Diseducation

From White Hot Harlots, a Tumblr account of all things that I was put onto by a thread of other people I read, comes a bleak assessment of the current state and future of education in these here United States.

This, my friends, bodes very poorly for the future of education, regardless of whatever happens in the coming months. A movement that cannot articulate its own worth is not one that is long for this world. Teachers themselves are the only force that can resit the slow press toward the eventual elimination of public education, and they have embraced a worldview and comportment style that renders them absolutely unable to mount any worthwhile resistance. 

Part of what he talks about is the adoption of critical race theory (CRT) in the classroom. Some of the downsides of this approach are obvious to everyone except those who have power. CRT popularizer Ibram X. Kendi has said that discrimination that produces equity is antiracist. Well, I can't read his mind to tell you exactly what he has on it, but soldiers tend to take the general's orders at face value, which in the case of some ideologically minded teachers could justify all sorts of abuse. 

Then there's the question of whether CRT-based teaching really helps the kids it's supposed to. If it's even meant to do that, which, you have to wonder. One theory making the rounds now is that emphasizing the right answer in math class is whiteness in action. So the solution is to make math in schools fuzzier and more subjective? If that's the path schools take it's pretty easy to see what happens next. A few years down the road, jobs that require mathematical skill go to people who had tutors when they were school-age. No public schoolers need apply!

The idea of "social justice all day" in schools has been deeply endorsed by Randi Weingarten, current president of the American Federation of Teachers. She's also been instrumental in scaring schools off from in-person learning for the last year-plus. If your goal is to defund public education, you really have no better friend.

All is vanity

 This story, which isn't short but isn't ridiculously long either, is depressing in a lot of ways but fascinating in the detail that author Jonathan Kay goes into. The upshot of it all is that the striking students at the quite exclusive Haverford College got some nice perks for themselves. The school administration debased themselves, but at least turned the protests into a PR victory of a sort. The family, friends, and neighborhood of the man in the incident that started everything―a man whom the system failed before the fatal 9-1-1- call was ever made―don't have their lives improved in any meaningful way at all. They might not know this protest that quickly became about nothing but itself ever happened, and maybe that's for the best. 

Also on the "depressing" side of the equation are the excerpts from the demands made by students toward the administration, which could be described as sounding "righteous" or "incendiary" but for the most part say nothing at all. But as a wise man once said: 

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

That essay has never left me, and it never ceases to be relevant.

Waiting for Joey

I don't see myself going out to see Waiting for "Superman". When it comes to films about education, Allan Arkush's and the Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School set a very high standard. Can Davis Guggenheim fill those sneakers? I doubt it.

This rave from Forbes is smooth and articulate. It has the structure and contours of a reasoned response. Trust it not. Close your eyes for a second and you can see the guy in front of you swearing that he's never met the three card monte dealer before, and going "golly gee" as he "wins" twenty bucks.

I find myself more in the same boat as IOZ.

I would probably strangle the first "likely voter" I saw upon leaving the theater, and somehow I don't think that my cellmate would believe me when I told him that I'm a top. The anguish that our technocrats direct at the perceived failures of our system of education delights me to no end. Oh, no, we are failing to turn our children into readily employable automotons whose mecahnistic mental processes mitigate against any improvement in their own station, amelioration of their own working conditions, or consideration of the nature of control and ownership--indeed, cause them to work actively against their own best interests by inculcating a Stockholm-syndrome-like identification with the values and imperatives of a corporate ownership class that they themselves will never join!

And through him, Eye of the Storm.

if you are sitting here with tom friedman actually worrying that our kids have lower standardized test scores than the finns or something, i say you have floated outside the realm of actual human beings or real children or anything relevant to learning. really is this an education program, or is it a project for world conquest? these people give you the impression of each nation's children as a kind of army, in a war with all the other nations' children to dominate the future. try to become aware of how fantastical and optional that is as a way of representing reality. but try to be aware too of what a picture like that entails about how we actually treat children.

My own two cents, the expression of which is compromised by computer keyboards lacking a cent sign? You hear about merit pay. You hear about battling the evil teacher's unions to get rid of bad teachers. A smokescreen, all of it. They're not talking about elevating good teachers over bad ones, not really. All educators are to be reduced to indentured servants. The future is all about central planners. Pay attention to flesh and blood kids to see what they need on a case-by-case basis, and you are not With The Program.

And doesn't the question of "Why are so many immigrants doctors and engineers?" sound a lot like "Why can't we put those people back in their place?"

The Glengarry Glen Ross theory of education

This column by Diane Ravitch has been around for a couple of weeks. I'm a little embarassed to have only gotten around to it now, because Central Falls is right in my neck of the woods. It represents a kind of one size fits all approach that needs to stop, but probably won't. I can't see any presidential or gubernatorial candidate announcing "I'm going to let standards slide" even if that's what needs to happen.

Recently, the school committee of Central Falls, Rhode Island, voted to fire all 93 members of the staff in their low-performing high school. Central Falls is the smallest and poorest city in the state, and it has only one high school. Those fired included 74 classroom teachers, plus the school psychologist, guidance counselors, reading specialists, and administrators.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thought this was wonderful; he said the members of the school committee were "showing courage and doing the right thing for kids." The kids apparently didn't agree because many of them came to the committee meeting to defend their teachers.

Yes, and I'm sure they'll be given the attention always afforded the dumb kids produced by worthless teachers.

In my social life, I know many teachers. I know hardly any who like No Child Left Behind and other reforms from the same era. One thing that gets overlooked in most of the press is that teachers are often--not always, but often--creative and innovative people. School boards almost never are. Committee-fying classroom standards results in a uniformity of approach that serves a projected average group of students. One that doesn't really exist.

So I repeat, standards need to slip. The teachers on the front lines need to have autonomy. A blank check and minimal testing for urban schools might result in chaos, but that's better than the order we're getting.