematically get rid of students who are too difficult and send them back to us. We get a massive influx of students through Oct-Dec, kids who weren't going to pad numbers at a charter school and got kicked back to us.
I don't go to union meetings, I only pay dues for legal representation in case I'm wrongly sued / defamed. I'm speaking from professional experience and personal research. Take your ad hominems back to Reddit where they belong.
The numbers prove you are not telling the truth. Please provide an example of a charter school like Success Academy in NY, which is villified by union hacks in exactly this way for its success with poor minority students, sending "massive" numbers of students back. They dont. The numbers are tiny.
Please point out the claimed ad hominem attacks in my post. There are none. In case your "well educated" self does not know the meaning of that term, it means personal attacks.
So - Please take your propaganda to the MSM where it belongs.
This is just incorrect. My kids go to a charter school that is public (CA), but has a lottery. The school is approx 50% latino. The kids with the most problems do not have Parents Active enough in their kids lives (likely do to Dual-incomes and very busy parents). There are various other reasons; English as 2nd language, too much screen time, unbridled web activity, lack of appropriate kid boundaries, grammy fell asleep and didn't watch the kids, etc.
The school does not kick out the low performers.
The education board has lowered the standard for testing criteria.
I have taught at public schools and charter schools. My kids have attended public schools, private schools, and homeschool.
You making a blanket statement about charter schools just shows your adherence to the pro-public (non-charter) school narrative. I quit my job at a charter school precisely because they refused to get rid of problem students, and those problem students made it next to impossible for me to best serve the other students there who wanted to learn.
"Food-insecure" is more accurate than "starving." They're not necessarily starving, but they can't count on their next meal. Some days they're very hungry, other days they're not. They are always anxious about food, which causes self-esteem and mental health issues. They tend to get poor nutrition because processed food products made from low-quality inputs are cheap.
None of this is captured by the term "starving." Sorry not sorry that precise definitions make you angry.
Yes, it is amazing that in the wealthiest nation in human history, 10 million children (at least) are food-insecure. How did man develop to this point? Now you're asking the right questions.
"Food insecure" is a dishonest way to inflate numbers of children "needing" help from government programs, which feed kids garbage processed food, and count their success by numbers of bags of processed garbage they hand out to kids, much of which gets tossed in the trash, and much of which creates excess amounts of trash.
Speaking from experience in school programs in which kids are "fed" by the government.
Many current and former public school teachers disagree with you. You talk about school not being a business in which you can input A to get output B, and about students being different, yet the vast majority of schools do NOT have a model that adequately individualizes to best meet the needs of each student.
the market has been the only large scale solution to every single case of serving human need from agriculture to dishwashers. what else has had any large long term effect to raise quality and standards of living?
simply claiming over and over that it does not work is not a compelling case. it's a sign of dogmatic reality denial.
Simply claiming over and over that markets are the only large scale solution to all human problems is incredibly dogmatic (and historically ignorant). Do you even hear yourself? I'm here arguing for hybrid markets, and I provided a good example with 5G. You sound like an ideologue... you are committed to an ideology, and you cannot accept that reality might deviate from theory.
Government intervention and regulations are often incredibly harmful -- no arguments there. I'm not an ideologue. Everything is complicated. There are no absolutes. That's what I'm trying to communicate to you.
Public ownership of infrastructure tends to be positive for the economy and the people living there. To deny this is to deny the history of human civilization.
And I'm not a socialist or a statist. I'm an anarchist. Prominent anarchists like Emma Goldman observe that the tyranny of Soviet Russia was matched by American business oligarchy. Anarchists therefore support the abolition of the state, as well as money and property rights. Abolishing one without the others is just shifting the locus of power to a different tyrant. Unless we can eliminate all three, balance is essential.
You mean like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Clarence Thomas?
Charter schools are "free market". Really?
Charter schools are *government* funded. This is the *opposite* of the free market.
"Indeed, organizing our education system around profit and a family's ability to pay is guaranteed to entrench power on the one hand, and squalor on the other."
All of those things have always cometo school with the students.
Difference was in days past, the students were supposed and required to leave those issue on the coathanger so to speak.
As time and empirical results have proven, the school systems of western nations (or european descendent nations or whatever moniker you prefer) were far superior before the 1960s.
The nation-state or eq. provided tax-funded buildings and staff, sometimes material for poorer students for a basic education; 6-8 years at most starting at age 5-6. This was because private corporate capital and actual demands for (industrial/agricultural) labour more or less mandated it to be so. Beyond the basics, trade schools and privately funded universities took care of the rest.
That older model was by far superior because the incentives were stacked right and the selection pressure was meritocratic to a much higher degree than today.
And the number one factor: teachers actually taught skills and knowledge and the system ensured the students had to work and work hard to make it through: it was made as hard as necessary to provide results. Kid won't study and the parents ain't on the ball for whatever excuse?
Not the school's fault. Not the teacher's responsibility. That attitude needs a comeback with a vengeance.
(Retired after about 25 years as a teacher, all ages but mostly 18+ and HFAs, if that matters.)
I work with teachers who have been in classrooms for 25-30 years, even longer. All of them tell me that more kids come to school with bigger problems than ever before. I'm telling you, things are changing.
The Great Financial Crisis has been absolutely devastating. If you acknowledge that the hollowing out of American industry and the middle class contributed to the fentanyl crisis in rural areas, similar forces are wrecking havoc on families, students, and schools.
Yes, inadequate teacher pay is a real problem. If you want good teachers, you have to offer a good salary. Otherwise, talented young people will run to the private sector, and for good reason. Why invest in a Masters degree to do one of the most difficult jobs in the country for $45,000? It's insane. Of course you're going to get bad teachers. If you want high-quality employees, you need to offer a competitive salary.
Don’t know where you are referring to. Let me school you about teachers salaries in suburban Phila. They are among the wealthiest folks around. Over 100k for 180 days of work per year. Compare with the private sector where talented young people are lucky to get two weeks vacation. Most of those with “Masters” are not in subject but in some area of ed. once upon a time teaching was a calling, like a vocation. Those teachers were not thinking about coparing themselves to “ private sector” employees. They wanted to teach. See the difference?
These days the right is all up in arms about ideological teachers, right?
Maybe if you want highly qualified teachers instead, you should think about how a low salary only attracts the most "passionate" people, who are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to promote the agenda they're passionate about. See how that works?
No. A lot of people do what they feel is their calling and still get a reasonable, living wage for it. It can /should be less than the private sector, but not as far off as it is.
Philly sounds like an exception. I've taught in CO and NY, with a MA. My starting salaries were $48k and $44k, respectively. That is not competitive. It will cause good people to burn out.
We live in capitalism. We all have bills, we all have dreams. If you want more talented people doing something, you pay a better salary. If you don't like the quality of teachers and you're not willing to raise pay, you're delusional. Many young people doing a cost/benefit analysis will flinch, and every time that happens you lose a high-quality teacher.
This is how labor markets work. You can pout about how it should be about "passion" all you want, but you'll never fix the problem.
Read what I said. When people get caught up in the idea that the free market can fix schools, it ruins districts and makes the community worse off. It is dangerous. I've seen it happen. It's happening now.
Words like "only" and "always" are favorites of ideologues. People who dogmatically cling to an ideology, using it to bludgeon contradictory facts out of sight and mind, are usually wrong.
blox - Oh, so now it's the private schools and homeschooling causing the public school problems. Just admit it, you/your system can't stand being compared to a private entity that lays bare some of the rot in public education. Case in point - just ask your public school system to define what a woman is. They can't? Well isn't that just special. And you think it is the private schools and homeschoolers with the problem? (I will admit there are still some mostly rural areas that know there is a difference between men and women).
Actually, Elizabeth Warren and Ketanji Brown Jackson, products of your vaulted public schools, are screeching about it last time I looked.
I am a product of public schools (of long ago) that were very good and have been a lifelong educator. The difference is that when I was in school (and we had plenty of poor people and none more than middle class) ALL were expected to perform. If you did not, you stayed and worked until you did. No one was entitled to anything -- as some earlier poster said, those things were hung on the coathook.
We are now struggling through the greatest diminution of meritocracy of my lifetime and perhaps of history. We have switched accepting medical students from ability to learn and ability to understand the meaning of being called/putting patients first to demographic and SJW scores. After protestations that this would all be fine...it wasn't (shocked, I know) so all medical schools are now pass/fail. And then because national boards showed how bad it all had become, they just went to pass/fail as well.
The abolition of meritocracy for a boatload of excuses (same ones in K-12 as in higher ed) is foundational to all other problems. What giving people a choice will do is allow them to opt for meritocracy -- and most people of any color and socioeconomic class will do so. If it is best in the public schools -- THEY WILL CHOOSE THEM. If it is not, you are hoist by your own petard. This does not seem to me to be hard to understand. People like homeschools primarily because they are generally learning meritocracy focused. If the public schools stopped making excuses and ran like they did when I attended, the carping would stop. Until then, Gato is completely correct, I believe.
This is true but if money followed the kid parents can choose a school. They will pop up and they will compete for that money. Mega schools will go away as they should!
Actually it's the other way around: choice *creates* mega-schools. A few schools with easier student bodies and better marketing teams have huge waiting lists, and the other schools see rapid capital flight. Faced with mounting financial problems and worsening reputations they close, putting even more pressure on a few schools to manage all students.
They can't close down all the public schools, so yes: when a district is in the late-stage of a charter takeover, you will see the last remaining public schools get massive. This is a consequence of the charter/performance eval/capital flight problem.
Not sure how we change over but change over we must. The teacher's union must be broken up. All of it will take time as it took decades upon decades to get where we are now. All I know is that it is a mess and has been for a long time. Happy people are starting to notice but this is not a new problem. I believed school choice was always the answer. Take the power away from the government and let parents have more say in all aspects of their children's lives. Government overregulating everything has been a disaster.
It seems to me that the public education system is so broken that it would essentially have to be torn down to the studs and completely rebuilt to be usable. I am inundated by teachers among my family and friends so I understand a lot of what you are talking about. But the rot is so deep and so extensive I’m not sure I see a process for renovation and maybe just bulldozing everything and starting over is what’s necessary.
So in your opinion how do we fix the current system? Do we abolish the Dept of Ed and make school districts entirely the purview of state and local governments? Do we make educator’s unions illegal? Does anything we do with the school system even matter since from what you say most of the problems are from things outside the school’s control like poverty and a shitty home life.
