Tag Archives: Education Stuff

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MORE Food Nazis!

Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home

You just had to know that things would come to this, based on what has already been going on with regulation nad legislation dictating the availability and use of food. It is LITERALLY not too far out to call these types of food police Nazis. Hitler WOULD have approved…he was a strict vegetarian, tee-totaler, and non-smoker, although even he wasn’t ready to enforce his personal preferences on others…yet. Fortunately he met his fate, and that problem went away, at least until its latest revival.

To encourage healthful eating, Chicago school doesn’t allow kids to bring lunches or certain snacks from home — and some parents, and many students, aren’t fans of the policy

What’s next? 2-way “telescreens” with compulsory daily physical exercise under surveillance monitoring a-la 1984? What’s scary about that concept, is that we now have the technology to actually pull that off!

A Latin tag comes to mind: NON SUPER NOS – “You ain’t the boss of us!”

Uncategorized

Gunning for Education!

Have Any Spare 12 Gauge Shotguns? If So, The Department of Education Would Like to Buy Them…

Remington

This is from the linked D.O.E. solicitation for bids.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14″ – PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT – XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID

Why do I doubt that they are starting a student skeet-shooting program?

So what ARE they doing with ’em?

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SD Academic “Donks” in Majority

DWU study: More S.D. professors are Democrats

This is not really much of a surprisE to the Chief, although apparently most of the state had beliefs to the contrary. The margin is not as great as it is elsewhere around the country, but it’s still there.

A new study by a pair of Dakota Wesleyan University students indicates that there are more Democratic college professors in South Dakota than the state’s residents suspect.

Kelsey Miller and Sarah M. Duff, students in professor Don Simmons’ Leadership and Public Service Seminar class, used voter-registration records to determine the political affiliation of 403 full-time college professors from the education, political science, business and history departments at 10 institutions in the state.

Eighty-seven of the professors were not registered to vote. Among the remaining 316 who were registered, 49 percent were Democrats, 37 percent were Republicans and 14 percent were independent.

The data contradicts perceptions held by South Dakota residents, according to an earlier telephone poll conducted by DWU students. In that poll of 413 South Dakotans, 55 percent of respondents said they thought college professors in South Dakota were either “conservative” or “somewhat conservative.”

Caveat emptor.

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Spirit of Mao Lives at U. of MN

At U, future teachers may be reeducated
They must denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.)

Sometimes the Chief has heard seni-laughing references from Minnesota friends about the “People’s Republic of Minnesota.

If this is any indication, maybe the laughter should be gone, leaving nothing but the “People’s Republic”…for real.

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

This is because of a series of “reforms” in the teacher education program being drafted and proposed for the U of M that forces compliance with a set of attitudes and procedures that are nearly exact reproductions of procedures implemented in ChiCom Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s disastrous “Cultural Revolution”.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic….

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward “cultural competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

Wait, it gets worse:

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an “autoethnography” report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their “cultural” motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a “cultural intelligence” assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other “isms.” They “earn points” for “demonstrating the ability to be self-critical.”…

The goal of these exercises, in the task group’s words, is to ensure that “future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”

Good grief, Charlie Brown!…and worse yet:

What if some aspiring teachers resist this effort at thought control and object to parroting back an ideological line as a condition of future employment? The task group has Orwellian plans for such rebels: The U, it says, must “develop clear steps and procedures for working with non-performing students, including a remediation plan.”

This is what Mao referred to as “re-education”, and he built special “camps” to insure proper implementation of this program.

And what if students’ ideological purity is tainted once they begin to do practice teaching in the public schools? The task group frames the danger this way: “How can we be sure that teaching supervisors are themselves developed and equipped in cultural competence outcomes in order to supervise beginning teachers around issues of race, class, culture, and gender?”

Its answer? “Requir[e] training/workshop for all supervisors. Perhaps a training session disguised as a thank you/recognition ceremony/reception at the beginning of the year?”

When teacher training requires a “disguise,” you know something sinister is going on.

