Joe Doakes from Como Park writes (and I’m adding emphasis to a particularly huge point):

Just ran to the post office to mail a baby book to my daughter-in-law.  Caller to Rush commenting on the Gosnell abortion trial says the problem is lack of meaningful sex education in the schools.  We should be teaching kids more than abstinence-only because that doesn’t work. Kids need to be taught that unwanted pregnancy is a possible consequence of sex and how to use birth control to practice safe sex.  Two thoughts:

 

Things must have changed since we were kids, because in the mid-70’s we knew about condoms and carried them faithfully, against the vain hope of ever needing one.

 

We don’t teach children about firearm safety in the schools because firearms have such powerful mystique in our society that giving children more information about them only leads to overwhelming desire to experiment, with disastrous consequences. The same isn’t true of alcohol, drugs or sex, of course.

 

Joe Doakes

The DFL Senate passed an education bill that includes all-day kindergarten, but eliminates proficiency testing to graduate from high school.

In other words, it made school worth less, but gave us more of it, for more money.

But Sen. Sean Nienow, R-Cambridge, criticized the bill for eliminating the current test high school students must pass to graduate.

“A student no longer has to pass a test, or get any score on a test, and a student doesn’t have to demonstrate proficiency to graduate. What does that mean? It means your diploma is meaningless,” Nienow said.

What is means is that the Mother State wants to start indoctrinating your kids full-time a year earlier (for now), and that “learning” isn’t really the objective, and that if you want your kids to by anything but duckspeak-chanting little drones (especially if you live in Minneapolis, Saint Paul or Duluth), you need to get them out of The System.

People in society at large are starting to notice what I wrote about six years ago; the public schools are insane asylums, run by the inmates, when it comes to Zero Tolerance.

Recent cases – a boy pointing a pop-tart “shaped like a gun”, boys being suspended for playing cops and robbers with finger guns, the usual – are old hat for me, personally.

Glenn Reynolds reaches the same conclusion I the better part of a decade ago; it’s not just about the petty, venal harassment of children (almost inevitably boys) on idiotic grounds; the worst part is what it teaches the children:

And that’s the problem with all of these cases. Our

justification for putting massive amounts of taxpayer money into public schools is that they’re supposed to teach critical thinking. But stories like these — and they’re legion — suggest that the very people who are supposed to be teaching our kids how to think are largely incapable of critical thought themselves.

A Pop Tart gun, a finger gun, or a toy gun — even a pink one that shoots, gasp!, soap bubbles! — isn’t any danger to anyone. Nor is playing with toy guns a sign that a kid is mentally ill or dangerous. It’s a sign that a kid is a kid.

When schools and teachers react hysterically to such non-threats, they’re telling us one of two things: Either that they lack the ability to respond realistically to events or that they recognize that there’s not any sort of threat, but deliberately overreact in order to stigmatize even the idea of guns. The first is educational malpractice; the second is educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power. Neither inspires confidence in the educational system in which they appear.

I vote for “educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power”, by the way; if you accept the idea that the left has turned the public schools into indoctrination centers – and more and more, I do – then that’s a no-brainer.

But Glenn’s mistaken as well; I’ve seen no evidence that the public schools care even a little about critical thinking.

In the public school district where I grew up, and where my Dad taught most of his career, I don’t remember a lot of “administrators”; I think the Superintendent had a secretary; each school had a principal, the high school and junior highs had assistants, each school had a secretary; there were a couple of guidance counselors, and a couple of special ed people.   If there were thirty paid staff in the whole districåt that weren’t teachers, I’d be amazed.

Thing have changed; Tom Steward notes the changes in the form of a pop quiz:

A quick true or false pop quiz based on a surprising new education study provides some clues to why K-12 public school funding constitutes the biggest line item in Minnesota’s state budget again this year.

1: Minnesota public schools employ more administrators and other non-teaching staff than classroom teachers.

True. Minnesota public schools employ 3,000 more non-classroom staff than teachers.

2: The growth in non-teaching staff has outpaced the increase in students by more than 50 percent.

True. While the student population increased by eight percent, the growth rate of non-teaching personnel exploded by 68 percent between 1992-2009.

3: Minnesota schools could pay their teachers more with the cost savings from “extra” non-teaching staff.

True. Classroom teachers could earn $15,000 more every year with the savings.

Those answers put Minnesota in a class of 21 states flagged as “top-heavy” in the number of non-teaching staff employed in public schools in a new report, “The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools, Part II.”

This has been creeping up on everyone.  Remember the district I grew up in?  Not long after I graduated, the number of admins started growing.  They soon had their own building (a disused storefront).  Then another bigger building – which, my dad noted after decades of teaching summer school in a room that felt like a toaster oven, had air conditioning.

Education administration has been a booming business.  That sounds so cynical when I put it that way.  That’s intentional:

“We have increased employment in public schools at a much greater rate than the increase in students, and the most disconcerting part of that trend is that we’ve hired more administrators and other staff than teachers,” said Ben Scafidi, author of the report for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

I’ll add emphasis:

Minnesota public schools have put 20,000 more “non-teaching personnel” on the payroll than the number needed to keep pace with the growth in students between 1992-2009, according to the analysis of data reported by state schools to the US Department of Education. Overall, non-teaching staff outnumbers teachers in the state’s public schools by about 3,000 employees.

And if the response to this is “we need the administrators to deal with the bureaucracy involved in education…” – well, the followup question asks itself, doesn’t it?

A few years back, I reported on the “education” my daughter, Bun, got in a summer “Economics” class at a Saint Paul Public School.

Among the lessons she “learned” from the teacher:

• We’ve had five black presidents: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge were all afro-American.

