Tag Archives: education

Goodbye, Public Schools?

27 Friday Mar 2020

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Maybe the best thing that has come out of the Corona hoax is the closure of the government’s “schools.” They’re done for the 2019-2020 year and it’s possible that they might not return this fall. Good riddance.

Allegedly, the kiddos are “learning” remotely. I guarantee that 90% of them haven’t even logged in since they left the prison halls a few weeks ago. And the prisons are beginning to drop all of their precious tests, now existing only to deliver lunches and host neighborhood parades.

Georgia school officials took steps Thursday to scrap final exams and relax a wide range of other accountability rules for the state’s nearly two million public-school students who have been out of class since last week due to the impacts of coronavirus.

I realize this may hamper my efforts to ridicule low scores for this year, but hopefully, this is the end of the “schools” so that will no longer be necessary.

For the other ten percent, and parents, you are essentially homeschooling. You might as well make that permanent. Kara Stiff offers some words of encouragement to that end.

My heart goes out to all the parents who were never planning to homeschool, but nevertheless find themselves teaching their children at home today. I chose this beautiful, crazy life, and I completely understand why some people wouldn’t choose it. But here we are. We have to do what we have to do. You don’t want them to fall behind. You don’t want to lose your mind.

Believe it or not, it’s a golden opportunity.

Read the whole thing, but remember that it is almost impossible to fall behind what the inmates have left. Take advantage. After their parades, and if there is any money left in the coming years, maybe some of the good teachers could involve themselves in true education.

The Schools: Corona 101

23 Monday Mar 2020

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If nothing else, the COVID is shedding more light on the public schools:

Sherica Freeman said she has not connected with students in one of her American Literature classes since March 12, the day Georgia schools were told to close school buildings to curb the spread of COVID-19.

The DeKalb County School District, where Freeman works, was among the metro Atlanta school districts that decided to shift to online learning amid the shutdown. On March 13, she spent the day uploading lesson plans for her Stone Mountain High School students to use for the first two weeks of a shutdown now expected to last more than a month. So far, with at least one class, she said she’s got nothing to show for it.

“My whole fourth period doesn’t know where I am, what they’re supposed to do,” said Freeman, who has worked for the district as a teacher for 13 years. “It feels like there’s no real understanding of how these systems work … like we buy this software and never figure out how to use it.”

This is so much different than how Stone Mountain High normally operates! With 15% average total test scores and 22% literature scores. With 14% proficiency in math and 21% in reading they still somehow manage to graduate 69% of the seniors. This year, they’ll do it again, but with that trendy telecommuting! Indeed, there is no understanding of how these systems work.

People Should be Happy the Schools are Closed

16 Monday Mar 2020

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Leave them closed. They are worse than useless. Somewhere in this strange nation-shaped kind of place, there’s a little school district that will experiment by making online class permanent after the Corona has subsided. And, they’re going to see an immediate improvement in all measures. It will happen. But, for now, the nearly-retarded people are in a tizzy that the children they forgot to “choose” away are now lingering around the house.

New York City schools will be closed for at least the next four-plus weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday evening.

De Blasio said at a media briefing there would be no school until April 20, and perhaps for the rest of the academic year.

Oh no! Who’s going to feed the children?! Parents obviously have no experience in this field. Not to worry … the massive government has a plan to keep the “free” lunches flowing, even absent open prison school houses. I mentioned this one summer, a few years ago – how come so many of the kids, especially in such allegedly good economic times, are on free or reduced lunches? It didn’t just happen. Despite that booming (until recently) GDP, the ranks of the under-nourished (if overweight) youngsters have risen steadily. I randomly picked a sad, dead high school in Georgia for analysis. By no means is this my alma mater – I no longer claim any such. In this random school, back when I would have been interred there, 6% of students were on free or reduced lunches. Today, it’s about 96%. All other metrics have adjusted accordingly. Sad. Dead. Leave it closed.