Doesn’t the current system of funding public schools result in the exact same concentration of resources you are worried about occurring in the private sector? It’s just applied to communities rather than families in the current system. Schools are funded in large part through property taxes so even now the more wealthy kids in the burbs are getting better schools than the kids from the hood. What is a better way to fund schools?
I very much see where you are coming from when you describe the cultural and societal issues that are adversely effecting students. I also understand the concern that a completely privatized system would leave a large segment of students behind. But in the current situation everyone is pulled down by the lowest functioning students. Currently many of our public schools are not fulfilling their duty for any students. So maybe a system that fulfills it’s duty to 50% of the students is a reasonable answer.
In many ways in a local context I agree with you. Simply abandoning public schools usually isn’t the answer. But that’s easy for me to say. I live in a rural area with small schools where a few people who actually care and are driven can make a huge difference. I live in a conservative county and state which makes change achievable. But at the same time I recognize that such change is simply impossible in many areas and as you pointed out the votes of the kids in the crappy public schools elsewhere will vastly outnumber my kid’s votes. So maybe burn it all down is the least worst option. I cannot think of any perfect solution that will provide high quality education to every single child in the US, but maybe a system where at least some of the children are able to get a good education is a start or a step in the right direction.
Thank you for disagreeing in good faith and being a reasonable person. Wow.
There really aren't any good solutions, because the problems are much bigger than the schools. I honestly think a hybrid, localized approach is best. I love what you're doing in your area, sounds awesome. It wouldn't work everywhere. Some places like NYC have benefited from the addition of charters like Success, although that program only got good after a lawsuit ended their practice of mass expelling kids who wouldn't score well. It required checks and balances through a state apparatus, the judiciary. Other places need public investment because the tax base simply cannot afford quality schools and educators. If they're struggling that means they need help.
The dogma in these comments about ending public education and replacing it with market-based education is intellectually lazy and historically tonedeaf. If you think one political ideology is the unerringly correct approach to all of society's challenges, you're wrong. It's that simple.
No, I'm not. My students improve their reading and writing scores significantly above the average for our region, and that's because I teach them everything from annotation to syntax, in Social Studies.
Here's some fun data for you. Parents tend to rate their local schools very favorably, but they rank public education in general very unfavorably. We get a lot of propaganda from the national press about how bad schools are, but when people actually go to their local schools they tend to like them. The national press loves to take isolated incidents and generalize them, but it's rarely generalizable.
Now I'll be the first to admit public education is broken and flawed and needs a total overhaul. I've said it many times in these comments. But you can't get rid of public education. Going whole hog on market-based education is as good as creating a caste system. You can't make access contingent on your ability to pay when it comes to education.
If your students come to school already suffering from their difficult home situations, why do these folks continue to vote D election after election? Might another philosophy improve those pre school situations? How do you vote?
I'm all for the removal of entrenched credentialing/accreditation systems, but would be pleasantly surprised to see anyone in the center sign off on it. Yet it's not only ideal but necessary for any semblance of school choice to avoid worse demonic possession than what we've already seen. I remember this being my biggest disagreement with Friedman in Free to Choose, having the benefit of greater hindsight. An approval system of any sort seems eminently reasonable but becomes the chief invincible vector of capture since it is most difficult to abolish.
Absolutely. The current move in many states to tie funds to "students not systems" has the devil in the details. Homeschoolers take the funds and can only spend on accredited programs. The accreditation bodies are the source of much of this evil, and what few aren't yet are easily captured. Everything Friedman said about vouchers has been undermined by accreditors; those institutions and school baords and recommenders are no different than the FDA in terms of regulatory capture. We'd have been safer with no agency at all. The same is true for education.
We successfully got rid of orphanages (for better or worse.) and replaced with a foster system. Public funded schools should only be schools of last resort for kids without any parental units. No money for schools at all, and only school-foster kids get vouchers given to families to school them however they wish. Yes this sounds absurd but so was the invention of state run schools. Had the mid and western US states come into being at any other point in history, they wouldn't have written public ed into their state constitutions.
Agreed. Like all public WELFARE programs, public schools have become a grift and a means of indoctrination. Public school should at the very most be a program for the most needy- not the default. Moreover, it should be funded from a general fund - NOT property taxes.
when I came to the US I was surprised how kids here have to go to a certain school, that there is no choice until age 18. The European countries let you free to send your child to your choice of school. Of course they don't have buses, so you have to get the child there. But that is IMO a small price to pay.
Open in app or online
I like the quote about civilisation, that it is a kind of self-control. Unfortunately very little people are civilized lately
Ha funnily enough when I came to Europe from the USA I was surprised by the lack of standard curriculum until 18. Even though I understood the rationale, I still thought everyone should get a liberal arts background to produce more well rounded citizens. But after those losers completely dropped the ball on critical thinking and ethics, I decided the vocational learners deserve WAY more respect than I gave them. I am leaning away from even allowing my child to attend university. What for in heaven’s name? So she can betray her parents first and her country after that??
America's fast declining highly complex educational system is a clear reflection of the fragmented American mind.. a mind now prone to contagions such as Woke.. Trans.. partisan politics.. over stimulation.. being drugged up.. reactive.. fear porn... sex porn... instability... add to that a grossly unhealthy lifestyle.. Social Apps.. and AI.. Oh Boy what a mess..
Perhaps the most Glaring examples of Educational Corruption in America is Big Pharma's Greed driven highjacking of our Medical schools turning Dr.s into Drug dealers... as shown during the Plandemic their practice to often a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath..
American education systems are more about Conditioning and Fragmentation into more and more narrow views of life and more volatile states of being.. there is hardly a trace of Wholeness in the American system top to bottom... There is little mention of the Importance of Inquiry... the Importance of All Life.. the importance of Meditation, What is the Actuality of Love? Who am I? What is thought? What is Truth? What is Enlightenment? What is Unconditional Absolute Truth? What is Unconditional Absolute Freedom? What is the origin of Violence? What is Excellence?
To clean this system up Americans must make the Realization that Education starts in the Home..
The parents job is to light the Educational fire... with Real daily involvement... todays parent must be on top of what their child is reading, listening to, who their friends are..
Sit down at the dinner table everyday and turn OFF the devices.. find out what they are curious about while eating together... engage them in conversation they will respond..
Get the child out in nature even as a baby.. Nurture their ability to Inquire and do difficult things.. Teach them to function in nature without any electronic junk... The child will take it from there..
Yes, I’m having similar thoughts. I’m making a new life for myself in Guatemala. I don’t believe that there is any way that our culture and country don’t end in disaster. What will follow? I don’t know. My children, still living in the US, are of like mind but the challenges of exiting the system and the country are too much for them to contemplate right now. I see “Galt’s Gulches” as an escape route not a means of effecting change from within.
You got out while the getting's still good. Smart choice. We are Not going to change "from within" the system what's happening in Mystery Babylon America and in other places. We are under the Judgement of God
It is in God's hands. Pray for them and turn the worry into trust in God for the outcome. He is always fair and just. The Prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
Its nearly impossible to visit classrooms in most schools now. That's on purpose. Any school that tells YOU the parent that YOU can't see your own child in his classroom without a background check is a school you need to leave. Right now at once immediately.
But if you get to set foot inside, you would see the slovenliness of the students. They wear their pajamas to school. You'd see the staff they hire aren't capable of stringing together a coherent sentence. You would see elementary schools with silent lunch and no talking allowed during carpool pickup. You would see KGB-TQIA+ posters everywhere but no math ever. Funniest thing my kid saw when he went to take the PSAT was a poster that said "Don't say Gay! Say "stupid" "dumb" "lame" "loser" ..."(and a few more I can't remember.) My kid came home laughing "synonyms, what are they?"
I went to a lecture a few months ago in the Bay Area (conservative groups do exist there lol), and one of the speakers was a parent told us her journey with her twin girls. How the San Jose school groomed them, prepared them, and then called her and told her that one of her daughters student had something important to say to her. She was nervous, didn't know what her daughter was going to say, until she came out as a trans boy. The mom, blindsided, talked to other family members, friends, and neighbors. What she said was astounding was the SUPPORT. People where like "trust your daughter, she knows." She was 14. The mom wished that someone would just tell her NO. Don't support it. HELP the girl, don't affirm. After a year, she pulled her daughters out of the school and homeschooled till they graduated. The "trans" kid , away from groomer influences, realized her mistake and stopped calling herself a boy after a few months. She's now a healthy 20 something with a boyfriend.
I know of a similar story of an 8 yr old girl in the San Diego area. Parents grabbed their four kids and moved to North East Florida. We met them at church. Go figure. Beautiful kids and all are well now.
The horror is that they are working to make it legal for the state to take your child under those circumstances. Out of state children who come to California can now become wards of the state and be kept from their parents if they claim their parents oppose them receiving gender related treatments.
Washington state just passed this rediculous law that they can take your kid and put them on puberty blockers without informing parents! No vote- nothing from our communities ! Our state goverment is so upside down!!
All I think now when I hear about these initiatives is that there seems to be a very strong desire to sterilize children. All the additional money for psych treatment, meds, surgeries and whatnot seem secondary. Even though they are definitely a path to profit, it doesn't explain the relentless and tireless efforts to push this agenda into everywhere possible.
I think its just one more piece of the depopulation agenda.
It is also to unmoor language from any real meaning. If something as fucking simple as male/female is corrupted in meaning, you've already thrown a huge spanner into human cognition. Never mind tracking all those tiresome pronouns.
I agree with the depop, but this is about control on a very deep and anti-evolutionary level.
My crackpot theory of the week is that the Aliens won the Dulce war and our governments are terraforming the planet for their use. The collaborators get Virtual Reality, those nifty bunkers that stretch for miles under Wal-Marts everywhere, and an AI for a best friend. Little do they know that 'To Serve Man' is a cookbook...
Yup. Tyranny starts with the laws of grammar.
Great Twilight Zone reference!!
🤣😂🤣😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🙏
Yes. Big Money from Big Agendas.
I think we need to stop using the word Gender, this nouveau self-identity. It's a Marxist slight of hand, on the common terms. You know you can't question how one self-identifies, because then you get labeled, that bad guy:
Ray Cyst.
