Politics: All liberal Democrat all the time. 7/7/2022 #2 of 3

 

Just let them teach!

The teachers in our local school district were wearing shirts recently emblazoned with the words, "Just let us teach..." I say good for them.

America in decline

One of the things that is ripping our nation apart is the dismantling of our public education system. We will pay for this, big time, in the long run.

When will enough be enough?

Where do you get YOUR news?

Conflicted over the sequester

I guess the Republicans were hoping that it would just be Democrats who suffered from their indiscriminate budget cutting.

From Daily Kos...

Kansas Republicans love the sequester but not so much its effects
from Daily Kos by rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson)

There was real enthusiasm for the sequester in the Kansas delegation in the U.S. House:

    Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) referred to sequestration as "the first significant tea party victory" in Washington, while Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas)said the cuts were "a home run for America."

Yay! This is awesome, right? Well ... maybe for Huelskamp and Pompeo's sloganeering far-right ideology, but for their constituents in Kansas? Not so much:

    A court ruled earlier this year that Kansas had failed to meet its constitutionally defined obligation to fund state education requirements. Now, the state Department of Education estimates a loss of $59 million in federal funds in the 2013-2014 school year, just as the state was looking to get its education funding back on track.

    The cuts will also cost the federal courthouses in Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City $750,000 this year-14 percent of their budget-according to the court clerk in Topeka. Judge Julia Gibbons, budget committee chairwoman for the U.S. Judicial Conference, said that as a result, some criminal cases in Kansas won't be prosecuted this year, and Kansans who face federal charges may wait longer to see a court-appointed lawyer.

    But most of the local attention has gone toward the closure of seven air traffic control towers, a consequence of the $600 million funding reduction for the Federal Aviation Administration this fiscal year.

And of course Huelskamp and Pompeo are outraged about the control tower closures, because closing those is bad and political, unlike all the other cuts that they support, which are good and, okay, also political, but in a good way that they agree with. A tea party victory, home run for America kind of way. I mean, when you hear that the justice system is slowed down and an already inadequate education system is losing funds, don't you think "YES! HOME RUN"?

Religion and education

Courses in comparative religions would probably be a good idea in schools. But conservatives don't want education, they want preaching.

Speaking of education

Why Republicans oppose increasing educational opportunities

Teaching intelligent design

Intelligent design - creationism - the story of the Old Testament. Go ahead - teach it - but by God, require them to present all of the scientific evidence behind the theory when they do teach it. Go ahead - I dare you.

Privatizing schools

When the private sector takes your tax money to make a profit and runs a school, charter or private, you will lose control over the nonsense that will be taught within. If you think America is getting dumber now, just turn over your schools and your tax dollars to private groups to see how bad it can REALLY get.

A dying civilization

The conservatives are destroying this nation child by child as they attack our intellect. How is it that the stupid people are actually making progress in our modern world?

From Mother Jones...

In biology class, public school students can't generally argue that dinosaurs and people ran around Earth at the same time, at least not without risking a big fat F. But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.

Cheating in the private sector so as to better screw the public sector.

From Crooks and Liars...


For-Profit School Backed By TN GOP Caught Deleting Bad Grades
from Crooks and Liars by Susie Madrak

It never ceases to amaze me, that voters keep falling for the same old tricks. An already-expensive school system will magically perform even better when a private company slashes costs in order to skim a layer of profit off the top? It hasn't worked yet. Instead, these for-profit schools continue to manufacture scandal and fraud -- yet the Very Important People on both sides of the aisle continue to push them as a solution. Via Raw Story:

A for-profit school that was hyped by Republican lawmakers as a solution to Tennessee's education problems recently admitted deleting bad grades to "more accurately recognize students' current progress."

A December email obtained by WTVF showed that Tennessee Virtual Academy's vice principal instructed middle school teachers to delete "failing grades" from October and September.

"After … looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes before the holidays," the email says, adding that each teacher needed to "take out the October and September progress [reports]; delete it so that all that is showing is November progress."

"If you have given an assignment and most of your students failed that assignment, then you need to take that grade out."

Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson said she was horrified because the school's instructions amounted to cheating.

Just sayin', folks

It would be a start...

Creating equivalences

Trying to make sense of religious dogma is usually pretty difficult.

Creationism

Creationism is having a profound effect on the content of our curriculum. And you wonder why the U.S. educational system is scoring so poorly internationally?

Educational profiteering

The wealthy are opposed to public schools for many reasons. They don't want their children associating with riff-raff, they want their own children in private schools, they don't want to pay taxes for public schools (especially if they are sending their kids to a private school and paying for that as well), and they want to be able to make a profit off of the public tax dollars that are going to public schools. They have had some problems convincing the public that public tax dollars should go to strictly private schools, so they have worked very hard to crate a middle-of-the-road school that is partly private, partly public, called the "charter" school. These schools often get to select some children over others and they are usually privately run, so some capitalist is making a profit at the expense of the educational program.

The wealthy (and conservatives who buy the whole bullshit line of reasoning) like to promote these charter schools as superior in some fashion to the public schools - not as good as the private schools mind you, but better than the average. There's just one or two problems. 

First of all, the public schools do not have to make a profit - every penny they get goes into educating the children. Charter school operators need to make a profit - and given the exact same dollar-per-student aid, 10% is taken off the top for the owners of the charter.

Secondly, there's not a lot of evidence that, on average, the charters do as good a job of educating the children as the public schools. (Go figure - 10% less money to run the program.) And so, they try to break all of the rules for reporting. Oh, there's lots of evidence of this - click the link below to read a fairly comprehensive report on this very topic.

Charter schools don't perform as advertised

In the 2012 GOP Platform

Face it, GOP - knowledge is your enemy - it sheds light on the darkness of your lies and misinformation.

Police the universities for liberal bias. “Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution in private institutions may be, in State institutions the trustees have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.”

Why our education system is becoming so pathetic

14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools