The abysmal state of Public education cannot be overstated—an increasing investment in declining results. Sorry. I’m presuming things, like the purpose of the buildings and the system, is to teach kids to learn. As observed here,
So we’ve been told for years, that we have to fund schools. And what about the teachers? And what about the children? And it’s just gone on and on and on. And of course, everybody’s like, ⁓ we can’t just not do that. Right. So
Property taxes go up, and schools get more and more money every year. We get into the millions, millions, millions, tens of millions, and tens of millions of dollars. And what happens? Assessment scores go down. We’re in a situation where we’re paying two, three, four times as much for an education system that can’t teach a third to a half of the kids, I’m sorry, two-thirds to a half of the kids to read at grade level.
Or do math at grade level; almost none of them leave with any critical thinking skills.
I go on about the topic quite a bit over on my substack, and it is obvious that the public school system has little to do with educating children (reading, writing, math, critical thinking). It is a machine that uses your money to protect the machine. That needs to change. Parents and taxpayers need to defund that machine. While there are plenty of ideas at the link, many are a heavy lift (some are paywalled for subscribers only), there is low-hanging fruit to be found.
Minnesota’s largest teachers union is under fire this week over its “professional development” courses on topis such as “Interrupting Whiteness” and “LGBTQ+ Training.”
The “racial equity trainings” can be brought “to your building” when requested by Education Minnesota members, the union website explains, and offer instruction on topics like “Culturally Responsive Teaching With a Racial Justice Lens” and “Cultural Competency.” Educators in the state are required to fulfill a “cultural competency” training in order to renew their teaching licenses, which can include topics such as “Systemic Racism,” “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students,” “Language Diversity,” and more, according to the state government page.
These “development” classes should be the first to go. Get all that funding out of the budget, in fact, I’d suggest cutting all professional development until further notice, for teachers, administrators, and staff.
If a grade school teacher with a master’s degree doesn’t know how to teach a child to read, fire them and hire a homeschool mom. She’ll do it for a fraction of the cost, and you’ll get exponentially better results. Kids who can not only read at grade level but also above.
Grade level is barely a standard, and one that they ‘ll be dumbing down until the results match the “achievement level.”
I had a college-grade reading level in the sixth grade, and I wasn’t the only one. These days, sixth graders are counseled to question why they have a penis or a vagina, because “educators” spend more time on that than on reading.
Feel free to gauge your moral outrage accordingly or ask this instead. When did the buildings and systems, and professionals tasked at a greater cost than anything a town or city might pay for, decide that the learning we sent our kids to them for was everything but reading, math, writing, critical thinking (and perhaps a bit of history and basic science)?
Education Minnesota’s programs are part of the “Facing Inequities and Racism in Education” (FIRE) series, designed to “disrupt systemic racism and racial inequities in Minnesota’s education system.” The union operates a “Racial Equity Advocate network” and offers “Equity EdCamps.”
Here’s a funny fact. If you teach brown kids to read, add, subtract, write, and think critically, there are very few places on the planet where they cannot find a way to excel above the average state of humanity. If you instead obsess over victimhood and outrage, where those skills are undervalued, they will become the thing you have convinced yourself your little talks will protect them from.
Stop wasting tax dollars, time, and millions of minds.
Professional development is paid free time, and it ought to be excised from the budget, and if the union doesn’t like it, bust the union. Fire them all. There are plenty of non-union teachers in your non-city schools, and more than a few who would work regardless. Note to privatize the whole thing and subcontract administration and operations to a third party that would actually teach kids and answer to taxpayers.
The unions don’t care. Administration clearly doesn’t. Lots of teachers care but are stuck in the system that pays most of them well enough to suffer through it. School boards are complicit in the waste of resources and the production of undereducated graduates.
Parents and taxpayers are the only cure, but they need to band together and create a force greater than the politics or the unions. An army that elects better board members, defends them at school meetings, and demands change. Not once, not a single issue, but indefinitely.
Or, you can let the school indoctrinate morons, obsess with identity political tribalism and the end of liberty (because it’s so oppressive) until true oppression finds them, not just by surprise, but with no skills or means to try and escape it.
