Given the attachment of Southern legislators to objective reality, I am awaiting the introduction of a bill in some Southern legislature to define pi legislatively as exactly 3.14. Because all those other digits after the 4 are just liberal lies intended to confuse our innocent little school children.
- Badtux the Snarkily Cynical Penguin
Last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed two years ago, there will be no more. After 244 years, Britannica Inc. is calling it quits in the print encyclopedia business. They sold a couple thousand copies of the 2010 edition to libraries, but that was pretty much it -- nobody else was willing to pay the price for information they can look up online as easily.
I am conflicted. I must admit that I rarely look up things in books nowadays. On the other hand I spent many a lazy summer evening picking up a random encyclopedia at a friend's house and opening it at random to some page about some topic I knew nothing about, and trying to figure out what they were talking about. In a way this gave me an education that the crappy schools of the desegregation-era South, which were all about trying to keep white boys out of the same schools as them uppity nigras and nothing about providing an education, could not have hoped to give.
And now that's gone, forever. There will be no more children on lazy summer evenings picking up an encyclopedia and turning it to a random page. I suppose it was inevitable anyhow, given the plethora of entertainment options that today's children have -- in my childhood there was one television, showing a black-and-white picture, in a large wooden piece of furniture in the living room, and if the grownups were watching a show that was not appropriate for children we were sent elsewhere to entertain ourselves. And we did, because we had no choice. And in homes full of books, naturally we picked up books. Today... that'll never happen again. Books are becoming obsolete. When I needed a new reference book on Microsoft Powershell, for example, I bought an e-book from O'Reilly, not a paper book. I have limited space on my bookshelves, and I save that for reference books I *can't* get as e-books... which is increasingly few nowadays.
-- Badtux the Wistful Penguin
One of the things that annoyed me greatly when I was teaching was just how many of the school's resources went to deal with kids who didn't want to be there, who weren't interested in learning, and whose parents weren't interested in learning, who sent the kids to school for lunch and entertainment. It short-changed the kids who *were* interested in learning -- who were the vast majority of kids. It appears that Noble Network, a group of charter high schools in Chicago formed by former high school teachers, had that same gripe. They found a solution: the misbehaving kids (or their parents) pay the extra money needed to run detention, pay for the out-of-school suspension class, and so forth.
Look. We're not talking first graders. These are high school kids. They have money of their own, they know what they're supposed to do in a classroom (i.e., *not* talk and chew gum and talk back to the teacher), they just choose not to behave, that's all. Well so be it. And while the $140 evening class is a lot of money for a poor family, it only happens after *TWELVE* detentions. And look, if you've been in detention twelve times, frankly I don't have any sympathy for you.
So what's the solution of those who dislike this discipline policy? Just suspend the kid, send the kid home to hang around on the streets and get dumber? Because that's the "traditional" discipline policy for dealing with kids who repeatedly misbehave. Yeah, that really works well at making sure kids stay engaged in school and learning... sorta like gasoline really works well for putting out fires. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
Just for fun I went to fueleconomy.gov and did a search for cars with best fuel economy and... hold it. What's this? A Hyundai Accent? A Hyundai Elantra? 30mpg city, 40mpg highway? WTF is going on here? Did they put a 20 horsepower engine into these things to get that kind of mpg?!
And the answer is... no! The 1.6L engine in the Accent produces more power than any other competitor's subcompact car engine, while the 1.8L engine in the Elantra is makes more power than even Honda's 1.8L engine while having better fuel economy because it's mated to a 6-speed dual-clutch transmission rather than a 5 speed conventional automatic transmission. What's going on is that that Koreans have matched, and SURPASSED, the United States when it comes to automotive technology. For the Accent they just released a GDI (Gas Direct Injection) engine that produces more horsepower than any other normally-aspirated (non-turbocharged) engine of its size on the planet. Direct injection is the technology that diesel engines use to squirt diesel fuel into cylinders to precisely meter how much fuel goes into the cylinder. It requires special fuel injectors that can take being in the middle of an explosion 3000+ times per minute, but gives much more precise fuel metering. Doing it to a gasoline engine brings that same precise fuel metering to the table, but because gasoline burns faster than diesel fuel does, you get horsepower, not just torque. GDI has been used in some high-end engines for performance prior to now, but this is the first large-scale application in a low end car for the purpose of getting fuel economy.
