An alum’s observations on homecoming week at Macalester College in Saint Paul – which, if you’re not from the area, is sort of like Oberlin or Bard or any of a slew of other relentlessly lefty four-year colleges.
About ten years ago, there was a Saint Paul city council rep – it’d probably be redundant to note that he was a “progressive” – who was a died-in-the-wool public school-support machine. Looooved those public schools. Hated hated hated homeschools and charter schools and private schools. Thought school choice created separate, unequal school systems.
Naturally, the councilperson’s son went to Saint Paul Academy.
“Progressives” have given any number of examples of such hypocrisy; Chelsea Clinton and the Obama kids would never be allowed in a public school, even as their parents fought against meaningful school choice for the children of the less fortunate.
Anyway – Matt Damon, outspoken supporter of more tax funding for the schools that are supposed to be good enough for all us proles, isn’t going to risk his own children in the public education cesspool:
Actor Matt Damon is a strong supporter of America’s public schools. Just two years ago, the star spoke passionately about the importance of public schools at a Washington DC “Save our Schools” rally. In fact, the actor is so impressed with public school teachers that he has demanded they receive a pay raise. That passion and conviction, however, does not apply to Damon’s own children, who will not be enrolled into the Los Angeles public school system.
And the excuse is almost too stupid for “progressives” to buy.
I said “almost” (emphasis added):
In an interview with the Guardian published Saturday, Damon revealed that he had just moved to Los Angeles from New York, but that he didn’t “have a choice” when it came to putting his four daughters into private schools. The multi-millionaire did say that it was “a major moral dilemma” and then made the bizarre excuse that the public schools aren’t “progressive” enough.
That was a leap in logic not even Jason Bourne could make.
One of the Minnesota establishment’s favorite fall-back lines is that our putatively-excellent education system drives the economy.
The evidence shows that it’s actually quite the opposite; a strong economy creates a niche for academics.
Education is not (or was not) training, although the distinction is fuzzy. Private colleges and universities were once the place for a few good men and even fewer good women. They were where we went to be sequestered from physical work, to learn, to mature, to develop communication skills and leadership confidence. Everyone else got calluses. No mammalian species could afford to take more than a few of its offspring, at the height of their fecundity and physical prowess, and isolate them to study Greek. In the 19th century, many didn’t live much beyond 50. Had we sequestered significant numbers from the age of 18 to 26 to pursue a doctoral degree in 1850, this would have converted their value proposition into an unsustainable expense. The popular terminal degree into the early 20th century was an eighth-grade diploma and for a very good reason. Families needed pairs of hands and strong backs. Colleges and universities did not drive the economy, but rather were able to expand as the result of industrialization and mechanized agriculture which improved the output of labor.
Yep, the world has changed; about 1% of the population grows our food these days, rather than the 98+% of 300 years ago. More of what we do to earn a living requires an “education” – which can mean anything from “literacy” to “training” to “developing a working understanding of a complex field” to, in some cases, “learning broadly and deeply about a range of disciplines and areas of human knowledge”.
But the article notes something that, when you read about most of mankind’s great advances, beats you over the head; academic credentials and major leaps in achievement aren’t especially correlated:
In just over 150 years, the likes of Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Steve Jobs changed the world, but they were far from credentialed scholars. Still today, the innovation economy is driven as much by enthusiastic, stubborn and impatient dropouts as by the credentialed. The imaginative and courageous accomplish more. The credentialed often check boxes in a regulatory role or debate rather than do.
The Birth Of The Modern,by the great British historian Paul Johnson, examines the number of things that make up what we call the modern world – everything from pants, the internal combustion engine, mass production, the repeating firearm, yellow paint and the hard-top road to motorized travel, the true “mass media” and the steam engine and true representative democracy – that started in the period between 1815 and 1845.
