Failure of Education

ASVAB Exposes Education Failures

For those who don’t know, the entrance exam for the US military is a standardized test called the ASVAB, and is one of the best vocational aptitude tests out there. The ASVAB includes tests in 10 areas: general science (GS), arithmetic reasoning (AR), word knowledge (WK), paragraph comprehension (PC), mathematics knowledge (MK), electronics information (EI), auto information (AI), shop information (SI), mechanical comprehension (MC) and assembling objects (AO).

The test is scored as a percentile. That is, the score ranges from 1 to 99. A 60 would indicate that you scored higher than 60 percent of the people who have taken the exam. For that reason, a perfectly average person would score a 50. The score required to enlist is different for each branch of the military, with the lowest being a 30 for the Army, and the highest being a 36 for the Coast Guard. (There are waivers that allow even lower scores to qualify)

With that being said, black applicants are half as likely to reach the minimum score as any other demographic. In fact, a whopping 40% of black test takers cannot achieve a passing score on the ASVAB. The average score for blacks is 38 and for Hispanics is 44, compared to whites’ average score of 55. These scores reflect the similar racial gaps on other standardized exams.

This is more problematic than it appears at first glance, going back to my post about licensing and certification. Every applicant for the military has a high school diploma- a piece of paper issued from their school district certifying that they can read, write, and perform arithmetic, yet are dumber than two thirds of the test takers. Even worse, if you extend this to those who have dropped out of school before high school graduation, a whopping 60% of US blacks can’t pass this exam. Our education system is a waste of money that is largely accomplishing nothing but grooming children to become liberal sexual deviants.

Now there are many who will claim that this is caused by some sort of racism, using the stupid metric of “anything that results in disproportionate results for blacks is racist” instead of looking deeper into the causes. Why? Looking deeper is difficult and exposes uncomfortable realities.

By Divemedic, ago

Teaching Pigs to Sing

A report has come out, showing that math and reading proficiency dropped nationwide during the COVID lockdowns. Maryland students have the lowest test scores in reading and math of any US state or territory, with only 19 percent of Maryland students performing math that is appropriate for their grade level. Some schools in Baltimore had NO students who were proficient in math.

It doesn’t take long to figure out why. The scores are available online. It isn’t that the test is too hard or that teachers in general aren’t doing their jobs- there are schools in Maryland that had 91% of students proficient in math. In general, whites and Asians score higher on standardized tests than do other races, and the more affluent a student is, the higher the test scores.

The 5 cities with the best scores (racial makeup, median household income) were:

  • Bethesda: 88 percent white and Asian, $173K
  • Ellicott City: 83 percent white and Asian, $136K
  • Clarksville: 87 percent white and Asian, $161K
  • Rockville 68 percent white and Asian, $116K
  • Glenelg 88 percent white and Asian $181K

Some would see that and think that there was racism involved. That is what “equity” is all about- looking at outcomes, then trying to make them the same, but that is simply saying that correlation means causation. Instead, let’s look at the correlation and see if we can find the causation.

Parents who make more money do so because they value education, hard work, or some other trait. That doesn’t always mean college- it can mean trade school, learning to run a business, something. Those parents are also clever or intelligent, which is inheritable. The point is, parents who make money tend to impart the values that made them successful upon their children. Parents who are not successful pass their traits on as well. So children in affluent households tend to be successful. The children in poor households tend to be less successful.

How do you fix this? School and teachers can’t. Teachers who are with a student for less than 1100 hours a year can’t fix 18 years 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 that case, you are doing nothing more than trying to teach a pig to sing.

The other thing that I would like to point out is that the response to COVID had an effect on an entire generation of students, who lost learning opportunities that will hurt them in lost learning gains, thereby affecting them for their entire lives. The knowledge gap that they have as a result of missing a year or more of school will cause them to play catchup for years.

By Divemedic, ago

Hate Crime

Take a look at this before I comment on it. I’ll wait while you watch it.

Note that there are at least two, perhaps as many as four, black kids as old as 14 are beating on a 9 year old white girl. What the video doesn’t show is the rest of the facts here.

  • Her 10 year old brother was beaten on the same bus at the same time
  • All of the assailants were black
  • All of the attackers were older than the victims
  • The two victims had only been students there for three weeks at the time of the beating
  • The mother had been reporting escalating physical beatings and school officials refused to take action

Now the school wants to do something, and has had the oldest of the assailants arrested. I think it should be a hate crime. Imagine if the situation were the same, but races were reversed: a group of white kids were harassing and beating two black children. What would happen then?