He lives everywhere, that guy.
One has a Biological Sex.
So sorry about your feefees and oppressor narratives. That Bullsh*t doesn't work on me. Have a great day 😋😆
How any child would rather be a ward of the state is beyond me. Sometimes in more cruel moods I think to myself: have at it and see how you feel in a few years. Not every child listens when you tell them the stove is hot. Though maybe we should require reading Dickens in schools just in case.
Here's a test: ask those advocating this governmental power if the child should be allowed to choose to stay with their parents in this situation. The answer will be no, they don't have the judgment to know what's good for them. Exposing the argument for what it is. They are arguing that the child has the judgement to choose medical procedures that permanently alter their bodies? There is the fundamental flaw.
Exactly. I see this at my kid's middle school. They treat the kids like adults when it suits them and when it doesn't they are mindless pawns who have to follow the rules because the school said so. Can't get through to the administrators though, it's always the fault of the bureaucracy.
The primary purpose of bureaucracy is to avoid accountability and responsibility. That is why the French invented it ;-).
I point out logical inconsistencies. To suggest a child in primary school has sufficient judgement to make an informed, responsible decision regarding permanent physical changes via surgery or hormone therapies while then assert the same child lacks the judgement to make an informed, responsible decision about what to eat for lunch is a logical inconsistency.
I noticed at a young age (Jr. High) that school administrators do not know how to handle logic. Pointing out the illogical (and irrational) policy assertions got me suspended several times and expelled once. Though at least one of those suspensions it might have been the delivery terminology (when pointing out a logical and/or factual error by a teacher, the term "bullshit" is apparently unacceptable from a 7th grade student, well it was 50 years ago at least ;-).
Ha ha nice!! I am busy pointing out the logical inconsistencies of school desiring my bilingual child to be on campus for a first period English class (when she has already passed the final exam) but then allowing her to sit in the library and study alone, citing that all children must receive a minimum number of hours of instruction. She is not in fact receiving any instruction, so why does she have to be there? She’s a straight A student. Given the time, she teaches herself all kinds of stuff. She is currently learning American Sign Language for her own pleasure, but really so she can talk shit with her friends! She’s following a philosophy course at school that is not required merely because she respected my opinion that it would be much more beneficial to her than English as a second language when she is a native speaker. So she is above the minimum hours of instruction anyway. But getting her excused has been a months long exercise in talking to brick walls who don’t see the lack of logic, don’t see her for who she is and has turned us all off this school. If we keep up the good work we might get expelled too!! One can only hope. Meanwhile it’s perfectly fine for the school to pull kids out of class to evangelize for the sterilization of children. As they say here, even if you beat me to death I could not explain it. I remember the first time I really understood how bureaucracy is a cover for accountability: while reading the grapes of wrath in my twenties. And so an early hatred of bankers was incubated. Even reading such classics would be better for us all than sitting in bullshit classes. I have had to spend a lot of money buying said classics because they don’t read them in school anymore! Sigh
That’s really sad. Of course it must happen. Maybe I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that most kids who want to transition are not coming from that type of situation which is why I made that comment.
Similar to our situation.... our son trans Id @17 during Covid, mostly with think he has been taught all through school that being a white straight male is the worst possible thing to be. The cult has turned him into a good little activist and abhors everything his father and I believe. It’s very sad.
They teach self-hatred, ultimately.
No wonder they are anti-religious.
They are absolutely not anti-religious, this search for the sacred Trans child is deeply religious, maybe more totemistic or animist or gnostic than monotheistic, but deeply religious all the same.
Social Justice is an ideology founded on the worship of the pain of "the marginalized", which is why when a child utters the magical incantation ("I was born in the wrong body") the true believers drop to their knees and proclaim the child sacred and infallible.
We are not dealing w an absence of religious needs, beliefs or impulses, these have just been shifted into the realm of the political.
Agree with your comment CP. May I offer a wee suggestion re "these have just been shifted into the realm of the political". Might that not be more appropriately worded, "these have just been shifted into the realm of the stark, raving, fucking mad".
one led to the other ;)
Okay, anti-Christian. You know what I meant.
im sorry! i know...cheers!
Your point I think is that secularism has become a religion. Yes.
It is politically powerful and powerfully intolerant of any other religion of belief system.
There is definitely a vibe of getting kids to hate the fathers most of all. I watched five kids grow up. Four out of five have serious problems with their dads. All different circumstances.
Well, yes. Attack the one with the most power potential in the family, and you've successfully destroyed the man--and his family.
Just an FYI, not all fathers are great guys.......not all men are great guys.
Not all people are great. Period.
This is true I think.... in my sons case to look at his father is to look at everything the cult has told him to despise.
There are probably a lot of fathers who deserve it.
I’m so sorry for you and your family. Hopefully you have a support network. There is a Substack called Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans that may have resources.
Bay Area native here. I am actually quite leftist and historically I have been quite open to people who are transgendered because I've had a few close friends who are and more or less, I believed them.
Whatever this is, it's completely different. Kids spend tons and tons of time trying to figure out who they are and go through many phases of identity. To try to ideologically capture kids in the middle of their identity formation processes as a product of their own natural development (e.g., figuring out what gender is and how it works) is profoundly sick.
Do you recognize the Left anymore?
What about freedom of speech and all the censorship. How do you feel about those issues?
Seems to be the most important principle for liberty. You can't have one without the other.
This is a beautifully insightful comment
I know some people with a daughter who decided that she was a boy. Her parents were all about "supporting" her. Luckily they didn't go so far as approving irreversible procedures, because the phase only lasted a few months. She is back to "girl" now.
Now their other daughter says she is a lesbian because she is dating a boy who says he is a girl.
Whew! 😥 Thank goodness that parent had the protective instinct to save her child!
“she pulled her daughters out of the school and homeschooled till they graduated” When the girl got HEALTHY attention, she felt better, stronger, and more “whole”. Competing in the Victim Olympics is driving young people crazy, especially girls.
So sad. I thought I was Mr. X (the wrestler) at 5, Spider Man at 6, Batman at 7, Alan from "Space 1999" at 7, and Ken Dryden at 8. Then I kind of grew up I guess. Wanted to be "as good as" Benny Goodman at 13, "as muscular as" Arnold at 19 and so on. There must be something wrong with me because as a male I never wanted to be a mom. We homeschooled and our kids thank us for that approach.
Alan was cool.
Schools and colleges actually have in their mission statements that they want to create activists, either overtly stated, or through more subtle language.
activist socialism is inherently anti-social.
Socialism, period, is anti-social—and self-hating.
And let us not forget the small matter of these barbarians murdering some 150 million people just in the last century in their endless quest to "transform" the rest of us into whatever idiotic utopian ideal du jour inhabits the impenetrable, poisonous fog wafting about between their ears.
This lot has destroyed every society, polity and economy they've ever seized control of, from the new world colony of Jamestown to the carcass of Venezuela, and after a century of progressivism, the US is a top contender for next up to bat.
Not so long ago, polls showed that a plurality of Democrats favored once again marshaling the cattle cars to transport "anti-vaxxers" to parts unknown, with a solid majority advocating house arrest for we pesky infidels.
This is the "progress" in "progressive".
BINGO
Well said!
Gato = Cult Slayer.
tyvm.
Don't you think he'd be a lot cooler if he gave like a 15 minute heads up before he posted such incredibly important essays?...;)
cats are ambush hunters, ryan.
🙀
I have Rex kitties and they jump on your shoulders in a snap. No warning ever. So.... yeah. Hubbs and I are just aware of it, but we do warn our friends when they come over.
Our kitties like warm bodies and hairy heads and necks and faces etc
LOLOLOL
I think this all stems from declining testosterone levels over the last 70 years.
I'm serious.
Funny how the madness coincides with massive use of BCP (hormones ... with little research on long-term effects) plus the exponential increases in childhood jabs. Now compare US to another part of the world where those things didn't happen.
Yeah and it's a positive feedback loop.
Definitely in universities and corporate settings, the masculine form of competition and combat has been replaced by the feminine
form, which while less physically violent are protracted, passive -aggressive and rely upon psychological manipulation and ostracism. Most men can accept losing on merit rather than losing by Kardashian. Rather get punched in the face than die by one thousand administrative maneuvers.
"losing by Kardashian" Great turn of phrase!
When they castrate your brain in grade school, testosterone levels will naturally decline.
I agree. And how many colors of chemtrails are there now?
Some decades ago I was a member of the local school board. The administrators never failed to refer to the district’s goal of turning out consumers. Consumers are passive. Clearly times have changed and now they mean to produce activists. Also bad.
The problem is that these administrators are in the position to decide what to "turn out" in the first place. They're engaged in self-interested social engineering at the expense of the public's happiness, health, and stability.
I wonder how many administrators there are per student now vs let's say the 70's?
I think that might be revealing.
In a local district, always asking for and receiving HUGE donated bucks, I watched it go from one principal per school, to two; plus two added assistant principals; the district went from one head to three. Why? To handle the tech challenges of transforming to a fully online district. Meantime, within every five year span, another vote for another bond to pay for the "poor teachers who will get pink slips if this bond doesn't pass." No joke. And they fool 'em EVERY time. Same district that applauds, and provides police escorts for the kids, as they march through the streets chanting anti-establishment tropes.
Gosh. Unreal.
I used to make fairly meaningful donations to my alma mater for 20+ years and then they kicked me off campus for being OUTSIDE without a mask on during the summer if 21'.
I wrote a letter to the dean and the alumni association excoriating them and told them they'd never see a dime from again.
I should've done it 6 years ago when they allowed the campus to be destroyed by BLM rioters and elected a Trans as homecoming king!
Our little town built a new high school – sixty years ago. To accommodate 250 students. (When the population was over double what it is today). A gymnasium, a large, very well equipped, woodworking shop, a teaching kitchen, with 18 stoves & sinks, a library, of course, a science lab, and a dozen classrooms. Truly a state of the art educational facility when it opened in 1963.
Our new school was well staffed too! We had a principal, a 'secretary', and a 'custodian'. Our shop teacher did double duty in facilities maintenance. And there were twelve or thirteen teachers, depending on enrollment. (Which varied between 190 and 220 through the 60s and 70s). So the total staffing requirement, for 200 students, was fifteen. Two [2] of whom were administrators. Staff to student ratio 13:1. One staff person for every 13 kids.