Furthermore, they introduced a 6-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission which also happens to be their "manual" transmission too. Normal automatic transmissions lose power in the "torque converter", a sloshy thing that uses vanes on one side to slosh fluid around to push on vanes on the other side. A dual-clutch transmission has a pair of clutches like a normal manual transmissions and simply uses electronics rather than cables or hydraulic fluid to actuate them as well as to shift the gears. So they basically created a way to get the fuel economy of a manual transmission out of an automatic transmission. This isn't a new concept, VW's been doing it for a few years now (but for performance reasons rather than fuel economy reasons) and ZF has a dual-clutch transmission that Chrysler is in the process of building a factory to build here in America that's currently used in a number of high-end European makes (again, though, for performance rather than fuel economy), but Hyundai appears to be the first manufacturer to do it across their entire low-end line.
What this basically says is that you can't stand still. You can't refuse to innovate. You can't mark entire realms of science off-limits because they are "un-Biblical" and de-fund the schools because they're "liberal". Or else you're toast. South Korea has 1/6th the population of the United States. 25 years ago, they were a third world assembler of other people's parts, creating cheap piece of shit cars that fell apart almost as soon as they got off the boat. Today, 25 years later, they are world class, producing designs of their own making that are as good as or better than anybody else in the world. They didn't do that by de-funding their schools. They didn't do that by proclaiming that Jesus prohibits teaching of physics and biology because they contradict the Bible's creation story. They did that the old fashioned way -- by valuing education, innovation, and hard work. You know... like America used to be, before we started worshiping ignorance and started electing Presidents based on whether we'd like to have a beer with him rather than because he was, like, smart and shit.
-- Badtux the Car Penguin
At least, that appears to be the opinion of the editorial writers at Reason. Like most Libertarians, they're of the opinion that if kids are poor, it's because they chose the wrong parents. The poor kids should have just been smart enough to choose comfortably off parents like their own. Duh.
That said, the problem involved here is real: by basically handing out government-subsidized student loans to everybody, not just to poor kids, the Feds basically caused massive tuition inflation as colleges competed to buy the most gilded equipment for their labs and the biggest research names for their faculty. The colleges could not have done these massive tuition hikes if not for the fact that students could now not only be allowed to take out student loans to pay for them, but basically could be *forced* to take out student loans to pay for them, since a year of college is now beyond the financial means of any family that is not independently wealthy.
Furthermore, by shifting aid for poor kids from grants and scholarships to non-dischargable student loans, poor kids are being punished disproportionately when they default on the loans. Poor kids will have a harder time finding a job out of college for reasons out of their control -- poor kids' parents don't have the connections that rich kids' parents have (e.g., my parents were on a first name basis with the owner of a local gas station, not with the CEO of a major computer company like Bill Gates's parents), and because they grew up poor, they don't "dress right" or "talk right"(i.e., like a rich preppie) because that's not how people dress and talk in the 'hood so they have no experience doing it and when they try, they suck at it. The end result is that a poor kid has to be twice as smart as a rich kid to get a job out of college. For the rest, they're condemned to a life on the edges, because with that non-dischargable and too-big-to-ever-pay loan on their record, they can't get a real job (because their wages would get garnished), they can't get a credit card (thus meaning they can't ever use the Internet to purchase things, and given the shift from brick-and-mortar to Internet sales, that basically means they're cut off from a huge swathe of the consumer culture), they can't ever retire and get Social Security (because of a. no work record due to having to take off-the-books jobs, and b. even if they did put in enough on-the-books time, so much of their pitiable $14K/year Social Security allowance would get garnished as to make it impossible to live on).
And finally, the rise of virtually-unregulated private schools funded by all this student loan money and targeting poor kids has had a devastating effect upon poor kids. Poor kids don't have the ability by and large to get into elite colleges, due to lack of decent schools in their neighborhood and lack of exposure to the middle class culture needed to score well on standardized tests (which are basically tests of, well, how middle class you are, there is no -- ZERO -- evidence that standardized tests have any correlation to any fundamental intelligence, just that they accurately predict how middle-class you are and thus how well you will perform at a college that expects a middle-class background). State colleges are overcrowded and often require you to show up year after year to stand in line in hopes of getting one of the few precious slots allocated to in-state students (because they can charge middle-class out-of-state students full price, thus state governments have been cutting in-state slots at state colleges all over the nation to plug their higher education budget holes). What's a somewhat bright but naive poor kid supposed to do?
