Category: education and schooling

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crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom

Can’t Complain

During the Soviet era, there was a joke going around about how Soviet citizens expressed their feelings about life under Communist rule.

Whatever a citizen is asked about, he shrugs and says, “I can’t complain.” Finally the exasperated interviewer asks, “Well, is there anything about life in the Soviet Union that you do dislike?” Of course the answer is “I CAN’T COMPLAIN!!!”

In certain societies, persons who complain too pointedly or publicly are subject to arrest and imprisonment, if not worse. Luckily, being arrested for complaining, especially in a civil, peaceful, non-rights-violating way, would never happen in the U.S., right?

Don’t tell it to Jim Howe, the Tennessee parent arrested by a splenetic officer, Avery Aytes (“Officer Absolute Obedience” as Cory Doctorow dubs him), for calmly articulating disagreement with a new school policy on how his kids were to be picked up from school. The policy created traffic jams, so Howe walked to the school to get his kids. When he continues to calmly express his viewpoint despite being told to zip it, Aytes slaps on the cuffs.

The crime: talking.

County Sheriff Butch Burgess says he doesn’t even need to look at the starkly unambiguous video of the incident to know that the arrest was justified, Aytes was just doing his job. This means that all arrests by law enforcement officers are per se justified because they are arrests by law enforcement officers. Which is a prescription for cowed submission to tyranny.

That’s not common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Pledge or No Pledge

School authorities in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, decided not to require students of all ages to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They said they couldn’t find time to put it in the schedule, etc., thereby both disappointing and puzzling local veterans, who were the ones who brought the issue up.

The “time” excuse was just that, of course. What the real reasons for the decision are, I don’t know, and will let others guess.

On the bright side, there are reasons not to require recitation of the Pledge. My qualms center on how un-American it seems. Veterans today often talk up the Flag, and the Pledge, etc., but the Founding Fathers took allegiance seriously, and they didn’t secede from Great Britain to pledge their sacred honors to a symbol — a fighting banner too easily unanchored from the best part of the short declaration, “with liberty and justice for all.”

Besides, the Pledge was written in the late 19th century by Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist who targeted the Pledge at those sectors of society that he most feared: immigrants, anyone prone to “radicalism.” And yet when I read his political agenda, I see the very radical ideas that corrupted American politics away from limited government.

Worse yet, Bellamy devised an ominous salute to go with his recitation. (Thankfully, that was modified to the hand-on-heart gesture in 1942, when Congress officially adopted the Pledge.)

I’d rather students learn about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Substance, not symbol; law, not fiction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Progress in Talk About Schools

Since my days in the early grades of school, there’s been a lot of educational progress in America.

Not so much in the public schools, but in alternatives to them. When I was young, public schools were not only paid for by taxpayers, they were near-monopolies. Parochial schools and other religious-based programs were few. Home-schooling was uncommon, technically illegal in most states and locales.

How things have changed! Not enough, mind you. But the general political culture has improved enough that charter schools are often voted in, and there exist working voucher systems, if of a limited scope, in several areas of these United States.

In Britain, the situation is also opening up. The Labour Party is pitching its support for “parent-led academies in areas of educational need.” Party outreach spokesman Tristram Hunt, who had previously snarked that such projects were “vanity project[s] for yummy mummies,” takes it all back, now insisting that his (quasi-socialist) Labour Party now backs “enterprise and innovation.”

Britain is ruled by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, with Labour on the outs, so of course Labour could be said to be grasping at straws. It’s cheap to try freedom when you have little power. Conservative politicians insist that the latest statements are nothing but empty promises, and that Labour is still socialistically clinging to the old notion of schools “run by bureaucrats.”

But hey: notice that freer solutions are on the table.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture

Liars, Fools, Educators

There’s something very, very wrong with today’s public school culture.

I wrote that as a start for today’s excursion into the land wherein common sense has utterly fled . . . but without knowing whether I would dissect a Washington Times story about two Virginia Beach, Virginia, students suspended (perhaps for the entire year) for playing with an air soft gun in their own yards, or the Washington Post’s excellent coverage of a new test-score scandal.

The first story reflects both today’s crazed anti-gun culture and a sort of imperialism: educators seem to think that it’s their jurisdiction to judge how children behave at home, especially when it comes to toy guns, which they apparently deem inherently bad, etc., etc. Yes, Virginia educators insist on enforcing pacifism and disarmament as a settled matter, as if the Second Amendment didn’t exist.

