Education

A Smart Kid

Mark Noonan11 Comments

This was apparently first given a bit more than a year ago, but it is well worth listening to.  She sees through the scam:

It isn’t a matter of agreeing with everything she says – no fully matured, capable adult would.  Smart and perceptive as she is, she yet lacks the experience of someone who if 40 or 50 years old.  But she’s thinking – she understands that what was spoon fed to her in the public schools is not all there is.  It is amazing that someone who went through the whole grind to become valedictorian and yet retains originality of thought.

All is not lost – the youth of America have lots of problems and a gigantic burden we adults have laid upon them in the way we’ve wrecked the family, wrecked the faith and ruined the economy.  But they are not lifeless, the young…there is spirit there and a willingness to challenge and demand better.  I rest far more content after hearing this young lady speak than I have for a long while.

HAT TIP:  Zero Hedge

How to Reform Education

Mark Noonan44 Comments

The geniuses of the left have come up with a way to improve education – from Yahoo News:

How would the nation’s school system be different if teachers were paid like engineers?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country’s brightest college graduates into the profession.

Teachers should be paid a starting salary of $60,000, Duncan said, with the opportunity to make up to $150,000 a year…

Yeah, that’ll fix it.  The only problem we have with education is that we’re not spending enough money on it.  If we just “invest” a bit more, all will be well.

The truth is that we spend plenty of money on education – in fact, probably many times more than we need to.  But the funds are misapplied because the education system – from pre-school through graduate school – is not geared towards providing education for kids, but for providing well paid positions for incompetents.  Fundamental to this are teacher’s unions and tenure.  Get rid of the unions and tenure, and you’ll fix education within, at most, two or three years.  There will no longer be protection for idiocy, and so the natural common sense of humanity will start to take hold.

To be sure, a lot of other particular bits of reform spring to mind – such as, why do we provide loans, grants and scholarships for kids to become lawyers?  We have more than enough lawyers in the United States – but not nearly enough engineers and doctors.  So, cancel all loans, grants and scholarships for law degrees and re-direct the funds to medicine and engineering.  But that is in the details – and such reforms will always be stymied because of the main things wrong with education:  unions and tenure.  Unions and tenured educators don’t want their place at the trough disturbed and so strangle every effort at reform…while on the other hand they are always quick to come up with their own “reform” efforts which invariably demand more money for the worthless education system we already have.

George Will called the events in Wisconsin the “Waterloo” of the left…it may well have been.  Unions were taken head on and defeated…and the people of Wisconsin are already seeing the improvements in government finance, the Wisconsin economy and Wisconsin education.  Here’s the real kicker – there is more money in the Wisconsin education budget for hiring and paying teachers, now that the unions are cut out of the loop.   Once the word starts to get out that getting rid of the unions is just about a silver bullet, more and more unions will be got rid of.  It will snowball.

Eventually we can start educating the kids, again…and that will do more than anything else to restore American greatness.

“Ethical Cleansing”

Mark Noonan15 Comments

Have yourself a population which, despite your best efforts, still bitterly clings to old-fashioned morality?  Well, here’s you answer – just get hold of the school system and start brainwashing the kids in to rejecting that old-fashioned morality.  From Life Site News:

Equity policies purporting to combat “homophobia” amount to “ethical cleansing” that aim to eliminate opposing moral views, says the Catholic Civil Rights League of British Columbia.

In a July 6th letter, CCRL BC Director Sean Murphy criticized the BC Civil Liberties Association’s support for an equity policy that passed in the Burnaby school board in June.  The policy aims to combat “heterosexism,” which it defines as the “assumption that all people are heterosexual and that heterosexuality is superior and more desirable for all people than any other sexual orientation.”…

Which works out, in practice, to a program of telling the kiddies that being gay is just as good (well, better, really) than being straight. As I’ve been saying for many years now, the so-called “gay rights” movement is not about securing tolerance for homosexuals but is instead an effort to legally enforce the notion that homosexuality is morally the same as heterosexuality.  The activists (which are not by any means the same as all gay people – quite a few of whom want no part of the totalitarian nonsense of the gay left) don’t want to be free to live their own lives…they want to grab hold of society and shape it to fit their ideas of what is right and wrong.  It is a legislation of morality they want – their own morality, as opposed to the morality held by the overwhelming majority.