Well, we know what they do -- they get scammed. In other words, Reason is right that the current system sucks donkey dicks. But you know what Reason's solution the problem is going to be. They're going to say that the Free Market Fairy waving her magic wand all over the higher education field will fix everything -- even though that never happened before the GI Bill educated a generation of Americans who otherwise would have never had access to higher education. In short, Reason's lack of, well, simple acquaintance with actual objective reality makes the Free Market Fairy smile:
Oh yeah, solutions?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
8 year old boy goes on rampage, tries to stab teachers with sharp object, must be subdued by police who pepper sprayed his ass to get him to drop the sharp object he was threatening to stab police with. And the mother says the cops should have "talked the boy down" like they did "the other two times". Excuse me? Your little angel has had the cops called on him not once, not twice, but THREE times (and believe me, schools do *not* call in the cops on a whim, because it's way bad PR), and you're whining that your little angel got pepper sprayed when he threatened to stab cops?
Dude. Just... dude. That is one mother in serious denial. The kid doesn't have "anger issues". The kid has *PARENTING* issues. As in, he ain't gettin' none. I never did shit like that in school for one good reason -- if I had, the principal would have called my father, my father would have rushed right down to the school, grabbed my ass right there in front of the whole fucking world, and whupped my butt until I was a sobbing heap on the floor. And I knew it, so I pretty much stayed sneaky when I felt like being disobedient, rather than disrupting the whole fucking classroom. Hiding a car magazine behind my open textbook to admire the trim lines and sexy bulges was the limits of my disobedience, 'cause if I'd done shit that caused my father to get called to school.... oooh boy. Not something I wanted to think about *at all*.
So anyhow. I never had a kid come at me with a weapon. I had a couple kids get in my face, but homey don't play that and they didn't go further than that 'cause they knew I didn't give a shit anymore and didn't know what I'd do if they took it further. I definitely encountered plenty of "special" kids though. Who generally had "special" parents, as in, parents who believed their kid's shit didn't stink and that if the kid was misbehaving, it was 'cause the school was being mean to him, not 'cause he was a mean little shit who beat up 1st graders for their lunch money. So anyhow, back to the kid and pepper spray. Just the other day, a cop around here got sent to the hospital when he got stabbed two times by a young kid like that. When the cops get called into a situation, the first responsibility of the cops is to assure the safety of the bystanders. The second responsibility of the cops is to assure their own safety. Then, and only then, does the safety of the perp come into the equation. And if you're the perp, like this kid, you learn a valuable lesson at that point -- that if you come at a cop with a sharp object, the *least* they will do is pepper spray your ass. Frankly, if the kid had been a teenager they probably would have tasered him on the spot and not even bothered with the pepper spray, you got a kid threatening you with a sharp object, your job as a cop is to end the situation right then and there as quickly as possible before anybody can get hurt. Which is exactly what the cops did here -- they ended the situation, and nobody got hurt. The pepper spray made the poor innocent little angel's face burn? Oh WAHHH!
The sad thing is that now the kid's been transferred to a "special" school. As in, the money that could be used to educate EIGHT kids whose parents give a shit about their child's behavior is now being used for this "special" kid. And now you know why our schools have budget problems...
-- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
In comments below, JzB asked what my source for that data was. Well, the source is a U. Cal. study published in late 2009, which Project Censored notes as one of their top censored stories of 2010.
The primary reason why schools are segregated today is housing segregation, combined with the "independent school districts" in Texas and the West. That is why school segregation is worse in Texas and the West than in the South -- in the South, school districts are principally county-based, with the school district lines being the county lines. In Texas and the west, by contrast, it's possible to create "independent school districts" that encompass only the white neighborhoods and not the neighborhoods inhabited by brown-skinned people.
Thus for example in San Mateo County California, if all students in the county were in the same school district, the school district would be 51% white, 22% Asian, 22% Hispanic, and roughly 5% African-American and other. Instead, Palo Alto Unified School District, which excludes primarily-Hispanic East Palo Alto, had these demographics in 2005-2006: White, 52.2; Asian 25.1; Hispanic 7.9; African-American and other, 4.7%.
