It's A Sign

 If you have visited God's country lately you may have noticed a couple of things. First, there are not many billboards, at least not compared to Georgia. And, a significant number of the billboards they have look a lot like this:

This Might Backfire

Much of what they say is true, well, at least the facts they lay out verify. But the messaging...that could use some work. At a glance, folks seeing this billboard might assume that school teachers in NC are not being paid, or not being paid enough. Relative to other states the pay is low. Relative. But relative to other states, outside of Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte and Asheville, the cost of living is relatively lower. It would also be interesting to compare median public school pay to median private school pay and compare those state-to-state. In this state, and presumably most, private school teachers' pay is less than public school. 

A verifiable claim is made regarding 2000 or more open teaching positions, so do private schools have a larger number of open positions? Relatively speaking. If NC is anything like GA, there are lots of "teaching" positions in the schoolhouse that do not include any in-class activities. Then there is a possibility, there as well as here, of the fox and the henhouse, as it is they who assign these classifications, and they who declare the staffing requirements. That is something they can, and do control. 

That's the quantitative story: more money; more teachers. Maybe. There is the qualitative story, which the casual reader, like the one doing 70 MPH on I-85, may, to be kind, infer: that more money means the current teachers on the payroll will do a better job, thereby creating better schools. Is this to say that the teachers they have are holding back and could do a better job? This also begs the questions of "what does better mean?" and "who defines better?" How do we, the taxpayer, audit for improvement, IE better, when the taxpayer doesn't even control these definitions? Or maybe the taxpayer does. DeKalb County Schools have been enduring declining enrollment, some caused by underlying demographic changes, but some attrition is due to parents, taxpayers, taking a different path. A powerful message given these parents still pay for public schools but are concerned enough to also pay for the other option, be it in money, or time, or both. 

DeKalb has the answer to our problem: hire a PR firm to run a campaign. Looks like NC has done the same. 

No Other Option...Really?

Fortune magazine reports that Gen Z students are making it into college "unable to even read a sentence" and this worries professors. Their concern? It could lead to a generation of anxious and lonely graduates. 

Let that soak in.

Fortune doubles down:

"It's leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations."

Here's another choice: maintain (or raise) your entrance requirements and your expectations, and simply do not accept applicants who cannot even read a sentence. Professors have lamented that critical thinking is no longer a valid issue, which makes sense when you're dealing with folks who struggle and usually fail to find the period at the end of any given sentence. 

Then Fortune triples down:

"With students struggling, academies have been forced to adapt---a move critics describe as 'coddling'."

Of course when they cannot read a sentence asking them to read a few dozen pages is like asking them to climb Everest without a Sherpa, which is nearly as difficult as going half an hour without a screen. But folks, including some of the non-reading Gen Z cohort, are suggesting that college is not for everyone, and they are self-identifying as not college candidates. It is worth noting that college administrators seem to disagree, perhaps because their jobs depend on the myth that your life is worthless without a college degree. A degree that is increasingly not worth the cost and approaching objective, absolute worthlessness. 

Is it ego? Is it greed? Is it self-interest over all else? All of these? Why would anyone, Fortune magazine or the academies, not recognize the vast number of young Americans who are not college-ready, and that lowering standards to well below high-school levels is exactly the wrong thing to do?

How Many Times?

How many times can you write the same opinion piece? With the AJC public school advocate there seems no limit. The latest diatribe included jumping on the mis/dis-information bandwagon and it is good to do it now because hearing those chants from mainstream media, shown to shun veracity, is getting tiresome. Just hop right on before the wheels fall off. The author questions how anyone could believe what the author finds to be exaggerations and falsehoods (SAT word for "lies"). It is not because these things are in and of themselves believable, but because public schools have actually done so many things equally unbelievable. They make it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

There is also the juxtaposition of "send their own kids to their own public schools" with "public schools as a national source of commonality." So which is it? Are they local schools? Or, are they a national machine for homogeneity? Does this mean PTA's do not matter at all, but for being a possible source of money for a school? And just whose "commonality" is to be imposed from the national level? Is that the AFT?