Now, schools should not allow violence on school grounds or buses. And, if the kids who were playing with the toy guns were pointing and shooting with dangerous irresponsibility, and against city code, then maybe the school has a leg to stand on.

Nearby in Washington, D.C., in our second story, public school administrators have rigged the testing system to yield better math scores. Indeed, the district had boasted of a four-point gain. Then it was discovered that scores had actually declined, in part because of new rigorous tests. But instead of “biting the bullet” and taking a “temporary” hit, educators fiddled with the statistics and came up with phony bragging points.

Liars to the north of me; fools at another point in the compass, entirely.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling too much government

Choosing Choice

Public schools often get lousy report cards.

One big reason is that under the bureaucratically run government monopoly, teachers and administrators have no freedom to try fundamentally different approaches and be rewarded by consumers when they get it right. Educators must obey uniform and stifling standards.

Alas, too many of these public-school staffers are far from eager to shuck the mandatory mediocrity. They’re more worried about keeping their jobs and keeping captive their mis-taught and under-taught students. Such educrats oppose all policies — tax credits, vouchers, more autonomy for charter schools — that help students escape failing classrooms.

The educrats’ prejudice against educational freedom is being abetted by Obama’s “Justice” Department, suing to block school-choice policies in Louisiana on “civil rights” grounds. Obviously, no “civil right” is violated merely because a student attends a private school. But Obama’s lawyers want to make the issue about race regardless. Something about how it’s harder to maintain racial balance if too many children of a particular race leave public schools . . . even if fostering school choice makes it easier for all kids of whatever race to do so.

By Justice’s bogus standard of “justice,” then, actual justice — indeed, actual freedom and opportunity, even actual quality of education — must be shoved aside as irrelevant. What matters is only “racial balance,” no matter the injury to any student’s rights or well-being.

But preserving the jobs of educrats and preserving somebody’s idea of ideal demographics are not the purpose of going to school. The purpose is to learn.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture Second Amendment rights

Wear NRA T-shirt, Go to Jail

In April, eighth-grader Jared Marcum was arrested for refusing to change a T-shirt with the National Rifle Association logo, a picture of a rifle, and the words “Protect Your Right.” The 14-year-old now faces a possible $500 fine . . . and up to a year in prison.

Jared had bean wearing the shirt in the cafeteria when a teacher demanded he either change it or reverse it. He refused and was sent to “the office,” where he again refused. And then a police officer was called in.

According to press accounts, when Jared was sent to the principal’s office, he went. Doesn’t sound like he posed a threat to anybody. Why was the cop called in?

Jared did nothing to “obstruct” the officer — the charge that may send him to prison — except reportedly continue talking when asked to stop. If so, sounds like poor judgment, given the power over us that police have. Maybe it would be good for Jared not to remain 14 years old indefinitely. He will probably grow older even if not sent to prison, however.

What the whole controversy comes down to is this: The kid peaceably displayed a pro-rights sentiment which a particular teacher happened to dislike. Logan County Schools’ dress code doesn’t prohibit references to the Bill of Rights — indeed, it doesn’t prohibit messages on clothing unless they contain “profanity, violence, discriminatory messages or sexually suggestive phrases.”

One hopes that the school doesn’t regard a defense of the Second Amendment as “violent,”  and therefore worthy of prohibition.

Nor does wearing a pro-NRA shirt deserve the threat of a year in prison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling

Arrested Development

Former Atlanta schools superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other school employees, including high-level administrators, principals and teachers, were recently booked in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail after being indicted on 65 criminal counts. The charges included racketeering, theft, conspiracy, making false statements and witness tampering.

Just four years ago, Hall was the National Superintendent of the Year. Now, she faces 45 years in prison for having allegedly snagged almost $600,000 in bonus income for higher test scores achieved through fraudulently changing students’ test answers.

And this, the nation’s largest-ever cheating scandal, may prove only the highest shard of a proverbial large floating mass of frozen water.

But instead of condemnation, some of the nation’s leading “education experts” seem bent on excusing the cheaters.

“What we do know,” Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss pointed out, “is that these cheating scandals have been a result of test-obsessed school reform.”

Dr. Christopher Emdin of Columbia University Teachers College reminded readers at the end of a recent Huffington Post column, “I am not saying that educators and school officials who cheat on tests or conspire to cover up cheating should not be reprimanded.”