Meanwhile, just across the US101 freeway in East Palo Alto, the Ravenswood ISD has these demographics: Hispanic 70%, African-American 20%, Pacific Islander 9%, and other (including white) 1%. Note that Ravenswood is a K-8 district, East Palo Alto's high school students attend Sequoia Union high schools in Redwood City -- despite the fact that Palo Alto's high schools are closer. But wouldn't want *those* people in the very exclusive Palo Alto schools, right?
So anyhow, that's how it goes. We pretend that America is a racism-free land where everybody of every origin goes around hand in hand singing kumbaya... but the reality on the ground is anything but.
-- Badtux the Racism-smellin' Penguin
So a student wasn't paying attention and the teacher picked up a desk, startling her. So what did she do? She ran to the loo and called 911, of course! She reported that her teacher was out of control, rampaging around the room throwing furniture around and cursing out students, and she was "scared". The cops arrived, found that the teacher was teaching to a quiet room with no rampaging maniac in sight, concluded there was no crime, and left.
Now, back when I was a kid, if I would not only have been eating dinner standing up that night because have been spending the next few days in my room -- *without* Nintendo, television, or any other entertainment. The teacher would have received an apology from me shortly thereafter, with my father pointedly hooking his thumb into his belt as his hand guided me by my neck to the proper spot to issue said apology. The school might or might not have suspended me. But that was before the days of touchy-feely "education", when it was expected that we would go into classrooms and behave like students, or else. Today? Not so much. The point of schools today, apparently is to make students feel "safe" so that we don't harm their "self esteem". And so a teacher who apparently is a fine teacher ends up suspended, and I'm sure the little actress who faked hysterics for 911 is smiling that she "got" the teacher who yelled at her.
-- Badtux the "Sometimes progress ain't" Penguin
Providence, RI, sends layoff notice to EVERY SINGLE ONE of their school teachers. I guess they figure the custodians and school secretaries are all they need to edumacate them thare little brown chilluns.
State of Michigan orders the Detroit Public schools to raise class sizes to 60 students. That's about the same size as seminar classes in college. You can't fit 60 kids into a regular-sized classroom. But again, I guess they figure them thare brown chilluns don't need no edumacashun anyhow, 'cause they's all criminals or athuhleets anyhow, right? Right?!
Remember, this here is AMERICA. Ain't no damn NEGRO got a right to an edumacashion in this here nashion, it's time them darkies picked themselves up by their bootstraps and got right on out of our white Christian nashion, God bless America, Glory Halleleujah, AH-men! If them darkies want an edumacashon, they should just move into our lily-white gated community (where the gate keeper won't let'em past the door 'cause they're all criminals, but hey, ain't no racism here, nosiree!), and go to our segregated all-white suburban school in our segregated all-white suburban school district. It's conservative family values at work, it's the American Way! USA! USA! USA! Whoot yeah!
-- Badtux the Disgusted Former Teacher Penguin
That is a question that Andrew Sullivan asks. And the answer is... no. And yes.
I got to see how charter schools work first-hand when I lived in Arizona. Basically in Arizona if you can afford to hire a certified principal (or are a teacher willing to take the courses for administrator certification) and have a pulse, you can start a charter school. The only regulation is that you a) accurately tell the state how many pupils you have so they send you the right per-pupil monies, and b) actually spend that money educating kids, rather than embezzling it for yourself.
So did it work? The answer is... well, mixed. The horrible things the liberal doomsayers said about charter schools didn't happen -- charter schools did not become modern "segregation academies" for white children, charter schools didn't cherry-pick only the best students and leave the worst for the public schools, etc., what happened was that a lot of teachers of "at-risk" children decided that they could do a better job outside the public schools and started charter schools focused specifically at kids at the lower end of the scale, so there was a wide variety of charter schools formed, not just the segregated academies. The doomsayers also said that charter schools would suck money out of the public schools. That happened, but because the charter schools get less per-pupil monies than the public schools, it turned out that the money taken away was less than what it would have taken to educate the kid in the public schools. Given that the public schools in Arizona were overcrowded because growth had outpaced school construction for years, the net effect was minimal on public school budgets -- they just let the lease lapse on some of their temporary classrooms and the normal turnover of teachers handled the rest.
The problem is, few of the great things that advocates of charter schools promised happened, either. Charter schools in Arizona, on the whole, turn out to educate children no better than the public schools did. And while there were thoughts that large educational companies would come in and start for-profit charter schools even though Arizona has one of the lowest per-pupil funding ratios in the nation and charter schools get even less than that, because "private enterprise is more efficient than public", that turned out to not be true. A couple tested the water, couldn't make money on the per-pupil funding provided by Arizona, and closed up shop in Arizona within a couple of years.