I also blame the mother. She let her white kids go to a school that is 2% white , likely because she wanted to show how progressive and inclusive she is.

Coconut Palm K-8 Academy placed in the bottom 50% of all schools in Florida for overall test scores (math proficiency is bottom 50%, and reading proficiency is bottom 50%) for the 2020-21 school year.
The percentage of students achieving proficiency in math is 27% (which is lower than the Florida state average of 48%) for the 2020-21 school year. The percentage of students achieving proficiency in reading/language arts is 31% (which is lower than the Florida state average of 52%) for the 2020-21 school year.

You let your kids go to a public school just to prove a point. Now they are paying the price.

When my son was in school, he was bullied and physically attacked by a larger boy. I went to the school and asked them what they would do about it. The reply was that “We can’t watch the entire outside during PE.” So I told my son that he was being given permission to beat the shit out of the other kid. He did.

The school called me and said my son was about to be suspended. My reply to that was my son had a right to legal representation before being suspended, and that I would return for his suspension hearing with an attorney, who would want them to state on the record why one kid can beat others, but no defense is allowed. They decided not to suspend him.

That kid never touched my son again, and my son learned an important lesson about bullies.

By Divemedic, ago

Accommodations, Certifications, and Standards

A diploma, whether it is for high school, medical school, or barber college, is a certification from the school that issued it. That diploma states that the school is certifying that the person thereupon named has met the standards for that diploma. Or have they?

Nowadays, that isn’t what a diploma means. It was decided years ago, with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that it was 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.)

In order to make students with disabilities more likely to have the same outcome, they are granted accommodations. These accommodations can vary. It can mean that they are granted extra time, or are allowed to test in a private room with no one watching them, or that they are even give multiple choice tests with one or more of the wrong choices eliminated. Furthermore, the law goes on to say that there can be no mention of the accommodations on the student’s transcript, diploma, or other certifications. Don’t want them having the stigma of people thinking they had it easier than other students, you see.

As a result, not every student is being evaluated by the same standard. This means that a diploma is no longer a certification, as there is no guarantee that two students who have received that diploma were measured against the same yardstick. Remember that next time you are having your hair cut or being treated by a healthcare professional.

There was a student in my nursing class who received the accommodation of testing in a private room, and was also allowed to have her cell phone in the room with her. She graduated with a 94% test average, the highest in the class. I wonder why. No one on staff could challenge her on it, or she would scream about IDEA and racial discrimination.

The same happened when I was a teacher. All a student needed was a letter from a physician, saying that a student had a learning disability, and the student got all kinds of accommodations. There were some families who had 4 or 5 kids, all with extensive accommodations. It’s the newest way to get your kid that high GPA they’ve always wanted.

It doesn’t just extend to the classroom. Even licensing exams are given with accommodations. The implications are obvious. Your doctor or nurse might be wholly unable to provide you with competent care, but at least we didn’t hurt their feelings by making them seem inadequate.

This also makes licensure and the certification that goes with it wholly worthless.

By Divemedic, ago

Not Surprising

University of Florida had some woke bullshit BLM stuff on their medical school webpages. That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I didn’t go to UF, but this is widespread throughout US colleges. I had to listen to and report on Podcasts talking about Health Equity and how all white people have privilege and are racist.

One of those podcasts talked about how black women have worse outcomes in healthcare than do white women, and this is proof of racial bias. As evidence, the podcast offered Serina Williams’ issues during childbirth to show that black women can’t get quality care, even when rich and famous.

Except that isn’t what happened. Ms. Williams has a preexisting condition requiring that she take anticoagulants to prevent blood clots. When she was to give birth by Caesarian section, the hospital told her to stop taking the anticoagulants, as they increase the chances of severe bleeding during surgery. After the surgery, she developed blood clots because she wasn’t on her medication. That happens and had nothing to do with her race.

That doesn’t matter to the woke professors that have infected our colleges. What do you do as a student? Well, you can do what I did when I was in grad school to be a PA, which was be loud and defend your opinions, but all that does is make an enemy of the professor who will then run you out of school and make certain you won’t ever be accepted to another grad school. Or, you can do what I did when I went to nursing school: keep your mouth shut, parrot the woke party line, and try to not be noticed.

By Divemedic, ago

Say What?

The vice principal of a Cleveland high school let three ski mask wearing, armed gunmen into the locked school with students inside, because he saw that police were chasing them and was afraid the police would shoot them.