In my view, the ultimate reason for this is that most gay people probably realize, deep down inside, that they are doing things they ought not to.  Understanding that gay people can have a deep-seated attraction to members of the same sex, it still sits there quite starkly – sex is not just for personal pleasure; ultimately, its purpose is children, and sex which is not at least in theory for the creation of children is disordered sex (s0, yes, liberals; older couples past their time and infertile couples can still have sex…because it isn’t absolutely impossible that a child will result, as is the case when two men engage in sex).  But with this realization there is still the very strong desire to do what they do…and whenever someone does something, it is nearly automatic that they will seek to rationalize their action…and also to seek approval of their peers.  Its the difference between a gay person knowing his neighbor resignedly tolerates his behavior and his neighbor actively applauding it.  Gay rights people want the applause.

And, so, “ethical cleansing” – a clearing out of the public square any hint that some where, some how, someone might have an objection to homosexual sex.  Not good enough to be tolerated; not good enough that every sign of unjust discrimination is removed; it must be a societal approval of homosexuality as being the same as heterosexuality.  We must instruct the children, regardless of their parent’s wishes, that if they choose to engage in homosexual sex, it is perfectly ok…great, laudable…something to be proud of.  And anyone who disagrees is a homophobic bigot.

This species of liberal fascism must be stopped – we must not allow liberal ideologues, for whatever reason, to undermine the inculcation of parental morality.  If a parent wishes to teach his child that homosexuality is the same as heterosexuality, that is fine…wrong, but within parental rights.  But if a parent wishes to teach that homosexual sex is inherently disordered and can never be approved, that is also within parental rights…and we can’t have the public school system saying otherwise.  At bottom, if you can’t get a societal consensus on teaching a certain moral precept, then the public school must not teach it.  The issue of homosexuality is not one of those issues we can all agree on (like, say, teaching that stealing is bad) – so it is better for the schools to remain silent on the subject and let each set of parents impart what knowledge they will.  Might lead to a wide variety of opinions and this wouldn’t be conducive to a liberal-fascist world view, but it would be just and workable.

 

Liberal Fascism at Law School

Mark Noonan8 Comments

From Legal Insurrection:

Lawrence Connell is a tenured law professor at Widener Law School in Delaware.  I have noted in prior posts that Connell was accused of a wide range of racist and sexist conduct directed at students in his classes and at Dean Linda Ammons (because of hypothetical examples Connell used in class).

Connell has sued, and also went through a university disciplinary hearing process.  The faculty committee which heard the evidence found that Connell did not violate any university policy with regard to the allegations of racist and sexist conduct…

…In a rational world, the university would seek no or minimal sanctions against Connell since he was completely vindicated of the underlying charges…  But Dean Ammons recommended that the university suspend Connell for a year without pay, which the university accepted.

But Dean Ammons recommendation, accepted by the university, went much further, demanding that Connell submit to a psychiatric evaluation, undergo ”anger management” counseling…and issue an apology…

In the old Soviet Union, this is what would happen to you – if you persisted in dissidence from the reigning orthodoxy, you could find yourself under psychiatric examination.  After all, if it has been carefully explained to you that you are in the wrong – and any man accused of racism and sexism is clearly in the wrong, regardless of the facts of the case – then it is time to knuckle under, accept re-education and become an emasculated cog in the liberal machine.  That Connell hasn’t done this proves he’s crazy…and, so.

This point out the larger problem we have in our legal profession:  those steeped in the liberal worldview don’t know what law is.  Without a rigid application of the law equally, all we have is the worst tyranny – that horrid arbitrariness which leaves the citizen in the dark about what he may or may not do.  That, in turn, breeds a political passivity conducive to dictatorship (which is, when you think about it, the goal of liberalism…even if not a conscious goal among most liberals).  Right now, at that law school, no one knows what is permissible – even if it is clearly laid out in statute, one has to worry that some school bureaucrat will essentially issue an “OSO decree” and send you off to Siberia for a term.