Hard to imagine Minnesota is only 20 miles away from the Chief’s outpost. And they can’t figure out why more people are interested in home-schooling.

DISCLOSURE: The Chief is a semi-retired teacher with over a quarte-century of teaching H.S. sciences, as well as social studies, including U.S. history.

SD Politics

SD Judge Slaps Ed System, Sups.

Judge Sides With SD In Education Lawsuit

The judge in South Dakota’s education funding lawsuit has filed a preliminary decision and she’s sided with the state.

A group of parents and students sued the state, claiming it doesn’t do enough to adequately fund education in South Dakota. After a trial and months of deliberation, Circuit Judge Lori Wilbur ruled that the plaintiffs didn’t prove the education funding system is defective.

Dozens of families and around 70 school districts claimed that the state doesn’t do enough to support education, and the funding formula is flawed.

Some additional details of the decision are noted below:

Judge: Education not a right

South Dakota students aren’t guaranteed a quality education, a circuit judge ruled Wednesday, finding that the way the state pays for education does not violate the state constitution.

Circuit Judge Lori Wilbur’s decision follows a trial that saw six superintendents complain that a lack of money was hurting South Dakota’s students. An appeal to the state Supreme Court now is likely, according to the lawyer representing students and their families.

The state’s funding system has room for improvement, Wilbur acknowledged, but she also found that education is not a fundamental right; the state need not prepare students for college or “meaningful employment”; and the testimony of the superintendents was unreliable.

[B-SLAP!]  Superintendents testimony unreliable?!  That’s gotta hurt!  She basically called thgem a bunch of liars.

The judge said students receive adequate educational opportunities even without the “wish lists” various school superintendents presented at trial.

“Whether school districts, if given more money, could provide more programs or resources, or higher teacher pay, or build better facilities, is irrelevant if the constitutional minimum is being provided,” Wilbur wrote.

This following point is something the Chief CAN get behind.

She said that some policy options discussed at trial could improve education, but those decisions are for the legislature, not the judiciary.

If people are not concerned enough about the issues cited by the Superintendents during the trial to carry them to their legislators, then I guess they get the system that they are willing to accept, and pay for, and the students get the leftovers of the public trough.  Kind of harsh for the schools, but that’s life in a representative republic.

(Disclosure: the Chief is a public school educator currently at a small school district.)

SD Politics, Uncategorized

Salary Salvage in the Dump, etc.

A few observations on the proceedings of our legislature:

Some Lawmakers Want ‘Salary Salvage’ Scrapped

Salary salvage: don’t fill job positions so the money can be spent elsewhere.

Sort of a way of doing an end run around what the legislature has actually voted to spend money on.

Not a good practice. This deserves to be dumped.

Senate approves change in school aid

Under this scheme, when state revenues are down, school aid will be down. When revenues are up, the aid will likewise go up. A big problem is that when state revenues are down, school expenses stay the same, regardless, something’s got to go.

As happened recently with Gettysburg, Rutland, and elsewhere, sometimes it’s teachers…who leave behind the same number of students to be taught, with a smaller faculty to carry on and do the job as best they can.

Another very real possibility is that later on, legislators may change the formula again if someone starts squawking that schools will get too much of an increase when the economy DOES finally start improving again.

No solution is perfect…maybe this one will ultimately help. Time will tell.

Misc. Ed. Bill Hearings Postponed

Hearings were scheduled for Wednesday on HB1234, the latest iteration of a Small Schools Kill Bill, HB1293 requiring school administrative consolidation (a defacto educational bureaucracy implementation act, and HB1198 allowing schools to charge activity fees for extracurriculars.

The Chief knows of a number of groups of concerned South Dakotans who had arranged their lives to be able to attend and offer comments to their Solons at work, but it seems said Solons decided not to cover those issues at that time…so those concerned could either rearrange their situation to go to Pierre on Friday, or forget the whole idea.

Perhaps I’m too cynical any more, but it does seem like a handy way to dodge slings, arrows, and mudballs from pesky constituents concerning these issues.

