Education Reform
First, you have to get school crime under control, and that is not just the rare occasional kook who decides to shoot up a school.
First Priority: Eliminate as much crime in the schools as is physically possible
You keep hearing, “If we only had armed resource officers…” in other words, the police. Aren’t we supposed to be “Defunding The Police”? Why have we gotten to the point where our urban and many suburban schools now need armed police officers to keep kids from getting beaten, stabbed, or shot? The loner who gets into a school and murders schoolchildren gets lots of national media attention, but the everyday violence that takes place, not just on the streets of our urban areas, but has descended into our public school classrooms, including the schools in the mostly White, college-degreed, upper-middle-class neighborhoods, where the residents wear their social justice warrior virtue signals on their sleeves. You have gangs attacking students right in class, and the teacher, terrified of repercussions, does nothing.
The challenge: How are you going to restore law and order in our public schools, and do it in a way that won’t result in lawsuits? You can’t. Those lawsuits are going to happen. It’s going to be one of the “slings and arrows.” You can’t create a positive educational environment unless you eliminate the crime problem in our schools first. It’s been building for years, and it’s going to take years to reverse itself.
We are reaching the apex of a civilized society, in which 71% of Black babies, 64% of Hispanic, and 24% of White babies born today, are born to single mothers out of wedlock.
The White working class has devolved into chaos with drug overdoses, suicides, out-of-wedlock births, and deaths from alcohol-related diseases, but it’s mostly rural or on the fringes of suburbia, so it doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. Plus, they are mostly Whites. That’s a subject for another day. Today, I’m concentrating on Education. You will not be able to fix our education systems academically if we don’t regain control of them first.
The first step is creating administrators who are going to be willing to stand up to the parents if Little Freddy tells a teacher to “go fuck yourself,” gets suspended, and the parents come storming into the school threatening legal action. With what I have seen with school administrators over the past 20 years, that is going to be a tall order. I understand the administrator’s concern: The vice-principal doesn’t want to be destroyed financially by some upper-middle-class Karen’s lawsuit or beaten to a pulp some evening in a parking lot by some irate working-class dad’s “friends,” who can’t afford the lawyer of the upper-middle-class Karen. You have school administrations that won’t back the teachers in disciplinary matters, even if the teacher is right. They will publicly chastise the teacher right in front of the parents, rather than behind closed doors and out of earshot. That does wonders for morale. A public school teacher friend of mine was assaulted and beaten to the point of hospitalization by a group of students because he had “dissed” one of their compadres with a failing grade. Did the administration know who did it? Yes. Did they do anything about it? No. Why not? There is a simple answer. The adults in charge are afraid of the students.
Too many chiefs and not enough Indians
Over the past 20 years, we’ve also created too many administrators, in order to be in compliance with Department Of Education directives. What exactly does a Vice-Principal In Charge Of Diversity, have anything to do with math, English, Spanish, or chemistry? The Left constantly bleats on about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). If we are going to continue down this road, and there is no evidence that we are not, the schools need to hire some retired military drill sergeants and make them the Vice-Principal In Charge Of Discipline. Would that be in compliance with DOE directives? If you believe that, I know a bridge that is for sale in New York City.
The days of the principal or the teacher with the paddle and/or the strap are long gone. When my father, who was a junior high school US History teacher, first started teaching in Connecticut, the principal of that school was well known for his use of the strap. More than one pre-teen boy or girl got sent back to class in total humiliation, with a very sore behind, and tears running down their face. The total humiliation of a 12-14-year-old was the general idea. Guess what? It worked. The school had very few disciplinary problems. In addition, if a student committed a major infraction, the principal would punish the entire school with the suspension of all extracurricular activities, silent lunches, and mass overloads of homework that would take up to 5 or 6 hours a night after school to complete. I’m sure he knew that there would be some restorative justice imposed at the bus stop after school.
