Teacher's Unions: Jumping on the Department of Education's FAIL

The Department of Education: Unsurpassed in their Achievement of FAIL

Throughout the 1980's every proggie worth his No Nukes T-Shirt used to sniff urbanely at the level of education spending versus the level of defense spending. "If we can spend this much on the military," went the refrain, or "for the cost of a B-1 bomber..." implying that if only the magic money spigot could be turned on, American education would return to the world's forefront.

The meme, repeated often enough, lodged itself in the collective unconscious, and behold: Federal defense spending now stands at 190% of what it was in 1970. The result?

Bupkis. (h/t: Protein Wisdom)

That's zip, nada, nothing. We've increased education spending by an order of magnitude and test scores remain as flat as a pancake pressed in a panini machine by a 2-dimensional hyperintelligent shade of the color red.

And when Reagan made large cuts to ed. spending in the early 80's? Nothing happened. When the GOP Congress made slight cuts in the mid-90's? Yet more nothing happened. 

So if the Department of Education vanished overnight, does anyone pretend that our educational output would change to any appreciable degree?

For the Children

Hat tip: Ace



Tax Reform now, indeed...

NY Schools Chancellor Jokes About Birth Control to Fix Over-Crowding; Hilarity Ensues

When demand outstrips supply, and service cannot be refused, what happens?

People make grim, bitter jokes:

The public-service novice, who has spent her entire career in media and publishing, also dropped jaws at the meeting by likening her task of satisfying space-crunch concerns in every neighborhood to making "many Sophie's Choices" -- a reference to the book in which a mother in the Auschwitz death camp is forced to decide which of her two children will live.

I know what she meant: she has to make impossible decisions, and she feels bad about it. The woman has to meet unlimited and ever-growing needs, with limited and and difficult-to-grow resources. Why anyone expects different is a mystery to me.

But faith in the endless power of public institutions marches on.

Self-Esteem vs. "Chinese" Parenting

This article in the WSJ about the superiority of "Chinese mothers" has been making the rounds of late. The debate has been had by people who know far more about raising children than I do. But the reason the debate exists, I think, is right here:

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Without question, this is the blinkered, self-emasculating guilt that the modern Western parent has willingly embraced. For some reason, we have decided that to have a child is a dastardly act, and that a parent must labor for decades, giving up all trace of adult life or personality, in order to atone for it. It's gotten so bad that a complete 180-degree turnaround -- becoming a totalitarian shame-dispenser -- can now be seen as an outre position worthy of a new look.

For myself, Here is what I wrote on the subject in September of 2005:

Our modern child-rearing techniques seem focused on the emotional lives of children. I think this is wrong, because in the grand scheme of things, the emotions of children are transitory and relatively unimportant. Child-rearing should be about not the blooming of the child's life but the coaxing into existence of the adult the child must become. None of the research-approved, peaceable parenting skills that the elite would foist on us are half so valuable as inducing a child to think beyond his immediate wants and desires. And I am unconvinced that this can be done without the use of fear.

Yes, I said fear. It is written that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To this, I add that the fear of parents is the beginning of familial peace. the State of childhood is a state of constant physical and emotional flux. They are long on impulse and short on experience. Catering to that mind-set gives that mind-set power that it neither deserves nor can use justly. To make up for that experience, it is necessary for parents to set boundaries and defend them to the utmost. As the best defense is a good offense, a properly built fear of parental anger keeps boundaries defended, sometimes without the parent even knowing it.

It is not that I love children the less, but that I love adults more.

Achieve Racial Harmony: Ban the Honkies!

Un-expletive-believable.

An Ann Arbor elementary school principal used a letter home to parents tonight to defend a field trip for black students as part of his school’s efforts to close the achievement gap between white and black students.

Dicken Elementary School Principal Mike Madison wrote the letter to parents following several days of controversy at the school after a field trip last week in which black students got to hear a rocket scientist.

I know there's an obvious reason that keeping white students away makes it more likely that black students will be inspired to achieve, but I'm apparently too stuffed with white privilege to see it.

