I have two points to make here. First, the public schools have been in a downward spiral since the end of WW2, from which they will never recover because they have no desire to recover. For a detailed discussion of our multi-general collapse in reading instruction, please see my "My Child Will Read" web site. There is no question that with rational leadership and (consequently) rational curriculum, children of all colors would be far more proficient in all subjects than they are, but under our socialist public school system we can never have leadership that serves parents and children. READ (if you can) AND WEEP: http://mychildwillread.org/
Yes, the teachers' union AND the US Dept of Education do NOT want Americans who can read well. I am very involved in flipping the local school board during this election, November 7th. Here is a Letter to the Editor recently printed in the local paper:
Matt:
When Frederick Douglass's slave owner caught his wife teaching the nine-year-old how to read, he was appalled. As he chastised his wife, the slave owner said "Learning would do him no good, but probably a great deal of harm, making him disconsolate and unhappy. If you learn him now to read, he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself."
I have been attending school board meetings on & off for two years, 15-18 total. I cannot recall the board agenda EVER containing a topic regarding poor reading scores, nor was this problem ever discussed by board members. Reading is the platform upon which all other learning rests. I don't understand why the current school board has not tried to improve reading scores which are at 39% of grade-level proficiency, one of the lowest in the state. (https://washingtonstatereportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ReportCard/ViewSchoolOrDistrict/100178)
According to Tracey Crook's 10/01/23 Letter to the Editor, over one-third of her third graders during her last year of teaching (2021-22) were reading at pre-K, kindergarten and first grade levels. This is not acceptable. The current school board was in charge then. According to Ms. Crook, there were no reading intervention programs then AND there are none NOW. Kindergarten through third grade is the most critical time for learning to read. If a child's reading skills are behind going into fourth grade, he is likely to be forever behind, which leads to frustration, which leads to dropping out, which leads to lifetime poverty.
Not all students are as brilliant as Douglass (1818 to 1895), abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman; however, every child deserves to reach his full potential. He/She cannot reach even a moderate level of learning success if he/she cannot read. The current board members are: Tiffany Turner, Nansen Malin, Anna Taft, Don Zuern & John Holterman (who just resigned). The kids deserve a board who cares about the QUALITY of education for ALL students.
I appreciate your dedication and enthusiasm, but as a fully jaded veteran of the Reading Wars of the 1990s I can assure you that the public schools are un-reformable, no matter who is on the school board or whatever else you may do. Unfortunately the vast majority of "conservative" or even "rational" parents, never having done battle with the public schools previously, imagine that the schools are some sort of rational animal that can be tamed. They couldn't be more wrong. To get some idea of what you're up against, read this history of my personal experience: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
But secondly, it is not "racist" to imagine that there might be differences between the races other than just skin color. In fact, the belief that we must all be equally skilled at everything is just a quasi-religious doctrine. Must the number of ball players in the NBA be proportional to their racial population ratios? I don't think so. Until you have read a book called "The Bell Curve", which looks at decades of real data relating to IQ, we are just making feel-good assumptions, as we have been brainwashed to do. We will have to throw aside such irrational ideals and resign ourselves to reality before it will be possible to even discuss the implementation of rational policy relating to racial groups. I assure you that the people implementing these "no standards" policies have read the book; they are doing this because they know that overall racial educational parity is not possible. Once you understand this, your understanding of them and their policies will change completely: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223556.The_Bell_Curve
The idea American voters care about our schools is, frankly, ignorant. Democrat pols run on education. Dems have owned education since FDR; if Dems WANTED better education, we’d HAVE better education. If American voters wanted better education, they’d not vote D. But they do.
It’s pretty straightforward.
JFK EO’d into existence govt unions, (EO 10988) of which the most destructive are ATF & NEA. But they exist to funnel bipartisan tax dollars to D campaigns. They don’t exist to make the lives of their workers better or the quality of their output higher.
Our Skools of Ed, as has been documented by Sowell and Williams, are full of the lowest-scoring SAT kids on their campus. In a 1984 OpEd, a former Dean of the Boston College EdSkool wrote that these kids were “the dregs of the academic population.”
So we instruct idiots to propagandize, with the patron saint of Progressivism, Dewey, as their hero, send them off to fairly well-paid jobs with summers off and gold-plated pensions, essentially disallow their firing for any reason whatsoever … then complain about the results.