One very noncontroversial point is made: it is all about the money. We're offered this interesting twist:

"It's never been the parents' money. The voucher represents the collective pooling of all the community's tax dollars, including those of residents without children." 

The word "collective" must have flown from the fingertips, but it makes you wonder which continent the author hails from or wishes us to emulate. Nonetheless, it is about money. Money being poured into a system that cannot self-correct, cannot self-improve, where incompetents cannot be fired even in places, like Georgia, without official union presence. Perhaps if the author exercised a bit of critical thinking we'd not be subjected to the same diatribe run thru the rinse-repeat cycle. 

Federal Money Runs Out

An AJC staffer recently published a political op-ed as a pre-emptive strike against upcoming legislation regarding money-follows-the-child vouchers dragging out all the usual objections cloaked in subjective comparisons. The problem with these pieces is they require a setup before the big pivot. The setup was far more revealing than the predictable "we hate vouchers" coming from a voice noted for chanting "public school, public school, uber alles."

In this case the setup was all the federal money, soon to run out, that was thrown at public schools...because CoVid. 

The federal bandaid on their self-inflicted crisis (assisted by AFT) is about to be ripped off, though Cardona prefers to present this as passing the baton to the states. This is predictable and has worked before. It is a common practice for the feds to dump in money to get local governments to start programs which then must be continued, at local expense. The feds have tried this with medicaid expansion that has been successfully resisted by only a few states. And this sell-off of local control happens at all levels. Dunwoody has been doing this through grant-grubbing since its inception.

It gets better. The tee-up includes the rationalization that this money was needed, and used, to address learning loss and mental health issues (how is that education?) caused not as much by CoVid but by the federal government's and teacher union's insistence on closing schools. This has been proven, throughout the world, to be an unnecessary and harmful over-reaction. Unless you were a teacher holding online classes from a beach in the Caribbean. The schools ceded local control to the feds and now they want the money to continue. They have a point: it is all but impossible to shrink, let alone eliminate, a government program. Think: REA. 

But public schools are facing more than a loss of federal funds or parents who have pulled back the curtain in their Emerald City. They are facing the disruption of AI, good for parents and their children, but for public schools-not so much. What parent would not want an IEP for their child, especially the parents of high achievers whose potential is never fully addressed in "bring up the back end" public schools? Who wouldn't want an individual tutor, knowledgeable in all topics? A tutor who is constantly training, who is intimately familiar with your child's current standing and trajectory-long term and short term? And when taxpayers find out the bill for this is much, much lower than the system we have, a system we would not build if we had no system at all, these taxpayers will demand a revolution. Will there be a King Ludd to save public schools? Probably not.

If Your Child Cannot Add...

...thank a teacher. Outside of the death toll the largest harm done by the pandemic and the government-union complex has been to the nation's students. Recent measures by the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows significant negative progress with reading scores falling to 2004 levels and for math, even worse, now at 1978 levels. Almost a 50 year setback. 

And why is this?

Teachers and their associations and unions were a powerful force behind closing public schools and keeping them closed either by fiat, government collusion or demanding impossible-to-achieve measures. Teachers found it much more pleasant to "teach" from a Caribbean island than a local school. And "virtual teaching" involved significantly fewer hours with the same pay and perks. Who would want that to stop? It IS worth noting that these "dedicated educators" abandoned the mission of educating our children. For these folks this is certainly not an avocation and there is not much dedication to the vocation.

And yet we have a $1.9 billion budget and a millage rate higher than the constitutional limit. This is for 92,000 students or over $20,000 per student. That's private school tuition and then some. It gets worse. This is apparently a jobs program with 14,000 employees of which only 6,600 (47%) are listed as teachers keeping in mind that not all "teachers" are in the classroom. 