So why didn't charter schools provide a better education in Arizona? Part of the problem is churn. Charter schools proved very prone to "founder burnout". Charter schools were largely formed by master teachers who wanted to teach a specific group of children (say, homeless kids). Handling all the aspects of running a charter school *and* teaching simply sucked the life out of them over the years, and after they burned out and went back to teaching in public schools, the charter schools they founded largely fell apart and disintegrated by the end of the next school year. A bigger part of the problem, however, is institutional. Charter schools don't have the institutional memory of public schools. That's the point, that they would be able to do things better because they were starting out fresh and new without all that baggage. But it turns out that the institutional memory of public schools is important. Those teachers who've been there 28 years turn out to have something to contribute after all, not to mention the decades of textbooks, teaching materials, lab equipment, classroom buildings, sports facilities, etc. that public schools have accumulated over the years. All of which turn out to be more important than public school detractors thought.
The experience issue is especially important here. A teacher with a lot of experience in the public schools is not going to leave for a charter school because he or she is putting in the years for retirement. That means most charter schools are going to be staffed with new teachers either fresh out of college or only a few years on the job. But I'll tell you a secret that's not really a secret: Most new teachers suck. I know. I was one, once. New teachers go into the classrooms and haven't a clue as to how to teach. Our schools of education don't have a clue as to how to teach teachers to teach, and most of a teacher's training in how to manage kids and get kids to understand material happens on the job as he or she tests various techniques and finds out, after a number of years pass, what works based on his personality and the abilities of the children he's teaching. We have studies on this -- basically if you look at student achievement gains and adjust for the socio-economic status of the students, on average experienced teachers simply show more gains than inexperienced teachers.
But by their nature charter schools are churn. The chance of any specific charter school being there 30 years from now is basically nil. The founders will get tired and fold up the school, or it'll lose its lease on its building and fold, or so forth. So at least in Arizona, they're being used by young teachers as their "tryouts" for better public school districts than the one they got a job with just out of college. Sick of teaching inner city kids in South Phoenix? Want to teach rich kids in North Scottsdale but you don't have the years yet to do that? Well, a charter school might just be the place for you!
So what *is* the solution for inner city schools? Well, they have to be institutional changes in how schooling is organized there, which is why charter schools have failed to do any better there -- charter schools have no institutional memory and thus by their nature cannot foster institutional changes. Furthermore, any changes will take *money*. Poor kids come to school lacking a lot of the background of rich kids. The culture shock of being a poor kid in a rich school was pretty dramatic on my part, here's these kids talking about their vacation to Aruba and their psychiatrists and stuff, while in our neighborhood vacation was piling the kids in the rusty third-hand station wagon and taking them to visit relatives who lived 50 miles away and psychiatric help was a belt across the mouth and a "quit talking crazy, fool". We can't take poor kids to Aruba to give them the same experiences as rich kids, but we definitely need to widen their horizons beyond the circumscribed world of no money that they live in.
But in the end, any such changes aren't going to happen as long as the United States continues its current war on the poor. Which means, if you were born to a poor family today, tough luck, kid. You're going to be spat upon, kicked, and treated like shit for the rest of your life, so just get used to it. I was lucky to be part of the last generation of poor kids to come up before Reaganism got a full hold on things, I got an education courtesy of Uncle Sam and the taxpayers and as a result now pay a large amount of taxes every year that I don't mind paying because if it wasn't for other people paying their taxes, I wouldn't be in a position to pay taxes. But the poor kids coming up today... they don't get that. They instead get the opportunity for permanent debt bondage with "student loans", which are actually slavery contracts today because they are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and the banks and government tack on fees forever that make them unpayable if you are currently unable to pay. And poor kids might be poor, but that doesn't make them stupid enough to sign slavery contracts in large numbers... which means they stay poor, which means the U.S. stays poorer because poor kids as smart as me choose other professions like, say, drug dealer, instead, and we're all the worse for it. But hey, kicking the poor when they're down and making sure that not one dime of white people's money goes to them is more important than a strong United States where all smart kids, rich and poor, have a chance at the education needed to contribute to the nation's economy, so...