The good news is that we’re likely to see a bursting of the law school bubble pretty soon.  They’ve been churning out so many “lawyers” that the law field is glutted.  This is why you see ever more ads from lawyers willing to sue anyone for anything.  We could have a nice, little collapse which will result in a lot of law schools closing, or at least being reduced in size…and fewer kids willing to enter that market.  That, in turn, may allow someone who knows law to actually have a say in how a law school is run.  Anything is possible…and certainly this liberal fascism on campus can’t go on forever.

The Coming (Ongoing) Constitutional Debate

tiredoflibbs35 Comments

When it comes to the Constitution, there are two main camps – the Constitutionalists and the “Living” Constitutionalists.   The Constitutionalists believe that the Constitution of 1787 can work at all times.  The Framers’ Constitution has guided this nation for most of the first two centuries and has rendered the freest, most prosperous, and most creative nation in the history of the world.

Then there are the liberals, who believe that the Constitution (and it interpretation) must “evolve” with the times and therein lies the problems we face today.  Proponents of the “21st century constitution” or “living constitution” aim to transform our nation’s supreme law beyond recognition – and with a minimum of public attention and debate.  Indeed, if there is an overarching theme to what they wish to achieve, it is the diminishment of the democratic and representative process of American government.  It is the replacement of a system of REPUBLICAN government, in which the Constitution is largely focused upon the architecture of government in order to minimize the likelihood of abuse of power, with a system of judicial government, in which substantive policy outcomes are increasingly determined by federal judges.  Rather than merely defining broad rules of the game for the legislative and executive branches of government, the new constitution would compel specific outcomes.

Forms of the Founders’ Constitution would remain – a bicameral legislation, periodic elections, state governments – but the important decisions would increasingly be undertaken by the courts, specifically the federal courts.  It will be the California referendum process writ national, a process by which the decisions of millions of voters on matters such as racial quotas, social services funding and immigration policy have been routinely overturned by single judges acting in the name of the Constitution – not the Framers’ Constitution, but a “constitution for our times”, a “living constitution”.

One of the liberals’ favorite argument for a “living constitution” is the “the founding fathers could not have predicted …. (insert favorite liberal cause or ideology here).  That is where they ignore the obvious.  The Framers put into place a means for the nation to amend the Constitution – to change it “with the times”.  This process has worked for over 200 years.  But this would put too much power into the hands of the people and not that of the politicians and their special interests (as we have seen in the last 40 years).  This process has been undermined time and again to the point where many “rights” have been granted through creative interpretation.

The Framers, through long experience of witnessing abuse of power, knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution, it amending process and its Bill of Rights, which specifically addressed situations and solutions to conditions that are not covered in the Constitution.  Too bad, MODERN liberals and their activists do not understand (or choose not to) these basic principles.  It is time that they did.

Guilty No Matter What

Mark Noonan8 Comments

That is our new legal principle, at least at the University of North Dakota:

In a stark demonstration of the failure of campus judicial procedures, the University of North Dakota (UND) has found a student guilty of sexual assault despite the fact that local police refused to charge him with a crime and instead charged his accuser for lying about the incident. Former student Caleb Warner has been banned by UND from stepping foot on any state public campus for three years. Meanwhile, his accuser has been wanted by the Grand Forks Sheriff’s Department for more than a year on the charge of making a false report to law enforcement…

It seems that Uncle Sam – carrying out the liberal mandate – has decided that all colleges receiving federal funds must use a “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for judging such cases.  In this case it does seem that an accusation is “preponderance of evidence” because if there was something beyond the accuser’s statement it is highly unlike that the regular law enforcement agencies would have charged the accuser with lying, even if they lacked sufficient evidence to convict the accused.  Beyond the outrage of what amounts to a kangaroo court convicting the accused there lies the double outrage in the college’s refusal to reopen the case in light of the charge of lying leveled against the accuser.