When I was in elementary school, many of those middle-aged and older female teachers (there were only three male teachers in the whole school), wouldn’t hesitate to spank you in front of the whole class, if you misbehaved. One kid I used to hang around with in third grade muttered something under his breath. Whatever it was, Miss Hitchcock our third-grade teacher heard it, marched him across the hallway to the bathroom in the teachers’ lounge, and washed his mouth out with soap. Today, that principal and those old-fashioned teachers would be in jail. Back then, the parents gave them their own version of the same thing when they got home. That was the rule in many households: If you got spanked in school, you got it again when you got home, and dad’s belt was much worse than the principal’s strap. I know that from personal experience.
It’s time to end the “feel good” method of education. Until we stop using this failed system, in which the kids walk all over the adults that are supposed to be in charge, we are not going to get anything done. We need to get the schools under control, and we need to do it now. No more making excuses. Before we do anything else, we are going to have to go through a period of very strict discipline, almost to the point of military boot camp (actually, we should make it twice as nasty as boot camp). Sorry liberals. Your approach didn’t work. Now it’s time to do it the conservative way. Right now let’s keep it the small “c” conservative way. Then you can address our education system’s other shortcomings. If we are lucky, we won’t have to do it the large “C” Conservative way. I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Teach our kids to the best of their individual ability
The biggest mistake we made when we started tinkering with education reform in the 1960s, was ending tracking. Not every kid can be a rocket scientist, but those that can need to be educated to become the best rocket scientists on the planet. Our astronauts need to be able to return from Mars.
It’s not just the hard sciences. It’s the same with music, art, and other soft sciences, like the social sciences. Who paints the paintings displayed in our finest museums and private collections? Who provides the music for our social functions, and at the top end, performs with our major symphony orchestras? What about the touring and recording session musicians, who supply the music for our celebrity performing artists? What about that young attorney who tries a case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court? They all need proper education and training. There is no reason why our public schools can not provide that training. I remember tracking from when I was in elementary school. There was the “Accelerated Group,” the “Average Group,” and the “Slow Group.” Yes, it was called the “Slow Group.” There was no political correctness back then. There was also a grade called pre-primary. That was for the children who were not quite ready for first grade after Kindergarten. Basically, it was all-day Kindergarten mixed with some preliminary reading and numeracy activities to give them more time to develop the logical skills and mental maturity needed for grades 1-6.
When we got to high school, there were the Honors classes as they were called. No, they were not AP courses with college credits either. You couldn’t just sign up for Honors English, Honors Algebra, or any of the other Honors classes. You had to be invited into the Honors program. Basically, the Honors classes were comparable to what you would experience if you were enrolled in one of the high-dollar private prep schools. If you weren’t good enough for Honors, you were not going to be good enough for the Ivy Leagues or MIT. Sorry, but that’s life.
When I taught as adjunct faculty at a high-dollar private school in the DC area, at lunch one day, one of the teachers said that we had to shield the kids from any ideas or activities where they might feel uncomfortable, or wouldn’t come out the winner. Everyone gets a trophy. I asked her “What happens when they get that college rejection letter?” Her answer was, “Nobody here gets a college rejection letter.” In a lot of ways, she was right. These kids were the winners anyway. They were the products of money and parents with high IQs. Everyone one of them had to pass very demanding entrance examinations before they would be admitted to that school. You had to be invited into that school. Those that didn’t were able to experience the uncomfortable feeling of rejection. I guess those kids don’t count. Out of sight, out of mind. One thing I did notice about the parents of the private school students: Besides being quite smart themselves, after all, it’s been proven that intelligence is at least partially hereditary. Along with being very smart and producing very smart kids, they are very involved in their children’s education both in and outside of the classroom. It might have something to do with the fact that the parents are spending over $40,000 a year, to send their kid to a private school. They also get a lot of private tutoring so they can keep up with the pace of the classrooms. Then there are the sports teams that are in addition to the ones at the schools. Add that to as many resume padding activities that involve some sort of community service as can be fit in, and you have your typical Ivy League candidate, just like all the other comparably prepared that are competing for a certain number of slots in Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford…
That means that yes, it starts at home. How many Black Tiger Moms do you know? ( I know a few. Their kids all went to private schools on scholarships, and went to the college of their choice on a full scholarship too, including Yale and the US Naval Academy). How many Hispanic Tiger Moms do you know? How many White Tiger Moms do you know? How many Asian Tiger Moms do you know? Plenty! I’m sure there are a lot more Tiger Moms, and not just the Asian variety, from all races than we realize. That would be well and good. Parents need to do a better job of getting involved in their children’s education. That also means that parents need to help the schools maintain good order and discipline, as well as offer an educational environment conducive to quality education. We need to make the schools favorable to a challenging academic environment, and that means little to no disruptive behavior getting in the way. Both the schools and the parents have to agree on a zero-tolerance approach to anything less than excellence both in academics and deportment.