HB1254 and HB1293 both force centralization, and move things farther away from direct local control. HB1198? A mixed bag at best, which given the direction of things at Pierre, would eventually be used as a bludgeon to push for school aid cuts to districts who were unwilling to charge fees…thereby using other funds to support what the local communities felt was a positive (even if extracurricular) part of their school program.

Committee Sends Smoking Ban To SD House Floor

As a matter of principle relating to property rights, the Chief opposes this sort of thing in general.

If someone wants to have a smoking environment on their property, so be it. If you don’t like the smoke, take your custom elsewhere. This is NOT hard to figure out.

By the way, I do not smoke or use any tobacco products, and I do not especially like 2nd hand smoke, but property rights SHOULD BE property rights, irrespective of the irresistable urge of legislators to play nanny.

SD Politics

“Pay to Play” at Schools?

Bill Would Allow Student Fees For Activities

A bill in the South Dakota Legislature would give schools the option of charging students to participate in sports and other extra-curricular activities. Republican Representative Mark Kirkeby of Rapid City says his bill would give school districts a chance to spend more of their money in the classroom.

This idea may have some merit, but it would depend a lot on what the details were. If for example, football were REALLY that important in a community, then why wouldn’t the community be willing to support it? Or, many other activities.

The bill does not set guidelines for how much the fees would cost.

Ooops. What details? If Kirkeby and the legislature wants to go down this path seriously, they need to do the heavy lifting and really figure our pretty explicitly how it all would work. Of course, then they would have to take the heat if it DIDN’T work out well too. Maybe that’s biting off a bit more than they want to chew. The Chief would contend that community responsibility begins at Pierre, as far as setting up some sort of orderly framework for something like this is concerned.

Mary Stadick Smith in the state Education Department says extra curriculars are an extension of the classroom and should not be subject to extra fees.

This is another whole argument in itself. Certainly putting on a play, debate, declam, science fairs, bads, ag judging, etc are obviously an “extension of the classroom”. It’s less obvious to the Chief that this is the case in the case of team athletics, but the Chief is willing to bet that this is another aspect of the question that Kirkeby and Pierre are reluctant to tackle. It’s easy to throw this stuff into the legislative hopper like a drive-by shooting, but another thing all together to deal with it thoroughly and thoughtfully. For evidence of this, all one needs to do is look at the greatest irresponsible piece of drive-by legislation in history…the B.O. Bail-out Bill just approved by Congress.

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SD School Formula Change?

This has been an idea under discussion for years…and has even been the subject of the ongoing Davis v. SD lawsuit which is premised on the demonstrable proposition that the SD aid formula for schools has been consistently deficient.

Senate panel approves school aid change

This COULD be an improvement down the line, although it would be tight for the first couple years.  Of course there is no guarantee that subsequent legislootive sessions wouldn’t change things again before any increase actually took place.

The way things run, the outcome is a total crapshoot.  In any event, time will tell.

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Chicago School Problems: The Heritage of the New Ed. Secretary!

‘Painful Lessons': Abuse At Chicago Schools
Hundreds Of Kids Beaten, Whipped, Even Choked By Teachers, Coaches

A couple of weeks ago there was news of $67,000 being spent on a no-bid deal for cappucino machines for Chicago schools, most of which hadn’t requested them, and weren’t even using them once they were delivered.

Now, comes another installment showing how the Chicago school system has been in the habit of operating.

Treveon Martin, 10, is afraid of a teacher at his school. “I’ve seen him hit five of them in the classroom,” Martin said.

Martin says he and others have been hit, grabbed and even struck with a belt. “He’s threatened almost all the kids in his classroom,” Martin said.

He says it happened at Robert Emmet Academy in November but a Chicago Public School investigator didn’t talk to him until last week – 70 days after the case was reported, and not until after we started asking questions.

“He holded my arms and he picked my body up, and then he just slammed me on the desk,” Martin said.

An exclusive CBS 2 investigation discovered Treveon Martin is one of at least 818 Chicago Public School students, since 2003, to allege being battered by a teacher or an aide, coach, security guard, or even a principal. In most of those cases – 568 of them – Chicago Public School investigators determined the children were telling the truth.

So, just another local issue? It shouldn’t be.

These sorts of incidents don’t spontaneously appear in a large organization. They won’t appear at all where competent, engaged, hands-on management is not afraid to set and enforce rigorous standards of professional conduct at all levels.  In order for this pattern of mismanagement to have arisen, those in charge are prima facie guilty of failure to exercise due diligence in the performance of their responsibilities.

The REAL question at this point is where is the media’s questioning of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about his prior and  apparently poor performance as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, under which the above noted financial, (and even more seriously) physical abuses occurred.

From the Department of Education website we find the following:

Prior to his appointment as secretary of education, Duncan served as the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, a position to which he was appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, from June 2001 through December 2008, becoming the longest-serving big-city education superintendent in the country. (emphasis added)

Seems to the Chief that Duncan SHOULD have some ‘splainen’ to do!

DOE’s bio blurb goes on:

As CEO, Duncan’s mandate was to raise education standards and performance, improve teacher and principal quality…

If that was Duncan’s mandate, based on the evidence, he failed to live up to expectations…and now he’s the man that B.O. (The Exalted One) himself has picked to lead the rest of the country’s educational establishment ever onward and upwards beyond the realm of “no child left behind”.

(Eeeeeuuuu!)

Better the Department of Education was eliminated than to turn it over to Duncan’s apparently incompetent management.

SD Politics

Killed: Small Schools Death Act

This occurred as the SD Legislature continues its annual session. It indicates to the Chief that there is evidence of at least some reason being present this year at the session.

Panel kills plan to raise minimum school size

A bill to make more small schools in South Dakota reorganize is premature, a House committee says.

The House Education Committee voted 12-3 on Wednesday to kill HB1182, a bill that would have required schools with fewer than 195 students to reorganize with other districts. Two years ago legislators passed the current law, which requires reorganization for schools with fewer than 100 students.

The Legislature should see how the current law works before raising the reorganization bar, opponents of the higher minimum size said.

This is a perennial proposal that bubbles up like an unpleasant gas released from the bottom of a slough while duck hunting. It doesn’t help in accomplishing anything, but just gives evidence that something (or someone, in this case) has gotten stirred up.

The given reason for this is of course (genuflect appropriately!) is to save money, which as a general principle is ALWAYS a laudable, if too rare, a thing for any governmental body to contemplate. In this case however, earlier testimony indicated that this would not be the result of this scheme.

State education officials testified earlier that reorganization wouldn’t necessarily save money because the state-aid formula is based on a per-student cost.

So, what’s the point then?

Given that there may be occasional cases of smaller districts being educationally deficient, in most cases this is not a problem, based on testing results. If local communities are willing to support their schools of whatever size, and the school district is able to work our a modus operandi that meets the needs of the students and community, then WHY IN THE HECK ARE SOME LEGISLATORS FROM OTHER COMMUNITIES SO BOUND AND DETERMINED TO IMPOSE THEIR IDEA ON THEIR FELLOW SOUTH DAKOTANS, WHEN THERE IS NO OBVIOUS GAIN IN DOING SO?

Maybe somebody knows, but the Chief sure can’t see the reason in it, so for that reason it is a good thing that H.R. 1138 seems to have met its doom, at least for another year, and community based schools like Rutland, Oldham-Ramona, and others will be able to continue serving the educational (and yes, also social) needs of their areas, just as do the schools of Brookings, Sioux Falls, Tea, Canton, or anywhere else.

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Today Chicago, tomorrow the Nation?

Chicago Public Schools’ cappuccino bill: $67,000

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general’s 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted.

Isn’t B.O.’s designee for the Sec’y of Education coming directly from running the Chicago schools? Don’t look for anything effective, or efficient to come out of D of Ed if this is a sample of his management expertise.