I was on an NCAA athletic team in college & spent lots of time in the gym. With lotsa kinesiology majors planning to go to Ed Skool… why? Cuz they could get summers off… not because they wanted to teach…
After graduating in 1977, I went to work for IBM & have been in tech since - for IBM, AT&T, Disney, Sony, Sun Microsystems, etc. No one with whom I’ve ever worked would agree to work daily with stupid unionized workers. This is why all the “Teach For America” programs in the world will never work. There are no self-starters in any union I’ve ever heard of.
In 1989-1992, I was a Systems Engineer / Project Manager with IBM, with LAUSD as my account. Spending days at a HS in South Central, and in many of the other inner city schools, listening to the black kids carrying home books being berated by other black kids as “tryna act white.” This tells anyone all they need to know about our future.
No logical process allows any of this to be fixed. It explains the idiots in congress. It explains the morons in the CA legislature & other single-party D states. It explains idiots like Hochul deciding she can steal your children. It explains Covidiocy the VAX deaths, the fact Fauci isn’t in prison for mass murder exceeding Pol Pot, and the absurdity of the climate hoax. It explains no one caring about election integrity, $34T deficits, funding stupid wars none of our business, the Industrial Censorship Complex, the anti-4A “Patriot [LOL] Act.” It explains not only having a wraith in the oval office, but also the fact that no one seems to care that no one knows who is running the Executive Branch of the most powerful country in the history of the known universe, and that it is being intentionally destroyed by those running it.
You know the second-dumbest college cohort? Journo majors. The idiots we have “educating” us on the issues of the day so we can vote intelligently…
Chew on THAT.
It all comes down to education. American voters just don’t care.
The Democrats' rotten inner-city schools have failed black students for years. Understaffed Democrat controlled police departments fail them again when they die of gang related warfare bullet wounds on our inner-city streets.
John: Yes, they have kept black kids on the Democrat plantation in order to maintain an underclass. On the Long Beach Peninsula, we have very few black residents (quite a few "Hispanics," some rather new arrivals). The current school board is intent on indoctrinating the kids in place of teaching them life skills. The election is next Tuesday. I have been involved in a two year effort to "flip the board" by recruiting Kids-First candidates. Diane
Ah, the dumbing down of America accelerates by regulation. (For those of you who are already dumbed down it means the process is speeding up.)
Rick: That’s funny, but I’m sure it’s not what you intended.
I have two points to make here. First, the public schools have been in a downward spiral since the end of WW2, from which they will never recover because they have no desire to recover. For a detailed discussion of our multi-general collapse in reading instruction, please see my "My Child Will Read" web site. There is no question that with rational leadership and (consequently) rational curriculum, children of all colors would be far more proficient in all subjects than they are, but under our socialist public school system we can never have leadership that serves parents and children. READ (if you can) AND WEEP: http://mychildwillread.org/
Yes, the teachers' union AND the US Dept of Education do NOT want Americans who can read well. I am very involved in flipping the local school board during this election, November 7th. Here is a Letter to the Editor recently printed in the local paper:
Matt:
When Frederick Douglass's slave owner caught his wife teaching the nine-year-old how to read, he was appalled. As he chastised his wife, the slave owner said "Learning would do him no good, but probably a great deal of harm, making him disconsolate and unhappy. If you learn him now to read, he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself."
I have been attending school board meetings on & off for two years, 15-18 total. I cannot recall the board agenda EVER containing a topic regarding poor reading scores, nor was this problem ever discussed by board members. Reading is the platform upon which all other learning rests. I don't understand why the current school board has not tried to improve reading scores which are at 39% of grade-level proficiency, one of the lowest in the state. (https://washingtonstatereportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ReportCard/ViewSchoolOrDistrict/100178)
According to Tracey Crook's 10/01/23 Letter to the Editor, over one-third of her third graders during her last year of teaching (2021-22) were reading at pre-K, kindergarten and first grade levels. This is not acceptable. The current school board was in charge then. According to Ms. Crook, there were no reading intervention programs then AND there are none NOW. Kindergarten through third grade is the most critical time for learning to read. If a child's reading skills are behind going into fourth grade, he is likely to be forever behind, which leads to frustration, which leads to dropping out, which leads to lifetime poverty.
Not all students are as brilliant as Douglass (1818 to 1895), abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman; however, every child deserves to reach his full potential. He/She cannot reach even a moderate level of learning success if he/she cannot read. The current board members are: Tiffany Turner, Nansen Malin, Anna Taft, Don Zuern & John Holterman (who just resigned). The kids deserve a board who cares about the QUALITY of education for ALL students.