Our school is still there. For now. The teaching kitchen is long gone. As are the Home Ec programs it supported. Turned into a breakfast/lunch room so the school can “ensure the children have healthy meals”. The shop is still there. The ten of thousands of dollars of equipment idle, except for the rare occasions when school district workers use it for maintenance projects, or their personal hobbies. The library, inexplicably, is gone. Turned into an unused “computer lab”. Replete with antiquated electronics. (The kids i-pads and phones are MUCH more up to date!)
And the stats are different. Very different. Our school is no longer a high school. Some years ago, we tore down the elementary school and combined everything into a single “K-12 facility”. In spite of which, enrollment, for the last decade, has seldom reached 100. Last year was about 90. Which has resulted in staffing challenges.
We still have a principal, and a 'secretary', (who is now an “administrator”). And who now has an assistant. So we have three [3] full time administrators. Custodial services are contracted. Maintenance is performed by school district personnel, from 70 miles away. When they can schedule it. And there are the teachers, all six of them. And the five “support staff”. So we have a staff to student ratio of 6.5:1. One staff person for every 6 kids.
My experience as an 'educator' was some time ago. At the college level. So I may not be technically qualified to comment on the relative quality of “education” today as opposed to that of 50 years ago. But I am a parent, grandparent, and great grandparent. I have actively participated in home school activities of three generations of children. And I'm not at all convinced that by doubling up on staff in our public schools that we are adequately preparing our kids for an ever less certain future.
Activists consumers is the ultimate goal until depopulation can be completed.
Good thing activist consumerism can go both ways.
I’m trying to come up with a pithy reference to Bi but having trouble formulating.
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/what-we-do
k. 1st sentence on linky: Our global work has four areas of focus— justice, equity, expression, and climate justice.
Did someone assault the climate? jeez. poor guy. Gets him Justice!
"Sore rose" funded.
“Social Impact” has been a big one since 2009.
After zoom school, attempts to make covid vaccines mandatory for school, and a creepy DEI task force, we decided to homeschool and took our kids out of the local charter school just before they nuked their entire Waldorf curriculum to conform to some anti-racism program instituted by the DEI board. That DEI board was assigning the teachers tasks like "report on your microaggressions over the last week," which sounded to me like a self-criticism session straight out of communism.
We tried online homeschool programs that were able to access state funds, only to discover that they made you fill out checklists to track about 350 learning items for each school year so that they could demonstrate to the state bureaucracy that the money wasn't being used fraudulently. We opted out of that tedious and idiotic nonsense.
So now we have one income and pay for all our childrens' education expenses out of pocket. Still, my children are happy and learning well. I just wish we didn't have to pay into a system that does nothing for us.
Like so many other issues these days, the reform of public school system will not be easy to accomplish. You can't appeal for reform to politicians with the goal of providing a better education since the current system has nothing to do with education, but everything to do with patronage, power, social control and, frankly, demoralization.
I agree that the best bet is to push hard for complete abolishment of public education (especially federal bureaus of education) maybe through constitutional amendments. Any sort of tinkering at the edges will just shift the graft and corruption into a new form.
“Still, my children are happy and learning well.”
I would replace “Still” with “Especially” there!
Weird. I'm not trained in Waldorf-pedagogy as such but I have never heard that it was in any way racist? Far as I recall from the brief mention Steiner's pedagogy got at teacher's college, the nazis hated him/it.
The festivals and much of the teaching material was considered to have been too deeply rooted in Western European culture and not representative enough so they nixed the festivals entirely. The festivals were a core part of the curriculum shared by all the Waldorf schools worldwide.
A DEI task force will find problems with anything though. That is their purpose: to sling accusations and force conformity while ritually humiliating normal people, much like struggle sessions or self-criticism sessions.
In short, anti-racism has nothing to do with anti-racism and everything to do with accusing others of racism on pretexts to seize power and authority and moral high ground.
That first paragraph is beyond depressing. Steiner, even when he seems quite wrong, is infinitely more interesting and charitable than our insane DEI tyrants.
DEI is sounding Marxist. It can't be. Oops.
Been around Silicon Valley for decades ... DEI and AI are THE cool things right now. Brace for incoming.
The weather, trees, friends. Until I can’t anymore …!
Interesting. My eldest son had his high school education at our local Waldorf School. He and a couple of classmates submitted an interesting but benign essay to be read to class examining the impact of his abusive childhood on Hitler's Nazi regime. Were not permitted by the school to present it - considered offensive to Jews.
You are SO right about this:
"Any sort of tinkering at the edges will just shift the graft and corruption into a new form."
We pulled ours out in 1987. Now our children are homeschooling their children. Best thing we ever did! We only have them for a short time ... and then they are suddenly grown. We know too much now; we cannot hand them over to others who may lead them astray - and even ruin their lives.
Is not a Waldorf school wacky to begin with?
Hey! They knit!
And I made a couple of bucks being a knitting tutor to some Waldorf kids. They seem to be turning out fine, but then, their mom is raising them in a very old fashioned way in some areas.
I'm a little weirded out with some of the really esoteric Steiner stuff, like only introducing colors in a certain progression, etc. I think that borders on cultish, but most kids going to a Waldorf based school won't even notice it and are unlikely to continue with the program past graduation.
Good for you.
Get some info. I know 1 family that goes there. they seem okay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfec6eF4I_4&t=8s (17mins) see user comments on YT. You Decide.
I was drawn into a cult at the age of 19, now many decades ago. Your analysis rings true. I left the cult after about three years but stayed in long past the point where I was ready to go because there were others I cared about. Two left with me. I survived intact. Most others didn’t. Despite the pressure I never completely lost my capacity for skepticism. When I reflect on my experience of the last three years I think that this early formative experience has left me largely immune to manipulation. When I first started to pay attention to the events of early 2020 I immediately recognized the deception. I can honestly say that I wasn’t fooled for even a moment, even though I felt completely alone in my assessment. Of course, I am unvaccinated, as are my children and grandchildren.
Glad you didn't take the Slow Kill Death-Injections.
Good things can come from bad experiences 👍
Yes they can. “What doesn’t kill me ...”
One more thing
That meme of General Milley in his “war face” is a classic. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Our global adversaries are surely laughing their asses off.
Darn it. You made me look at it a 2nd time! And I'm conducting a stupid zoom meeting...lol
Dittos
Gato I watched them deconstruct American Education while I was in it, circa 1970s and 1980s. When that retiring Harvard professor said the kids graduating today couldn't have passed the entrance exams when he started, I knew my nation was in trouble.
Today the kids are so damaged by toxic food, medicine and injections that 2/3rds are unable to do actual high school, let alone college level work. America is done, if we cannot clean up our act! Finally, for full blown insanity, IMHO, take a look at HB 2002 currently being pushed rapidly through Oregon's Legislature; another Pharma feeding frenzy, post covid. Any child can get any procedure they or the school pushes, and parents will be kept 100% in the dark, while we all pay for the 100,000$ gender _____, abortions, etc., at any age at all, through forced taxation.
Insanity reigns.
I personally would not place my child in school in any state that passes such dark laws, but many people simply do not know what is happening or how far from health or normality we have come. I pray more wake up and quickly!!!
You really need to leave the state. Many in Oregon have done so...most of my Florida neighbors are either from Oregon or California. Just because you are home schooling does not keep their tentacles off your children. Escape while you can.
My daughter is grown. And I moved here from Florida in 2012, as I could no longer tolerate the excessive growth and development bulldozing every inch I formerly delighted in. Cities do not appeal to me and Oregon is a stunningly beautiful state with many brave people still fighting to save her rather than choosing to flee the battlefield. I understand those who do however, and if I had children I would also.
But I can fight this agenda and still will, at this time.
Taking down the toxic pharmaceutical corporations, returning medical freedom, parental rights, property rights, and freedom of speech to Americans, here in Oregon, is worth my efforts, I believe, whether or not we win right away or at all.
This corruption, delusion, destruction and callousness cannot the allowed to stand unchallenged.
Oregon stands on the frontline of the International One World Order's plans for all humanity, IMHO. By drawing attention to what is happening here we, at a minimum, can help prepare others for what is headed their way in order to prevent it taking root in their home state.
And I still love Oregon and consider her worth fighting for.
❤
PS- God works in mysterious ways. I always try to listen to that "still, small voice." To date it hasn't steered me wrong.
WA here. I won't leave. I'm in a stable situation, in a small community with friends. Why should I flee to some place that I have no support and would have to return to the city if I did?
I'll stay and fight.
I admire you for being a warrior in a fight that, as you point out, may be unwinnable. Thanks for trying. And your daughter is safe, so really you have covered all bases.
Very inspiring to hear this as a fellow Oregonian. It’s really crazy here. I’m especially interested in your take that Oregon is an intentional frontline spot--I’ve felt that too; your naming of it out loud is powerful.
Homeschooling- it’s better than ever!!!
Did it with both my children- wish I had had the money they spend on them I’m school.- but I did it on a shoestring way better than the schools could!!
Bless Up 🙏 sometimes it's hard to see the path outside of the one you knew/went through.
The system is designed to incentivize outsourcing the things the family used to do for the state to do a worse job while also not giving a shit about the job.
I can’t tell you the number of lost young men in our extended family. These kids all had parents and grandparents that graduated from college. And yet they can’t seem to make any purchase on life. One consistent theme seems to be marijuana abuse. The kids all think marijuana is healthy and are essentially taught that in school. They don’t seem to be getting edification anywhere.
One thing that previous Americans all knew instinctively is that work and effort is gratifying and fun. Without obligations and goals life is boring. Most successful people don’t work only to earn money or just to buy brand name stuff. They work because bosses and/or employees and customers/clients depend on them. They work because it’s fulfilling and gives one purpose. They work because it’s intellectually stimulating at least sone of the time. They work also gives you social standing, and it makes you resilient and so forth and so on--even if you are only earning minimum wage. And yes eventually there are also monetary rewards too, and you can decide to use it on brand name stuff or tuition or travel or give it all away.
These kids aren’t learning that. They are too caught up in thinking they want to be rich and that all rich people live in some magical dream world where everything grows on trees and everything is perfect and there are no conflicts or setbacks to overcome.
It's incorrect to blame this on substances. We need to be asking what feels so terrible that young people will do anything to feel differently?