And in those societies – which were if anything more dominated by social and academic elites than they are today (for now, anyway), the things that defined what we call “modernity” were predominantly achieved by…
…the self-taught, hard-working, brought-up-by-their-bootstraps people with little formal education but great inspiration, intellect, and the ability to tie many disciplines together to make things happen.
Side note: in a world where arts academics avoid hard sciences and hard-science people sneer at arts majors, it’s amazing how cross-displinary the great achievers truly were. In 1820, a great engineer like Robert Fulton or James Watt had to be a talented artist and communicator; artists like Robert Turner were highly versed in the physical world.
Which is something modern academia beats out of the rare academic that tries to practice it.
At any rate – the conclusion?
So what’s the problem? One problem is recognizing that academia follows the economy and doesn’t lead it…
And creating an economy with too many academics with too little academic work to do merely devalues academia itself. You get situations like in Greece and Spain, where college graduates find themselves lucky to get 10 hours a week as a barrista – or like in the US, where chemistry professors sit for years tweeting about politics while worthy younger academics shuttle around between non-tenure-track make-work jobs, eternally…
…while the real work of innovating and building goes on elsewhere.
They said that if I voted Republican, that government officials would launch vendettas against dissidents and dissenters.
And they were right!
A Texas high school principal has launched a vendetta against a student who gave a flaming counterculture speech…
…referencing God and the Constitution
[Remington] Reimer, a senior at Joshua High School, made national headlines on June 6 when officials cut off his microphone in mid-speech after he strayed from pre-approved remarks and began talking about his relationship with Jesus Christ.
Reimer, who has received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, thanked God for “sending His only son to die for me and the rest of the world,” the Joshua Star reported.
The following day the principal met with Reimer’s father and informed him “that he intended to punish Remington for his perceived misdeed.”
“Specifically, he threatened to send a letter to the United States Naval Academy advising them that Remington has poor character or words to that effect,” Sasser told Fox News.After consulting with a school attorney, the principal temporarily retracted the threat, Sasser said.
Just a liberal snit that got overblown?
Principal Mick Cochran defended the school’s decision to cut off the audio feed.
“The district has reviewed the rules and policies regarding graduation speeches and has determined that the policy was followed last night,” he told the Star.
The Joshua ISD issued a statement to MyFoxDFW noting, “student speakers were told that if their speeches deviated from the prior-reviewed material, the microphone would be turned off, regardless of content. When one student’s speech deviated from the prior-reviewed speech, the microphone was turned off, pursuant to District policy and procedure.”
Nothing, naturally, about launching a vendetta to try to screw up the kid’s adult life.
The only real question I have: when will Mr. Cochran be hired as the Saint Paul superintendant?
In the wake of the Newtown/Sandy Hook massacre, as America’s political class and educational-industrial complex spun themselves into paroxysms of anxiety working out non-solutions (ramping up regulations on the law-abiding) and anti-solutions (useless fripperies designed to increase the theatrical “sense” of security without actually making anyone safer from the kind of atrocities that happened in Newtown)…
…one Minneapolis teaching assistant, actually did something useful; she brought her legally-permitted gun to school.
As cops are teaching themselves – and others who are at liberty to use the knowlege – the best way to respond to an active mass shooter is immediately, with lethal force. It’s ended not a few potential mass shootings, notably the shooting in Portland three days before Newtown, where a citizen pointing a gun at a man who’d just murdered two and still had hundreds of rounds of ammunition was all it took to break the killer out of his fantasy – which is the key step. Mass-murderers are delusional narcissists lost in a fantasy world; interrupting the carefully-planned fantasy is the key to ending the shooting (at least before the plan reaches its end).
But that’s just too practical a solution for the Minneapolis school system, or any other, apparently:
A Minneapolis education assistant has been put on a year’s probation and remains on unpaid leave after bringing a loaded handgun to Seward Montessori School the week after school shootings grabbed national attention in December.
The district identified the aide who brought the .357 Magnum gun to the school as Kathleen E. Scozzari, in response to a Star Tribune data practices law request. She is a 21-year district employee.
