I’m on the air with LuAnn Walters talking about Seth Kirk’s op-ed.

It’s well worth a read.

Lockdowns. Weapons checks. Enforced dead silence at lunch.

How exactly is it that the traditional “sit your butt in your chair and learn what we tell you to learn, when we tell you to learn it” model of education isn’t the same as prison, again?

A Roman Catholic elementary school adopted new lunchroom rules this week requiring students to remain silent while eating. The move comes after three recent choking incidents in the cafeteria.

No one was hurt, but the principal of St. Rose of Lima School explained in a letter to parents that if the lunchroom is loud, staff members cannot hear a child choking.

Christine Lamoureux, whose 12-year-old is a sixth-grader at the school, said she respects the safety issue but thinks the rule is a bad idea.

“They are silent all day,” she said. “They have to get some type of release.” She suggested quiet conversation be allowed during lunch.

A better idea: Have an assembly. Tell the kids “if you see someone choking, yell at the top of your lungs SOMEBODY’S CHOKING”. Better yet, show them how to deal with it.

Another mother, Thina Paone, does not mind the silent lunches, noting that the cafeteria “can be very crazy” at the suburban school south of Providence.

Gosh, I have no idea why. Being jammed into a seat for six hours, threatened with dire consequences for failing to suppress all that pent-up energy…

It’s not the dumbest idea ever, but I can’t think of many worse.

I hate “Free Speech in the Schools” debates. 

On the one hand, students being adolescents, and adolescents having huge tolerance for drama, the controversies are frequently giggly, overwrought and self-serving.

On the other hand, as I’ve noted (and will note further in the future), school administrations are frequently – how can I say this? – not the brightest lights on the Christmas Tree?  And while students under age 18 are not adults and aren’t expected to have fully-formed decision-making skills, school is (in theory) where they’re supposed to start learning how the adult world works.

So that’s why I’m going to side with the students in this rhubarb:

A high-school newspaper in Anoka County will be printed today with a big blue box on the front page because the principal banned a photo that simulated the ripping of an American flag.

“Originally a photo was to be placed here but was censored by the administration,” reads a message inside the box, which is to accompany a front-page story in the Crier student newspaper at St. Francis High School.

It’s not really a flag that was destroyed during a school play last fall, but rather bunting that looks like an American flag. The Cold War-era story had explored the repercussions of a fictional conquest of a U.S. school by an oppressive government such as that of the Soviet Union.

Under the circumstances, the photo in question seems very appropriate to the story. 

Not everyone thinks so, of course:

The brouhaha began with a photo that [the paper’s editor Eric] Sheforgen took during the play called “The Children’s Story.” Students handled an actual flag, then substituted shredded bunting to make it appear as though a flag were destroyed. …”A photo of the school’s fall play was not placed in the newspaper after Principal Paul Neubauer threatened the newspaper with possible legal action and froze funds to the Crier’s financial accounts. Because of these actions the Editorial Board felt it had no choice but to not print the picture.”

Under the compromise, the principal allowed the blue box to be published in place of the photo.

A caption reads: “During the fall play, lead actress Becca Bennett held up a prop, made from table cloth bunting, representing how a country could be torn apart by affecting the youth. The picture was removed off the wall in the PAC (Performing Arts Center) hallway.”

Aside:  they’re teaching their paper’s editor to write like freelance soft-skills consultant? 

[Superintendent] Saxton, who fully supported the principal’s decision, said that while many other photos of the play would have been suitable, the one depicting flag desecration could have offended many veterans and service organizations that support the schools.

Which is, I think, fascinating.  I’ve yet to meet a school that fudged one iota about offending, say, Christians, Republicans or pro-lifers.  Money talks, I guess.

But this seems like a bad decision on the part of the administration.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein spells out the case for vouchers in the Strib today.

He starts in with all that common sense:

A common myth is that schools across the country with lots of low-income students are less-well-funded than schools with fewer low-income students. The opposite, actually, is more routinely the case. Minnesota, in fact, recently ranked fifth best in the nation in terms of “extra poverty-based funding per student living below the poverty line.” This (benevolent) gap was $3,075.

But given that African-Americans in Minneapolis are doing unusually poorly academically, how do these conflicting findings compute?