A school security officer called 911 while watching teens with masks and guns. They had pulled up in three stolen cars and walked up to the school. The school went into lockdown. The police pursued the three, and one of them was able to escape.

The vice principal made a statement to police: “I confirmed the interior doors were locked and instructed the four suspects to come to the vestibule because it was unsafe to be outside because I saw police officers.”

The school district defended them by saying that the principal made sure that the doors to classrooms were locked, so the gunmen were not able to threaten students. Here is the official statement from the school district:

As one of the witness statements indicates, the males entered a controlled, secured area that is specifically designed to prevent access to the rest of the building. Cleveland police had already arrived on the scene and were able to make arrests. The staff member made a split-second decision that the individual thought was the best way to keep students and staff safe.

At the very least, the two vice principals are guilty of aiding a fugitive, or perhaps accessory after the fact. After all, he made an official statement that his purpose was in helping three masked gunmen avoid the police.

The police union had the best quote:

administrators at Garrett Morgan HS allowed MASKED GUNMEN to enter the school in order to protect the gunmen from wait for it police officers outside. They risked the lives of CHILDREN to show how woke they are. Can’t make it up.

Parents need to be down there at the next school board meeting and demanding some answers.

By Divemedic, ago

School Wasteland

Students don’t learn because teachers don’t teach. The reason for this is that the teachers who try to teach get screwed over and either burn out or get fired when students and parents complain that classes are too hard. So the good teachers either leave or give up and phone it in. I discovered this the hard way.

After I retired, I took a couple of years off before becoming a teacher, which I did part time for two years, and then full time for the next five years. I taught high school science classes during all of that time. For the first couple of years that I was full time, I taught advanced courses like Chemistry and Physics. The courses I taught allowed a student to take an exam after it concluded, and if they scored high enough on that exam, they would receive college credit for the course. In other words, a college level class being taught at the high school level. Students hated the fact that my course was difficult and constantly complained. Meanwhile, school administrators wanted my course to be both more rigorous and easier for students to receive an A.

During that first full time year, I was physically attacked in my classroom by a student because I took his cell phone and told him he would have to get it from the office. I wound up quitting that job and changing school districts.

The second year saw me teaching physics in my new school district. Students were constantly complaining that I was destroying their GPA because my class was too hard. They just didn’t have the math or study skills to be successful. I spent far too much of my time trying to teach things like calculating uncertainty, which isn’t that mathematically difficult.

A quiz in this class would look something like this (you will find the answers at the end of this post, for those of you geeky enough to want to solve them):

  1. A man in a tree stand 5 meters above the ground fires a rifle perfectly parallel to the ground. At the instant the 4 gram bullet leaves the muzzle of his rifle, his 125 gram watch falls off. If the bullet’s muzzle velocity is 1,000 meters per second, which will hit the ground first: the bullet or the watch? (You may ignore air resistance and the curvature of the Earth)
  2. NY Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge hits a baseball. It leaves his bat at a 22 degree angle while travelling at 40 meters per second. The outfield wall is 370 feet away. Does he score a home run? (You may ignore air resistance, the initial height of the ball when it was struck, and the height of the outfield wall.)
  3. You specify that a metal shop cut you a metal plate with the following specifications and margins of error: 32.0mm +/- 0.5mm x 30.0 mm +/- 0.5mm x 1.0 mm +/- 0.05 mm. If the density of this metal is 2700 g/cm3, what will the plate’s mass be (in grams)?(Significant figures count)

They began circulating a petition to get me fired. I caught them cheating. It was a tough year. The average grade for the class of 20 students was an 84, with 3 students getting an A, and two getting a D. The rest got B’s and C’s. When the college exams came around, four of them managed to score high enough for college credit.

So in year three, they gave me standard track Biology to be taught to the students that they euphemistically referred to as “underperforming.” This paper, written by a 15 year old who was in the 10th grade, is what I had to work with. Yes, this is a scan of an actual paper that was turned in to me, and no, he is not retarded:

At the beginning of year four, I was pulled aside by the principal and asked if I wanted to go back to teaching physics to the smart kids. It seems that the teacher that they had given that class to gave 3/4 of the class an A, but every one of them failed the college credit exam, even though the class average was a 92. I told them that the only way I would teach it was if I would not have to catch any static from administrators when students complained about their grades. The reply that I got was “We were hoping that you would agree to find a way to make your class more fun.” I declined and was sentenced to teach Biology to the dumbasses again. Hey, at least the lovable little morons weren’t trying to get me fired.