The System is designed to make more dependents, socially, economically, mentally. By doing this the owners of the system, get to enforce more regulation & control and profit while doing it.
The Corporate Oligarchy is running the show and is now Global. Thus we always go back to the CFR, Bankers, and Billionaires with their fake philanthropy - manipulating all things for their profiteering in profits and control.
Short Attention-Spans interrupt hard work and long-term goals. Cell phones, commercials, sometimes music, contribute to this, and disrupt the natural system. No evidence here, going off gut - though the dopamine response and addictiveness in mobile phones is likely demonstrable.
Cults are similar. They disrupt individuality, questioning, and possibilities. One size fits all. if that's the case, good by meritocracy.
Young men need hardworking, honest role models. nothing more.
That's incredibly sad.
Male children are in a tough spot. There's never been a better time to be female, yet somehow we didn't manage these mild gains without falling for the swinging pendulum.
Ten years ago I was saying, "We need to be clear about whether we are doing away with bullying, or just switching up players and who gets to be on top." Now, I'd say the answer is unavoidable.
Great article, Gato; gracias! As a NorCal public school teacher of 38 years, my conclusions: "US public education: Bullshit to train stupefied work animals. Introduction: defining ‘bullshit,’ demanding comprehensive, objective, and independently-verifiable factual accuracy everywhere in Life, along with freedom to authentically respond (1 of 12)" http://web.archive.org/web/20191001051023/https://washingtonsblog.com/2016/06/us-public-education-bullshit-train-stupefied-work-animals-introduction-defining-bullshit-demanding-comprehensive-objective-independently-verifiable-factual-accuracy-ever.html
And: "Challenging our public school district’s obedience to county ‘health’ ‘orders’: My reflections after 2 years of tragic-comic district refusals to answer BASIC and REQUIRED questions, Orwellian lies, ‘official’ obfuscations + colleagues’ ‘taking a knee’ to propaganda = humanity’s need for ‘friends in high places’ to prevent massive child sacrifices to psychopathic prima facie-criminal ‘public serpents’ (59 of ?)" https://carlbherman.blogspot.com/2022/07/challenging-our-public-school-districts.html
“but it’s enough to make them dominant even as a deranged shouty minority”
If a deranged shouty minority is dominant, it’s not the minority that is the problem.
Stand up against deranged shouty minorities!
Ignore the hell out of them.
No. That's the mistake we've been making. Ignoring them. We need to fight back - HARD
There’s a difference between ignoring and trying to pretend the don’t exist.
Damn straight! I agree 100 %
Ignoring doesn't always work. In situations in which the squeaky wheel gets the grease, we have to be squeakier.
Oh, I’ve ignored flailing trans folks in supermarkets and in other public places.
Trust me, my ignoring them squeaks LOUD AND CLEAR!
Yeah, I'm sure in that case it's very effective. I'm thinking about when they are loudly demanding policy changes, in which case we need to avoid remaining "riders on the subway all trying to stay quiet while the crazy guy who reeks like piss and has this pants on his head harangues them in a glossolalia fusillade that no one (least of all he himself) understands but that no one wants to interrupt for fear of him turning on them."
Right. That’s pretending something doesn’t exist. Not a good look.
I’m talking about actively ignoring. Knowing they’re there, but giving them no credence whatsoever.
It’s delicious.
As a K12 teacher, what you've written here is inaccurate. Please pump the brakes on the dogma and the culture wars talking points.
The public school system is deeply broken, but not for the reasons you've mentioned. Schools are breaking because society is broken. School is not a business where you get uniform input A and produce uniform output B. Every student is different, and increasingly students are coming to school traumatized by the conditions of poverty and want. 10 million children are currently food-insecure, a number that has increased dramatically since 2008. Homeownership and the middle class have been eviscerated. It's really hard to learn if you're hungry, if your parents are too busy working to care for you, if your home is permeated by financial anxiety at all times, if your neighborhood is violent.
All of these things come to school with children. All of these things require more time, patience, and technical skills as a professional educator. This translates to higher costs, and/or lower scores. It makes sense that education budgets have gone up while outcomes have fallen: the inputs are changing. Education does not work like the private sector. Period.
Some of the things you said are true, certainly. Unions are problematic, administrative grift and bloat is a real concern, etc. But the biggest challenge schools face comes from outside our walls: more social problems, and funding/resources failing to keep pace. We don't need shareholder returns siphoning even more resources from students.
The free market would not provide a better education. Charter schools currently pretend they're better than public schools by selecting the best students and pumping out impressive scores, while the public schools have a higher concentration of difficult students. The comparisons are lovely for investor presentations, but the community is worse off. Some charters are great, but the free market model is not a silver bullet for America's education problems. IMHO, you need a mix depending on the needs of each community.
But organizing our education system entirely around profit and a family's ability to pay is guaranteed to entrench power on the one hand, and squalor on the other. We already see it with the college admissions scandals. Rich kids will go to good schools, poor kids will go to schools where the profit margins are thinner, and therefore the quality of schools are lower. "Efficiency" is great for markets, but not everything works like a market. Schools are one of those things.
My district is about to open its first charter. Here's what will happen. The kids who can get the best test scores will flow to the new school. The student body at the public schools will decrease, so some percentage of teachers will be forced to go to the new school for lower pay. The public school's scores will decline because we have a higher concentration of difficult students. The charter will use the juxtaposition to market itself and further erode the public school, even though the quality of education isn't actually better. Teacher burnout will increase at both schools (low pay at the charter, tougher jobs at the public), so professional quality and consistency will plummet. It will be harder to convince talented young adults to get into the profession, too, because of lower average pay. And the students lose every step of the way.
this appears to be a laundry list of made up facts and presumed conclusions to defend a failing system from the inside.
schools are not "traumatized by poverty" to some unprecedented degree. recent decades have had the least poverty in american history.
the kids in schools are unsafe there, fail to learn basic skills, and education has slid into indoctrination.
name 3 products that the government provides better than a free market. it would be trivial to do so much better with schools. take the same money spent now, give each kid a $15k voucher, and let them spend it as they like. let schools experiment, specialize, and learn what works. most of all, make them compete and the level will rise massively. competition breeds competence.
charter schools are made to compete on an uneven field with less money and loads of overwhelming regulation and overhead. that's not free market, it's stifling real competition .
education absolutely works like the private sector. everything does. there are no "special cases" immune from the rules of economics and human behavior and if this is what's being taught, you're only further convincing me of the desperate need for change.
sounds to me like you're just invested in perpetuating the problem.
if your system is so good and effective and cannot be outperformed, why does it fear competition?
"schools are not "traumatized by poverty" to some unprecedented degree. recent decades have had the least poverty in american history." I don't know where cats like you live, but there is a poverty problem here in the United States. Blox has hands on experience and makes some very good points. I'm not even a teacher but I could imagine and understand how difficult and sad it would be to try and teach anything to a classroom full of kids where probably half of them live under the constant anxiety of financially stressed out parents. The reason I am pointing this out is because it is always a subject that is overlooked in education.
It's always uplifting to hear about someone that has overcome personal obstacles. I admire the fact that you had the foresight and determination to take a miserable situation and use it as leverage to push your way out of it. That's a wise kid.
Homie. Your entire article is a "laundry list of made-up facts and presumed conclusions." My comment is no more or less academic than this publication. You sound like someone who knows very little about education, and after reading some talking points you've decided you have it figured out. Maybe have some humility? Talk with people who are engaging in good-faith and have more industry knowledge than you do? No one knows less than the man who thinks he has nothing to learn.
I can easily come up with things the government does better. Let's go with infrastructure. Imagine you're building a 5G network. Three companies will build 3x the necessary towers in cities to serve the biggest customer base, and few if any in rural areas with low ROI. A public project would not have those constraints and incentives, and would build the right amount of towers for everyone everywhere. Once built, operation can go to the private sector for higher efficiency and better customer service.
The government is better at mass scale, resilience, and democratization of access; markets are better at efficiency, which often comes at the expense of resilience and broad access. Therefore, hybrid markets do things best.
If you think what schools need is another drain on resources via shareholder returns, you are gravely mistaken.
i love how the people who start by attacking and calling people "dangerous" suddenly call for "humility" when challenged.
i doubt very much you have more relevant knowledge here than i do, but the appeal to you own authority is also fun.
seems like you're just used to being the "authority figure" and are struggling to argue by more than assertion.
you think government cell phones would be better than the incredibly cheap, incredibly effective, rapidly improving and near universally available private systems that provide staggering value for money despite operating under outlandish regulatory constraint? because now you're walking onto a field where you obviously do not understand they systems or the outcomes. if the government had not run the phone company as monopoly, we'd have had internet in the 70's and 80's. you literally could not be more wrong in your claims and have chosen perhaps the most inapt example possible. (and one i know in great detail from end to end)
you also exhibit the classic statist/socialist blind spot of presumed knowledge that does not and cannot exist. you just assume that there is some "optimal" configuration instead of trade offs and that whatever this is can be known by people who have no means to collect such information, no objective structure by which to weigh it, and no incentive to get it right.
"we'll just put smart people in charge and they will decide and do the right thing for everyone" is one of the most failed doctrines in human history.
you seem to have no basic understanding of markets at all and are just vilifying them from incomprehension.
the discipline of markets is what creates consumer sovereignty and producer efficacy. your argument that "shareholder profit" is somehow a net drain on outcomes is wildly wrong. apply that to computers or cars. yeah.
it sound to me like you have swallowed the statist top-down doctrine hook and sinker and fail to understand that your standard of living and the quality of that which you consume comes from markets, not government.
Well handled, Gato.
The first rule of collectivism: Never, ever question the collective.
Markets are not disciplined. Economist Steve Keen has proved this decisively, as have many others over the decades.
Markets are over-exuberant during good times. The private banking system creates massive amounts of new credit chasing high yields, and the speculative feedback loop inflates asset values beyond their productive capacity. Invariably growth fails to keep pace with debt obligations in some sector of the economy (often in finance because they can create their own leverage for securities and other derivatives, which all depend on continued good times). The leverage creates systemic risks, the good times can't go on forever, and down we go. Along the way, much of the capital is misallocated to speculative assets like derivatives and investment properties rather than productive enterprises.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/keen-steve-berlin-paper.pdf
But I digress. You'll never hear me argue that the state is great. Fuck the state. I'm not delusional about government, and I'm not delusional about the infallibility of free markets, either. It's all dogma, and I don't play that.