To complicate matters even more, consider Ascension School, a K-8 Catholic school in north Minneapolis. Students are overwhelmingly minority; they’re overwhelmingly non-Catholic; and in 2005, 90 percent of eighth-graders there passed Minnesota’s Basic Skills test in math and 95 percent passed Minnesota’s Basic Skills test in reading.

In contrast, eighth-graders in Minneapolis public schools, in 2003, passed at these rates in math: 82 percent for whites; 57 percent for Asian/ Pacific Islanders; 41 percent for Hispanics; 40 percent for American Indians; and 28 percent for blacks. Please note, though you probably already have, that the 82 percent passing rate for whites in Minneapolis public schools was substantially below Ascension’s 90 percent for all its kids. MPS scores were significantly better in reading than they were in math; but again, they were significantly below Ascension’s reading scores.

What are tuition rates (for non-parishioners) in inner-city Catholic schools in the state? According to the Minnesota Catholic Conference, they average under $3,200 for elementary schools and under $8,000 for high schools. By contrast, as long ago as 2003 — in the wake of a recession — federal, state, and local revenues in Minneapolis Public Schools totaled $13,658 per “pupil unit.”

Pearlstein notes that, given the objective data (and data he didn’t state – such as the fact that private, Catholic and alternative schools do a vastly better job with most “special ed” students), the case for vouchers should be open and shut.

Of course, it’s not about rational evidence.  It’s been said that the greatest victory of the compulsory education system has been convincing people that there’s no other way to educate kids; similarly, the greatest victory of the current school system has  been getting people to think that what we have today:

• is, when everything is working, good for our kids
• can be made to work
• That the system “working”, even as intended, can be a good thing.  I’m reminded of the teacher I had, who declared “communism in its ideal form would be cool; it’s just not practiced properly anywhere”.  The current school system has turned into the same thing.

The fact is, the school system will not change as long as enough voters believe the three bullets above.  The teacher’s union and the academic-industrial complex is too firmly entrenched to allow any significant changes, and too many voters believe the three points above to make any meaningful change.
And the only change that will come is when parents seize the power and control back from the teachers, the unions, the administrations and the educational academics.  It’s happening, of course – minority parents are leading the efflux from the inner-city schools.

Which, of course, will only exacerbate the “problems” (I prefer to call them “terminal diseases”) in the public system, as the parents with what P.J. O’Rourke called the “infinite common sense to give a sh*t” leave the system, taking their interest, their commitment and their kids with them.

If vouchers – or any other kind of school choice – ever happen, it’ll be after everyone that could benefit from them has already left the system.

St. Paul school kid kicked off a bus for speaking English:

It happened to a few children in St. Paul and now the school district is apologizing.

Rachel Armstrong sent her kids to pick up the bus as usual Monday, but after the driver let the kids on, he told them he would not pick them up again. He even said he wouldn’t take them home that afternoon.

Armstrong left work early Tuesday, forced to pick up her kids from Phalen Lake Elementary School.

Her twin girls, 10, and her son, 8, were kicked off their regular school bus. They were told by the bus driver the route is for non-English speaking students only.

There was an explanation, of course; it was a bus assigned to all-Spanish and all-Hmong schools.

Ah.  It wasn’t a mistake – it was part of an official policy of balkanization!

More on school bureacracy later…

 (Read the whole series) 

As I noted a while ago in the first and second parts of this series, I didn’t start out as an opponent of the public school system. As the son of a teacher and grandson of two more, Education was one of those issues where, even as I swung to the right on most politics, I remained very much a moderate. After all – the schools did a pretty good job with me, right?

Maybe, maybe not. But either way, I went about ten years without any real contact with any kind of school system, from age 18 to my late twenties.

Then, I got a prefab family – my then-wife had a nine-year-old son when we got married – and got a quick education. My stepson was in fourth grade when we got married. We enrolled him in the Saint Paul Public Schools.