The 59-year-old northeast Minneapolis resident has been on leave without pay from her $19.90 per hour job since the Dec. 19 incident, in which her gun was recovered from her locked locker in a staff room. The incident occurred a week after the mass school shootings in Newton, Conn.
“She was immediately cooperative. She explained her motives to the police right away,” said attorney Sarah MacGillis, who represented Scozzari. “Her principal concern was protecting the students.”
Kudos to Ms. Scozzari for her motives.
Of course, it’s against the law – and against policy, which is that your children must be compliant, orderly victims, the better to be used as a helpless dependent in life, and posthumous political cudgel.
Provided your children look like the children of NPR executives.
The story doesn’t mentioned how the staff detected Scozzari’s pistol. Scozzari has a carry permit.
And I suspect there are not a few other teachers out there, in the wake of Sandy Hook, doing the same thing, only more quietly.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Student loan fraud has nearly doubled since 2009. Something about 2009 sounds familiar. What happened in 2009?
Oh yeah, that was the last year private lenders made student loans. After 2009, the federal government took it over as part of Obamacare, so the interest paid by students would offset health care costs for poor people.
Either this is a government-run program that’s twice as corrupt as a private-run program, or half as competent. Who could have seen that coming?
joe doakes
Who could have seen it coming?
Less than 47% of the people, unfortunately.
A chunk of the next generation thinks a president siccing the IRS on his opponents is juuuuuust fine:
Remember; they’re college kids. “Tomorrow’s leaders”.
We’re so screwed.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A colleague at work is reliably liberal. I can depend on him for the latest liberal spin on any issue.
The reason people are upset about the high cost of education is: students are greedy. They expect to retire too early, which makes the cost of education seem like a bad investment. If they were willing to work until 70 or later, then the education investment would pay off.
In completely unrelated news, William Mitchell Gay College of Law is offering buy-out packages to tenured law professors. Not because the school is bloated and has lost sight of its core mission in a time of declining enrollments when most of its graduates can’t find work, but purely as an altruistic measure out of the goodness of their hearts. No word on whether they’re cutting diversity administrators. But they did change the school mission from teaching law to offering a degree in practical wisdom, no doubt to defend against false advertising claims.
In Wonderland, the White Queen advised Alice to practice believing impossible things. Some people don’t need practice, they’re Minnesota liberals.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Devaluation: whether currency, society, the individual, it’s all part and parcel of “progressive” government.
In the book Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams described a grossly-overpopulated planet dealing with its problem by radical means. The plan involved building two spaceships to fly the population to a better world.
They built the first one, and loaded up all of the – er, let’s say “less essential” populations; I forget Adams’ list, but today it could be reality TV stars, TMZ-bait, Youtube sensations, Taylor Swift’s exes, and millions of society’s other useless mouths, and shot it into space. They were told that the rest of the people would be coming.
Soon.
As soon as they finished the next spaceship.
Honest.
——–
A Dutch company is taking applications for a one-way mission to Mars, to start a Mars colony.
And they‘re getting a slew of applications:
“These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants,” said the founder of Mars One, Bas Lansdorp. “Mars One is a mission representing all humanity and its true spirit will be justified only if people from the entire world are represented. I’m proud that this is exactly what we see happening.”
Here’s the part I found…intrigueing? Well, deja vu at any rate:
According to the company’s chief medical officer, Norbert Kraft, Mars One is eschewing the usual astronaut candidates – scientists and pilots – in favour of YouTube fanatics and internet people, “because what we are looking for is not restricted to a particular background.”
All applicants have to do is pay the application fee, which ranges from $5 to $75 – in the US, it is $38 – and then submit a video in which they answer three questions.
Huh.
I’m going to run over to Google Translate to see if “Bas Lansdorp” is Dutch for “Slartibartfast”.
Just a hunch.
