Failure of Education

Leesburg, Florida is the third fastest growing city in the United States. In fact, the city has increased in population by 18% in the past year. The city manager claims that 99% of that increase is due to The Villages, a nearby retirement community that is infamous for its frat house style elderly shenanigans. The houses in The Villages aren’t cheap- the average home in the area is selling for well over $400k.

Since Leesburg is located about an hour north of Orlando in Lake County, which is the county that wraps around the west and northwest side of the Orlando metro area, these new homeowners are paying school district property taxes, but the Lake county school district doesn’t have to provide any services. This is a huge cash cow for the county’s schools, with each home bringing in about $300 a year in school taxes. This means that the new construction is adding about $4.2 million in new tax revenue annually, and it’s being compounded each year as new homes are being built.

Other towns in Lake county are experiencing similar growth- Clermont, which is located about 20 miles south of Leesburg, has doubled in population in the past decade.

That’s why I was surprised to see that the Lake County School district is crying poor, claiming that they have a $35 million deficit, which they are attributing to a loss of 1,500 students. They said it’s partially because of the drop in birth rates in Lake County and the rise in private school vouchers. The county is claiming that they are losing $50 million a year to private schools. I say bullshit.

The county school board has an annual budget of nearly $730 million with a total enrollment of 48,500 students. If they are losing $50 million to vouchers, that represents 6,250 students, which is about 13% of total enrollment.

No, this deficit is due to mismanagement and waste, like most government money. For $15,000 a year per student, the taxpayers of Lake county should demand better. Our entire government, from the dog catcher to the President, is an exercise in poor management.

First, there is this:

If you’re a young intelligent guy, block anybody who tells you not to go to college. Because good fckn luck trying find a good match of wife & career otherwise, out in the meatgrinder.

There are invisible castes everywhere, and the world will punish you for not living up to your…

— 🐍 Ƥşץ𝕔𝔥𝕠pomp_Đ𝔦o̷͝ηуรǗ丂 ඏ (@Read_Acted) May 6, 2025

My career in the fire department didn’t require college, and I was making a good living at it. I know many firefighters who were making over $100k a year, and that was more than a decade ago. That might not be much money in NY or southern Cali, but in Central Florida that was quite a good wage. I didn’t go to college until it was almost time to retire.

Then there is this gem:

A woman’s confused that her student loan balance keeps growing—even though she’s been making small monthly payments for years.pic.twitter.com/IIUkhdsZyP

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) May 6, 2025

How can you graduate from college and not understand how interest works? If you borrow $40,000 in a student loan at 8% per year before making payments of $250 per month, your loan balance at the end of the year will be higher than it was at the beginning of the year.

Math, it’s a thing.

So if I don’t go to college, I won’t find a wife and a career? I would rather not have a wife than marry one who is a gold digging moron. Trust me, I did that once. It sucked. I don’t recommend it.

19 year old Aleysha Ortiz graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. She enrolled at the University of Connecticut, who admits students without requiring SAT scores. She is suing the public school because she can’t cope with the rigors of college. That is odd to me because I found college, with a handful courses being the exception, to be easy. Why is an honor student finding it so difficult?

Because she is illiterate. That’s right- she graduated with honors, but cannot read or write.

I met my wife just after I retired from being a paramedic in 2014. I was driving her nuts because I am a high energy guy, and it was killing me to sit at home every day. She talked me into working as a teacher- meaning that our schedules would line up, and we would have time that we could spend together. I started by teaching two classes a day, then progressed to full time for my second year. I taught high school for six and a half years. During that time, I saw a lot of this. How does this happen?

The Department of Education, that’s how.

Funding is tied to benchmarks. Special Ed students don’t have to meet them. The incentive here is to make as many kids special ed as possible. It needs to be done because not only do special ed kids bring increased funding per student, but missing the testing benchmarks means less money. The law is called Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It says that it is unfair and discriminatory to treat students with intellectual disabilities (what used to be referred to as retarded) the same as other students. So this law was passed to make things more equitable. (Not equal, which is the same standard, but equitable, meaning that they have the same outcome.)

School funding for special education students says that they have to be permitted to pass, and that their diploma and transcript can’t say a thing about the fact that they were special Ed, or that they were passed without meeting benchmarks. In fact, my school district even had a policy stating that non-English speaking students couldn’t receive anything less than a C.

For all students, not just special Ed, teachers are under a microscope. I was once told that another teacher was obviously better at teaching than I was, because all of her students received A’s in her course. If more than 15% of your students received less than a C, you had to submit a written plan to school administrators on how you were going to get their grades up. If more than 15% of your students get below a C for two years in a row, you are fired. The only incentive there is to pass everyone in order to keep your job.

When I was put in charge of teaching Biology at my school, I was given 6 classes of it. The teacher who had been teaching that schedule before me had been fired. I was told that the school’s goal was to have half of the students pass the standardized test on Biology at the end of the year. They told me that they didn’t expect me to hit that goal the first year, but were hoping I could do it by year three. At the end of that first year, 67% of my students hit the benchmark. My evaluation? Meets expectations (in other words, average). Why was that? Because almost a quarter of my students had below a C. I countered by pointing out that my grades were an accurate reflection of my students’ abilities. That didn’t matter.

The goals are difficult, if not impossible. The only real incentive that students have is grades, and some don’t even have that as an incentive. If you remove any possibility of negative outcomes, many students just won’t do anything. That isn’t on the teacher.

The entire education system in this nation is broken. I know- I was teaching in it for more than 6 years. It isn’t just the teachers. Administrators don’t care about the kids who are discipline problems, so they don’t do anything about it. The parents and the teachers also play a huge role in the suckage that is our school system.

There is a liberal moron in the video above claiming that the problem is with inequality. Bullshit. The list is of reasons for the failure is long-

• There are kids who never come to school. You can’t make them. More than half of my students were chronically absent (meaning out of school more than 20% of the time). More than 10% of them were absent more than half of the time. In a 180 day school year, I had more than one student who were absent over 100 days.
• Their parents don’t care, and no one is prosecuted for truancy.
• There are parents who claim to “home school” but don’t actually bother to teach the kids anything. Yes, it happens. I know a few.
• Students who do come to school and care, largely are cheating their way through school using apps, Google searches, and other cheats. That is how the girl who is the subject of this post made it- she cheated using apps.

The truth is that not every kid is smart enough for college. Not every kid is suited for school. A school that has a student for less than 1100 hours a year can’t fix 18 years of around the clock bad parenting coupled with the handicap of losing the genetic lottery. All of the programs in the world won’t turn a student with a 75 IQ and no motivation into a scholastically successful person. In this case, the mother of the girl didn’t speak English and didn’t bother to learn- she passed her parental responsibilities on to the school district.

We waste a lot of time and effort on trying educate kids who don’t want to learn, and on students with disabilities that prevent them from ever being more than simple manual laborers. There should be an exam at the end of the year when a student turns 15 (9th grade). Those who excel go to a college prep high school, students who show aptitude for it go to vocational school, students who fail are done and can go get a job. If you or your parents want to stay in school after you have failed the exam, you can pay for it yourself and go to private school. Let’s stop wasting money trying to prove that every child has the same mental aptitude. You don’t need to know calculus to run a cash register or push a broom.

Educating a child is a partnership between the student, parents, teachers, and administrators. If any one of those links fails to do their job, the effort will fail and all of the money spent will have been wasted. Let’s stop spending gobs of money to get the end result where a child receives an honors diploma and still can’t read or write.

A pair of 19 year old high school freshmen – read that again- 19 year old high school freshmen decided that they didn’t like something that their teacher told them and decided to ambush and beat him.

It happened in Broward county, which is one of the most left leaning counties in Florida, the site of a lot of election shenanigans. Of course it was the usual suspects, Amish Norwegian teens, in a Democrat stronghold, demonstrating that you can’t stop certain demographics from doing what they do.

When his defense attempted to ask for a reduced bond because McClover was on track to graduate and his mother would be unable to afford his bond, the judge had some harsh words.

“Counsel, he and another individual, without any provocation, walked up and started punching a teacher in the face, beating him,” the judge said. “He’s a danger to the community. $15,000 bond. Have a good day.”

My wife is an adjunct professor at a college. She teaches online classes in finance, economics, and an intro course in the Microsoft Office suite. The Microsoft class is a good one, because the state of Florida requires one semester of computer education in order to graduate, so there are a lot of students who take those classes.

The policies of the courses are set by the college. Every professor has the same policy- no late work is allowed, no cheating, etc. This is to make sure that the lessons are the same for everyone to ensure consistency.

The class covers a different program every few weeks: Office, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. The assignments go as follows: they are taught how to use the features of the program, then are given a file that they have to make edits to. The edits that they must make are spelled out, the student then makes those edits, saves the file, and turns it in to the professor. The file has a digital watermark to ensure that students aren’t merely sharing the file and turning in each other’s work. They have two weeks to complete the assignment- it’s due on Sunday night at midnight.

In her Microsoft class, she has 90 students. The first assignment was due at the end of the second week, consisting of making 25 edits to an Excel Spreadsheet. It’s an intro class, so the edits aren’t difficult. Still, this is what happened:

• fully 24 of them didn’t turn in the first assignment, and instead sent her an email asking for more time. Because the spreadsheet is being edited in the school’s environment, she can see how they are progressing. 21 of the 24 students didn’t even begin to work on the assignment until the day it was due.
• Five students didn’t turn in an assignment, nor did they bother to message her as to why. They didn’t even attempt to work on it.
• Another 6 students were caught turning in assignments with other students’ watermarks.
• Then there was the student who takes the cake- he sent her an email complaining that he got an A on the first week’s assignment (introduce yourself to the class by posting an intro to the class discussion page), but now has a 23% in the class because he didn’t do the assignment, but that’s not fair because he doesn’t even OWN a PC or a Mac, and it’s not fair to penalize him for being poor and not owning a computer. In an online class about computers, when there are computers free for students to use in the campus library. He complained that the assignments should be able to be completed on a cell phone.

Fully 40% of the students in her classes are failing because they didn’t even TRY to get the assignment done in the two weeks that was allotted for them to complete it.

So my cranky assed wife spent the day dealing with students’ emails about why they didn’t get their work done, and why they are failing her class. For those of you in the workforce- these people are going to be working with you any time now, and this is the work ethic you will be dealing with.