Culture Wars, SD Politics

Gov. Continues to Push for SD Pre-school

Witness skeptical about preschool

Gov. Mike Rounds continues to push for preschool standards in South Dakota, but a Stanford educator says studies so far don’t support a “full-scale” program.

Erik Hanushek, a Stanford professor who is among expert witnesses for the state in a school-aid lawsuit, seems lukewarm about the value of preschool, which he admits is “complicated.” “There are some good but very small-scale studies showing positive effects of preschool,” Hanushek said in an e-mail exchange. “Most of the positive effects, however, are not educational improvements but reductions in crime and incarceration. These might well be good investments for society, but they do not solve the education problem.”

Rounds, in an address to school superintendents in Pierre on Tuesday, said, “Preschool is something that is very, very important.”

EuroSocialists, Lenin, Hitler, and Plato would all be in agreement with the Governor on this one. How so?

Mrs. Chief recently received some correspondence from Norwegian cousins who related that their first child was starting the (government mandated) kindergarten – at one-year of age!!

Plato’s Republic advocated that the training of children was too important to leave to the parents, and that to obtain good citizens of the polis, systematic removal from parents for training was the ideal to be implemented.

The above noted 20th-century devotees of the superior wisdom and knowledge of their respective states (of totalitarianism) also advocated, and implemented programs to reduce the influence of parents in the early childhood education of children, again, in the interest of getting more reliable citizens of their versions of a “new world order”.

While Governor Rounds obviously is NOT in the category of these stark practitioners of the superiority of the state in all that matters, his trend on this issue is clearly in the same direction: that the early education of children is too important to leave to parents…this proposition being a (possibly unintended) keystone in the development of more TOTALitarian (get it? TOTAL – as in state control of all aspects of life, including for example, child-rearing) relationships between the state and the people.

This path is NOT a good direction to start down.

Uncategorized

Students the Same; Tests Get Stupider!

Girls = Boys at Math

Zip. Zilch. Nada. There’s no real difference between the scores of U.S. boys and girls on common math tests, according to a massive new study. Educators hope the finding will finally dispel lingering perceptions that girls don’t measure up to boys when it comes to crunching numbers.

“This shows there’s no issue of intellectual ability–and that’s a message we still need to get out to some of our parents and teachers,” says Henry “Hank” Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston, Virginia.

It won’t be a new message. Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study led by psychologist Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found a “trivial” gap in math test scores between boys and girls in elementary and middle school. But it did suggest that boys were better at solving more complex problems by the time they got to high school.

Now, even that small gap has disappeared, Hyde reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science. Her team sifted through scores from standardized tests taken in 2005, 2006, and 2007 by nearly 7 million students in 10 states. Overall, the researchers found “no gender difference” in scores among children in grades two through 11.

This all makes sense to the Chief, based on his 26 years in the science classroom. This piece goes on to point out that the REAL problem is in the testing.

The study’s most disturbing finding, the authors say, is that neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests now required to measure a school district’s progress under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. Using a four-level rating scale, with level one being easiest, the authors said that they found no challenging level-three or -four questions on most state tests. The authors worry that means that teachers may start dropping harder math from their curriculums, because “more teachers are gearing their instruction to the test.”

This is a real issue, and one of the major flaws in the NCLB approach. The Chief was involved in South Dakota’s efforts to bring the testing in line with the states science standards…which are pretty good, and which also include higher level type three and four items noted above.

In the assessment project, we were instructed NOT to attempt to address these levels of competence in NCLB-related testing, since THERE IS NO WAY TO PROPERLY EVALUATE THE ATTAINMENT OF THESE ON THE TYPE OF “OBJECTIVE” TESTING USED FOR ESTABLISHING NCLB COMPLIANCE.

The same thing applies in math as it did for science. While the Chief has no objection (quite the contrary!) to establishing and maintaining high educational standards, the NCLB approach is fatally flawed. Unfortunately, there is no easy, concise, quick fix that readily lends itself to a bureaucratic type of approach. IMHO not only is this the case, but it is the INEVITABLE outgrowth of the establishment and growth of the massive Federal education bureaucracy of the Dept. of Education, which in turn drives a similar growth in the administrative infrastructure at the state and local levels in order to “document” compliance with the Federal mandates.