Over the past 20 years, society’s largely made it illegal to just be a boy.
For a while, it was an openly-held belief in educational-psychology circles that the niggling traits of typical boyhood – a penchant for rough play and exploratory violence, a disdain, at least through one developmental stage, for verbally-based social interaction (that’s what girls do) in favor of getting outside and mixing it up – were pathologies that needed to be cured, or at least harnessed. As documented by Christine Hoff-Summers in her classic The War On Boys, “making boys more like girls” became a bit of a crusade in the educational academy during the 1990s and 2000s. Recess – with all its ritualized rough and tumble – was curtailed, supervised, sometimes abolished. Via means social, pedagogical and chemical, “educators” tried their darnedest to get boys to sit down, shut up, and get verbal.
It’s led us to a generation of kids who’ve been medicated to a fine sheen, who remain in a state of suspended adolescence well into their thirties in many cases, and in the worst case who don’t know the limits of roughness and violence, since the rituals by which they used to learn how to process that testosterone – rough play, stylized roughhousing, the occasional fight that usually ended in friends staying friends who knew who not to mess with – have been scolded, punished and drugged out of existence.
I don’t know who the woman is who wrote this piece; she sounds like she could be any of a few thousand middle-aged moms in Edina alone, at least in the first couple of grafs.
So, I think that instead of teaching our kids NOT to be violent we need to teach them HOW and WHEN to be violent. We have so many stories of people standing around watching others getting assaulted or verbally attacked and we don’t know why. We have thousands of self-defense classes all over the country. We have anti-bullying programs that tell us to stop bullying but offer no concise steps telling us how. Honestly ask yourself, if you don’t know that you can physically defend yourself, would you really step in to verbally confront someone who is being physically and verbally threatening? I know I wouldn’t.
If we are to raise boys who are willing to step in when a girl is being attacked or fight back when a boy is being vicious, we are going to have to admit that we DO expect violence in some scenarios and teach them the fine lines to walk within. Why wait to learn self-defense as an adult? Why not let them learn it, as they are growing up, with the guidance of their parents? Maybe not all is violence is so bad after all.
Force isn’t necessarily violence. And not all violence is bad.
And we have raised a generation kids that don’t know the difference. And it’s our fault.
And by “our fault”, I mean “all you feminists who banned boyhood’s fault”. Just so we’re clear on that.
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 Daycare Union Jamdown bill – sponsored by “my” Senator, the foul-mouthed Soliah-supporting Sandy Pappas – hit an unexpected speed bump in the Senate Finance Committee yesterday; DFL Senators Terri Bonoff and Barb Goodwin broke with the caucus and voted against the jamdown:
The sponsor, Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, called the defeat a disappointing setback. But she said she hopes she can resurrect the bill yet this week and have the committee re-vote and move it out to the Senate floor, perhaps without a recommendation that it be passed.
But she mentioned the bill remains challenging to pass, because it represents a major change in the idea of what a union is. Goodwin said she believes there are not enough votes on the Senate floor to pass the bill this year.
It “remains challenging to pass” because most providers hate it, and have done a great job of telling parents what’s wrong with it; it’ll raise costs (daycare is already terribly expensive in Minnesota) without affecting quality of service, and will alter the meaning of “union”, pitting small businesspeople against their customers. The only purpose it would serve, if passed, would be to provide dues and headlines (“membership is up!”) to the big state unions.
It’s still alive in the House, and Senator Pappas has vowed to find a way to bring it back for a re-vote in the Senate. Here’s how you can help hold this bill’s head underwater until it stops bubbling.
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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.
West Virginia teen Jared Marcum, who was arrested for wearing a pro-Second-Amendment T-shirt to school came back with 100 of his closest friends:
Jared, a student at Logan Middle School, was arrested and suspended Thursday after he was pulled from a cafeteria line and told to remove or turn his shirt inside-out an order he refused.