Much Ado About Schools

Investigative Voice covers the kabuki about closing one school or another in Baltimore, in which two grown men argue about a term that has no business belonging in an argument about schools. Education is a process, and it will inevitably be a process with unequal outcomes. To treat it as a right is to use it as a political football, when it ought to transcend politics.

A Friendly truce to the "War Against Boys"

Cathy Young doesn't have any answers to the issue of male underachievement in school and college, but she thoughtfully applies the brakes to some of the screechier rhetoric, and that in itself is welcome. Me, I think the anti-intellectual, thuggish culture that has been sold to boys is Prime Suspect until someone convinces me otherwise.

Here's an old post from the Notion underlying this theme that I wrote of in "Mean Girls, Boo Hoo."

Mean Girls, Boo Hoo

Lemme just say, as an educator and as a male, that this is a bunch of bunk. School biased in favor of girls? Boys need to be encouraged more? Maybe, maybe. But maybe the boys simply need to get off their dead arses and perform. It's high school, for Faber's sake. And public high school at that. How hard can it be?

Look, I've long been of the opinion that some of the things they do to boost girls' self-esteem would be counter-productive. Self-esteem boosting usually is. In fact, if I had to pick one thing that schools shouldn't bother about, that would be it. Encourage kids, yes. Encourage groups to get all excited about their groupiness, no. Because the end result of shaping boys' esteem isn't going to be improved scores, but excused pathologies. "You don't understand, I'm a guy. I ain't got time for none of that note-taking, book-reading stuff! I'm a rebel! I go where the wind takes me!" Have we really gone, over the course of a century, from "Women cannot think nor write," to its gender opposite?

Anyone who thinks that teenage girls have an easier time sitting still and paying attention than teenage boys has never ever taught teenage girls. Teenage girls never shut up, whine when disciplined, and act as though the world revolves around the particular ephemera they find fascinating. They only perform if they come from families that expect it from them. The same is true for boys.

Maybe it's me, but I've rather enjoyed not belonging to a Designated Victim Group. It meant I had no one to excuse my failures, and conversely, no one to put an asterisk next to my successes, such as they are. That's the creed that millions of men across the country live by: my life, my choices, my results. I really don't care to be turned into another sniveling worm under the lash of the Designated Oppressor.

Because in the end, boys, there's really nothing less manly than whimpering "the girls made me feel bad about myself." Should young gentlemen get outlets for their restless energy. Yes. Should we bring back Dodgeball? Yes. Should we dispense with all the gender-specific ego-encouraging? Yes, yes, YES.

The only way to have sanity in education is to insist on standards and keep to them, and stop making excuses for those who aren't interested. If boys don't wanna learn, indeed resist learning, maybe we should check what signals they're getting about learning from the outside culture.

I begin to wonder if reading books hasn't become a "girl thing" among boys, as it's become a "white thing" in the inner city. Do guys talk about literature and the arts with other guys? 'Course not, only gay guys do that, right? What do men talk about? Sports, music, cars, "guy stuff." Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of guy stuff. But you shouldn't be thought odd because you can discourse cleverly on Neo-expressionist paintings or tell a Shakespearean from a Petrarchan sonnet (and conversely, all the guys who can do that need to stop acting as though being downwind of an understanding of the nickel defense will rob them of their souls). But that notion of male intellect is enforced by just about everything you see in popular culture. Think that message doesn't get through to boys, while schools are saying "You go!" to to the girls?

It's really very simple. When the culture values and promotes intelligent manliness, we'll have some. Until then, enjoy the perfumed air of college graduations.

Get Away From Here, Kid, You Bother Me...

Cathy Seipp has an interesting rumination on the idea that "Children should be seen and not heard."

I for one am not holding my breath, because the factors that lead us to the current epidemic of rude, noisy children are not going away anytime soon. People will read the quotation above and find it distasteful, if not horrific, it provokes imagery of nuns with rulers and the Mom in Carrie, and the response, "What, do you hate children or something?"

Let me put it in the words of Brutus in Julius Caeser: it is not that I love children less, but that I love adults more. Moreover, I recognize the truth of the old dictum that in every generation civilization suffers an invasion by barbarians: we call them children. To be a barbarian is not a moral fault, but a path down which we must all tread. But succoring the barbaric is no way to preserve a civilized society.