WASF. And if you're poor, you're doubly-fucked. And we're all the poorer for it.
-- Badtux the Education Penguin
At least two of the liberal bloggers that I follow have now been cursed with car troubles that would be cheaply repaired if they had the slightest clue about that box on wheels that they get into every morning to go to work. As in, the parts to repair their vehicle cost less than $100, and if they went to Wal-Mart and bought the necessary tools they'd have a hard time getting above $50, yet they ended up paying over $500 to a garage to fix it. Not necessarily because the garage ripped them off, but because by the time you put a car up on the lift, remove a part, and replace it, you've used a lot of time and infrastructure that the garage could use to repair real problems, and they're going to charge you for it.
Look: The automobile is not magic. It's technology -- late 19th century technology, even. There isn't a single thing in my Jeep that a time traveler from 1920 could not fix with a few references to the service manual. He would not understand how the black boxes sparked the spark plugs and adjusted the fuel mixture, but he would know what they were doing, because there isn't a single principle underlying today's automobiles that was not known in 1920. He couldn't fix the black boxes, but he'd know to replace the black box that is attached to the spark plugs if he pulled a spark plug and didn't see a spark, even if he had no idea how that black box worked. Because spark plugs today are the same damned things they were in 1920, yo. Ain't nothin' new here that the time traveler from 1920 wouldn't figure out quickly, unlike, say, the latest personal computer attached to the Internet.
Yet I continue to read liberal bloggers who apparently haven't a clue. It doesn't take a frackin' genius to understand how cars work. All it takes is a couple of books from your local public library and a good look at the insides of your own car. By the time I was 10 years old I knew how a car worked... because I could read. Yes, read. Not because of magic. Not because I was somehow endowed with mystical powers of Mek. I *studied* it, just like I study anything else I want to learn. Because that's all it is -- learned skill. Not one I'm particularly good at (otherwise I'd have gone into the business, but I'm too darned slow at wrenching to make a living that way), but look. When my pitman arm boot got bummed up and let grease out of the tie rod end and it developed slop, I didn't pay a garage $500 to fix it. I unbolted the end at the steering box with a big crescent wrench ($10 at Wal-Mart), grabbed a big hammer ($5 at Wal-Mart), and went *WHACK*. I then loosened the nuts on the clamps that keep the tie rod end from turning in its socket, unscrewed it from its socket, screwed the new one back in to the same number of threads showing that the old one had shown, bolted everything back together, and that was that. I paid $80 for the OEM tie rod end, already had the crescent wrench, and that was all she wrote.
It doesn't take a genius to do the above, just a willingness to study the service manual to figure out how your car steers. I wasn't born knowing how a car steers, I studied it. And so I paid $80, when a garage would have charged me a minimum of $200 to do the same thing ($120 for the full retail for the part, $80 labor for the hour to whack it out and whack it back in and center the steering wheel again). Yet again and again, I see people who refuse to learn about the things they rely on in their everyday life, who insist upon making everything magic. And then they're shocked, shocked I say, when they get ripped off... but look. If you refuse to learn about the world, you will be victimized. That's just how it works. Ignorance is not an option unless you're a Republican -- and you're not a Republican, are you? Are you?!
-- Badtux the Knowledge-seeking Penguin
... Joseph "Crazy Joe" Farah (or one of his underlings at wnd.com ) goes off on a long blast about how evil accreditation boards won't accredit colleges whose Biology departments teach that evolution is a myth, and how the evil Department of Education is about to change the student loan program so that only accredited colleges can get student loans. Because, y'know, other than cutting off the rip-off private diploma mills that charge a bundle for worthless "degrees", this would also cut off all those "Bible Colleges" that charge their students bundles of dough to teach the li'l darlings that Jesus rode a dinosaur then gives them a worthless diploma and a lifetime of student loan debt slavery (since student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy like normal loans)... the horror, oh the horror!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Fox News proposes eliminating Chicago's public libraries. Because libraries are socialism. As are police forces, fire departments, interstate highways, post offices, and all those other things that our founding fathers supported and, in some cases, wrote directly into the Constitution (like post offices and interstate highways, which they called "post roads").
OMG... that means our founding fathers were.... (gasp).... SOCIALISTS! But I forget, that's those stupid liberal FACT thingies from those notoriously liberal TEXTBOOKS or from the actual text of the Constitution. It wasn't said by Rush Limpdick or Glenn BatshitCrazy Beck, so clearly it can't be true... clearly those wiley lie-berals have tampered with the text of the Constitution that's in our textbooks!