“I’m still confused, thoroughly confused,” he told a local TV station. “The school didn’t even make a statement to the news agencies, much less myself.”
The schools did what they always do; demand unthinking conformity and enforce it with unreasonable fury – a day’s suspension and an arrest.
Marcum points out that while he was arrested for being disorderly, the evidence tells another story:
School officials told the eighth-grader Monday that his one-day suspension was appropriate because he was being disruptive.
Mr. White said Jared was exercising his right to free speech and did not disrupt anything.
Video evidence in the case, Mr. White said, indicates that the situation in the cafeteria deteriorated when a teacher raised his voice while confronting Jared. Other students jumped up on benches and began chanting Jared’s name.
“I think the disruption came from the teacher,” Mr. White said.
Can’t wait for that video to get released on Youtube.
Marcum went back to school along with 100 fellow students who also wore Second Amendment t-shirts paid for by a local pro-human-rights group.
The more the merrier, I say.
(SCENE: Mitch BERG is standing in the line for car tabs at the Saint Paul Sears with Avery LIBRELLE)
LIBRELLE: I saw your blog post about the restaurant in Mower County that is offering discounts for gun nuts who bring guns into their restaurants.
BERG: Yeah. That’s pretty cool.
LIBRELLE: I’m sure there’ll be a mass shooting there soon.
BERG: (shakes head silently, with deep weariness)
LIBRELLE: What this does mean is that they should raise their minimum wage.
BERG: (wearily) OK, I’ll bite. Why’s that?
LIBRELLE: Because the owner is giving away money.
BERG: Er…huh?
LIBRELLE: Discounts. That’s money he’s giving away. That means he could afford to increase his staff’s wages.
BERG: Er, the discount – leaving aside the extent to which it might be a personal protest statement – is what’s called a “loss leader”. It’s designed to get people to come out, bring their non-gun-carrying friends – to get people in the door. Once they’re through the door, that’s more traffic, more word of mouth, more potential to win over customers that keep coming back and spending more money.
Sort of like when Chipotle has their Free Burrito Day. They lose money on that day’s burritos – but hopefully create loyal repeat customers who come back later to pay full price.
LIBRELLE: Well, if they can do that, they can afford to pay the dish washers and waitresses and counter staff more.
BERG: Er, why do you think businesses do that?
LIBRELLE: Because they’re rolling in money at the expense of the worker!
BERG: No, it’s to increase business. It’s called Marketing, and Advertising; spending a little money so that there’s more business, which in turn brings in more money, which eventually goes into things like paying off investors and turning a profit and expanding and remodeling and buying a new oven and, by the bye, salaries. Because a successful restaurant can afford to give a raise, while an unsuccessful one can’t even retain workers.
LIBRELLE: Giving away the workers’ money in this way is like the Bush Tax Cuts. That money is needed.
BERG: Government doesn’t need to advertise or market. And even if the money were “the workers’ money”, it’s part of marketing a business, to try to make it successful Like spending money on advertising, or on having clean restrooms and unripped seats, or laminated menus, or quality ingredients and attractive preparation and presentation; it’s about making people come to your business, and then making them want to come back.
But – and I can’t stress this enough – the business’ revenue is not “the workers’ money”. The person or people who started and run the restaurant – which provides the jobs for “the workers” – has the job of using that money to the business’ best advantage, to promote and maintain the business. Which includes paying salaries.
LIBRELLE: It’s more important that they pay the salaries. Without the workers, the owner is nothing.
BERG: Er, what now?
LIBRELLE: It’s the workers that make the business. Without the workers, there’d be no business.
BERG: I’m sure that’s news to every sole-proprietor entrepreneur out there…
LIBRELLE: Look at Bain Capital. Mitt Romney didn’t even show up to work for months at a time. And yet the janitors had to show up every day. Bain could have prospered without Romney, but not without janitors. The janitors deserved the money more than Romney.
