Say Anything Blog

Great quote.  Do you have a linkable source for this?

Just what myself and several others on this site have been sayin’ all along.

Many of today’s teachers in our public school systems wouldn’t make it in a competetive, merit driven environment like in the private enterprise world.

Election ‘08 - We Are So Screwed

Pil
Just a slight enhancement to your comment:

merit driven environment like in the [non-unionized] private enterprise world.
Pilgrim on February 18, 2007 at 09:44 am

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. —Aristotle ...

Blaming teachers’ unions is way too simplistic; the problem is multi-faceted.

Decouple teaching credentials from courses in university schools of education.  Most of the faculty there have never been in a K-12 setting, and end up teaching nothing but theory.

Allow districts to expel students for rotten behavior.  If a 4th grade teacher has to spend just 10 minutes a day on discipline, thats 1800 minutes wasted in a 180-day school year.  Let the parents worry about educating their little sociopath monsters.

Especially in the sciences, if you want the best, you have to pay competetive salaries with the private sector.  Why teach if you double your starting salary at 3M?  You can’t expect people to be altruists.

Get rid of the Feds and their mandates.  The Dept of Education has been a boondoggle since it was established.

btw, I am not a K-12 teacher, just a parent who has seen the good and bad of the system.

Allow districts to expel students for rotten behavior. ....  Let the parents worry about educating their little sociopath monsters.
ec99 on February 18, 2007 at 12:05 pm

I don’t disagree with those two sentiments.

However, the only group in society that must be spoken of in reverential terms at all times, no matter what, is public school teachers.

Don’t dare say anything bad about teachers unless you want it on your permanent record.

We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers’ raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don’t make enough money.

Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money?

After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren’t they too stupid to be teaching our kids?

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. —Aristotle ...

Here’s a link to the article.

"No Sane man will dance.”—Cicero

ec99, your comment about teachers unions only being a small part of the problem is sort of tossed in the dust by the success of school vouchers, both on a limited scale here in the U.S. and on a much larger scale in certain nations abroad.

Put simply, when schools have to compete for students and parents are allowed to pick schools that best fit their kids a lot of the problems you talk about (expelling troubled kids, etc.) go away.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

Thanks Daniel, I’d forgotten to put in the link.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

The chapter on the National Education Association is in some ways the most fascinating. (The NEA didn’t begin life as a union, but the IRS has classified it as one for over two decades now.) Consider this argument: ’If our government- monopoly schools perform poorly, let’s give them more money, and if they perform well, let’s give them less money. Then they’ll have plenty of incentive to improve.‘ If that logic sounds backwards to you, you’ve just understood what, in a nutshell, is wrong with the entire U.S. educational system—and thereby demonstrated that you’re smarter, in that respect, than everybody who voluntarily joins a teachers’ union. You’ll understand in _much_ greater detail after you read Chavez’s and Gray’s chapter on the NEA.

-- Review, Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics

It’s worse than that.  The Teacher’s Unions (NEA and AFT would have you believe they are simply inept bureaucrats.  But they actually have a Socialist agenda.

The NEA one half of the Socialist duo (NEA/AFT) who have long held a stranglehold on US public education, crows with great pride about repeal of the Little Red Rider:

Among the NEA’s most dramatic achievements in this area was the repeal in 1937 of the “Little Red Rider,” a resolution adopted by Congress in 1935 forbidding the payment of a salary to any employee in the District of Columbia who “taught or advocated communism.” All teachers were required to take an oath that they were not Communists before receiving their pay checks.

Now, why on Earth would it be so important to eliminate an oath saying that you are not a Communist, unless, of course you were a Communist?

“I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly view their role as the proselytizers of a new faith… The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new; the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of Humanism...”

