I
became privy to the loud conversation of three young women in their early
twenties from the nearby table. One was bemoaning the lack of a raise in three
years to her $44,000 a year teaching job – she had had enough and was going to
look for another job. I was wondering if anybody sent her the memo that 25
percent of college graduates in her age group, 25 and younger, are unemployed
and would gladly take her job.
High
school teaching and a library science degree were the source of their
displeasure and the list was quite long. Who decided that filing books in a
library by the Dewey system is a science?
Dealing
with a liberal education curriculum, demanding administrators, unruly students
who challenge any authority and come unprepared to school every day, placating
helicopter parents who hover at school all day, objecting to anything American,
demanding progressivism, multiculturalism in teaching methodology, or parents
who only care if their children have three free meals a day away from home, can
be challenging. Complicating the problem is the lack of subject matter
knowledge of some teachers and the political correctness required in the
classroom. All can make someone’s life quite miserable at work.
Making
only $44,000 in early twenties is certainly an outrage for young people in the
Obama-entitled society. After all, they
were promised a six-figure salary by their college advisor and plenty of jobs
in spite of their unemployable field of study. Such overt “social injustice”
can only be rectified by confiscating wealth from the rich and distributing it
to the young. It is a right now to have everything that someone else has, regardless
of effort or age. Why wait and build up a career and experience when you can
demand full rights here and now?
You
can always take to the streets with the Occupiers and burn American flags,
deface buildings, cars, and squat in the middle of a busy city or a beautiful
park to make your demands known. If you are a nuisance to the taxpayers who
must dodge your flea-infested camp daily on their way to work while they can no
longer use the park they are paying for, and you cause millions of dollars in
public property damage, so be it, America is rich and can afford it.
We
no longer teach a common culture, common identity, common true history, or
values such as hard work, charity, morals, virtue, and the rule of law. The new
freedom among the youth is anarchy. Secular education and “green” environmentalism
in support of mother earth has become the new religion.
Greek
universities are offering protection to the young anarchists and rioters. If
they make it to campuses, the police cannot arrest them without a warrant from
the university presidents who, of course, refuse to issue them. Education is
encouraging anarchy and lawlessness in Greece.
Goethe,
a classical liberal, warned us that democracy is incompatible with liberty.
“Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same
time are psychopaths.” Political centralization would lead to the destruction
of culture. (Hans Hermann Hoppe, Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Common
Core national standards, another President Obama brainchild, will implement
among schools a Race to the Top competition through federal grants. If states
adopt his Common Core standards, they will be exempt from the onerous
provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates.
According
to the Brookings Institution, “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common
Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will
have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.”
The
authority to create and set standards belongs to states and school districts,
not the federal government. Better yet, parents should have the power to give
their children the type of education that best suits their children’s needs and
abilities.
The
Department of Education does not know best – it paid two Washington, D.C.
organizations, the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices
and The Council of Chief State School Officers, to come up with the Common Core
national standards. (Pioneer Institute)
According
to Lance Izumi, author of “Obama’s Education Takeover,” the President
“strong-armed the states into adopting these standards through a number of
devices, principally through the Race to the Top competition through federal
grants.”
Awards
in Race to the Top $4 billion “historic” grant scheme will go to states
“leading coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform.” It was
authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
“Assessments
have to be developed that are valid, support and inform instruction, provide
accurate information about what students know and can do, and measure student
achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the
knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace.” (Race to
the Top)
My
translation is, dilute education, water down curriculum, force everybody into one
“successful mold,” and receive an undeserved pass, a high school diploma and a
worthless college degree. Exceptionalism is discouraged; poor students are
rewarded, while achievers are punished.
In
my 30 years experience as a teacher, the College of Education came up with many
experimental programs that promised to be a breakthrough in education and ended
up as another giant waste of taxpayer dollars.
“As
the nation seeks to maintain our international competitiveness, ensure all
students, regardless of background, have access to a high quality education,
and prepare all students for college, work and citizenship, these standards are
an important foundation for our collective
work.” (Arne Duncan on Core Standards)
Searching
deeper into the Core Standards, the true intent is clear, “all children can and
should learn to high achievement standards.” Policymakers must “endorse, fund,
and recognize assessment regimes that accomplish this goal,” Universal
Design and Universal Design for Learning. Really? All children can
learn to high achievement standards? Our minds, IQs, learning styles, and
God-given talents are so equal now that everything is possible by government
fiat?
Apparently,
standardized tests “fail to produce a valid and reliable measurement of what
significant minorities of students actually know, especially students with
disabilities, English language learners or those from varied cultural
backgrounds. Without accurate measurement, accountability systems are not only
ineffective, they are unethical.”
(Core Standards)
It
will be a fascistic world in which every person will be forced into a
government-dictated and enforced, dumbed-down mold, where everybody is equally
intelligent, equally capable, equally trained, equally able, and equally
educated with a diploma on the wall that is not worth the paper with the fancy
intaglio printing.
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