It went something like
"Good Teachers,
Great Kids
Great Schools."
I had to laugh because I knew the opposite was quite true. Minneapolis had the
shittiest teachers
the shittiest kids and
the shittiest schools.
But it made me think. Precisely what are the ingredients that go into making a school shitty, good, or even great? And I think the Minneapolis Public Schools were very close when it came to ingredients, they just had very poor quality ingredients to throw into the pot.
So I developed a new and revised formula for the Minneapolis Public Schools with one caveat. The formula is:
Parents
+
Teachers
+
Children
=
Schools
And the caveat is that only two of the three ingredients have to be shitty in order for the whole school to be shitty.
For example you can have great kids, but horrible parents and horrible teachers. Doesn't matter how great the kid does, his parents are losers, his teachers are losers and the kid is likely condemned to failure.
Another combination, shitty teachers, shitty children, but great teachers. Much as I loathe teachers I do know there's a handful of them out there who truly do care about education and are indeed great teachers. Unfortunately, that's rendered moot when you have shitty students and equally shitty parents who believe their children can do no wrong (though that is more of a trait of elitist suburban schools, and not the inner city). Regardless, the kid is condemned to failure.
And then there's shitty teachers and shitty students. The parents could have the greatest intentions in the world, but unfortunately the state now effectively raises your children from 5 years old on. You are merely to feed, clothe, and house them until they can be returned to the state indoctrination facility for an amount of time that nearly quadruples the amount of time you get with your own flesh and blood. Again, failed school.
We can go on, but the point is as the moral decay of America has progressed and higher and higher percentage of these three pillars are being corrupted, increasingly becoming "shittier," a higher and higher percentage of our schools are becoming "shitty." And it doesn't matter how much money we throw at them, it's going to require personal resolve, character and dedication to excellence of ALL THREE GROUPS to improve public education.
Until that time you can expect increasing amounts of:
Single/incompetent/absentee/outsourcing parents
Misbehaving children, and
Poorer quality teachers
all resulting in the laughing stock that has become public education. And it will only be a joke until these poor kids are dumped out into the real world.
But hey, at least you didn't have to raise your own kids
And at least you got summers off.
And at least you got your GED.
Almost every day I go to work, I listen to Sirius/XM in the morning. I catch the end of the Opie & Jimmy (formerly Opie & Anthony) show. One of their sponsors is "Mathnasium", one of these modern "do it yourself" franchises that is essentially a math-tutoring-for-pay franchise.
ReplyDeleteNow, paid tutors have likely existed since the dawn of intellectualism... but in what developed world universe with a "good" education system should a commercial high-overhead franchise operation be able to exist that solely teaches math to kids?
I can find no answer to this. I find the existence of commercial for-profit, high-overhead tutoring services a blatant and in-your-face proof-of-existence of the masses of lazy civil servant schoolteachers and the system that encourages such.
I can't say this enough, fellas. The schools are a write-off. They CAN'T be saved - they are infested with union slugs with years of seniority and today Education is basically a useless liberal arts program. Any good younger teachers are being shut out by the old pooch screwers and nothing short of dynamite and mass murder will get rid of them.
ReplyDeleteForget about your kid being exposed to drugs. Or gangs. Or bullying or peanut butter sammiches ... although those may be major hazards the REAL hazard is the socialism they will foist off on your child.
They will treat him/her like a special snow flake. They will encourage and enable copping out, slothful behavior, and excuse-making. Then there will be the warped sexual/feminist/Marxist/socialist crap that you seriously may not want your child indoctrinated in.
Also - the academic stats the Captain gave are flawed - what teachers call 'literacy' and 'numeracy' are laughable in my opinion. In Pacific Rim countries kids are doing intermediate calculus in Grade 10. Our kids are taking remedial English in university.
Public schools have failed right across the board - not just in the States either. They have become liberal moron factories and if you have ANY interest in seeing your child succeed in life - you are talking private and homeschooling.
sorry you might need an edit here
ReplyDeleteAnother combination, shitty teachers, shitty children, but great teachers. Much as I loathe teachers I do know there's a handful of them out there who truly do care about education and are indeed great teachers.
I was inspired in public school.
ReplyDeleteThey set the standards low, so I took the lead and set them lower.
They have since called my bluff and have established standards I could never reach.
Touche, I guess.
I had a great education outside of the US. We each had to sit an exam at age 11 to determine at which school we would attend for high school. So, we had to bust our butts early.
ReplyDeleteOnce you got in to the school of your choice, the schooling had just begun; everything was graded on a curve. Five to seven years of Math and science, regardless of what you intended to study. Even the art and history majors took five years of mathematics (I took seven).
At the end, if you sat the final exam and scored at the top of any subject, the government would pay for your education in any country in the world, so there was motivation to perform. The best part is that ten years after having done any math, I took a math exam in the US and got a perfect score. Just educate your children in another country; it's free, too. I would never educate my children (on the lower level; bring them into get into Ivy Leagues and to get scholarships so they go to school for pretty much free, as I did) in the US. I've had friends who were failing in my home country and went on to Ivy Leagues in the US and smoked everyone. The standard is that low.
Yep, to all of what Cappy wrote.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that you could maybe add "administrators" to the mix, but these are really just a more malignant (i.e, more degenerate) breed of "teacher."
Of course it's really a moot discussion, since it's been pretty thoroughly proven by now that "public school" = "shitty", without any genuine exceptions.
Of course the schools can't be saved. In fact, they were originally designed to be gov. run brainwashing warehouses to train the avg. soviet-amerikan citizen to be a good little slave.
ReplyDeleteThat was, and is, the original design of amerikan gov. run schools.
You do not improve public education. You abolish it and leave education to parents and the private sector.
ReplyDeleteThis is the #1 issue that Republicans do not understand. Fix education...and by fix I mean burn to the ground and start over...and you solve just about every other problem within a generation.
A number of years ago I had a vendor booth at an NEA convention - one of the two major unions for public school teachers and administrators. Let me tell you, the collection of mutants would have been right at place in the Star Wars bar scene. Not to mention knee deep in SJWs. @Glen is right - there is no fixing this. What are you going to do with tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of lazy, over-compensated people who are all but unemployable in the private sector?
ReplyDelete