Failure of Education

Let’s Keep Our Money

Harvard is claiming that the Trump administration is attempting to force it to give up its constitutional rights when they tie Federal funding to conditions and accuse the administration of trying to “control teaching and learning at Harvard.” That is false. Where in the Constitution does it say that a college has a Constitutional right to the public treasury? I think that it is obscene that the US government is giving taxpayer dollars to an elite school that despises most of the people who are paying the taxes that make that very funding possible.

Harvard got $820 million last year. The list goes on. Columbia got more than $1.5 billion. All told, the eight colleges of the Ivy League received more than $6 billion in government handouts last year, despite the fact that they collectively are sitting on $185 billion in endowment funds.

The Harvard college has the largest endowment of any school in the world- to the tune of more than $53 billion dollars. They spend most of their money and time supporting leftist causes like David Hogg, who is now the vice chairman of the DNC. That is influence peddling of the highest order. Five of our last eight Presidents attended either Yale or Harvard.

I say that the Ivy league doesn’t need our money, and I think we should keep it.

By Divemedic, ago

Wasting Money

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.

By Divemedic, ago

Grift

Emily Brown is a government contractor. For the past 18 years, she has made a living working part time, billing the government $3700 a month. For 2025, she had three contracts lined up that would have totaled $63,000. What does she do for them?

Her contracts have her traveling to Albania and Ghana to “conduct research on the barriers that girls, women, persons with disabilities, and others face in accessing secondary education in Timor Leste and Gambia.” In other words, she was performing bullshit make-work.

We have entire school districts here in the US where not one student demonstrates reading comprehension. Reading comprehension and literacy in the US is at an all time low. There is no need to go to other countries to study that phenomenon.

This entire article is supposed to make us feel sorry for her and angry at Trump for putting a stop to the wasted tax dollars like this. This is what I voted for, to stop this stupid bullshit.

By Divemedic, ago

Teens

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.”

By Divemedic, ago

Rights Without Responsibility

Watch this video, then I will tell you my own story.

She claims to be an independent woman while at the same time wants her father to pay for her wedding, because she can’t. That doesn’t sound very independent to me.

When my daughter was 15 years old, she was dating this 20 year old loser who it turned out didn’t have a driver’s license because his had been suspended. When I told him that he couldn’t take her anywhere in a car since he had no driver’s license, he told me to mind my own business. I tried explaining to her that he was a loser who couldn’t date women his own age, so he was chasing younger girls, and all he wanted was to get laid. She told me that I was too old to understand how it is “nowadays” and that they were soulmates, and there was nothing I could do to keep them apart.

See, school taught her that she was a strong girlboss who wasn’t owned by anyone. She could decide for herself, thank you very much.

The young lad sent me an email telling me to mind my own business or he would come over with a bat and teach me a lesson. The next time he came over, I pulled a gun on his smarmy ass and told him that if I caught him coming over to my house again, I would kill his ass and produce the email as evidence in my trial.

I caught them once, having sex on my couch. I called the cops, who did exactly nothing.

Things degenerated to the point where she would just walk out whenever she pleased. Out of the house while I was taking a leak, out of school when he wanted to see her, nothing worked. I even tried getting a restraining order, but the courts denied granting it because she begged them not to. It turns out that the courts hold a teenage girl’s opinion in more regard than that of her parents.

On the day she turned 18, my daughter came out of her room and told me that she was now an adult and could do whatever she wanted. I pointed out to her that part of being an adult is understanding that adults have responsibilities, and one of those is to learn that there are consequences for every action you take, meaning that you can’t always do whatever you want.

She replied that she was done with my “bullshit rules” and she was going to live with her soulmate. I told her that, if she decided that she was an adult, then she needed to understand that, as an adult, she would have to provide everything on her own. Don’t come back here and ask for any handouts, not even a single dollar. She walked out.

I didn’t see her again for four years. That was when she came to me and asked for money for her wedding. It appears that she had broken up with her soulmate six months after moving in with him, and he stalked her to the point where she had to get a restraining order. She met this new guy, they were in love, and wanted to get married. She wanted me to pay for the wedding. I told her no.

My ex-wife (her mother) called me to tell me what an asshole I am, before telling me that I should pay for the wedding AND the honeymoon to Alaska, a bill that came to over $20,000. I said no. She is an adult, and I am not going to have her turn her back on me, only to come crawling back whenever she needed money.

The biggest lesson that she learned was just a few months after my grandson was born. Her husband ran off with an only fans porn actress, leaving my daughter and his kids high and dry. That was what she needed to grow up. The responsibility of having children of her own taught her lessons that she was unable to listen to when I tried to teach them.

Our relationship has never been the same as it once was, but we have slowly come to terms with what happened.

All because society and our kids’ schools fill these kids’ heads with ideas about the rights of being an adult, but don’t bother to teach them about the responsibilities that come with it.

You can’t be an independent adult if you need someone else’s money to pay for it.

By Divemedic, ago

College, How It’s Going

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.

By Divemedic, ago

“Scientists”

A group of scientists have declared that lobsters, shrimp, and cuttlefish are sentient and conscious. The specialties of the scientists?

A review of the signatories on this declaration indicates most of the expertise is in philosophy, psychology, and environmental studies.