COVID hit at the end of that year. Teachers were instructed to hold class by Zoom meetings, we were required to give and grade assignments, and were told to enforce it rigorously. So I did. I would up doing quite a bit of effort and work, holding class. Only a quarter of my students did the work. At the end of the school year, the school district gave everyone at least a C. To think I could have done nothing for three months and gotten paid.

My fifth year as a full time teacher was to teach physical science. At the halfway point of the year, we were told that, due to the stress of COVID, we would have to give every student a passing grade. More than a half of my students were chronically absent. Then we were told that our students’ performance on end of the year exams would not affect their grades, but would affect our pay raises. I quit a week later and went back to health care.

ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ ARE BELOW THIS LINE

  1. Since the acceleration of gravity is the same (~9.80 m/s2) for all objects on Earth, the watch and the bullet would strike the Earth at the same time, but the bullet will be some distance away in the horizontal plane.
  2. Yes, he will score a home run because the ball will land 372 feet away.
  3. The plate will have a volume of 0.883-1.04 cm3. That will cause it to have a mass of between 2,380-2,800 grams. (three significant figures) This last problem gave them fits. They couldn’t understand how tolerances could give you an uncertain result.
By Divemedic, ago

Librarian Groomers

When I was teaching, every few years the school district had to select a new textbook. The process would include the district narrowing it down to a few likely candidates. The books which effectively covered your student benchmarks were listed, and parents would have an opportunity to look them over. So did teachers. The final textbooks were then selected with this feedback in mind.

After a book was chosen, there were of course dozens of books that were not chosen. No one ever accused the schools of censorship or book banning because they chose to have one book over another.

Not so much anymore. Now school librarians are “enraged” because schools are not allowing them to promote books that openly discuss fellatio between a 12 year old boy and a grown man, called Lawn Boy. There is also the story about two teen boys who wake up to discover they are in space before embarking on a gay love affair, or stories about how hard it is to be a teen transgender. They complain about parents not wanting their children to read about fathers raping their daughters.

This is just a way for librarians to attempt to get grooming past parents who don’t want their children educated in how to be sexual deviants. This particular story even goes on to complain that complaints about CRT are actually just “amorphous conspiracy theories” that gained traction in conservative circles last year, before going on to blame these “book bans” on deep-pocketed rightwing donors who are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.

You will note that none of the “banned books” these librarians are fighting for are things like the Bible, Rush Limbaugh’s “The Way Things Ought to Be,” or other books from the right.

Librarians are claiming that they are “banding together” to fight “book bans.” Look- the books aren’t being banned. The parents and others who pay the taxes that fund your library and your job have decided that they don’t want to use their money to fund their children reading stories with passages in them like this one:

What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick? What if I told you I sucked it? I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goebbels’ dick in my mouth. I was in fourth grade, it was no big deal. He sucked mine too. And you know what, it wasn’t terrible.

Citation from “Lawn Boy”

You want to publish a book like that, fine. It isn’t illegal. This isn’t a First Amendment issue. No one is restricting your speech. The First Amendment prevents the government from restricting you from speaking your mind. What it doesn’t do is require that the government fund it.

When you are a librarian in a government funded facility, you are an agent of the government. While you are acting as an agent of the government, you are not acting in your individual capacity. This is why clerks of court can’t refuse to issue a marriage license. This is why a judge can’t have a sign with the 10 commandments mounted on the front of his desk in the court room. It’s also why teachers can’t explain gay sex to children and why librarians don’t get to push children to read “how to” books on sucking dick.

I will fight against using taxpayer funds to provide that book to children, you sick fucks.

By Divemedic, ago

Constitution and Government Employment, continued

On Saturday, I posted that the government can’t fire an employee without due process. That is, a government entity has to follow certain steps before terminating the employment of their employees. Many of you disagreed, but I will share with you why I feel that this is so important:

There is a teacher I know who was terminated in violation of this law. Gerry Buell had been teaching for Lake County schools for over 22 years. He was selected as the county teacher of the year. Just a few months later, he posted on his private Facebook page that he was opposed to gay marriage.

On his personal Facebook account, outside of school time, Buell posted a reaction to New York’s passage of homosexual ‘marriage’ saying he “almost threw up.” He also referred to homosexual unions as sinful and referred to it as part of a “cesspool” of behaviors. The local media got ahold of it.