• People are “disregarding their blackness” to “reap white benefits”: The teacher cited the “one drop rule” – people with “even a drop” of black blood, so says the teacher, are black – and disregard their “blackness” only for the swag, apparently.

• Minorities have “no rights”: the “teacher” didn’t elaborate.
•  The teacher told the class that the government “may have blown up” the levees in the poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans. He also said that White New Orleans put police on the bridge between Black and White New Orleans to send black refugees back to their deaths, as white people sat on the levees and watched the black people die. He apparently did an impersonation, in a “white trash” voice; “Hey, Bill, grab me a brewski; that n***er is trying to swim”. Because, says the teacher, “Black people as a rule can’t swim”.
• The class studied a packet from Ebony Magazine; the first one is called “A Child’s View/A Young Man’s View/An Elder’s View” of Obama; it was their considered opinion that most people who didn’t vote for Obama were motivated by race. The class is also supposed to write whether they do or don’t agree with Obama. According to Bun, it was intensely intimidating.
• “Hurricanes follow the path of the slave ships”, apparently as God’s punishment for slavery
•  “Sharks, to this day, folow the route of the slave ships”, as a matter of evolutionary adaptation.  According to the teacher, sharks “evolved” to live in the subtropical trade wind zone because of the centuries of slaves being tossed overboard from slave ships.

I used to think it was merely an incompetent, crank teacher (who happened to be Afro-American) abusing his position.

But after reading John Fonte at NRO reporting on Minnesota’s proposed new Social Studies standards for public schools, I’m starting to think Buns’ old teacher was merely ahead of the curve:

Nine years ago a group of history professors from the University of Minnesota sent a letter to the state’s education department. They complained that the history/social-studies standards for Minnesota presented American history too positively. The historians wanted early American history described in terms of “conquest,” “subjugation,” “exploitation,” “enslavement,” and “genocidal impact.” For these academics, the story of America primarily meant slavery for African Americans, genocide for American Indians, subjugation for women, xenophobia for immigrants, and exploitation for poor people.

And yesterday, the Department of Education held one of the pro-forma hearings that the bureaucracy always holds to give a rubber-stamp of “openness and transparency” before going ahead and doing what the DFL’s pet bureaucrats were going to do anyway.

Here – barring an unlikely ruling from an Adminstrative Law judge or, even less likely, a veto from Governor Dayton – is what Minnesota’s schools are going to be teaching your kids, if they go to a public school, according to Fonte’s piece:

For example History Standard 20 for the period 1870–1920 declares: “The student will understand that as the United States shifted from its agrarian roots into an industrial and global power, the rise of big business, urbanization, and immigration led to institutionalized racism, ethnic and class conflict, and new efforts at reform.” [italics added]

Less biased standards might suggest that “the student will understand” that the growth of business enterprise, urbanization, and immigration led to greater prosperity for most Americans, including African Americans who moved to large northern cities and Ellis Island newcomers who chose to become Americans. Further, the period 1870 to 1920 witnessed tremendous technological development and inventions for which Americans are famous: including great advances in medicine; the promotion of public health (including a clean water supply and indoor plumbing), the sewing machine, typewriter, phonograph, and electric light bulb.

So we’d like to think.

But “social studies” aren’t about history, or fact of any kind; the new standard are about indoctrination:

But, American achievements are downplayed while the overarching theme becomes “institutionalized racism.” Of course, this logically means that the major “institutions” of American liberal democracy — the courts, Congress, the presidency, state and local governments, businesses, churches, civic organizations — and the entire democratic system and its civil society are racist and therefore, clearly, illegitimate.

The stated purpose of the Minnesota 2012 standards is “to identity the academic knowledge and skills that prepare students for post-secondary education, work and civic life in the twenty-first century. . . . Students need deep knowledge of this information in order to make sense of their world.”

While the 2004 Standards specifically examined 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and terrorism, the 2012 Standards, incredibly, include no references to 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, the Gulf War of 1991, or terrorism itself. Nor is there any hint of a global conflict with terrorists described either as President Bush’s “War on Terror” or President Obama’s “War against violent extremists.” True, there are two tepid references to the “Arab Spring,” but this is hardly adequate to provide the “deep knowledge” needed for students “to make sense of their world.”

As I’ve observed for years, the last set of standards, from 2004, were bad enough; in my kids’ time in the public schools, all they really were taught was slavery and civil rights.

Read Fonte’s entire piece; it only gets worse.

And I’m afraid we’ve finally gotten to the time when our public school system in Minnesota isn’t merely expensive, incompetent and befuddled.  With these standards, our school system is the enemy.

Forget about the “the terrorists have won” jokes; even most of the dumbest people know you need to resist those who are trying to kill you.

But these standards?  They are the entire agglomerated intellectual and moral rot of the American left, wrapped up a cutesy “Raise Your Hand For Minnesota’s Kids!”-chanting package.

My dad and both my mom’s parents were teachers.  If there’s a family out there where American public education was the family business, it’s mine.

But the time has come where people who value what this country really means have to either abandon the public schools – all our kids, every single one of them – or get serious about fighting for them.

Me?  I”m torn.

Minnesota’s Latino community voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama and, more importantly at the moment, for the DFL.

And; what did they get?

Minnesota’s achievement gap among Latino high school students is the worst in the US:

Minnesota has the largest Hispanic achievement gap with Latinos lagging 33 percent in graduation rate than their white counterparts. Only 51 percent of Latinos graduated from high school in the state (the worst Latino graduation rate of any state), whereas 84 percent of whites graduated from high school in the same state. Our nation’s capitol, the District of Columbia had the second biggest achievement gap, with 30 percent.

So here’s a question for all you Latino DFL voters; other than rhetoric, what’s your DFL vote getting you?