 

The Eight-Week Spring Break

12 Thursday Mar 2020

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That’s what they’re calling for, among other measures:

Working parents without child care have a legitimate concern, and we must find ways to help one another. But school closings can be the single most effective intervention. Amid an influenza pandemic, schools would be closed to protect the students themselves. Because children are not among the groups most vulnerable to coronavirus, schools should be closed in an effort to reduce community transmission and to protect the children’s parents and grandparents. How long? Epidemiologists suggest eight weeks might be needed to arrest this outbreak. Administrators, students, teachers and parents need to get busy figuring out how to continue the education of our children while contributing to this community-wide public health effort.

Then, based on the success of the closures, leave the public schools shuttered for good.

Fixing Failure: End the Experiment

10 Tuesday Mar 2020

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Dr. Anthony Esolen writes excellently about the plague that the new schools are to boys.

One is that nobody cares. If you hire a man to teach English in your school, and the girls languish because they can’t stand his manners or the things he chooses to teach, you let that man go; it’s his fault. If you hire a woman for the same job in the same place, and the boys languish because they can’t stand her manners or the things she chooses to teach, she keeps her job as long as she wants; it’s their fault. Again, I am speaking generally. If some individual boy or girl fails in your class, that may not be your fault. But if a whole group fails, you are not the person for that job.

…

However that may be, the facts speak for themselves. The experiment has failed. It is time for men to resume the responsibility to educate their sons.

Will anyone care to so resume? And, if so, when?

Another Take on the Modern Schools

08 Sunday Mar 2020

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“Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.” – Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning.

It does sound a little like Tom Ironsides, no? Except, she said the above … in 1947. Read about the Tools.

 

 

 

Parents Should Have the Final Say

29 Saturday Feb 2020

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The LGBTP brigade is suing the state of South Carolina over one of the last shreds of sanity and decency in the failed SC government schools. All over the legally-mandated way that sex education is supposed to be taught to children. The state make-work idiots and conservatives have already conceded defeat. (Shock!)

State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, named as a defendant in the lawsuit, agrees that the law is on shaky ground.

She requested an opinion on its constitutionality from South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson. That opinion says “a court would likely conclude” that the law violates the equal protection clause requiring that people in similar circumstances be treated the same under the law.

“Whether we agree or not, the Constitution is the Constitution,” Solicitor General Robert D. Cook wrote in the opinion.

“I agree with the arguments and evidence presented in the opinion,” Spearman said in a statement. “I also believe that parents should continue to have the final say in whether or not their child participates in health education curriculum.”

State Superintendent of Schools. South Carolina. Hmm. It seems there was this guy in a recent novel who dismissed a similar official as a simpleton. Art imitating life or something. At any rate, the law was never enforced. From the CIA’s Scholastic’s Read 180 program to the social studies texts to clubs, libraries, etc., the LGBTP lifestyle is not only taught and tolerated but celebrated in SC public schools (in yours too). The preemptive caving is par for the conservative course. Why wait for the courts to invent new rights for the mentally ill? Better to force everyone else to bow immediately – even lower than they are already forced to. Really, what else can one expect from people who are adamantly anti-Christian and anti-civilizational?

You do have the final say, however. So say something like: classical education, private school, church school, or homeschool. Maybe consider suing the state for stealing your tax money to indoctrinate other people’s kids in something that offends your freedoms?

One Coronavirus Benefit: Homeschooling

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

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Based on the WSJ headline, I was going to say something like “watch these students thrive.” Kind of like the city that took everyone off social security and saw a surge in retirement savings. Anyway, this schooling issue is in Hong Kong. They’d have phenomenal results regardless of what they did.

Concerns about coronavirus have led to a two-month school closure for the city’s 800,000 students, prompting a crash course in digital learning.

Instead of calling off lessons, many schools expect students to keep up their work online, sending them assignments to complete and submit for grading. Six-year-olds are writing nonfiction books and toddlers are having live video interactions with nursery-school teachers.

The academic experiment has children and their parents, many of whom also have to work at home because their offices are closed, crammed into the same space. It’s a potential harbinger of what might face the U.S. if the virus continues to spread.

Always look for outside examples. Just don’t expect US kids to write books, or even read many. It will be interesting if the HL schools discover this approach works better and switch to it permanently.

Government Schools = Guns Aimed at Dental Patients

19 Wednesday Feb 2020

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John Whitehead went on a tear against the failed public schools.

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

More on this later.