Reagan was right – abolish the US Dept. of Education!

Uncategorized

Wikipedia Killer or Great Firewall of America?

Google Knol – Yup, it’s a Wikipedia killer

Google Knol, Mountain View’s answer to Wikipedia, launched last week and, while it can’t yet match the volume of articles on Wikipedia, its focus on accountability and ownership makes it a better choice for students and teachers.

Unfortunately, it gives the whole thing back to a supposedly more reliable “higher authority: to determine what is more accurate. In this case, whoever the GoG (Gods of Google) think is “reliable” gets heard.

Google wouldn’t weight things that way? Why not? Google people haven’t been bashful at expressing their own particular political opinions. Nor have they been hesitant at cooperating in erecting the “Great Firewall of China”, to help the ChiCom regime censor web content.

There is NO guarantee that these two things couldn’t be combined to give a bias to the coverage of Google Knol.

To give one possible (probable?) example; something like Glowbull Warming, where according to the major media and Al Gore there is no longer any debate POSSIBLE…except that the American Physical Society had recently stated that this is NOT the case, and that there is still a lot of SCIENTIFIC debate going on.

In short, I would rather have a no-holds barred mud-wrestle between various points of view from whatever source under a “caveat emptor” regime, than trust a corporate entity to “sanitize” and present what THEY determine to be the acceptable, orthodox view on possibly controversial topics.

Culture Wars

Dumbing Down in Britain?

Children need ‘life skills’ not dates say teachers

DISCLOSURE: The Chief is currently teaching U.S. and World History, along with some other social studies, and science, all at the high school level.

Children should not be taught to remember key historical dates such as the Battle of Hastings but should instead learn “life skills”, teachers have claimed. A new curriculum should place greater emphasis on broad skills such as team working and interpreting evidence rather than learning dates by rote, said the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

Dum-de-dum-dum!

She said: “Is the world going to collapse if they don’t know ‘To Be, or Not to Be?’ Our national curriculum should be far more focused on the development of life skills and ways of working than whether or not we teach the Battle of Hastings. The skills of historical understanding are far more important than whether or not we teach a particular battle.” She insisted it was “not dumbing down – we are raising up”.

Raising up WHAT? People who are unable to think analytically, but may be well integrated members of their “tribal group”.

A skills-based curriculum demands that you make connections between different subject domains,” she said. “That requires thought. Too much learning that goes on today is rote learning.

This begs the distinction that without having a sound command of the CONTENT of the “subject domains”, any “connections” are pretty much irrelevant. This is NOT to deny that such connections do exist, but, without the foundational knowledge base, all that is left to operate by is ones “feelings” about things…which perfectly meshes with the successful creation of another brick in the Ingsoc wall of the Labor (UK) or Donkocratic (US) brave new world.  Besides that, it’s a LOT easier to meet your educational goals when focused on “life skills” and “ways of working”…which can only be evaluated using subjective judgement…and none of those pesky facts that can be objectively tested!

SD Politics

Pierre Nannyism Strikes Again!

3 Comments

When heard on the radio this morning driving to the school where the Chief currently teaches, there was a sudden need to focus on not driving off the road! Somebody up at Pierre needs a good sharp whack upside the head with a cluebat.

Nanny State alert: SB 67 – Mandatory applications for college

PP at Dakota War College has it all laid out for dissection, starting with this:

But now there’s been a bill doing just that – telling people what they HAVE to do – which has been submitted to the SD Legislature.

SB 67 is a brand new bill that will “require high school students to submit at least one application to a postsecondary educational institution.” (It’s so new, the text hasn’t been posted.)

UPDATE: The bill text is now HERE.

PP goes on with more comments on this one…which I COULD repeat…but go read his post, & consider my own point to be made.