Now, my stepson – who is now 25, lives in Manhattan and is a very talented manager who is engaged to a lovely girl who’s involved in the theatre business in NYC – had some big pluses and, when it came to school, a couple of minuses. He was (and is) blazingly intelligent – especially when it comes to tinkering with things. Mechanical things, mental things, systemic and managerial things – he’s a kid who likes to tear things apart, put them back together again, and make them work. Smart? After high school, he got a grunt job at a flailing, wretched business; within six months, he’d risen to manage the place (a store in a national service chain) and become a superstar within the chain’s district management (hence, when he wanted to move to Manhattan, the company gave him the job he wanted pretty much for the asking). He did with that store in the Midway what he did with countless apppliances, toys, and gadgets over the years as I was helping raise him; he took it apart, saw how it worked (or in the case of the store, didn’t work), and put it back together again better than it started (in the case of the store. Not so much with the appliances).

That, of course, is not the way schools work these days. In retrospect, it never was, of course; most school systems, public or private, place a premium on:

• Sitting quietly
• Learning by absorbing what’s fed to you, when it’s fed to you. No sooner, no later.

Now, apologists (witting or otherwise) for the “sit your butt in the chair and be quiet” model of education will respond “they’re going to have to learn that anyway, to survive in the adult world”.

It’s true, sort of – although the vast majority of people would learn that without 13 years of reinforcement, anyway, just as they did in the centuries before compulsory schooling – and still misses the point. The public system (and most private ones) teach, at the end of the day, little but obedience and learning according to program. The kids who are, for whatever reason, wired to learn best in that manner succeed, and are labelled “good students”. The rest?

For years, teachers (sitting in panels that outnumbered the parents present, always) solemnly intoned their concern for my stepson’s future; “we want him to succeed”, they insisted, even as they drew ever more clearly in the sand that the only criterion for success was becoming engaged in a process that was the exact opposite of how he was wired to learn best – by doing. As years went on, it became clearer and clearer that my stepson had earned the dreaded “bright, but…” label; a smart kid, but he just didn’t care about keeping his ass in a chair for six hours a day learning what he was told to learn.

What he did do – and excel at – was fixing computers. He started by putting computers together at schools, then wiring school computer rooms, and eventually – in ninth grade – working with a teacher to essentially wire and network an entire junior high school. He put in overtime, coming home hours after school let out, doing (according to the school’s netgeek) excellent, diligent work.

“All well and good”, the panels of teachers said, “but he still needs to learn to do his work, and finish what he starts”

By this point, the irony of it even got through to me.

Eventually, though, there was no more wiring and networking to do, and it was back to the grind. He became aggressively unmotivated; waking him up became a dreaded chore. Homework went begging. Finally, he started skipping school. Aggressively so – there were days I’d drive him to school, and find out later that he’d slipped out the back door as I drove away. He got by on pure charm and BS for years, when finally called on it (yet another skill he has)…

…until the week before senior prom, when security met him at the door and told him he’d been expelled. He wasn’t with the program. The school washed his hands of him and the statistical drag he was giving them. “We’re worried that he won’t know how to succeed”, I remember a teacher saying.

The punch line: after he got his diploma at a self-paced alternative program, the Saint Paul Schools hired him to run the network at their crown-jewel, showcase high school.

Not bad, for a kid who never really “learned how to succeed”.

It was after that that he started work at the ailing Midway store in a national chain. He took the chronically-underperforming store apart, cleaned it up, and made it the star of the local chain.

If only he’d learned to sit in a chair for hours on end without becoming distracted, who knows what he’d be today. Right?

I thought that, without sarcasm, for quite some time. Then I had kids of my own.

And it was time for me to learn.

(Read the whole series)

Seth Kirk might just be a lot like me:

Seth Kirk enrolled his elder child in a Minneapolis kindergarten five years ago. Then he went back to school, helping in his son’s classroom, getting active in school leadership and finally tackling district-level issues such as class size.

By last July Kirk was a frustrated man, pounding out a manifesto on his computer keyboard. The title: “Minneapolis Public Schools: A Sinking Ship.”

The online posting by the 42-year-old industrial process researcher speaks for many parents who are true to their own schools but are losing confidence in the district. And when you consider that Kirk is relatively happy with Armatage school, where he has a fifth-grader and a second-grader, you see how precarious things are for Minneapolis schools.

Indeed, the Kirk kids could join the exodus.