Remember, boys and girls, if you aren't stupid and ignorant, if you dare darken the doors of one of them thare libary places and, like, learn them un-American fact thingies, why... you aren't a REAL American. Yessiree, ignorant is the only American way to be, you don't wanna be one of them, like, fact-spewin' EGGHEDS, do ya?!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
A U.S. school for the disabled tortures its students with electroshock and long-term restraint.
As someone who once worked as a teacher in a center for BD children, I am appalled. We had some seriously ill children in our care, but we never -- *ever* -- resorted to anything like this. The most we ever did was restrain a child who was physically out of control in a non-painful and temporary manner, then escort him to a safe place like an administrator's office where he could reflect on the fact that his classmates were having a fun time up in the classroom. Because that's how we controlled the kids -- by making sure they had a good time as long as they behaved appropriately, making sure they knew at all times what appropriate behavior was expected of them, what good things would happen if they displayed appropriate behavior, and what the consequences would be if they did not behave (generally loss of privileges such as not being able to play with the toys after finishing their work to acceptable standards).
Granted, I was lucky enough to be working with verbal children. But even with non-verbal autistic children engaging in self-mutilation activities that you must stop for the safety of the child, only temporary short-term use could be justified in response to that one specific behavior that is a danger to that child -- *not* as a blanket "punish the kid whenever he doesn't do what I want" measure.
Positive reinforcement *works*. All that punishment like electric shock does is make sadists chortle with glee, and teach children to be fearful, resentful, and avoidant. It doesn't teach children appropriate behavior, and it doesn't make children want to display appropriate behavior, all it teaches children is that adults are sadists. As someone who has worked in that environment, I can say explicitly that there is nothing -- *NOTHING* -- that can justify what the Judge Rotenberg Center for the Disabled has done. My suspicion is that they started out using electroshock for the case that I mention in the previous paragraph. But it is clear that once they used it for that specific case, the ease of use -- and the glee that sadists feel at torturing children -- have led to a situation that is, bluntly, inexcusable torture.
- Badtux the Former Special Ed Teacher Penguin
In Arizona, ESL teachers who don't speak English well are being re-assigned to non-ESL classrooms. ESL classrooms are meant to teach English to children who don't speak English as their native language. The Every Child Left Behind Act says that ESL classrooms must be taught by people "fluent" in English. The official in Arizona who is responsible for ESL NCLB compliance, Adela Santa Cruz, interprets this to mean that if the teacher does not speak English grammatically or consistently does not pronounce words correctly (saying "bery" rather than "very", for example), this teacher does not meet the requirements to teach ESL.
Is this a racist attack on Hispanic teachers? Uhm, somehow I doubt "Santa Cruz" is an Anglo name :-). I'm willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept the AzDoE's explanation that the intent is that people just learning English should have someone to model their speech after who, well, actually speaks English. In other words, I don't buy the left-wing conspiracy theory that this is an attack upon Hispanic teachers, because it's targeted only at a specific subset of teachers rather than at all teachers, and it's based upon an interpretation of federal law, not upon some racist nonsense coming out of the Arizona legislature.
Now, there's clearly racist bullshit coming out of the Arizona legislature, and Arizona's top education official is clearly a racist Republican nutcase, as his bill to ban ethnic studies in Arizona proves. But let's not read racism into every action taken by any official in Arizona. That way leads to the sort of right-wingnut conspiracy theory bullshit that I regularly make fun of here, where Preznit Obama deliberately took time out of his day to call in a dozen awkward Keystone Kops to march out of time and scare little children and grannies by, err, looking their way. The right wing regularly invents freakouts of that nature to scare their supporters into being even more right-wing. We don't need to emulate that behavior on the left too.
-- Badtux the Non-conspiratorial Penguin
British teacher snaps, cracks open skull of trouble-maker who cursed him.
When I started getting that temptation big-time, that's when I knew it was time to hang up my shingle and go into another line of work. Way I see it, if the little shits want to be disrespectful little shits, and the administration won't do fuck-all about it, and the parents don't give a shit, why the fuck should I give a shit? Let them be taught math by the goddamned P.E. teacher, I'm sure he (who can't add 1+1 without a calculator) will do a great job of it...