Just “reprimanded”?

Award-winning teacher Steven Lin explained  that “environments such as that alleged in Atlanta present the classic sociological phenomenon of ‘diffusion of responsibility,’ along with a host of other flaws regarding the compartmentalization of job descriptions within bureaucracies.”

You mean they suffer from “peer pressure”?

Nevertheless, I still think it’s more than sorta bad to cheat.

And I agree wholeheartedly with the “controversial” remark by George Washington University Dean Michael Feuer: “It’s not the test that made them cheat.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

It Takes a Collectivist

First they told us that we didn’t build our businesses. Now we learn that our kids aren’t ours.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” TV talking head Melissa Harris-Perry argues in the latest MSNBC “Lean Forward” propaganda spot, “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

Yeah, better investments. Like Solyndra. Or . . . the K-12 public education system for which, since 1970, the federal government has increased per-pupil spending by roughly 190 percent, only to flatline test scores in math, science and reading.

“When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief,” Perry writes on her blog. “I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade!”

Doesn’t Tulane University pay her for grading those papers?

Claiming to “double down” in her defensive blog post, she actually admits that, “Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values.”

Of course.

What does Melissa Harris-Perry not get? That children belong, not to the state or the collective, and not really to their parents, but to themselves.

Is that much individual freedom leaning too far forward?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling folly

A Pointed Reminder

“In schools,” the Washington Post headline warned, “a pointed finger or a toy gun can spell trouble.” The front-page feature detailed a far too extensive and growing list of zero tolerance, zero commonsense punishments meted out to children as young as five at various “educational” institutions.

A ten-year old boy in Alexandria, Virginia, showed kids on the bus his new toy gun, which sported a bright orange tip to let even the most dense person know its essential toyness. Police arrested him the next day.

His mother points out that her son did not threaten anyone. Or pretend to. Nevertheless, he has been “fingerprinted and photographed,” writes the Post. “He now has a probation officer, lawyers and another court date.”

In my Virginia county, Prince William, an eight-year-old boy contorted his hand and fingers into an apparently loaded pistol and through insidious manipulation of his mouth and lips may have imitated the sound of firing hot lead at a classmate, while said classmate was, in an evil orgy of violence, simultaneously pretending to be shooting arrows from an invisible bow.

The finger-slinger was suspended for “threatening to harm self or others.” He did neither, of course, but his offense is equivalent to having waved a loaded gun. (No word on the whereabouts of the silent-but-deadly pantomime archer.)

A five-year-old girl was interrogated by three school staff members, summarily found guilty of issuing a “terroristic threat,” and suspended for ten days for allegedly attempting to murder her friend and then commit suicide. She offered to unload her weapon all over her friend and herself. The weapon? A Hello Kitty gun, which fires bubbles.

The Post suggests the schools are jumpy after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. But this zero tolerance insanity didn’t begin last December.

My grandson was suspended from his public school more than a year ago. He was six and playfully shot his finger at several fellow students.

Educators, who long ago abandoned the distinction between play and reality, must have been shocked at the lack of fatalities.

Does the crusade against crime really require public institutions to reject, utterly, common sense?

Shouting “No!” . . . I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling

Legislation for Graduation

The most obvious problem with government-run schools is that, well, politicians are in charge.

Two Arizona solons have written bills to require high schoolers to pledge their loyalty and allegiance to the Constitution in order to graduate. You’ve probably heard about at least one of these bills, since it affixes a “so help me God” phrase at the end, and that would pose a problem for atheists . . . and for those pious folks who don’t believe in swearing by the God they believe in.

While most of the media coverage has focused on that tacked-on “so help me God” aspect, both measures seem “tacked on” to me: Tacked on to the end of a high school career. Pretend you are a student. You’ve worked hard, or at least hard enough to graduate. Much of your future employment depends on your diploma. And now some politician is going to require that you recite a loyalty oath to the federal (not state) government?

Sounds like something more appropriate to a Communist dictatorship.

Stranger yet is the bill, proposed but not moved forward, further north:

Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

Before one hyperventilates, it’s worth noting that the good Sen. Goedde did this to “send a message,” so to speak, to the State Board of Education because of his unhappiness with their recent moves lowering graduation requirements and canceling evaluations of principals.

Well, I guess there’s method to his madness. And besides, there are worse books.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.