“I like to say that we have a one-year lease,” he said, anticipating his high-performing son’s transition to middle school next year. “I would bet very little money that we’re going to finish our public school career in Minneapolis.”

I, of course, have been there; I finally got the last of my kids out of the Saint Paul Public School this fall – and Saint Paul is “better” than Minneapolis (miles “better”), by any objective and most subjective measurements of school districts. The reasons are part of an ongoing series in this blog (which will, shortly, indeed be progressing).

The Minneapolis district’s enrollment is off by a quarter in the past six years, a victim of – critics often fail to note this – black flight: minority parents are leading the exodus from the public schools, to charter, private and suburban schools (using Minnesota’s open-enrollment law to put their kids in a district of their choice).

The article also notes the three most-cited problems, citing the most common “solutions”:

• Leadership. Like other urban districts, Minneapolis has relied on hiring new superintendents, electing new school board members or chasing silver bullets to fix things. Some critics say that a lack of stable leadership and focus keeps the district from following through on valid strategies it does pursue. Others suggest that the district is so straitjacketed — by such factors as contractual limits on how teachers can be assigned to schools — that no change in leaders will matter.

All this is true, as far as it goes. But the real problem is that Minneapolis is a one-party town – and that party is largely controlled by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, a group with an institutional imperative to keep the current system untouched. A party that facilitates the election of chuzzlewits who may know nothing about schools, but are dogmatic racists, to the school board.

Changing the approach at Minneapolis’ public schools would require a huge political change in Minneapolis; this is as likely as Anna Nicole Smith winning a debate on speaker points.

• School readiness. A high proportion of Minneapolis students arrive at kindergarten without the preparation for learning that other children bring…Meanwhile, the most recent comprehensive report card on preschool readiness found some key indicators getting worse, not better.

Most of the “talk” is, of course, wrong; pre-school teaches very little except how to act like the system wants a child to act; if the system itself is the problem, then the “preparation” is just part of the disease.

• Achievement. Although poverty is the most consistent predictor of a student’s performance, as a group, low-income white students often outperform middle-class black students on standardized tests. Some point to the clustering of inexperienced teachers at many schools dominated by low-income, high-needs minority students or the small share of teachers of color.

Er – if poverty is “the most consistent predictor of a student’s performance”, then why do poor whites outperform middle-class black kids?  Or is poverty perhaps not a consistent predictor, but merely a politically-palatable excuse? 

 And given that black flight is the reason the MPS system is collapsing, one might ask – are the charter, private and suburban schools chock-full of teachers of color?  Are their teachers more “experienced” – and, indeed, is teacher experience an indicator of anything but resistance to burnout?

 Beyond that, is it possible the system itself has nothing to do with ‘achievement’ at all, but rather about perpetuating itself and the gravy train it provides for the union and the academic-industrial complex?

“Saving” the Minneapolis schools is going to come down to a simple horserace, between two forces:

1. Minneapolis’ ability to think outside the one-party-town box, and
2. the market, as parents with what P.J. O’Rourke calls “the common sense to give a sh*t” flee the broken system, taking the money assigned to their students with them.

The market, versus a 180 degree change in an ossified political system. Hm.

Where are you putting your money?

(Other than the money you pay in taxes, obviously…)

It’s a good thing Lori Sturdevant is a columnist, and doesn’t work in a field where she needs to be insightful or accurate.

Sturdevant – the most reliable operator in a regional media that serves as the DFL’s PR agency – finds this blazing insight while writing about the economy:

All it took for the “too-few-workers” lament to return were a solid recovery from recession,

That’s right; Lori Sturdevant has realized that when companies aren’t laying off workers, they need workers.

She gets paid for this.

Sure enough, “workforce” is back on top as the No. 1 “drag on economic growth” in Minnesota. That’s according to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s latest findings from a year of interviewing 797 business owners around the state. Worker issues beat out lousy transportation and — amazingly — high taxes, which have fallen to Gripe No. 3…Availability and quality of trained workers are “the No. 1 issue for our members. How do we ensure that we’ll have a workforce that can do the job?”

Welcome back to the right question, bizfolk. Hope you stay with it this time.

Lori.  Bubbie.  Why do you suppose taxes have fallen to number three?

