An Ohio school district, claiming teachers are overworked, has cut school days by 20% by going to a 4 day class week. I’m betting that school taxes remain unaffected.
Failure of Education
Bathroom Breaks
This parent is upset that her child isn’t allowed to leave the classroom whenever she wants by using the claim of needing to use the bathroom. Students do this all the time. There are kids who will need to use the bathroom constantly, then will leave the classroom and wander the halls for half an hour or more. Many teachers, myself included, developed policies that were intended to keep kids in the classroom. If you don’t do so, you will find that the kids take full advantage of that, and of you.
There are some things that you hear when you are a teacher that are heard so often, they become cliché.
- The teacher is only giving me that grade because they don’t like me
- The teacher must have lost my homework, because I turned it in
- I wasn’t cheating, I was using my resources
- I need this phone to text my mom
- I wasn’t using this phone to cheat on the test, I was texting my mom. She needs to hear from me every hour, to make sure I’m safe.
- My kid wasn’t cheating on the test, he was texting me, you can’t tell my kid that he can’t text his mother whenever he wants to.
- I need to go to the bathroom (before being gone for half an hour)
- My kid should be allowed to do whatever they want.
You get the point. Kids will do anything and everything to get out of school, to get things that they shouldn’t have, etc. If you are a parent, you know how manipulative children can be. It’s a parent’s job to guide and teach their children the right way, to show them the path to becoming functional, responsible adults. Sadly, many parents fail in this duty and instead strive to be the child’s ally and friend, rather than their parent. I saw this time after time during my seven years as a teacher. It’s so tedious that it was one of the main reasons why I am no longer teaching. .
This bathroom thing is no exception to that. Let that child get hurt, and the first thing those very same parents want to know is why was their child not being supervised. It’s tiresome, and looking at this teacher’s policy in the article, it seems reasonable.
Mrs. Garrett has allegedly implemented a classroom “reward system” that allows students to earn “Garrett dollars,” which they can cash in to borrow supplies or use the bathroom, among other things. How do you earn dollars? Students can donate supplies, do extra work in the classroom, be good citizens in the classroom, etc. They can then use those dollars to buy things like a pencil or paper (which was donated by another student), bathroom trips, and other things.
It’s a great idea. It teaches the kids that work carries reward, it teaches them fairness, and helps impart a work ethic.
Instead, this parent wants to teach her child the lesson that whining and complaining is far more effective a tool to get what you want.
Sadly, that is the lesson that is learned far too often. Too many parents claim that their kid is different, their kid “would never do that,” which ties the hands of the teachers who actually DO want to do their jobs. That’s how we wind up with schools that can’t control kids, and the school becomes a discipline free for all, like this Minnesota school where parents are complaining that the violence is out of control.
Cancel Culture
Sue
If you are a Christian with a teaching certification who lives in Arizona, or are a student at Arizona Christian University, you should sue the school board of the Washington Elementary School Board for saying that Christians can’t teach there
Proselytizing is embedded into how they teach. And I just don’t believe that that belongs in schools.
Crime
Me Too
A teacher’s aide doesn’t make much money. Usually just over minimum wage. This poor aide was attacked by a 17 year old student who stands 6 foot 6 and weighs 270 pounds. He beat her unconscious for taking away his video game. In this case, he is being tried as an adult for aggravated battery. If the attack hadn’t been caught on camera, this wouldn’t have happened.
There was a librarian at a local school. She was in her late 50s, a typical little old librarian lady. A girl entered the library, looking to hide from her boyfriend, who she said was threatening her. The librarian let her hide in the back room. The boyfriend came in, demanding to know where she was, saying “Imma kill dat ho.” The librarian stood in front of the door to the back room, and the BF told her to get out of the way. When the woman refused, the BF threw her out of the way, causing her to fall and break her arm. She was later chastised and told that it was her fault for getting in his way.
I was also attacked in my own classroom, you can read about it on this blog.
The animals and pedophiles are running the place.
Anti American left
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.
COVID
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.
Failure of Education
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.
Education
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.
Education
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.
Criminals
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.