Rethinking accountability in the wake of the pandemic.
This event has exposed a lot of shibboleths.
14 thoughts on “K-12 Education”
Comments are closed.
Rethinking accountability in the wake of the pandemic.
This event has exposed a lot of shibboleths.
Comments are closed.
Does anyone understand the fad of teachers driving by their students’ houses? Is it a PR stunt from the teachers union or a genuine thing?
I can’t imagine any schoolteacher I ever knew doing this and when I was a student I would not have wanted them to.
One often repeated narrative I’ve seen is how the local public school districts are selflessly continuing in the essential mission of providing hot lunches.
Actually putting teachers in front of students is, if not entirely non-essential, considered flexible. Negotiable. Subject to experimentation and change. Low priority.
Putting institutional cafeteria products into the mouths of children turns out to be an essential high priority mission.
That’s a nice thing to know.
They’re openly admitting that the primary purpose of government schools is ‘free’ childcare. During which the kids are indoctrinated to become good little Marxists.
I’ve mentioned before that I dropped out of elementary school and then passed a GED before having any high school credits. I skipped six years of school and had a diploma before completing a semester of night school.
Teach the kids work ethic while they are out and most of them will be just fine. That and a strong grounding in basic math and reading will allow many to educate themselves.
The article was the classic bureaucratic BS. “The measurements are inaccurate so let’s stop using them but not develop better ones. Then, despite the fact we have no accurate measurements to tell us what’s working, I’m gonna say throwing more money at the problem definitely will fix it.” It’s kinda like building SLS. But at least the worst for SLS we get is an overpriced non flying rocket.
I’m going to disagree on more money fixing the problem. A quick search turned up $11,398.00 per student per year spending in the US. A few years ago a deeper search gave a bit over $12,000.00 per student per year k-12. There’s plenty of money to get the job done. Far more than enough to get the job done right.
Danegeld.
They will need to break down that ~12K USD to show how much is: (a) for administrative bureaucracy and, more importantly, (b) money for the retirees. Both have been “growth industries” as the closing of the Baby Boom has shuttered quite a few schools in my town alone over the last decade.
In fairness, they also don’t break down how much is spent per special ed student. They spend a lot more money per student in special ed than in regular classes due to legal mandates. I’m not arguing against it, just stating a fact. Source: I have a niece who is a special ed teacher.
Last I looked, US school spending was among the highest in the developed world, and results among the lowest, if you believe schools are for actually for educating kids rather than indoctrinating them into Marxism.
The switch to mass home-schooling can’t come soon enough.
John, how’d you manage that? Where I went to school in the 50s and 60s, the minimum legal dropout age was 16. I don’t think home schooling was legal in Virginia then. I did have a friend who graduated high school at 15 (via summer school every year), starting college at the end of the 10th grade, and another friend who was expelled from school in the 8th grade for the sin of getting married.
The schools I attended only allowed summer school to remediate failed classes, not to accelerate. Nonetheless I found myself with enough credits to graduate high school after five semesters. I only stayed for a sixth because I hoped it would help me get scholarships from universities.
That semester the high school let me attend only in the mornings so I could go to the community college three afternoons a week. During the first week a vice principal told me I had to stay at the high school the other two afternoons despite having no classes. The first such afternoon I slipped out a side door, half expecting to be caught and punished. Once I realized no one had been assigned to keep track of me I left by the front door just for the fun of it.
I dropped out in early 1969 and there wasn’t as much Big Brother around then. My parents signed me up for a correspondence school, which was dropped as soon as I got their ID card. Traveled with carnivals for a few years, and then agricultural work. Never was actually checked.
The problem that nailing the GED caused me was that I thought I must be brilliant to walk out of 4 classrooms of night school students that had dropped out of the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades that couldn’t keep up with me. It took years to figure out that none of them had been taught properly and that I was nowhere near as smart as I thought I was.
The logical endpoint of the social distancing paradigm is to permanently close the public schools, with easily anticipated implications for the return of the traditional family. So teachers gone, moms back home… I wondered what those screams I was hearing from some quarters were about!
The other logical move, not so obvious, is the end of the cubespace white collar work environment. The first jobs to go will be admins, who can be replaced by… well, by “executives” doing their own work. Imagine that! And, of course, most admins are women as well…
When I worked at IBM (until the end of 2012) in RTP, NC, workers self-segregated between those with children and those without. Some people would not share airspace with a parent.
A return to Herman Miller “cubespace” would be nice. At the last jobs I worked before I started my permanent vacation, our workspaces were crammed together as close as possible, with no walls or partitions to provide any privacy or soundproofing. (At one place, it was funny how several of the shared meeting rooms became unofficially permanently assigned to certain “directors” who never seemed to work anywhere else.)