Unless we can eliminate all hierarchical systems, including the state but also money and property rights, there must be balance. Too much power anywhere is tyranny.
this is a bizarre take so orthogonal that it's not even wrong, it's just non-responsive to the issue. you keep pointing to equity markets (and keen is totally wrong about them, i'm read his work and it's a mashup of bad math and misattribution of central bank and regulatory issues to the private sector, esp around things like CRA and the GSE's) but we're talking about a market for a product. you do not get this kind of bubble there (and rarely in private ones absent gov't meddling as has bee the case since 2000.
assets are not "misallocated" to derivatives and derivatives ARE productive. they hedge risk. someone is using them to generate liquidity and their game is zero sum so it nets out. they do not consume capital on an aggregate basis.
you seem to be getting your takes here from people who have no grasp of capital markets and then trying to presume that capital markets are somehow interchangeable for "a market for goods and services" which does not make any sense.
seems like this is just spiraling into fully irrelevant takes and appeals to "if it's not perfect then planning can make it better" fallacies.
will leave you to it.
I'm simply critiquing your dogmatic faith in unregulated markets. Reality cannot and will not conform to your ideology.
Here's an on-topic question.
We're not just talking about individuals and their pursuit of happiness with education. We're talking about putting the highest-quality people into the workforce regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, cultivating innovators and leaders regardless of zip code. Investments in human capital pay off at a rate estimated at 7:1, calculating both the addition of a well-educated workforce and the subtraction of costly social issues.
But a long-term investment in the capacity of all citizens -- regardless of circumstances, profitability, or geography -- simply is not incentivized in unregulated capital markets. At least as far as I can tell. So here's the question.
Can you imagine the market mechanisms by which unregulated capital markets would be incentivized to give every child in the country a high-quality education, regardless of geography and their ability to pay? Because $15,000 per child isn't going to cut it. A school is not a business. The inputs (children) have different needs, learning styles, everything.
There might be examples of such things, but this isn’t one of them. Companies will not build “3x the necessary towers in cities”. Companies do not waste money building things that are unnecessary. On the other hand, companies WILL build infrastructure in rural areas if there’s sufficient demand. But the tradeoff when you live in a rural area is that it takes more cost/effort to get things, all else being equal. At the margin, that means some things won’t be available, or will be available only at a higher cost.
Government does the same thing, except it response to political rather than monetary incentives (although the two may coincide). So it will serve politically powerful constituencies. It’s still chasing ROI but measured in a different currency. Granted: this does mean the government is “better” at doing cost-ineffective things, but the fact that they're cost-ineffective is a signal that they shouldn't be done in the first place.
If AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all build towers separately, then yes, you will get roughly 3x the necessary number of towers in urban areas so each provider can deliver good service to the largest block of customers.
The second half of your argument boils down to: fuck everyone who wants to live in a rural area, they should just move to the city. Interesting position.
Most of us who live in rural areas do so at least in part because we don’t want to rely on the government nor to have them dictate every little detail of our lives. I am glad that we went years without internet where I live, because no doubt the government internet would have been unreliable and slow as is pretty much everything the government touches. Now I can get StarLink which is light years better than anything I would have got from government run internet. There was and is a huge market for internet in rural areas and yeah it took some time, but now the internet available in many rural areas is far better than the internet available in our urban areas. So please please please when you are arguing in favor of government control of anything do not drag rural communities into this.
"If AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all build towers separately, then yes, you will get roughly 3x the necessary number of towers in urban areas so each provider can deliver good service to the largest block of customers."
---------
I love how you assume that you know the 'correct' numbers of towers to build, and that one tower can OBVIOUSLY deliver good service to all customers -- if only government built it.
Glad I’ve got you to tell me what my position is. I thought it was an ordinary common-sense observation about tradeoffs. But it turns out it actually “boils down to” a cartoonish straw man that you can dismiss with a smug handwave. You can imagine my chagrin. (eyeroll)
Companies don’t like wasting money, so why are they building three times the necessary capacity in urban areas? The answer is… they aren’t. They’ve already figured this out. You’re just ignorant of how they do it. We’re not running a seminar on telecom industry economics here, so I’m not going to get into the weeds explaining it to you. But the fact that you don’t know or understand how this works doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, still less that the government would do it better.
People in rural areas with lower population density generally have less access to goods and services, or pay more for them (in economic terms it’s the same thing). This is just physics. Stuff has to move farther in rural areas, and that doesn’t happen by magic. Someone has to pay for it somehow. So yeah, if you don’t like that, then move to the city – where you get to deal with a whole different set of downside costs. As a great man said, in real life there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. (And since people value things differently, there's no one right tradeoff for everybody.)
What your position boils down to (ahem) is that people in rural areas shouldn’t have to make tradeoffs, and everyone else should subsidize their choices by covering their downside costs. This is an intelligible position, I suppose. You haven’t begun to make an argument for it, but that's the argument you have to make. Or you can stick with childish emotionalism and barely-disguised special pleading. Readers, in the unlikely event we have any, can judge for themselves.
Your public school takes money out of my pocket to pay for other people's kids to utterly fail at learning while I have to pay for my children's homeschool where they do quite well. There simply is no justification for that.
I experience a second version of that: I have no children, yet I am forced to pay for the school system used by other people's children. To my knowledge, there is not a single location I could choose to live that does not have a school district that is funded by tax money -- I either pay it or I lose my home.
This is a 5-year-old's understanding of economics, society, taxes, and education.
Ad hominem devoid of a single coherent idea from a public school teacher, who'd have thought the discussion would devolve to that so quickly?
Yeah, I'm not trying to write a book in these comments, but much of your misunderstanding can be boiled down to the fact that you seem to forget you live in a society.
Homeschooling tends to work well in homes where one parent can stay home, when that parent is well-educated. It does not work well when both parents must be employed to pay the bills, and/or have poor educations. Homeschooling as a solution therefore entrenches power at one end, and squalor at the other: rich kids have a great experience, poor kids suffer.
If it works for you, great. I'm not saying homeschool is bad, just that it won't work for everyone. Now we get back to my point about living in a society. The children getting a poor education now -- be it at home, or at a public school -- will soon be voters, neighbors, citizens. Refusing to invest in an education system that serves all means you're going to have a bunch of dumb, shitty neighbors that will make your life miserable.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of public ed, but divesting from it is not a good solution for a society. We should try to figure out how to FIX the problems.
We are happy to invest in children's education. Throwing money at public schools is throwing money down the drain. A failed, politicized, unresponsive monolith. Since you dont know that, YOU are the one who doesnt understand what it takes to have a healthy society
The free market can't solve the challenge of education in the 21st century. Market-based education means that poor neighborhoods will get worse schools. That exacerbates inequality.
Inequality does affect you. If talented kids get trapped in bad zip codes, bad schools, etc., the economy loses countless potential innovators and leaders. Instead they become criminals and cost society through policing, incarceration, broken families, productivity loss, etc.
We need to fix public education because we need a system that cultivates talent regardless of zip code.
Abraham Lincoln went to a small, private school sporadically and largely educated himself through reading and the encouragement of his mother. He was a day laborer in an extremely poor family that spent an entire year living in what was essentially a lean-to. Since he didn't attend a public school, he must have been a menace to society by your theory. I'm sure we could have expected more of him if he had attended a modern public school.
Your entire argument for the benefit of public schools to society would make a lot more sense to me if the public schools achieved any reasonable academic goals for their students. Instead, they focus on politically correct issues and empirically failed ideas like whole word reading. From your other comments I see that you have a lot of excuses for this and lay blame on any students who manage to escape for lowering the quality of their remaining peers education-- as if public school education were some sort of mutual suicide pact. In that at least I agree with you!
You will NEVER hear me make an "always" argument, so your claim that "Lincoln must be a menace by [my] logic" is a strawman. There are always exceptions. Lincoln was one of the great men of history. We are all fortunate for his success, but it's not a model for education.
I have stated it before and I'll state it again: public education IS broken. But that doesn't mean we should abandon public education, because societies without public education are terrible. We need to fix what we have. Leaving it to markets is basically creating a caste system, whereby people who can afford a good education get credentialed for high status, and everyone else languishes in bad schools and lifelong poverty.
I already have dumb sh*tty neighbors that make my life miserable. They’re called Products of the Government School System.
"You seem to forget that you live in a society." Your collectivist worldview taints every argument you try to make.
Funny. I'm sitting here laughing at how one-dimensional and short-sighted one's thinking must be to believe that a mass of individuals pursuing maximum self -interest makes a good society, to believe that one tool (markets) are the best solution to all macro problems. It's hilarious. Just blind, stubborn, quasi-religious zealots.
HAHAHAhHa ⚔👊
When you can’t make an argument, call them names. And this, from “inside education”.
Then it should be easy for you to point out the actual error, yes?
Actually, it's not easy to bring a 5-year-old's understanding to a complex and nuanced understanding. It seems you misunderstand the challenges of education, as well.
Poor you, blox. Alone in the world of complex, nuanced understanding.
Oh my. What an epic fail. Gaslight on.
Anyone who doesn't disagree with you, you accuse of having a five-year-old's understanding. That sounds pretty immature to me.
This is just a compilation of union talking points -
You have not addressed the woke indoctrination nonsense like CRT, gender theory, and relentless social activism. The dumbing down of standards. Discrimination in the name of "equity."
Schools provide breakfast and lunch to children who don't get enough to eat at home.
Charter schools mostly use lotteries. They don't select the best students. Why can't you tell the truth?
The free market and competition are the only way out of this horrible monopoly
After they use the lotteries, they systematically get rid of students who are too difficult and send them back to us. We get a massive influx of students through Oct-Dec, kids who weren't going to pad numbers at a charter school and got kicked back to us.
I don't go to union meetings, I only pay dues for legal representation in case I'm wrongly sued / defamed. I'm speaking from professional experience and personal research. Take your ad hominems back to Reddit where they belong.
The numbers prove you are not telling the truth. Please provide an example of a charter school like Success Academy in NY, which is villified by union hacks in exactly this way for its success with poor minority students, sending "massive" numbers of students back. They dont. The numbers are tiny.