-- The Official Journal of the American Humanist Association (1983)

More to the point…

“One cannot permit submission to parental authority if one wishes to bring about profound social change....In order to effect rapid changes, any such centralized regime must mount a vigorous attack on the family lest the traditions of present generations be preserved. It is necessary, in other words, artificially to create an experiential chasm between parents and children to insulate the latter in order that they can more easily be indoctrinated with new ideas. The desire may be to cause an even more total submission to the state, but if one wishes to mold children in order to achieve some future goal, one must begin to view them as superior, inasmuch as they are closer to this future goal. One must also study their needs with care in order to achieve this difficult preparation for the future. One must teach them not to respect their tradition-bound elders, who are tied to the past and know only what is irrelevant.”

-- Warren Bennis and Philip Slater in The Temporary Society (1968)

Much of this new indoctrination, introduced under the auspices of NEA AFT guidelines and greatly accelerated during the Clinton administration by Donna Shalala, falls under the quaint-sounding label of ‘mental health’ Remember, this focus on mental health is directed at your children.

The challenge to humanity is to adopt new ways of thinking, new ways of acting, new ways of organizing itself in society, in short, new ways of living.

-- UNESCO’s Commission on Culture and Development, report, Our Creative Diversity

Of course, that means keeping pesky parents and their old-fashioned ideals of religion, right and wrong, sexuality, patriotism completely out of the picture.  Thus it comes as no surprise that the NEA AFT has fought home schooling, vouchers and charter schools tooth and nail.

There is much more here.  Much much more.  All’s it takes is some scrutiny.

...for great justice

Throwing all the blame on the unions is nothing more than creating a strawman.  And equating classroom teachers’ views with the NEA/AFT agenda is like saying truckers agreed with the Mafia draining the Teansters Central States Pension Fund.  If you want to change the system in regard to public schools, by creating a business model, then weakening the union’s say in things is just one step.  Business implies competition.  So, if you want the best teachers in your system, you send out headhunters, find them, and offer them better salaries.  But where is the money coming from to pay those salaries?  And what of Central High School in Armpit, ND that can’t compete?  Who do they get?  Or do you just shut them down?  And then where do the 20 students go?

ec99, painting my opinions as “throwing all the blame on the unions” is the real strawman.  I recognize that a departure from parental responsibility is a problem as well, among other things, and I have posted as much in the past.

But the major problem with public schools right now are the inflated wages and benefits being paid teachers along with our inability to compensate teachers based on merit or even get rid of less-than-competent educators/administrators.

And the NEA is, absolutely, the problem.  That group negotiates the wages and produces the sort of dogmatic rhetoric that leads people of this country to somehow believe that the only problem with our schools is underpaid teachers and underfunding.

So, if you want the best teachers in your system, you send out headhunters, find them, and offer them better salaries.  But where is the money coming from to pay those salaries?

A school voucher system would take the money we are spending on education now and divide it up among the students. Schools would get funding based on the number of students who choose to go to that school.

Private schools across the country are educating kids better than public schools on budgets that are significantly lower than that which the public schools receive.

And the truth of the matter may be that the kids in “Armpit, ND” may have to go to another town to find a school if the school in Armpit, ND isn’t viable.  Which will probably make some people’s heads explode, but is it really responsible to spend tax payer dollars on a school for just a dozen or so students?  Aren’t there better solutions to be had?

There are, and we can find them.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

"But the major problem with public schools right now are the inflated wages and benefits being paid teachers along with our inability to compensate teachers based on merit or even get rid of less-than-competent educators/administrators.”

Are we talking ND or the whole country?  The wages may be inflated, but that is the market.  Las Vegas is offering $50K to start and housing allowances, plus other benefits.  The same is true for Texas and much of the southwest.  Does that make the wages inflated in ND where average salaries are last in the country?  You can’t want a market model and then say it’s too expensive.  It’s analogous to Canada Health, where doctors and nurses are flying to the US for better salaries and more freedom.  As for blaming the unions exclisively, that seemed to be the tenor of this thread...if not by you, by others.

I noticed on one of my trips to Washington, D.C. that the NEA building was larger and newer than the Department of Education building.