Because we’ve had four years of holding the line on taxes.  Which played a disproportionate role in solving the recession.  Which has led to skilled workers (unaccountably including myself) being in demand again.

Did I mention Lori Sturdevant gets paid for this?

Educators, economists and crystal-ball gazers long have been saying that the most serious long-term threat to this state’s prosperity isn’t uncompetitively high taxes. Minnesota has had a higher-than-average tax burden for decades, and thrived with it.

No, Lori.  History is replete with examples of cities, states and nations that were sunk by high taxes.  Minnesota has thrived in spite of high taxes, as we’ve noted in the past; we’ve had certain advantages that have helped us survive the profligacy of a couple of generations’ worth of tax and spend DFL governments.

The greater competitive risk is that this still-small, climatologically challenged state won’t be able to raise, attract and educate enough of the brainpower workers that 21st-century businesses need.

Minnesota’s Private College Research Foundation has been clanging that alarm for years. It predicted in 2004 that by 2010, Minnesota won’t produce enough college grads to replace retirees and meet employers’ expansion needs. By 2017, new college grads won’t be numerous enough to replace the retirees, let alone keep up with business growth.

That forecast appears to be on target. Already last year, the state Chamber of Commerce said, nearly two out of five outstate employers and a fourth of metro ones had trouble finding specialty skilled workers.

So what would be the sensible course to take?  Would it be…:

• Crediting business for their training efforts – which make sense in any case, if they’d like to stay in business in the first place?
• Using the school system we already have to try to inculcate in students the sense that they need to develop the kind of mental agility and planning ability it takes to pick a career path from the many that are opening (and begging for workers) that best fit their talents?

No.  In Lori Sturdevant’s world, like always, it comes back to government:

“Other states are taking action on this problem, creating special training at local colleges and universities for larger employers, and/or bringing basic technical skills to high school students. … Minnesota could lose these companies and these jobs if it cannot find a solution,” warns the Chamber’s just-released “Grow Minnesota!” annual report.

Such matters appear to be moving up on the legislative agendas being set in executive suites and boardrooms. Last week, the state Chamber of Commerce decided that at the 2007 Legislature, it will support increased funding for the University of Minnesota and the MnSCU systems…Other CEOs are lining up smartly in favor of more student aid and incentives for college-prep work by at-risk high school kids, as urged by the private colleges.

In other words – business wants the state to help them out of the jam by sponsoring yet another big-dollar program which is both a handout to business and to the higher-education industry and unions.  And since Minnesota does such a lousy job educating K-12 students, they will likely need to.

When higher ed was taking a beating at the Capitol in 2002 and 2003, the biz lobby seemed too busy fending off proposed tax increases to care. Competitiveness was their mantra then. It can be still. But its meaning needs to shift from “no new taxes” to “beef up education.”

Where “beef up education” equals “keep tossing money at the educational-industrial complex that already squanders so much of this state’s wealth”.

Sorry, Lori.  This state spends more than enough to educate good workers.  Most of it is wasted.  More money won’t help.  Better to give it directly to the businesses and let them teach the kids.

It’d be more honest.

The public school system has a lot of problems.

• The goal, in this era of “No Child Left Behind”, is for students to do well on tests. That’s about it. Schools, teachers and administrators can back and fill all they want, but at the end of the day they are all just “teaching the test” – on pain of running afoul of NCLB’s “Accountability” rules. NCLB has been ta disaster.
• The biggest disaster, of course, was way public education got into the mess in the first place. The teachers’ unions take a lot of blame – justifiably – for the “dumbing down” of education. The unions, being unions, have done their best to turn education into a blue-collar factory job with white-collar accessories and workload. Detractors call the system the “Factory Model of Education”, and justly so; the system resembles an assembly line. Procedures must be followed. Parts that don’t fit the specs are removed from the production line. Speed and efficiency are essential.
• The basic model for education – sit in a desk in an airless building for six to eight hours at a shot, eat lousy food, get water only when given (infrequent) permission, learning things when someone else, a curriculum designer or teacher, deems fit – is one that works, objectively, for maybe a tenth of the population. For the rest, it’s a matter of gritting one’s teeth and toughing it out, or…not. Remember – most of what kids learn in six years of elementary school can be taught to average kids of average intelligence in a matter of weeks.
• Above all, students have to show up and sit in those damn desks. Schools are paid on a per-student, per-day basis; if Johnny doesn’t have his butt in that desk at 8:40, the school doesn’t get paid for the days that the student is absent, or even late without an excuse.