They are no more qualified to comment on this than I am on any number of random subjects. By using the term “scientists,” they attempt to claim an expertise that they do not possess. It’s like that time a bunch of Doctors expounded on gun control.

Just because you have expertise in one field doesn’t mean that you have been granted any special wisdom in any other.

By Divemedic, ago

Your Money

This man racked up $250,000 in student loans going to college getting a Masters Degree in Music, Violin Performance. Then he chose to live a life pursing music as a professional meditation musician, but it didn’t pay him enough to make the payments on his student loans. In his own words he did not want to give up his dream of being a musician to get a job that would allow him to pay off his loans. (This is the perfect example of a useless college degree.) Here is his Linked In description of his job:

I am a meditator, musician, and web developer that is interested in finding ways these things can be combined and applied to make people’s lives more peaceful and fulfilling. My work in music technology and longterm cultural outreach has taught me just how great an impact opening perceived barriers to knowledge can have on individual lives and communities. It is meditation and this impact that motivate all of my work.

His “web developer” credentials, as posted on Linked In? He attended a single 18 week web developer boot camp. His job as a musician is for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in NYC:

I develop chamber music focused classes for public school children that introduce general musical concepts and highlight its contemporary relevance.

He also gives private violin lessons to kids that want to be just as successful as he is.

His student loan debt was just wiped clean by Joe Biden. With your tax dollars.

Now he is planning a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India. It’s amazing what a $250,000 gift from the taxpayers of this country will enable a spoiled New Yorker to do with this spare time.

Charles Cook from the National Review summed this up for me, and I can’t say it any better:

This year, though, I feel unusually great about paying my taxes, and for that I have to thank a 49-year-old American named Joel Lambdin, who, thanks to President Biden’s remarkable generosity with other people’s money, was recently given $250,000 from the Treasury as a reward for being a financially illiterate dilettante. As Business Insider reports, Lambdin left graduate school in 1998, but, since then, he has chosen to make almost no money. “The only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans,” Business Insider notes, “was by switching careers.” Lambdin “didn’t want to do that because he loved working in music.” So he didn’t.

He loved working in music so much, he didn’t want to pay his bills. Now that he has no bills, music can go fuck itself, he’s going meditating in India.

By Divemedic, ago

Facts Explaining Our Situation

We always wonder why the US has the problems that it has. Here are some facts that might explain it.

How can the people unable to read at a 6th grade level overlap with the people that have gone to, and in some cases graduated from, college? The answer is simple- education is failing us by charging money without delivering the finished product.

I am about to finish my latest Bachelor’s Degree. This one will be in nursing. The majority of the classes (all but one) had nothing to do with nursing or actually delivering health care. No, the college classes I took concentrated on the following the format of APA citations. Use a comma in a footnote, when you should have used a period? That gets you a C on the paper.

College is largely a useless waste of time. The only reason why I even bothered to get the BSN is that my employer paid for it, and promised me a 7% raise for finishing it.

By Divemedic, ago

Oregon: “Minorities too stupid to learn”

The state of Oregon says that proving proficiency in reading, writing, or math is no longer required to receive a high school diploma, has required it since 2020, and won’t require it at least through 2029. This makes an Oregon High School diploma completely worthless.

A little over a year ago, I put up a post on what the terms ‘licensure’ and ‘certification’ mean.

Certification is where an entity certifies that a person meets certain standards. The entity issuing the certification can be a private business or a government. The value of the certification lies with the reputation of the entity that issues it.

A diploma is a piece of paper that certifies the person named thereon has met the requirements put in place to receive that certification. It is, in this case, a statement from an Oregon school that the high school graduate has met all of the requirements that the state says need to be met in order to receive the diploma. That way a prospective employer can see that you have graduated from high school, knowing that the person named on that diploma has certain abilities and skills.

In Oregon’s case, just what are those requirements?

Higher rates of students of color, students learning English as a second language and students with disabilities ended up having to take intensive senior-year writing and math classes to prove they deserved a diploma. That denied those students the opportunity to take an elective, despite the lack of evidence the extra academic work helped them in the workplace or at college, they said.

Where is the evidence that a high school diploma helps a graduate in the workplace or college?

Board members underscored that state-mandated standardized tests will still be administered to most Oregon high school students – they just won’t be used to determine whether a student has the skills necessary to graduate.

I know high school students. Make them take an exam that doesn’t count as a grade and isn’t required for graduation, and they will not take it seriously, rushing through it so they can get back to interacting with social media on their cell phones.

Oregon lawmakers, however, have mandated that families be told each year that they can opt their student out of taking state tests – and one third of high school juniors didn’t take the tests last spring, meaning they and their families don’t necessarily know how they measure up against statewide academic standards.

Oh, wait. They don’t even have to take them. That’s how you hide your policy failures- simply stop measuring them. So why are they doing this?

Opponents argued that pausing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. Giving students with low academic skills extra instruction in writing and math, which most high schools did in response to the graduation rules, helped them, they have argued.

But leaders at the Oregon Department of Education and members of the state school board said requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students, a misuse of state tests and did not translate to meaningful improvements in students’ post high school success.

So they are saying that black and Hispanic students are too stupid to learn reading, writing, and math, but then turn around and claim that those who demand that they learn these things are the racists.

By Divemedic, ago