Diane
I appreciate your dedication and enthusiasm, but as a fully jaded veteran of the Reading Wars of the 1990s I can assure you that the public schools are un-reformable, no matter who is on the school board or whatever else you may do. Unfortunately the vast majority of "conservative" or even "rational" parents, never having done battle with the public schools previously, imagine that the schools are some sort of rational animal that can be tamed. They couldn't be more wrong. To get some idea of what you're up against, read this history of my personal experience: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
But secondly, it is not "racist" to imagine that there might be differences between the races other than just skin color. In fact, the belief that we must all be equally skilled at everything is just a quasi-religious doctrine. Must the number of ball players in the NBA be proportional to their racial population ratios? I don't think so. Until you have read a book called "The Bell Curve", which looks at decades of real data relating to IQ, we are just making feel-good assumptions, as we have been brainwashed to do. We will have to throw aside such irrational ideals and resign ourselves to reality before it will be possible to even discuss the implementation of rational policy relating to racial groups. I assure you that the people implementing these "no standards" policies have read the book; they are doing this because they know that overall racial educational parity is not possible. Once you understand this, your understanding of them and their policies will change completely: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223556.The_Bell_Curve
Where’s Milt Friedman when you need him.
The idea American voters care about our schools is, frankly, ignorant. Democrat pols run on education. Dems have owned education since FDR; if Dems WANTED better education, we’d HAVE better education. If American voters wanted better education, they’d not vote D. But they do.
It’s pretty straightforward.
JFK EO’d into existence govt unions, (EO 10988) of which the most destructive are ATF & NEA. But they exist to funnel bipartisan tax dollars to D campaigns. They don’t exist to make the lives of their workers better or the quality of their output higher.
Our Skools of Ed, as has been documented by Sowell and Williams, are full of the lowest-scoring SAT kids on their campus. In a 1984 OpEd, a former Dean of the Boston College EdSkool wrote that these kids were “the dregs of the academic population.”
So we instruct idiots to propagandize, with the patron saint of Progressivism, Dewey, as their hero, send them off to fairly well-paid jobs with summers off and gold-plated pensions, essentially disallow their firing for any reason whatsoever … then complain about the results.
I was on an NCAA athletic team in college & spent lots of time in the gym. With lotsa kinesiology majors planning to go to Ed Skool… why? Cuz they could get summers off… not because they wanted to teach…
After graduating in 1977, I went to work for IBM & have been in tech since - for IBM, AT&T, Disney, Sony, Sun Microsystems, etc. No one with whom I’ve ever worked would agree to work daily with stupid unionized workers. This is why all the “Teach For America” programs in the world will never work. There are no self-starters in any union I’ve ever heard of.
In 1989-1992, I was a Systems Engineer / Project Manager with IBM, with LAUSD as my account. Spending days at a HS in South Central, and in many of the other inner city schools, listening to the black kids carrying home books being berated by other black kids as “tryna act white.” This tells anyone all they need to know about our future.
No logical process allows any of this to be fixed. It explains the idiots in congress. It explains the morons in the CA legislature & other single-party D states. It explains idiots like Hochul deciding she can steal your children. It explains Covidiocy the VAX deaths, the fact Fauci isn’t in prison for mass murder exceeding Pol Pot, and the absurdity of the climate hoax. It explains no one caring about election integrity, $34T deficits, funding stupid wars none of our business, the Industrial Censorship Complex, the anti-4A “Patriot [LOL] Act.” It explains not only having a wraith in the oval office, but also the fact that no one seems to care that no one knows who is running the Executive Branch of the most powerful country in the history of the known universe, and that it is being intentionally destroyed by those running it.
You know the second-dumbest college cohort? Journo majors. The idiots we have “educating” us on the issues of the day so we can vote intelligently…
Chew on THAT.
It all comes down to education. American voters just don’t care.
Silence is golden!
Tell me how this is not identical to slave owners (D) refusing literacy or schooling to their slaves.
Democrats always gonna Democrat. But why blacks support them in doing so ... oh, yeah: cuz Democrats own our schools ...
YES!!!!!!! Slavery!!! I wrote about this some time ago.
The Democrats' rotten inner-city schools have failed black students for years. Understaffed Democrat controlled police departments fail them again when they die of gang related warfare bullet wounds on our inner-city streets.
John: Yes, they have kept black kids on the Democrat plantation in order to maintain an underclass. On the Long Beach Peninsula, we have very few black residents (quite a few "Hispanics," some rather new arrivals). The current school board is intent on indoctrinating the kids in place of teaching them life skills. The election is next Tuesday. I have been involved in a two year effort to "flip the board" by recruiting Kids-First candidates. Diane