THis is SOOOOOOOOOO far out of reality, further description would be futile.

Uncategorized

Brit “Educational Reform”?

Cameron: Hold failing primary pupils back

The Chief was bemused to see that the Conservative leader in the UK was proposing a radical new suggestion to improve educational quality:

Poorly performing children would be forced to stay on to resit their final year at primary school under plans to drive up classroom standards unveiled by David Cameron today.

WOW! What a concept! Repeat the content to learn it better! Why haven’t WE thought of that? (Oh, right. We DO do that, at least in some places.)

But wait! They’re on a roll:

The Conservative leader calls for a “genuine schools revolution”, including improved discipline, a concentration on the basics and a better chance for pupils from deprived backgrounds. In an article for The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Cameron backs plans for an “advantage premium” which would see schools given an extra payment per child, on top of existing state funding, for taking pupils from disadvantaged families. This could mean schools being granted up to £6,000 for each disadvantaged pupil they took – making them more attractive “customers” for a range of schools.

This is what now passes for “Conservatism” in the UK. £6000 is a pretty healthy chunk of change…somewhere near the $10K-12K range these days. This is an EXTRA payment also. By comparison, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs formula for per student expenses at its boarding schools TOTAL is less than half that, speaking of “disadvantaged”.

How did the once proud UK reach this sad state? Maybe this has something to do with it:

Its most eye-catching initiative is a call for the worst performers at the end of year six – the final year at primary school, when children reach the age of 11 – to catch up either by attending summer schools or in some cases resitting the entire year. This would lead to children of much more widely differing ages becoming classmates than is usual in the present system, which is strictly delineated by age. (emphasis added)

THIS, sports fans and fun-seekers is what happens when the schools are “dumbed down”, but surely this can’t happen HERE, could it?

At least there IS some positive sounding direction behind the proposals:

In his article, Mr Cameron vows to use school reforms to help tackle Britain’s “broken society”. He adds: “Educational failure lies at its root. Labour’s obsessive micro-management and rigid attachment to old-fashioned ideas has entrenched deprivation, shut doors and closed minds….We need a new approach: one that offers real hope and opportunity; harnesses aspiration and opens minds; and gives children from poor backgrounds the chance to get on in life….I know what parents want for their children because it’s the same thing I want for mine: schools with a disciplined learning environment; focus on getting the basics right; tailored teaching according to each child’s ability; and emphasis on rigorous teaching standards. I wouldn’t – and we shouldn’t – expect anything less.”

SOUNDS good…the devil, as usual, will be in the details, along with the fact that this is dealing with government schools. Meanwhile the current Labor goverment toots it’s own educational horn, with a tune that sounds strangely familiar to the Chief:

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: “Our investment and reform is driving up standards after the neglect of the Tory years. We will do even more to help kids who are falling behind with our Every Child a Reader and Every Child Counts programmes.

Hmmm. Any similarity there to “No Child Left Behind”? (Another reason why Dubya got along so good with Blair?)

One hardly knows whether there is any hope at all for Britain any more. For that matter, is there any hope for US?

Uncategorized

Enough is Apparently Enough in UK Ed “Reform”

Two-finger salute

It looks like educational “reformers” in the UK have bitten off more than they can chew, or that most of Her Majesties Subjects are willing to accept as reasonable.

Fury erupted last night after Sir Winston Churchill was axed from school history lessons.

Sort of brings to mind some old Kinks’ lyrics from Living on a Thin Line:
All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there’s no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore.

Britain’s cigar-chomping World War Two PM — famed for his two-finger victory salute — was removed from a list of figures secondary school children must learn about. Instead they will be taught about “relevant” issues such as global warming and drug dangers. Churchill’s grandson, Tory MP Nicholas Soames, branded the move “total madness.”

The decision to axe Churchill is part of a major shake-up aimed at dragging the national curriculum into the 21st century, it was claimed last night. But the plan — hatched by advisers — angered schools secretary Ed Balls, who vowed to probe ALL the changes to the curriculum.