Please point out the claimed ad hominem attacks in my post. There are none. In case your "well educated" self does not know the meaning of that term, it means personal attacks.
So - Please take your propaganda to the MSM where it belongs.
blox uses ad hominem attacks, doesn't provide evidence of his claims, etc., then turns around and accuses his opponents of doing so.
This is just incorrect. My kids go to a charter school that is public (CA), but has a lottery. The school is approx 50% latino. The kids with the most problems do not have Parents Active enough in their kids lives (likely do to Dual-incomes and very busy parents). There are various other reasons; English as 2nd language, too much screen time, unbridled web activity, lack of appropriate kid boundaries, grammy fell asleep and didn't watch the kids, etc.
The school does not kick out the low performers.
The education board has lowered the standard for testing criteria.
Thanks to the State gov.
I have taught at public schools and charter schools. My kids have attended public schools, private schools, and homeschool.
You making a blanket statement about charter schools just shows your adherence to the pro-public (non-charter) school narrative. I quit my job at a charter school precisely because they refused to get rid of problem students, and those problem students made it next to impossible for me to best serve the other students there who wanted to learn.
OMG, if I hear or read “food insecure/insecurity” one more time . . . !
Just say they come to school starving!
Or are they really not starving?
"Food-insecure" is more accurate than "starving." They're not necessarily starving, but they can't count on their next meal. Some days they're very hungry, other days they're not. They are always anxious about food, which causes self-esteem and mental health issues. They tend to get poor nutrition because processed food products made from low-quality inputs are cheap.
None of this is captured by the term "starving." Sorry not sorry that precise definitions make you angry.
"They are always anxious about food, which causes self-esteem and mental health issues."
Amazing how Man developed to this point at all.
Yes, it is amazing that in the wealthiest nation in human history, 10 million children (at least) are food-insecure. How did man develop to this point? Now you're asking the right questions.
I asked nothing.
Too bad. The smartest person in the room is the one with the best questions. Guess you're the other guy.
"Food insecure" is a dishonest way to inflate numbers of children "needing" help from government programs, which feed kids garbage processed food, and count their success by numbers of bags of processed garbage they hand out to kids, much of which gets tossed in the trash, and much of which creates excess amounts of trash.
Speaking from experience in school programs in which kids are "fed" by the government.
Many current and former public school teachers disagree with you. You talk about school not being a business in which you can input A to get output B, and about students being different, yet the vast majority of schools do NOT have a model that adequately individualizes to best meet the needs of each student.
I agree, schools are not doing a great job and there are lots of improvements to be made. But the free market won't solve it.
the market has been the only large scale solution to every single case of serving human need from agriculture to dishwashers. what else has had any large long term effect to raise quality and standards of living?
simply claiming over and over that it does not work is not a compelling case. it's a sign of dogmatic reality denial.
Simply claiming over and over that markets are the only large scale solution to all human problems is incredibly dogmatic (and historically ignorant). Do you even hear yourself? I'm here arguing for hybrid markets, and I provided a good example with 5G. You sound like an ideologue... you are committed to an ideology, and you cannot accept that reality might deviate from theory.
no, you didn't. you picked perhaps the most outlandishly wrong example in human history.
cell phones, landlines, internet, all of it failed to emerge because of government monopoly and then flourished once regulation was loosened.
you are literally making up facts and obviously understand neither 5g nor markets.
The government invented the internet, bro.
Government intervention and regulations are often incredibly harmful -- no arguments there. I'm not an ideologue. Everything is complicated. There are no absolutes. That's what I'm trying to communicate to you.
Public ownership of infrastructure tends to be positive for the economy and the people living there. To deny this is to deny the history of human civilization.
And I'm not a socialist or a statist. I'm an anarchist. Prominent anarchists like Emma Goldman observe that the tyranny of Soviet Russia was matched by American business oligarchy. Anarchists therefore support the abolition of the state, as well as money and property rights. Abolishing one without the others is just shifting the locus of power to a different tyrant. Unless we can eliminate all three, balance is essential.
That's an opinion, not a fact.
It is an opinion, but it's a well-educated opinion both from personal research and professional experience.
It cant be well educated when the facts we can see with our own eyes say otherwise.
Your eyes tell you "the free market is solving the education problem"? Because if so your eyes are stupid.
What utter bollocks.
Impoverished children "can't learn"? Really?
You mean like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Clarence Thomas?
Charter schools are "free market". Really?
Charter schools are *government* funded. This is the *opposite* of the free market.
"Indeed, organizing our education system around profit and a family's ability to pay is guaranteed to entrench power on the one hand, and squalor on the other."
Is that so?
How private schools are serving the poorest - Pauline Dixon at TEDxGlasgow, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzv4nBoXoZc
It is nonsense like yours, from a purported "teacher" no less, that drove my parents to send me to private schools and me to do the same for mine.
Shame on you.
Exceptions prove the rule.
Nice evasion and own goal.
Does it not occur to you that failing to make even a single substantiated counterargument validates everything I wrote?
Or that the rule in this case is that government "education" is a national disaster, that is proved by the exceptions I listed?
Thanks for making my point.
If you actually paid for your "education", perhaps you should petition your alma mater for a refund.
Lord have mercy.
All of those things have always cometo school with the students.
Difference was in days past, the students were supposed and required to leave those issue on the coathanger so to speak.
As time and empirical results have proven, the school systems of western nations (or european descendent nations or whatever moniker you prefer) were far superior before the 1960s.
The nation-state or eq. provided tax-funded buildings and staff, sometimes material for poorer students for a basic education; 6-8 years at most starting at age 5-6. This was because private corporate capital and actual demands for (industrial/agricultural) labour more or less mandated it to be so. Beyond the basics, trade schools and privately funded universities took care of the rest.
That older model was by far superior because the incentives were stacked right and the selection pressure was meritocratic to a much higher degree than today.
And the number one factor: teachers actually taught skills and knowledge and the system ensured the students had to work and work hard to make it through: it was made as hard as necessary to provide results. Kid won't study and the parents ain't on the ball for whatever excuse?
Not the school's fault. Not the teacher's responsibility. That attitude needs a comeback with a vengeance.
(Retired after about 25 years as a teacher, all ages but mostly 18+ and HFAs, if that matters.)
I work with teachers who have been in classrooms for 25-30 years, even longer. All of them tell me that more kids come to school with bigger problems than ever before. I'm telling you, things are changing.
The Great Financial Crisis has been absolutely devastating. If you acknowledge that the hollowing out of American industry and the middle class contributed to the fentanyl crisis in rural areas, similar forces are wrecking havoc on families, students, and schools.
You may be correct on this. Is it not possible that the teachers are changing too?
Yes, inadequate teacher pay is a real problem. If you want good teachers, you have to offer a good salary. Otherwise, talented young people will run to the private sector, and for good reason. Why invest in a Masters degree to do one of the most difficult jobs in the country for $45,000? It's insane. Of course you're going to get bad teachers. If you want high-quality employees, you need to offer a competitive salary.
Don’t know where you are referring to. Let me school you about teachers salaries in suburban Phila. They are among the wealthiest folks around. Over 100k for 180 days of work per year. Compare with the private sector where talented young people are lucky to get two weeks vacation. Most of those with “Masters” are not in subject but in some area of ed. once upon a time teaching was a calling, like a vocation. Those teachers were not thinking about coparing themselves to “ private sector” employees. They wanted to teach. See the difference?
These days the right is all up in arms about ideological teachers, right?
Maybe if you want highly qualified teachers instead, you should think about how a low salary only attracts the most "passionate" people, who are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to promote the agenda they're passionate about. See how that works?
No. A lot of people do what they feel is their calling and still get a reasonable, living wage for it. It can /should be less than the private sector, but not as far off as it is.
Philly sounds like an exception. I've taught in CO and NY, with a MA. My starting salaries were $48k and $44k, respectively. That is not competitive. It will cause good people to burn out.
We live in capitalism. We all have bills, we all have dreams. If you want more talented people doing something, you pay a better salary. If you don't like the quality of teachers and you're not willing to raise pay, you're delusional. Many young people doing a cost/benefit analysis will flinch, and every time that happens you lose a high-quality teacher.
This is how labor markets work. You can pout about how it should be about "passion" all you want, but you'll never fix the problem.
The sheer number of autistic children in the school system right now is shocking!
An epidemic in plain sight with all involved pretending there is no smoking gun.
How does a teacher address these needs without catering to the most challenged students at the expense of average and gifted students' needs?
The fact that you call an opinion "dangerous" is very telling.
Read what I said. When people get caught up in the idea that the free market can fix schools, it ruins districts and makes the community worse off. It is dangerous. I've seen it happen. It's happening now.
The idea that government can fix anything at this point is a joke. They can only create problems they will later exclaim the need to fix on your dime
Words like "only" and "always" are favorites of ideologues. People who dogmatically cling to an ideology, using it to bludgeon contradictory facts out of sight and mind, are usually wrong.
Name a problem government has fixed that they didn't first create.
Slavery.
blox - Oh, so now it's the private schools and homeschooling causing the public school problems. Just admit it, you/your system can't stand being compared to a private entity that lays bare some of the rot in public education. Case in point - just ask your public school system to define what a woman is. They can't? Well isn't that just special. And you think it is the private schools and homeschoolers with the problem? (I will admit there are still some mostly rural areas that know there is a difference between men and women).
If you think education can be boiled down to whatever Matt Walsh is screeching about, you are clueless about education. Period.
Actually, Elizabeth Warren and Ketanji Brown Jackson, products of your vaulted public schools, are screeching about it last time I looked.
I am a product of public schools (of long ago) that were very good and have been a lifelong educator. The difference is that when I was in school (and we had plenty of poor people and none more than middle class) ALL were expected to perform. If you did not, you stayed and worked until you did. No one was entitled to anything -- as some earlier poster said, those things were hung on the coathook.
We are now struggling through the greatest diminution of meritocracy of my lifetime and perhaps of history. We have switched accepting medical students from ability to learn and ability to understand the meaning of being called/putting patients first to demographic and SJW scores. After protestations that this would all be fine...it wasn't (shocked, I know) so all medical schools are now pass/fail. And then because national boards showed how bad it all had become, they just went to pass/fail as well.