Our modern child-rearing techniques seem focused on the emotional lives of children. I think this is wrong, because in the grand scheme of things, the emotions of children are transitory and relatively unimportant. Child-rearing should be about not the blooming of the child's life but the coaxing into existence of the adult the child must become. None of the research-approved, peaceable parenting skills that the elite would foist on us are half so valuable as inducing a child to think beyond his immediate wants and desires. And I am unconvinced that this can be done without the use of fear.

Yes, I said fear. It is written that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To this, I add that the fear of parents is the beginning of familial peace. the State of childhood is a state of constant physical and emotional flux. They are long on impulse and short on experience. Catering to that mind-set gives that mind-set power that it neither deserves nor can use justly. To make up for that experience, it is necessary for parents to set boundaries and defend them to the utmost. As the best defense is a good offense, a properly built fear of parental anger keeps boundaries defended, sometimes without the parent even knowing it.

Of course it would be foolish for anyone to rely on nothing else but fear to raise children. Those who do so rapidly cross the line from discipline to abuse. But child-raising without fear makes the child the ruler of the house, the child's wishes the ones that gain the most attention, and the adults the ones who dread doing and saying the wrong thing. This is precisely the opposite of what it should be, and we see the evidence daily.

Your Child is Depriving a Village of its Idiot

Blogging will be light today, due to parent/teacher conferences, which may well be the single biggest waste of time, breath, and catered food known to man, at least from the teacher's perspective. It's a very basic proposition: if your child works, he'll pass. If she doesn't, she won't.

Return to Un-Topia

Pursuant to this post, I decided after my freshmen did the Chapter 3 tests that we would revisit the Island of Un-topia, where they will imaginatively re-construct civilization following a nuclear holocaust. This second trip is to take place three hundred years after the first one.

The island is divided into a River Republic, complete with cities, and a Grasslands Tribe, which is largely nomadic but of late has been engaging in some light mining in the northern mountains to trade with the downriver civilization. This has become controversial, and as they met to elect a new Head Chief, I instructed this half of the class to come up with solutions to a) the fact that the border gives part of the plains to the River Republic, the many young men who leave their herds to work in mines, and c) whether they should give up Nomadism and build cities.

The River Republic, for their part, has a President and Council, and has to find a way for the competing interests of their various cities to work together:

Bordertown, on the river, is the trade center for most of the ore coming from the Grasslanders. They are enjoying the trade

Delta, the capitol city, is much the same as Bordertown, but enjoys its pre-eminence among cities

Landing has some access to mines of its own, but can no longer compete with the Grasslanders

Lumber Camp, across the desert, has been subject to raids by grasslanders.

Their task was to determin whether to raise taxes on imports, build forts along the border, or consider war with the north? I also gave them permission to change their government if they chose.

Here are the results:

Period 6: River Republic - attempted coup against President, saved by a deal. Proposed Embassy to Grasslanders. Second coup sends the President away in exile north to the Grasslanders. Chaos and confusion reigns. Turncoats and kidnapping, spying by those who are ignored ant not listened too. At least one guy runs away and joins the Grasslanders, after being ignored by his fellows.

Grasslanders - Decided to Modernize, and even build a dam to block the River.


Period 7: River Republic - much debating, recognizing the conflicts amid the constitutencies. Voted to raise taxes and build forts and ready for war.

Grasslanders -- decided to modernize, create a monarchy, and prepare for war. Men who left the clan herds for the mines would me made into slaves.


Period 1: River Republic - decides on a sudden, quick war rather than raising taxes or building forts, hopes to take the Grassland chiefs while they are electing a new head chief, then kill the leaders and enslave the people.

Grasslanders -- decide to modernize, build cities, and prepare for war. Mine workers to recieve better treatment, breaks and limited shifts commanded by law.


It's clear that the Grasslanders tended to think of themselves as a unified people, without individual interests within them. This might have altered if I had assigned some groups to represent the "traditionalists" and others to represent "miner's groups". The Period 7 River Republic kids were able to make parallels at the end of class between themselves and the Zhou Dynasty in China, which fell apart due to weakness at the center and gave itself over to in-fighting. I call that educational success.