When the schools are safe and the learning environment is conducive to education, you can then re-design the education curricula, bringing it in line with a 21st Century economy, rather than what no longer works: an education system based on preparation for the majority of the students for a 19th Century manufacturing economy; a manufacturing economy that no longer exists. Robotics should be required curricula in all high schools. Robots will be performing mind-numbing repetitive menial jobs in the not-so-distant future. Most assembly line work will be done by robots. Much of it already is. Somebody needs to design the robot. Of course, someone also has to build the robot, someone has to program the robot, someone has to run the robot, and someone needs to fix the robot. Ok, and is there any more than a flimsy excuse about why the robot can’t be built here in the United States with good old-fashioned American workers, rather than being outsourced to China? We should do the same thing with the manufacture of replacement parts too. I think it’s called re-shoring. It needs to be done now. We have taken globalism to the point where we are compromising our national security and our ability to function on our own if need be.
So where did all this stuff weasel its way into our lives?
What we are going through has been gone through in this country before. This time it’s not just here in the US. It’s global in just about all of the Western World. What we are witnessing is a little bit complicated, but when you put it all together it starts to make sense.
Let’s start with the Progressive Era of the late 1800s-1920s. An upper-middle-class educated elite was centered around the belief that it was their birthright to control the unwashed masses that made up the general population of the United States. Following the crash of the stock market in 1929, you had the end of the Hoover presidency, and then Franklin Roosevelt, who would shepherd us through the Great Depression with the New Deal and then World War II. President Johnson’s Great Society social programs of the 1960s were failures when compared with the New Deal; the main difference was the New Deal, while a nationwide welfare program, was centered around work rather than just a handout from the government. Many buildings and other projects were built through the Works Progress Administration (WPA). That set the stage. The result in the 1960s was the creation of a giant welfare state “industry,” that was not about to lose its client base.
Guaranteed clientele base for the Social Services Industrial Complex.
I blame a lot of it on what is being taught in our education schools and colleges. I was a music education major in college, and I remember those education methods courses we were required to take very well. At the time I was young and foolish, rather than just foolish. The subtle undercurrent running beneath all those education methods courses that were required for certification was about advancing a Socialist/Communist agenda (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in their earliest forms). The professors teaching those courses would never admit that, but looking back at it at age 68 rather than age 20, I can see how blatant, yet just under the radar the ideology was there for the indoctrinating. Could my dad’s approach to classroom management have been all that wrong? According to the “experts,” yes. He was just some old-fashioned WWII vet who needed to retire and get out of the way. The fact that he had a master’s degree in US History, and was an avid scholar of the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers, was irrelevant. He, and teachers like him, were standing in the way of “real” education reform. Exactly, what did all that education reform accomplish? Literacy? Numeracy? Criminality? Recently, in over 50 public schools in Baltimore, not one student tested at grade level in math or English. Not one student! In an economy that requires both numeracy and literacy, it looks like the Education Industrial Complex has done its job of creating canon fodder for the Social Services Industrial Complex. For those of us that are paying for it with our tax money, it’s been one terrible investment. It’s time for some serious change. To be continued…