-- Badtux the Burned Out Teacher Penguin
California business leaders agree: The state's school system is in a free-fall collapse caused by a collapse of school funding over the past forty years since Proposition 13 was passed. Their solution: Raise taxes. Raise taxes on other people, that is. Not on them.
At which point the ordinary folks of California, who've seen their percentage of the property tax burden rise from 50% of property tax collections to 80% of property tax collections over the past forty years since Prop 13 was passed, say "Nyet! Don't tax me, tax that other guy!". The guy behind the tree, presumably. Who *isn't* business. Who *isn't* an ordinary residential homeowner.
The problem is, who is that guy behind the tree? Nobody will point him out. Baffling, eh? But the game of "yes, we need taxes to fund education, but don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that guy behind the tree" continues, as California's school systems crumble under the weight of inadequate funding...
-- Badtux the Taxing Penguin
One of the stupidest things I've ever encountered is the notion that the lousy state of public education here in the USA is somehow a conspiracy by "Them" (for some mysterious "Them") to make us stupid so they can rule us. Which is complete and utter bullshit. Look: school boards here in the USA are local. Schools are run by local communities, not by "Them". It's true that states can set a curriculum, but the curriculum is a minimum, and half the time the schools ignore the damned thing anyhow except insofar as it's embodied in exit exams because most of these curriculums are stupid and there's nobody in the classroom with the teacher to validate that she in fact taught every stupid thing in the curriculum guide.
So that whole conspiracy thing is bullshit. What you are seeing is the education We The People want. Parents don't discipline their little heathens and don't want the schools to do so, either. Parents don't give their children any intellectual stimulation at home and don't want their children to get any at school, either, because if the little brats could think their way out of a cardboard box then the little brats might start doubting some of the "truths" they're told by their parents about invisible guys in the sky and crap like that. The old people who dominate school board elections don't want anything taught in the schools that weren't taught in the schools when they were kids 60 years ago, and want the exact same teaching methods used in the classroom that were used when they were kids 60 years ago, despite the fact that the world is much different now from what it was 60 years ago and if you look at the actual numbers, 60 years ago was even worse than today. If the school district has "those" kids in it -- you know, THOSE kids, brown, maybe speak one of them thare foreign gabbles instead of God's language, the language He wrote the Bible in, English? -- they don't want to pay taxes to educate "those" kids and underfund the schools in that district to the point where all the good teachers and administrators leave, which means that the schools fall apart because only the incompetent or the venal are left. And so on and so forth. The only conspiracy in the U S of A, my friend, is the conspiracy of STUPID. 50% of all people are below average, and that average is pretty much suck.
Even authoritarian dictatorships don't crash their economic viability this way. See: South Korea prior to the democracy era, Singapore today, China today, etc. If someone conquered the U S of A they couldn't do a better job of destroying our schools than we've already done ourselves. Yet... the majority of kids do leave school with some basic skills like reading and arithmetic. It IS possible to get an education in our schools. Just horribly frustrating both for the teachers and the kids, both of whom are trapped in a system designed by cretins (a.k.a. We The People) for generating cretins. We get the schools (as a nation) that we want -- and deserve. Alas.
- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
Just askin'. It seems way too many parents spurt'em out, but aren't willing to spend any time looking out for them afterwards. It always amused me during my teaching days that the only parents I ever saw were the parents I didn't need to see. Problem kids, the only time I saw their parents was if their parents stormed the school complaining about that mean Mr. Tux being mean to their darling little brat by sending the brat to the office for disrupting class...
And don't give me the bullshit about parents being busy, small kids at home, blah blah blah. There's aunts and uncles and neighborhood kids who can look after smaller kids, and if you can't re-arrange your schedule to have three or four evenings per school year off it's only because you don't care. And yeah, I know there are vicious employers who will fire you rather than allow you to go to a school event. But priorities, people. Priorities. If your child's education has less priority than a shift at Taco Bell, your child's education will have less quality than a taco from Taco Bell... and that's pretty damned scary, when you think about it.
-- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
In my previous post, I noted that the UK government is set to protect its schoolchildren from pedophile zombies. Perhaps the Earthbound Misfit has located one of those brainless zombies. Oh wait... no, that's a brainless school principal. Ooops! You understand how easy it is for a penguin to mistake these things, I mean, both zombies and school principals lack brains, so what can I say?!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