The abolition of meritocracy for a boatload of excuses (same ones in K-12 as in higher ed) is foundational to all other problems. What giving people a choice will do is allow them to opt for meritocracy -- and most people of any color and socioeconomic class will do so. If it is best in the public schools -- THEY WILL CHOOSE THEM. If it is not, you are hoist by your own petard. This does not seem to me to be hard to understand. People like homeschools primarily because they are generally learning meritocracy focused. If the public schools stopped making excuses and ran like they did when I attended, the carping would stop. Until then, Gato is completely correct, I believe.
So understanding of basic biology is not a strong suit and you think someone should trust you to educate their kids?
This is true but if money followed the kid parents can choose a school. They will pop up and they will compete for that money. Mega schools will go away as they should!
Actually it's the other way around: choice *creates* mega-schools. A few schools with easier student bodies and better marketing teams have huge waiting lists, and the other schools see rapid capital flight. Faced with mounting financial problems and worsening reputations they close, putting even more pressure on a few schools to manage all students.
False. That is simply not true. Please show me a mega-school that is not a public school.
They can't close down all the public schools, so yes: when a district is in the late-stage of a charter takeover, you will see the last remaining public schools get massive. This is a consequence of the charter/performance eval/capital flight problem.
Not sure how we change over but change over we must. The teacher's union must be broken up. All of it will take time as it took decades upon decades to get where we are now. All I know is that it is a mess and has been for a long time. Happy people are starting to notice but this is not a new problem. I believed school choice was always the answer. Take the power away from the government and let parents have more say in all aspects of their children's lives. Government overregulating everything has been a disaster.
It seems to me that the public education system is so broken that it would essentially have to be torn down to the studs and completely rebuilt to be usable. I am inundated by teachers among my family and friends so I understand a lot of what you are talking about. But the rot is so deep and so extensive I’m not sure I see a process for renovation and maybe just bulldozing everything and starting over is what’s necessary.
So in your opinion how do we fix the current system? Do we abolish the Dept of Ed and make school districts entirely the purview of state and local governments? Do we make educator’s unions illegal? Does anything we do with the school system even matter since from what you say most of the problems are from things outside the school’s control like poverty and a shitty home life.
Doesn’t the current system of funding public schools result in the exact same concentration of resources you are worried about occurring in the private sector? It’s just applied to communities rather than families in the current system. Schools are funded in large part through property taxes so even now the more wealthy kids in the burbs are getting better schools than the kids from the hood. What is a better way to fund schools?
I very much see where you are coming from when you describe the cultural and societal issues that are adversely effecting students. I also understand the concern that a completely privatized system would leave a large segment of students behind. But in the current situation everyone is pulled down by the lowest functioning students. Currently many of our public schools are not fulfilling their duty for any students. So maybe a system that fulfills it’s duty to 50% of the students is a reasonable answer.
In many ways in a local context I agree with you. Simply abandoning public schools usually isn’t the answer. But that’s easy for me to say. I live in a rural area with small schools where a few people who actually care and are driven can make a huge difference. I live in a conservative county and state which makes change achievable. But at the same time I recognize that such change is simply impossible in many areas and as you pointed out the votes of the kids in the crappy public schools elsewhere will vastly outnumber my kid’s votes. So maybe burn it all down is the least worst option. I cannot think of any perfect solution that will provide high quality education to every single child in the US, but maybe a system where at least some of the children are able to get a good education is a start or a step in the right direction.
Thank you for disagreeing in good faith and being a reasonable person. Wow.
There really aren't any good solutions, because the problems are much bigger than the schools. I honestly think a hybrid, localized approach is best. I love what you're doing in your area, sounds awesome. It wouldn't work everywhere. Some places like NYC have benefited from the addition of charters like Success, although that program only got good after a lawsuit ended their practice of mass expelling kids who wouldn't score well. It required checks and balances through a state apparatus, the judiciary. Other places need public investment because the tax base simply cannot afford quality schools and educators. If they're struggling that means they need help.
The dogma in these comments about ending public education and replacing it with market-based education is intellectually lazy and historically tonedeaf. If you think one political ideology is the unerringly correct approach to all of society's challenges, you're wrong. It's that simple.
You're a teacher, and you wrote that first sentence ??
It might be true that kids are in trouble when you get them, but you're making it 100 times worse.
No, I'm not. My students improve their reading and writing scores significantly above the average for our region, and that's because I teach them everything from annotation to syntax, in Social Studies.
Here's some fun data for you. Parents tend to rate their local schools very favorably, but they rank public education in general very unfavorably. We get a lot of propaganda from the national press about how bad schools are, but when people actually go to their local schools they tend to like them. The national press loves to take isolated incidents and generalize them, but it's rarely generalizable.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-do-americans-rate-their-local-public-schools-so-favorably/
Now I'll be the first to admit public education is broken and flawed and needs a total overhaul. I've said it many times in these comments. But you can't get rid of public education. Going whole hog on market-based education is as good as creating a caste system. You can't make access contingent on your ability to pay when it comes to education.
Much better to make access contingent on your proximity to the "elites" and their ability to get you out of the public school system.
You ain't wrong there. But the answer is to fix public schools.
If your students come to school already suffering from their difficult home situations, why do these folks continue to vote D election after election? Might another philosophy improve those pre school situations? How do you vote?
I'm all for the removal of entrenched credentialing/accreditation systems, but would be pleasantly surprised to see anyone in the center sign off on it. Yet it's not only ideal but necessary for any semblance of school choice to avoid worse demonic possession than what we've already seen. I remember this being my biggest disagreement with Friedman in Free to Choose, having the benefit of greater hindsight. An approval system of any sort seems eminently reasonable but becomes the chief invincible vector of capture since it is most difficult to abolish.
Absolutely. The current move in many states to tie funds to "students not systems" has the devil in the details. Homeschoolers take the funds and can only spend on accredited programs. The accreditation bodies are the source of much of this evil, and what few aren't yet are easily captured. Everything Friedman said about vouchers has been undermined by accreditors; those institutions and school baords and recommenders are no different than the FDA in terms of regulatory capture. We'd have been safer with no agency at all. The same is true for education.
We successfully got rid of orphanages (for better or worse.) and replaced with a foster system. Public funded schools should only be schools of last resort for kids without any parental units. No money for schools at all, and only school-foster kids get vouchers given to families to school them however they wish. Yes this sounds absurd but so was the invention of state run schools. Had the mid and western US states come into being at any other point in history, they wouldn't have written public ed into their state constitutions.
Agreed. Like all public WELFARE programs, public schools have become a grift and a means of indoctrination. Public school should at the very most be a program for the most needy- not the default. Moreover, it should be funded from a general fund - NOT property taxes.
when I came to the US I was surprised how kids here have to go to a certain school, that there is no choice until age 18. The European countries let you free to send your child to your choice of school. Of course they don't have buses, so you have to get the child there. But that is IMO a small price to pay.
Open in app or online
I like the quote about civilisation, that it is a kind of self-control. Unfortunately very little people are civilized lately
Ha funnily enough when I came to Europe from the USA I was surprised by the lack of standard curriculum until 18. Even though I understood the rationale, I still thought everyone should get a liberal arts background to produce more well rounded citizens. But after those losers completely dropped the ball on critical thinking and ethics, I decided the vocational learners deserve WAY more respect than I gave them. I am leaning away from even allowing my child to attend university. What for in heaven’s name? So she can betray her parents first and her country after that??
Let the Child make it simple for us...
America's fast declining highly complex educational system is a clear reflection of the fragmented American mind.. a mind now prone to contagions such as Woke.. Trans.. partisan politics.. over stimulation.. being drugged up.. reactive.. fear porn... sex porn... instability... add to that a grossly unhealthy lifestyle.. Social Apps.. and AI.. Oh Boy what a mess..
Perhaps the most Glaring examples of Educational Corruption in America is Big Pharma's Greed driven highjacking of our Medical schools turning Dr.s into Drug dealers... as shown during the Plandemic their practice to often a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath..
American education systems are more about Conditioning and Fragmentation into more and more narrow views of life and more volatile states of being.. there is hardly a trace of Wholeness in the American system top to bottom... There is little mention of the Importance of Inquiry... the Importance of All Life.. the importance of Meditation, What is the Actuality of Love? Who am I? What is thought? What is Truth? What is Enlightenment? What is Unconditional Absolute Truth? What is Unconditional Absolute Freedom? What is the origin of Violence? What is Excellence?
To clean this system up Americans must make the Realization that Education starts in the Home..
The parents job is to light the Educational fire... with Real daily involvement... todays parent must be on top of what their child is reading, listening to, who their friends are..
Sit down at the dinner table everyday and turn OFF the devices.. find out what they are curious about while eating together... engage them in conversation they will respond..
Get the child out in nature even as a baby.. Nurture their ability to Inquire and do difficult things.. Teach them to function in nature without any electronic junk... The child will take it from there..
Short of the coming revolution, thousands of Galt's gulches may be the way to swing the pendulum.
Yes, I’m having similar thoughts. I’m making a new life for myself in Guatemala. I don’t believe that there is any way that our culture and country don’t end in disaster. What will follow? I don’t know. My children, still living in the US, are of like mind but the challenges of exiting the system and the country are too much for them to contemplate right now. I see “Galt’s Gulches” as an escape route not a means of effecting change from within.
You got out while the getting's still good. Smart choice. We are Not going to change "from within" the system what's happening in Mystery Babylon America and in other places. We are under the Judgement of God
And I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren. I hope I’m leading the way.
It is in God's hands. Pray for them and turn the worry into trust in God for the outcome. He is always fair and just. The Prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
Its nearly impossible to visit classrooms in most schools now. That's on purpose. Any school that tells YOU the parent that YOU can't see your own child in his classroom without a background check is a school you need to leave. Right now at once immediately.
But if you get to set foot inside, you would see the slovenliness of the students. They wear their pajamas to school. You'd see the staff they hire aren't capable of stringing together a coherent sentence. You would see elementary schools with silent lunch and no talking allowed during carpool pickup. You would see KGB-TQIA+ posters everywhere but no math ever. Funniest thing my kid saw when he went to take the PSAT was a poster that said "Don't say Gay! Say "stupid" "dumb" "lame" "loser" ..."(and a few more I can't remember.) My kid came home laughing "synonyms, what are they?"
Schools are prisons. Free your kids.
Next week: Don't say "loser"!