BERG: (Stands, gobsmacked in stunned silence)
LIBRELLE: Without those janitors, Bain would have failed.
BERG: So you’re saying that janitors can manage venture capital better than managers can empty trash and sweep floors? Or that restaurants would spontaneously form in Mower County without someone to rent a building, set up a kitchen and a counter and some tables and buy some inventory and hire and train some cooks and waiters and dishwashers.
LIBRELLE: Of course not.
BERG: OK, then…
LIBRELLE: I’m saying that without janitors sweeping the floors, the capital would never have been managed. Without a dishwasher, there’d be no restaurant.
LOUDSPEAKER: “Number 36”
BERG: Oh, that’s my number. What’s yours?
LIBRELLE: Oh, I don’t have one. I just love hanging out here.
BERG: (shuffling toward the window) You what?
LIBRELLE: Yeah. It’s a great lesson on how business should work!
BERG: Huh. Wow. And to think some people say liberals don’t understand business.
LIBRELLE: I know. Right?
(And SCENE)
Over the past couple of days, critics – and a few parents – are making the usual outraged noises about MSNBC chat-bot Melissa Harris-Perry and her notion that parents’ idea that they, rather than government and society, are responsible for their children.
On the one hand, the news consumer needs to allow for the fact that Harris-Perry is a media figure who needs to create some sort of commotion to rise above the fray, especially at flailing MSNBC.
On the other? The notion that government and our “elites” really do believe that they are lending our kids to us at their own sufferance is out there in many slightly-less-obvious ways.
Uwe and Hannelore Romeik are a German couple. They’re Christians, they’re from Germany, and they brought their three (now six) children to the US when they were threatened with imprisonment for trying to home-school their kids.
And as much opprobium as American society – pop culture, the educational-industrial complex and the like – put on home-schooling here, it’s nothing compared to Germany:
Home schooling has been illegal in Germany since 1918, when school attendance was made compulsory, and parents who choose to homeschool anyway face financial penalties and legal consequences, including the potential loss of custody of their children.
And so the Romeikes, like many before them, came to the US.
To escape such legal action, the family fled to the United States in 2008 and was granted political asylum in 2010, eventually making their home in Tennessee. U.S. law states that individuals can qualify for asylum if they can prove they are being persecuted because of their religion or because they are members of a particular “social group.”
Now – do you consider risking prison and losing your children over choosing to raise their children in a way that is considered perfectly more or less perfectly normal in the US a form of persecution?
I certainly do.
But not the Obama administration:
The board overturned the initial asylum decision, arguing that homeschoolers are not a particular social group because they don’t meet certain legal standards, The board said that the home-schooled population is too vague and amorphous to constitute a social group.
“People who reject the local educational system” – as millions do in the United States with varying but usually minimal repercussions – aren’t a “social group?”
Apparently the only “social groups” the Obama Administration recognizes are the ones that chant about “the 1%”…
Now the family is fighting that decision in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the case on April 23.
“We think we have a pretty strong case,” Romeike family attorney Michael Donnelly told ABC News. “We feel that what Germany is doing by preventing this family and a lot of other families from exercising their rights in the education of their children violates a fundamental human right,” he said.
Donnelly says the right of parents to decide the direction of their child’s education has been established in Article 26, section 3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reads: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
Most people don’t realize that compulsory education was part of a process established by Prime Minister Bismark in the 1870s to keep the German government, military and economy fed with the proper ratio of people; 10% officers/management/professionals, 30% non-commissioned officers/foremen/tradespeople, 60% soldiers and sailors/laborers and farmers. People in manufacturing and retail would call it “supply chain sourcing”. And the Big System can no more allow parents a role in the supply chain than WalMart can allow a company to hand-whittle their furniture their own way.
Fewer people realize that the likes of Horace Mann adapted the system to the United States in the early 1900s, and for more or less the same reasons.
