Tag: public schools

Grading Democracy on the Curve

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 11, 2018
1 Comment on Grading Democracy on the Curve

public schools, education, democracy,, propaganda, ignorance

Voters, we are told, are amazingly ignorant. So, what to do?

“Ultimately, the ideal democracy is one in which as many citizens as possible vote,” writes Dambisa Moyo at The Guardian, “and the voters are armed with the most objective information. Yet today only a fraction of the electorate are voting, and many are armed with a diet of hyped-up statistics and social media propaganda.” Among her proposals is a voting booth access test: “why not give all voters a test of their knowledge?”

I can think of a whole bunch of reasons, as can Ilya Somin, over at Volokh Conspiracy, who considers just a few. One of the more interesting is this: whereas Moyo has no wish to shove poor people out of the voting booth, and so envisions public schools to teach to the test — “the knowledge needed should be part of the core curriculum” — Somin quotes John Stuart Mill about the very political dangers of the very idea of public schooling: “A general State education,” wrote Mill in On Liberty, would inevitably be devised to please and serve “the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation” and must constitute “a despotism over the mind.”

Though Moyo does observe incumbency and political careerism as big problems, she is innocent of the more fundamental issues.

Indeed, she does not consider the obvious: today’s voter ignorance of politics and government is in no small part the result of government schools.

For politicians, general ignorance is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Let’s look for solutions to political problems that do not give politicians more power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags brainwashing, democracy, education, freedom, government, John Stuart Mill, propaganda, public schools, voting

education and schooling general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government

Civic Engagement Activities

Post author By CS Admin
Post date March 16, 2018
4 Comments on Civic Engagement Activities

blackboard, sheep, public schools, indoctrination, protest, guns

I love a good protest.

My first was in Mrs. Grubb’s third grade class, after a substitute teacher gave us a ton of math homework. During recess we organized and delivered a written statement announcing a student strike against doing the math.

Believe it or not, the assignment was withdrawn, called an April Fools joke … but boy did we catch hell when Mrs. Grubb returned.

This week, with the school walkouts across the country to protest “gun violence” and demand “gun control,” some older kids finally got in the game. I may disagree with their public policy shibboleths and disdain their tone, but I would defend to the …

Well, you know.

The problem isn’t students or protests. It is the partisan government school system. The system’s taxpayer-paid agents — teachers, administrators — believe they can support student protest movements for changing laws they want changed, but block and punish protests on issues they do not favor.

And, especially, bring the hammer down on anyone who dares notice the double standard out loud.

Rocklin High School teacher, Julianne Benzel, “has been placed on paid administrative leave due to several complaints from parents and students involving the teacher’s communications regarding today’s student-led civic engagement activities,” the California school district said in a statement.

Benzel told CBS in Sacramento that she did not discourage her students from joining the protest — er, I mean, civic engagement activity. But in class, she did raise the issue of whether the school administration would similarly allow (much less facilitate, dare we say, encourage) student protests against abortion, instead of guns.

Let’s protest what we can actually change: public schools engaging in partisan political activity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags blackboard, guns, indoctrination, protest, public schools, sheep

Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling insider corruption local leaders responsibility

Schooled in Corruption

Detroit, kickbacks, bribes, crime, education, schools

Michigan’s governor just signed a $49 million emergency funding bill, designed by legislators to keep Detroit’s public schools open.

Open for what?

Will any of that dough actually make it to the classroom, where children might possibly be educated?

Or, as I inquired at Townhall yesterday, is it merely another opening for … graft?

Less than a week after the rescue bill, U. S. Attorney Barbara McQuade brought criminal charges against more than a dozen DPS principals and administrators, as well as a vendor of school supplies. Their kickback scheme was simple: school officials received big, fat bribes from the vendor for school supplies that, as the Detroit Free Press put it, “were rarely ever delivered.”

The scam involved at least twelve separate Detroit schools over as long as 13 years. During that time, more than $900,000 was paid in bribes to DPS officials.

The newspaper highlighted how “shocked” teachers were that their principals had been indicted. “It’s pitiful that they’re going after principals who are probably just doing what they need to do even if it might be a little bit unethical in order to provide the students in their schools with the supplies and materials that they need that district and the state should be providing us,” was the excuse one teacher offered.

“A little bit unethical”?

Frankly, the fraud didn’t deliver, but deny “supplies and materials” to students — supplies taxpayers had sacrificed to provide.

This same teacher added that her indicted principal is “always putting students’ interests first. It’s not just rhetoric with her. It’s actual practice.”

Except for the graft.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bribery, crime, Detroit, education, graft, public schools, schools

crime and punishment folly ideological culture responsibility too much government

Pincher, Pinchee

police, crime, law, rights, pinch, juvenile, illustration

Limited government sports several rationales. The need for it pertains on many levels. One such level we don’t think about enough? This: Not every rights violation warrants calling in the law.

Take the strange case of Breana Evans, 12-year-old assailant, charged with misdemeanor battery.

What did she do?

She pinched the gluteal posterior of a boy she did not know.

Now, pinching the butt-end of strangers is a breach not only of decorum (to the extent that this standard we call “decorum” even exists any more), but of a pinchee’s rights.

Yet it was a mere pinch.

And the boy did not press charges.

The school’s “resource deputy” did not arrest her; she was merely suspended from school.

It would have remained a minor matter (so to speak) had not the boy’s mother “insisted to police that he was the victim of battery, and so they had no choice but to arrest Breana,” as Robby Soave explained over at Reason. “She was Mirandized and put in a patrol car. They took her mugshot and booked her into juvenile detention.”

The escalation of the dispute over carnal rites and personal rights into a matter fit for the police is, it seems to me, a grave result of a sort of cultural hysteria about all sorts of things. The willingness of some adults to push children through our harsh, bureaucratic, and often ruthless criminal justice system is sad to behold.

It is more indecent than a pinch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags assault, child, children, crime, law, public schools, rights

Common Sense education and schooling national politics & policies

Diversity Double-Talk

Diversity, schools, collage, photomontage, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

“Black teachers flee schools, leading to concerns about diversity,” warned the Washington Post headline. I’m less concerned about “diversity” and more about why teachers — black or otherwise — would “flee.”

The study found a significant drop between 2002 and 2012 in the percentage of teachers who are black in nine large city public schools systems — Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

In New Orleans, the percentage of black teachers fell from 74 to 51 percent, while the percentage of white teachers rose from 25 to 43 percent. In the nation’s capital, black teachers tumbled from 77 to 49 percent, while white teachers went from 16 to 39 percent.

“The whole effort … toward minority-teacher recruitment … [has] been an unheralded victory, really,” argues the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll. “The problem is with retention. Minority teachers have significantly higher quit rates than non-minority teachers.”

Some argue the problem is a system that micromanages teachers. Others cite the expansion of “teacher evaluation systems.” Neither reason explains the racial discrepancy.

However, black teachers do appear to be overrepresented in rougher, lower-performing schools — often with large minority populations. That may be causing a higher “quit rate.”

It may also be purposeful. As The Post article informs, “[R]esearch has suggested that students who are racially paired with teachers — black teachers working with black students and Hispanic teachers working with Hispanic students — do better academically.”

So, all the talk of diversity is aimed at keeping students and teachers with their own race?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: My Townhall column last Sunday was a longer treatment of this subject.

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Tags charter schools, diversity, public schools, race, school

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.