It’s hard to figure which is less of wonder – that kids see the whole charade as a waste of time, or that the schools are failing to teach more and more kids the basics every single year.

The Strib addresses the truancy “crisis” in an editorial this morning:

At North High School, almost 50 percent of the 1,300 students skipped enough school last year to be considered habitual truants. That’s the highest truancy rate in Minneapolis — not coincidentally in one of the highest crime areas in the city. Those numbers speak volumes about how important is it to intervene with early-stage truants.

Only if you presume that:

• …school figures on “truancy” are accurate. They are not. Schools consider a student who is late without a “valid excuse” three times in a semester to be “truant”. They don’t, for the record, care why the student is late without an excuse; absentminded parents forgetting to write notes, kid missed the bus, car wouldn’t start, kid not feeling well? Who cares! The kid is “truant!” Why? We’ll get to that.
• …wanting to leave the madhouse of the modern inner city school is inherently irrational. Yet in a school where the majority of students do not learn what they need in the adult world (to say nothing of things like critical thinking and the love of learning), where they go through metal detectors and practice “locking down” and are subject to a routine more in line with prison than with school, truly – what’s irrational about wanting out?

The districts respond, of course, like any bureaucracy:

Recent city and county efforts are not the first or only antitruancy programs. Both Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys’ offices have addressed the issue with some success.

Really?

Have they?

Ramsey County’s “Truancy Intervention Program” employs a group of lawyers to chase after “truant” kids – county prosecutors who should be prosecuting crimes against citizens. They spend their highly paid days chasing after kids and parents who, for whatever reason, don’t get to class (or just don’t get there on time often enough), threatening dire consequences for non-compliance.

Have they had “some success”? The program’s website explains the “success” in terms that make perfect sense to bureaucrats; butts were indeed jammed back into seats. So why does a school district need to have the full weight of the County Attorney’s office to corral kids back into their seats? Could they do it less expensively – or is the TIP basically a make-work program for less-talented county lawyers?

This isn’t rocket science: Teens who like school and feel successful there are much less likely to skip. Young people who regularly participate in activities through community, church or school are too busy to look for trouble.

But the first thing school districts cut when the budgets are cut fail to rise as fast as the union wants are the very programs that help give so many kids a reason to stay current – indeed, where so many kids learn vastly more than they do in school, if they’re at all like I was.  And – biggest madness of all – “good” schools are now demanding a positively insane amount of homework, a bit of collective lunacy that deserves its own post.

As fond as the left is of seeking “root causes” for things, you’d think they’d be interested in the “root cause” of truancy.  But I suspect the “root result” is the biggest issue to them.

(Read the whole series)

As I noted last week, I didn’t start out as an opponent of the public education system [1]. No, in fact the school system had to work pretty hard to make me what I am today – a fierce, intractable, and deeply cynical critic.

It really didn’t start that way.

One of the best things that happened to me in elementary school was my fifth grade teacher, Barry Buchholtz. He’d just graduated from college, after serving a hitch in the Navy, some of it in Vietnam. Buchholtz was a godsend for a group of fifth grade boys, used to being crammed into long, orderly rows for hours on end. He told war stories (he had quite a few), he taught us karate moves, he roughhoused with us (to the horror of the women who taught the other classes, he let us play “tackle pomp”, which was basically a playground cage match), he quarterbacked our sandlot football games, he let us play cops ‘n robbers and cowboys ‘n indians and whatnot, even letting us made toy guns out of branches and sticks.

And he was the best teacher ever, to a group of ten year old boys. Not just because he let a bunch of boys roughhouse – but because letting us out of those dank, airless classrooms and letting us run around and do things other than rote memorizing and listening to readings taught most of us that learning didn’t have to be utter drudgery.

He’d probably be fired today. But I digress.