Over the decades since – decades where people placed misguided trust in government – it became largely accepted that the government school (or parochial schools that largely aped the government style, with uniforms and some carefully-measured religious instruction thrown in for good measure) was not just the best way to educate kids – it was the only way. That was intentional; public schools are a supply chain source, no less than the ones in Germany; it’s just that the manufacturing standards have changed since the 1960s.
Which is why the idea of school choice – home schooling, charter schools and open enrollment – was so openly and actively denigrated by the establishment.
So the Romeike case will be an interesting barometer of how the Administration views this key human rights issue.
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?
On a Saint Paul discussion forum, someone asked “what would you do to better the city if someone gave you a couple million dollars?”
It took me about two seconds to answer; I’ve been thinking about this one for years and years.
If someone gave me a couple million dollars my plan would look something like this:
I’m rarin’ to go. Someone pony up!
Bill Glahn – who’s been blogging for a couple of years, but has really jumped out as a go-to blog since the election – notices a huge change in the DFL’s tone, starting the second week in November:
For some reason, Dayton is given credit for proposing a “no-gimmick” budget, but he continues the biggest gimmick from the last budget for another four years.
More troubling, the new Democrat majority in the state legislature ran on ending the school shift as one of their top issues.
And “ending the shift” was one of the DFL’s biggest – and most dishonest – rhetorical cudgels:
Freshperson state Senator Melisa Franzen used the school shift as one of her top issues. Senator Franzen was elected from Senate District 49–covering Edina and parts of three other SW metro suburbs–in what was recognized as the most expensive race for the Minnesota state legislature in 2012. Some $600,000 was spend by various entities for a job that pays $31,140 per year.
In her campaign literature, Franzen listed education as her top issue area, and the school shift as her top education issue. “Paying schools back will be a top priority for me,” she writes on her campaign website. Her campaign piece No. 1 (p. 3) mentions “the accounting shifts and gimmicks used to balance the budget.” Piece No. 2, (page 2) has as bullet 2 of her vision, “pay back the $2.4 billion borrowed from schools.” Her piece No. 5 focuses on education and (page 2) has as her first education priority “pay our schools back.” Her piece No. 8 touts her “bipartisan” endorsements and (page 2) lists “pay back our schools” as her first agenda item. She writes, “Melisa Franzen will balance the budget honestly without gimmicks.” Likewise, this Franzen piece shows an adorable toddler and implores the voter to support Franzen’s efforts to “pay back our schools.”
You may also recall – and recollection is all you have, since the media will never mention it – that the GOP passed a bill, with bipartisan support, that would have had the “shift” paid back by now.
Governor Messinger Dayton vetoed it, at the apex of a whisper campaign by the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” (the attack-PR group run by his ex-wife, who also holds his pedigree papers) that the GOP’s plan was “a gimmick”, although not a single DFLer, when pressed, could say what the “gimmick” was. Messinger Dayton vetoed it entirely to give the DFL a campaign issue.
Glahn notes the results:
What a difference an election makes. During the campaign, ending the school shift was the No. 1 issue, now…we’ll get to it in 2017. Senator Franzen now faces the prospect of running for re-election in 2016, not having achieved her top priority, unless her colleagues reject Gov. Dayton’s budget and do the right thing by our children.
And Alida Rockefeller Messinger will never give them permission to do that.
One of the Public-Education pimps’ big chanting points is that “charter schools don’t perform as well as public school!”.
And in terms of top-line statistics, there’s something to that. Many charter schools – especially ones catering to low-income, inner-city, immigrant and Native-American students – have lower standardized test scores (although as I showed several years ago in delivering one of my uncountable drubbings to Nick Coleman, many charter schools beat the pants off their public district neighbors). The reason, I suspect, is that in most cases those students have already been chewed up and spat out by the public system, and are going the charter route to try to get back on track. It was certainly true in the charter schools my kids attended.
Indeed, I think the only really meaningful measurement would compare differences in improvement or deterioration in individual students before and after transferring from public to charter schools, compared with comparable students that stayed in the public system.