In the end, this is the result of all that liberal nonsense about political correctness, “hate crimes” and “zero tolerance”.  In their zeal to enforce liberal ideas, the very concepts of truth and justice have been jettisoned.  It will take extreme legal and political pressure to get the college to reverse course…and even if they are in this case, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll still go forward trying to enforce the liberal view.

How to fix this?  Simple:  prohibit the federal government from setting rules in colleges.  Go ahead and spend federal money if you like, but don’t go dictating how it is to be spent.  In other words, if money is to be spent it had better just be in the form of bloc grants (best calculated on a per-student basis) which is then dispensed to the colleges to use as they wish…scholarships, new facilities, slush funds for the faculty, what have you.  Better to have the money mis-allocated by some schools than to have all schools come under the thumb of liberal fascism.   Most places would use it properly and those which did would swiftly earn the better reputation and thus draw in more students…and thus more funding.  But get Uncle Sam out of it…all he can do is screw it up, as we see here in this case.

The Obama Lapdog Media Defends Atlanta Cheating Scandal (Bumped)

tiredoflibbs57 Comments

The Atlanta government schools are not worrying about the ObamaMedia pressing too hard on this test score cheating scandal.  They are more worried about Casey Anthony.  Instead, they are using the usual dumbed down talking points for the ignorant drones: blame Bush.  It’s Bush’s fault!  Wow, WHAT A REVELATION!!!!  Blame Bush for the cheating in Atlanta’s government schools.

Not surprising … they are pushing this tired old regurgitated talking point that if it wasn’t for No Child Left Behind, this cheating scandal would not have escalated (or even happened).

ABC correspondent Steve Osunami  said during a report:

Everyone here is pointing the finger at No Child Left Behind, the federal policy that made test scores king , closing schools with low scores, and rewarding schools with high ones. This former superintendent is accused of encouraging the cheating. She received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses tied to improved test scores. I’m personally friends with a good number of teachers in this community who tell me that they’re under tremendous pressure. They say that the same parents who are angry about all the cheating would be even more furious if the schools started reporting lower test scores … 

Pay close attention to: “Parents would be even more angry is the schools had reported lower test scores?”    Test scores, which by the way shows three things:

1) the incompetence of government schools (federal government policies and regulations rather than the states’ and local governments that are more accountable to the local people).

2) the detrimental effects of special interest unions which at heart are not “about the children” but about advancing their own power.

3) the inability to get rid of unionized teachers and administrators that are simply not doing (or can’t do) their job.

These parents should be concerned about whether or not their children are learning.  Period.  To falsify these test scores meant cheating many struggling students out of education they otherwise needed.  Of course, the looters will come up with the same excuses – MORE MONEY…..  and the ignorant drones will take up the chant.

It is time for the media to do their jobs and return to their ethical standards rather than support their ideological comrades.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Nothing to see here, people – let’s just move on:

Former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin called the state investigative report into widespread cheating on standardized tests in Atlanta Public Schools “pretty scary.”

However, she said, former Atlanta School Superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall deserves credit for her successes…

She’s a liberal, you see?, so her heart must have been in the right place…

Update: Award-winning gains by Atlanta students were based on widespread cheating by 178 named teachers and principals, said Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (a Republican) on Tuesday. His office released a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that names 178 teachers and principals – 82 of whom confessed – in what’s likely the biggest cheating scandal in US history.  The cheating has been going on for 10 YEARS!

http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2011/07/07/educators-implicated-in-atlanta-cheating-scandal

http://news.yahoo.com/americas-biggest-teacher-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-atlanta-213734183.html

The Criterion-Referenced Competency Test was instituted in the SPRING OF 2000!  Gee, long before the passage of NCLB and the election of George Bush!!!

http://www.doe.k12.ga.us/ci_testing.aspx?PageReq=CI_TESTING_CRCT

Note: There is no mention of NCLB nor did (or could) the 82 confessors blame Bush for their cheating.  The mindless drones would have you believe otherwise.