This is one of the cases where the less the federal government has to do with the issue, the better the People will be.  Having too much money and authority tied directly to the feds makes it easier for the NEA to buy votes and influence policy.  They already have deep ties with the DNC and probably the DSA as well.

ec99-- good quote “Allow districts to expel students for rotten behavior.  If a 4th grade teacher has to spend just 10 minutes a day on discipline, thats 1800 minutes wasted in a 180-day year”

Steve is merely saying, SOME teachers may need to be removed from the classroom.  The NEA union will not allow this now.

Communism is evil

It will be instructive to see how it is we came to this juncture.  It used to be that education was a completely local matter, controlled by the parents and the local jurisdictions.  Under the guise of racial discrimination and a failure of the Equal Protection of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court took jurisdiction and by its opinion, seized control of the American school system in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. 

By alleging that the Separate but Equal doctrine was unworkable, it ceased to interpret laws, as is its task, but undertook to write law, which is the exclusive domain of the legislature (legis = law, slature = to write) , not the judiciary. 

Legally, the reasons given for this assumption of power, ultimately enforced at National Guard gunpoint, was not established peer-reviewed studies and nationally gathered statistics, but the ephemeral feelings of the Court’s majority—an indicator of Leftist thought.  It was the thinnest of pretexts, but sufficient to seize the nations school systems for socialist purposes.

This was a coup and an egregious usurpation of power in a very real sense.  The Court had no authority to do what it did, yet the legislative climate was such that the SCOTUS’s chain was not yanked.  It was a very bad precedent in many ways.

Now, some 53 years and billions, if not trillions of dollars later, our federally-controlled system is an abysmal failure—a failure, that is, if your objective is to teach young American students about reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, civics and history. 

But instead we have a school system that indoctrinates young, impressionable Americans that our Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites, that other cultures are on par, if not superior, to our own, that Christian religion is bad and all others are good, that Timmy has Two Daddies, force female children to submit to pelvic exams without parent’s prior knowledge or consent, teach boys that boyish behavior is a disease and dopes our kids with class III drugs and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, such as Prozac, Ritalin, Luvox, Zoloft, and Paxil.*

If dumbing our children down, cutting them off from our history, our ideals and creating a gulf between them and their parents was the objective—it has been a ringing success.

Racism was never the issue in Brown v. Board of Education.  Control of the young minds and distancing them from parental influence was always the objective. 

The NEA AFT is and has been the problem.  The answer is wresting control of our children’s minds and upbringing from their grip and returning it to the parents and localities, where it properly belongs.

* School Shootings linked to Prozac, Ritalin and Luvox.
http://www. antidepressantsfacts .com/2000-05-16-School-Shootings-Psychotropic-Drugs.htm

...for great justice

Yes, this is an old thread, but I ran across this this morning and it seems strikingly similar to Stupid Left Tricks taking place right here at home.

Perhaps, seeking out and overwhelming the teaching professions in free countries is the modus operandi of the Left. It would be interesting to see how often this pattern repeats itself in other countries.

The quotes below are from the South Korean-based Blog ROK DROP and the forwarding links are on this page.

Communist Guerrillas Now Part of Korean Students’ Cirriculum

Posted by J in Anti-American Crap. 1 comment so far

The Korean Teacher’s and Educational Workers Union is at it again:

The students went up on stage and told participants they had distributed anti-war badges around the nation in protest against the Iraq war and said they felt unifying the two Koreas was a way to create “a world without wars.” They also joined the former communist guerrillas in the shouting of their old slogans against “imperialist Yankee soldiers” and the “puppet regime of Syngman Rhee.” Kim, who also instructed his students to operate an online group that opposes the U.S.-led war in Iraq, now serves as an official with the KTEWU’s North Jeolla Province chapter.

Only in Korea are communist guerrillas teaching anti-Americanism considered part of a school’s cirriculum.  Any bets if North Korean spies are behind this as well?  OFK has more.

...for great justice