“Utter Drudgery” may sound dramatic – and I largely didn’t mind school, because with a teacher for a father, I knew the value of playing the paper chase. I’d also learned to read early, which put me on the fast track for most of elementary school.

But I do remember the kids who didn’t have such a good time. Boys who couldn’t sit still in long rows on hard wooden seats (two of my classrooms as a kid still had the desks that were bolted into long rows on the floor) and were labeled “difficult”; kids whose blood sugar ran out about an hour before lunch; kids who reacted badly to the stale, stuffy, miserable air in our 1912 school building (which was later condemned and torn down). Boys who didn’t learn to read as fast as the other kids, for whatever reason. Kids who didn’t take to sitting in long, orderly rows for hours on end doing what someone else had planned out for them, day in, day out, year in,year out.
I remember during my senior year, talking with a friend who was a natural with machines. We’d been in first, second, fourth and fifth grades together. I had very fond memories of all the years (except fourth grade; I had the same fourth-grade teacher as my father had had. The woman, to say the least, was overdue for retirement). My pal denied remembering anything about first, second or fourth grades. I’d done well; he’d been labelled “not much of a student’ – and everyone knew it at the time! In fact, I pondered (years later) – everyone who’d had a rough time in school, or who’d dropped out, came as exactly no surprise at all to those of us who’d known them in elementary school. They just hadn’t fit in.

————-

A good chunk of the teachers, from fifth grade on (especially the males) had paddles hanging from their chalkboards. Many of them didn’t hesitate to use them; if a kid sassed off, left the room, or (in some cases) didn’t do his homework, they had carte blanche to swing away. And they did (although not, ever, with girls). My high school principal had been a Marine fighter pilot in WWII; his assistant in charge of discipline, was a 6’6 guy, also a former Marine, I think. The assistant would prowl the halls; guys who sassed him would be flung across the hall or stuffed into lockers. Smoking in the boys room couild earn you a “swirlie” (the AP would dunk heads in the toilet and flush, or so the rumor had it).

Now, I don’t support corporal punishment – and some teachers did abuse the “privilege”. But back then, I don’t recall a single instance of schools being “locked down”, or of any sort of hysteria over violence. Bring a toy gun to school? It’d get confiscated until your parents felt like picking it up. Sass a teacher? Get paddled, get detention (which, back then, was a solid, miserable hour after school). Draw on the walls? Stay after school and clean all the walls and desks, under the watchful eye of a teacher who was stuck in the building until 5 and not real happy about it.

In other words, dumb actions had dumb and immediate consequences. Consequences which most people eventually figured they could do without.

Consequences that didn’t punish the parents or every other student in the school.

I grew up, graduated, went to college, started a life, married a prefab family (my wife had a nine-year-old boy when we got married), and in 1990 became reacquainted with schools. I was still a big supporter.

After all – they’d done OK with me, hadn’t they?

(Read the whole series)

(more…)

When I was a kid, toy guns were not something you brought to school.

On the other hand, you didn’t bring any other toys to school, either. They were a distraction.

Nowadays, the biggest distraction is the idiots who run our school systems. Apple Valley schools have had a couple of students arrested for being insufficiently bright on school time:

Toy guns have landed two teenagers in Dakota County in serious trouble.

In one case, a 14-year-old Apple Valley student was arrested Thursday morning after twice firing plastic pellets from an air gun at students on a school bus.

Um, no, I’m not condoning this. The little dolt deserved to have the whole world come down on him. And an extent it did. But did it stop there?

According to a letter that district superintendent John Currie sent to parents Thursday, the boy first shot the air gun while he was on or outside a shuttle bus at Apple Valley High School. The bus driver was unaware of the incident at the time, Currie said.

The student then rode the bus to the School of Environmental Studies, where he allegedly again shot the air gun at students. The shuttle continued to the boy’s school, the Area Learning Center, where he was arrested.

On the one hand; a junior high kid has done something deeply, utterly stupid (and one might not suspect it’s the first time, since the kid attends ALC, which is school district shorthand for “We’ve had plenty of trouble with this kid already”. ALC is the educational gulag. More on that later.

On the other hand; the school sent a letter. To parents. A letter explaining to the parents of junior high kids that another junior high kid has done something really, really dumb.