Just for the record, this is his exact comment:

I’m watching the news, eating dinner when the story about New York okaying same-sex unions came on and I almost threw up. Then they showed two guys kissing after their announcement. If they want to call it a union, go ahead. But don’t insult a man and woman’s marriage by throwing it in the same cesspool of whatever. God will not be mocked. When did this sin become acceptable?

By the way, if one doesn’t like the most recently posted opinion based on biblical principles and God’s laws, then go ahead and unfriend me. I’ll miss you like I miss my kidney stone from 1994. And I will never accept it because God will never accept it. Romans chapter one.

“It was my own personal comment on my own personal time on my own personal computer in my own personal house, exercising what I believed as a social studies teacher to be my First Amendment rights,” he said.

He was 100% correct, but that didn’t matter to the Lake County school system. Some parents filed a complaint with the school superintendent. Shortly afterwards, he was suspended. Two days after being suspended, he was fired for “violating his professional ethics.”

“We took the allegations seriously,” said Chris Patton, a communication officer with Lake County Schools. “All teachers are bound by a code of special ethics (and) this is a code ethics violation investigation.”

According to the school system, what Buell wrote on his private account was disturbing. They claimed that they were especially concerned that gay students at the school might be frightened or intimidated walking into his classroom. Patton also disputed the notion that Buell’s Facebook account is private.

“He has more than 700 friends,” Patton said. “How private is that – really? Social media can be troubling if you don’t respect it and know that just because you think you are in a private realm – it’s not private.”

So, according to the Lake County, Florida school system, whether or not a government employee has the right to free speech depends on how many people are listening.

Patton said the school system has an obligation to take the comments seriously. He said Buell will not be allowed back in the classroom “until we do all the interviews and do a thorough job of looking at everything – past or previous writings.”

To accomplish that, he said people have been sending the school system screenshots of Buell’s Facebook page.

“Just because you think it’s private, other people are viewing it,” Patton said, noting that the teacher’s Facebook page also contained numerous Bible passages.

Buell hired a lawyer, who sent a notice of intent to file suit for terminating him in violation of his First and Fifth Amendment rights. The school caved in. If government employees were “at will,” that never would have worked.

I want you to ask yourselves- just who in government service needs to have their Constitutional rights protected? In these days of school boards shutting down discussion and declaring that parents are terrorists, do you think that leftist teachers have any fear of being fired? Or do you think it is conservative teachers?

I myself was fired from that same exact school. In October of 2016, we were told to discuss the gay and lesbian lifestyle* and its benefits in the classroom. Click on the link to see the actual handout we were given. I refused. Less than a month later, I was attacked in my classroom by a violent student.

I had worked for that school for exactly one week less than a year, so I was still on “probation.” I could be fired for any reason. I was placed on paid leave. Two months later, the school system told me that, if I resigned, they would not pursue any other actions and would simply tell future employers that I had resigned. The union wanted me to fight. I didn’t think the job was worth fighting for, so I quit.

A month later, the school system tried to have my teaching license revoked by pressing formal charges with the state. Had they been successful, my medical license would also have been revoked. They accused me of attacking the student and even tried insinuating that I was a pervert that was attracted to the teenaged girls in my class.

I wound up spending several thousand dollars on a lawyer, got a hearing, and won my case. Throughout the process, the school hid evidence, manufactured evidence, and played every dirty trick they could. My attorney was livid. After the administrative hearing was over, he wrote a letter to the director of Florida’s DOE, telling them that he had never seen the kind of outrageous behavior from a school system before.

Be careful what you wish for. Remove constitutional protection from government jobs, and the left will be free to eliminate the conservative minority.

* Note that I mentioned this in 2016. This grooming thing has been going on since before Trump was elected. Note also that the CRT stuff has been brewing since at least 2020. I mean to say that both grooming and CRT have been in our schools for at least a decade, perhaps longer.

If it weren’t for the constitutional protections that government employees have, the only voices our children would be hearing are the ones grooming them for the left. It’s important.

By Divemedic, ago

You Need a Lesson

Parents are waking up to what is going on in their children’s schools. Teachers are teaching ethnic and gender studies courses, but schools are refusing to release any details to the point where parents are having to sue the school district to find out what is being taught.

Parents are rightfully upset. So how do school boards across the country respond? By calling parents terrorists and telling them that they “need to be taught a lesson” in professionalism. Had I been at that meeting, I would likely have been escorted out by police after I stood up and told her that elected officials need to be taught a lesson about who they are actually working for and what part of my anatomy that dictatorial harpy could place her oral labia.

By Divemedic, ago