The proposals will see traditional timetables torn up, with pupils focusing on modern “relevant” topics such as drug and booze abuse, climate change and GM foods.

Churchill — voted the greatest ever Briton — goes off the required lessons list, along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King. There will also be no need to mention the Wars of the Roses, Elizabeth I or Henry VIII.

What’s the connection to us? DUH! When polls and surveys regularly show that many Americans have only (to be generous) a rudimentary knowledge of history and the principles of our constitutional republic, it’s plainly evident that we have similar processes underway here.

At least in the UK, the Schools Secretary has gotten fired up. One continues to hope for similar signs of life in the Bush cabinet…thus far in vain.

National Insecurity

Huh? Arabic Public School in NYC?

An Arabic Public School

The Chief had to look twice at this one…plans are afloat for NYC to set up an Arabic language school…AS PART OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM? WTF?

This is a bad idea for SOOOOOO MANY reasons. This link goes to a pro/con set-up in the NY Sun site. They go crying around about being short on resources, and then plan on spending for THIS? They had better do some serious checking into the quality of the NYC water system…something must be seriously wrong.

Uncategorized

A Modest Proposal:

A lesson plan to teach kids about American Indians

Although the Chief is a science educator (teaching at a Native American school), he is also certified for teaching history and government. These suggestions for Gov. Rounds’ iniative for promoting education seem to hit the spot…unfortunately, probably TOO much to be actually implemented…but it’s nice to dream:

Teach our kids what government did to the American Indians. Under the guise of caring for them, they herded them on to the least-productive parcels of land in the country and packed their children off to boarding schools, where they were forbidden to practice their traditional religion, speak their native language, and were routinely beaten and abused. The lesson: the power of the government to do evil is infinitely greater than its power to do good.

Teach our kids that there was once a scientific and intellectual consensus that American Indians were sub-human. The lesson: Awful things happen when we give people the power to decide what categories of human life are disposable for the sake of convenience.

Teach our kids that the white invasion brought disease, massacre, starvation and alcoholism, but it also brought medicine, literacy, political equality for women, air conditioning and the Bill of Rights. The lesson: The white man brought both blessings and curses to American Indians.

Teach our kids that the Lakota were only here a couple of hundred years before white settlement. Just as we displaced the Lakota, they displaced other American Indian nations which were here 300 to 400 years ago. The lessons: Control illegal immigration and maintain a strong military.

Teach our children about our government’s broken treaties with the American Indians. The lessons: Don’t count on Social Security, and beware of people who speak of “living” or “evolving” historical documents.

Teach our kids to be proud of how the Plains Indians survived in a land with such wild swings in temperature and precipitation. Teach them how American Indians organized their society without lawsuits, Social Security, Oprah, and Anna Nicole Smith. The lesson: Our material abundance has made us soft, selfish and shallow.

Teach our kids about the heroic lives our white ancestors lived. They took incredible risks and sacrificed immensely to build schools, churches, ranches, towns, governments and roads. They gave their time and treasure to benefit generations they’d never meet. Shame on us for scolding them for being racist or imperialist. Shame on us if we don’t teach our children to respect them.

Now THAT is the framework for a course that the Chief would have fun teaching!

Culture Wars

Comes the Comrade in Seattle School.

L’Eggo My Lego

This is bizarre – it sounds like something from the Soviet Union.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

IT’s even worse in detail than that! This is nearly physically sickening! Of course, it IS Seattle, which has taken a niche of being a de-facto northern version of San Francisco.

Uncategorized

Traitor at Kent State

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard

This piece from Townhall describes what is described as openly traitorous writings by a Kent State Islamofascist professor. Having gone and personally examined his website of dubious ancestry, the Chief’s personal evaluation is that, yes, indeed, this qualifies as sedition and direct treason at the cost of Ohio’s taxe$ that pay this scumbag’s salary.

It’s really sort of breathtaking to see this sort of stuff…worth taking a look in the interest of knowing the enemy.

Rope. Professor. Tree. Some assembly required.