And the story has made the front (online page) of the Strib!

We’ll get back to this. There was another incident. I’ve added emphasis:

In the other Dakota County case, a 15-year-old student at Hastings High School was charged Thursday with making terroristic threats, a felony, after telling other students he had a “hit list” with four names on it and planned to take a replica gun to school to frighten his targets.

The incidents that began at Apple Valley High School prompted school officials to lock down the School for Environmental Studies and the Area Learning Center briefly, Currie said.

A dolt and an overdramatic drama jack act like…dolts and overdramatic drama jacks, or, put another way, like adolescents. The proper response is to suspend them, maybe arrest them, deal with the situation.

But no. They locked down both schools, confining hundreds of kids to their airless, dismal classrooms, in a ritual that every student in a school today knows to mean “SOMEONE WITH A GUN!”

It’s a wonder anyone gets through our school systems without post-traumatic stress.

The San Francisco School Board voted 4-2 yesterday to resolve to eliminate the Junior Reserve Office Training Corps (JROTC) program.

The resolution passed says the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers violates the school district’s equal rights policy for gays. The school district and the military currently share the $1.6 million annual cost of the program. About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools across the district.

Cadets and instructors who spoke at the meeting and rallied outside argued that the program teaches leadership, organizational skills, personal responsibility and other important values.

“This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe,” said Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor. “You’re going to take that away from them?”

Unmentioned in the story; the program is especially popular in heavily-minority inner city schools, among parents who can’t afford private schools but want something in their students’ day that instills some form of discipline, pride and self-respect (as opposed to self-esteem) among their students.

To his credit, mayor Gavin Newsom criticized the resolution:

Mayor Gavin Newsom called severing ties with the JROTC “a bad idea” that penalized students without having any practical effect on the Pentagon’s policy on gays in the military.

Indeed.

Now, here’s the dirty little secret; the left – awash as they claim to be in concern for the well-being of minority students – hate JROTC. There is a faction in the Saint Paul School Board and the Administration that is actively seeking to bar JROTC from St. Paul schools – not primarily because of “Don’t Ask…”, but because they just don’t like the military.

I’d love to get some Democrats on the local school board on record about this.

Note:  This post has nothing to do with religion, per se.  At least, not in the sense that a person of faith would recognize. 

When I tell you I’m a Republican, those of you who don’t know me most likely resort to stereotypes; I’m white, male, Christian, anti-tax, anti-big-government, pro-defense (so far so good), anti-gay (not really true), pro-life (yes, but much moreso pro-Tenth Amendment), and…

…”Anti-Education”.  It’s an interesting phrase, that one; the notion of “Education” has been corrupted to refer to the institution of the educational establishment – the school boards, administrations, unions and the educational academy – in a sense that really has nothing to do with actually providing an “Education”.

So with that dichotomy understood – you’d be mostly wrong.  I was, in fact, one of those Republicans who was a big proponent  of public education.  Oh, it had problems, things that needed to be tuned up and fixed, but it was the system we had, dagnabbit!

Education was the family business, in a sense; my mother’s parents were both teachers, and my sister works in the system as well.   I even thought – briefly – about a career in education while in college, although that lasted about three days.

Most of all, my father was a teacher for the better part of four decades – and a great one at that.  Dad taught English, Literature and (best of all) Speech.  Strangers as well as friends of mine stop by years – now, decades – later and tell me he was the best teacher they’d ever had.  If every teacher were like Dad was – if every school district and administration let people like Dad teach, for that matter – we wouldn’t have an education crisis in this country.
You’ll note that everything in the previous couple of paragraphs is in the past tense.  I was a proponent.  Ten years ago, I was as strong a supporter of public education as one could find in the GOP.

That’s changed.  The public education system in Saint Paul and Minnesota has taken a guy who was once a firm friend, and turned him into an implacable, remorseless enemy for life. And it has little to do with politics – indeed, the GOP is almost (but not quite) as clueless as the DFL when it comes to education.  But it goes way deeper than that.
And now that both of my kids are at long last out of the public system, I’m going to tell their story, and mine.

There are going to be a number of parts to the story, probably two episodes a week for a couple of weeks.  Stay tuned.

(Read the whole series)