But beyond that? You’ll look long and hard for these figures in the mainstream, DFL-allied media:
And as all of us both brace for more “paying for a better Minnesota” and simultaneously watching the cities’ public schools slide even further into disgrace, this next bit (emphasis added) is fun reading:
As if these scores weren’t impressive enough, Best, Friendship, and Harvest are able to achieve them with much less money than the Minneapolis Public Schools district. Here is a comparison of 2012-13 per student spending in the district versus at these schools: MPS = $23,020 Best = $11,987 Friendship = $13,677 Harvest = $10,958 One has to wonder: Would these schools have been able to achieve these results under the aegis of the large bureaucracy of the school district? Or, does their independence help generate and inspire creative solutions that often elude large systems? Not all charters work. But the students at Best, Friendship, and Harvest would tell you that theirs do.
And so would their parents.
(BONUS QUESTION for MNGOP “Strategists”: Why is it, again, that you refuse to have Republican candidates approach charter parents in the city, to tell them that the DFL wants to destroy the charter school system? That’s gotten you what over the past seven years, exactly?)
Last week: the DFL in the Legislature, with the aid of their PR arm in the Twin Cities media, exclaimed with great ballyhoo that they were going to “repay the school funding shift”.
As we noted at the time, the DFL promised – ballyhoo notwithstanding – to repay half the shift. And they did it after Mark Dayton unaccountably vetoed the GOP’s plan last session to pay back the entire shift.
But beyond that, there’s one other clinker.
Take a look at the bill – HF1 – that relates to the “repayment” of the shift.
What’s missing from the bill?
Answer below the jump.
Katherine Kersten takes on a bill that will likely get fast-tracked in this unicorns-and-rainbows legislative session; “anti-bullying” legislation:
But what if the antibullying campaign now unfolding there has little to do with protecting the traditional targets of bullies: kids who are pudgy, shy or “vertically challenged”? What if it’s driven instead by a political/cultural agenda that’s not so much about stopping bad behavior as it is about using the machinery of state education to compel children to adopt politically correct attitudes on “the nature of human sexuality,” “gender identity” and alternative family structures?
What if a new antibullying law would require private religious schools — along with public schools — to enforce this agenda, so families who don’t want to subject their kids to indoctrination in state-approved views of sexuality have no educational refuge?
In the 2013 legislative session, you’ll hear lots of warm, fuzzy language from lawmakers and public officials about protecting “all kids” from bullying. You’ll read about hearings designed to break every legislator’s heart with tearful stories about bullying.
But every Minnesotan with a child in public or private school should understand that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Antibullying legislation is coming early in the session; its final shape is unknown. But the legislative goalposts were set in August 2012 by Gov. Mark Dayton’s Task Force on the Prevention of School Bullying, whose report announced recommendations on the shape a new law should take.
What it basically means is that Minnesota’s kids – in every school, religious freedom be damned – will be systematically taught that gender doesn’t matter. That there’s no difference between men and women, and that having a traditional (also scientific) view of gender is, itself, a form of bullying.
And, by the way, it won’t prevent a single case of what most of us think of as “bullying”.
And since it’s “for the children”, it’ll skate through with scarcely a speedbump.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I propose a poll:
Step 1: Are your children presently attending a school in St. Paul?
1A. Yes – go to Step 2.
1B. No – go to Step 3.
Step 2: Choose one
2A. While my children are attending St. Paul school, I want my children protected by people carrying guns, for example police officers. Go to Step 3.
2B. While my children are attending St. Paul school, I do NOT agree want my children protected by people carrying guns, for example, police officers. Go to Step 3.
Step 3: Thank you for taking this poll.
Joe Doakes
It was a moot point when my kids were in the schools; the high schools all have cops on the scene, and nobody asked the parents what they felt about it.
I wonder if anyone told Rachel Maddow?
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