The next time an eSPLOST rolls around remember what they did. 

It Isn't Really An Argument

When talking about college loan and the much awaited handout, words really do matter. So does logic. The former are weak and the latter is on a multi-year spring break.  One dirty little secret is that, by actions in congress, where constitutional authority resides, a vast amount of current debt will never be repaid. First, payment is means adjusted with the first $20K of income exempt, more than the IRS standard deduction. Then, there is a 20 year limit. This doesn't trigger a balloon payment as it should but instead it is the end of payments. And remaining debt is forgiven making many US college graduates charity cases just as they enter their prime income generating years. The ill effects are far worse than undermining any character that might remain in the younger generation and are detailed by the American Institute for Economic Research. Maybe if more parents listened to economists (or knew how to drive a spreadsheet) we would not be in this pickle. 

The defense, if you can call it that, of the administration's unconstitutional efforts to exacerbate all these problems by wiping out even more what is due to be paid to the public coffers defies even a cursory review. Incredible numbers have applied for the handout (college was supposed to be the hand-up, right?) and are a round-up of the usual suspects. And the politicians offer no surprises, only nonsense. One of the finest examples is Georgia's very own Hank Johnson by parroting the left-wing "median household income in your ZIP code" blather. The average income of families around you has nothing to do the amount of your college loan debt no more than it sets your salary. Remember that whole "college degree means more money" chant you've heard all your life? Hank exposes the lie pointing out that half his constituents have a bachelors degree but "many others" have debt but no degree. Therein lies the problem. Some folks do not belong in college, based on these results. Colleges have no business promoting degrees carrying a loan burden that offers no chance of loan repayment. The loan, the commitment to repay and the acquisition of the ability to meet that commitment is a business contract. It is simple business logic. And that logic and that commitment is simply missing.

Autopsy Report For Higher Ed

A recent article in the Communications of the ACM regarding participation bias in CS education research boldly exposed why higher education is dead. It has to do with the grade distribution of a CS class at a major public university:

This Is The "Dumb Bell Curve"

This is not an atypical distribution for college classes in America and has been since the shift from the "attrition" model where poor performers go elsewhere to the "developmental" model where nearly every student accepted is ultimately awarded a degree. It should come as no surprise that almost no students are assessed as average with a cluster of non-performers at the bottom and everyone else pushed to the top. This situation is much worse than wholesale shifting upward of grades towards A's and B's (the average score shown above is a B- with a median of a B+) and away from C's - this is happening as non-academic factors are being heavily weighted in admissions. High grades are being awarded to students who not only could not have passed under the previous model but who would not have been assessed as college-ready in the first place. And this graph was presented with no apologies, with no shame. This is the way it is. 

Colleges and universities are no longer in the education business, they are just in business. They are increasingly open about NOT educating our children.  

All Or Nothing

We live in a world where stupid knows no bounds and suffers no consequences. The current administration attempted to throw a sizable bone to the yellow-dog faithful only to have it soundly rejected. Apparently a $10K student loan forgiveness was totally unacceptable: seems like it is all or nothing as far as the overly entitled are concerned. These arithmetically challenged, intentionally ignorant "scholars" seem trapped in a never-ending pity-party of their own making. 

Well, mostly of their own making.

Even taking the "all" option will not address the fundamental problem and we'll only see wave after wave of the over-leveraged entitled. Like immigration amnesty without immigration reform this is kicking the can a very small ways down the road. Even public schools are over-commercialized expanding not the actual education services, hence the worthless degrees, but administrative overhead. This happened when the industry embraced the Oprah philosophy, everybody gets a degree, and to accomplish this a transition was made from an attrition model to a developmental model. This requires enormous expansion of wrap-around services, remediation (explicit or embedded), extended stays (outside of service academies graduating in six years is considered success) and exponential expansion of non-educational staff and administrators. Oh, yeah, and budget. 

Because when clear the mental fog you'll see that this is all about the money, not learning, not even credentials...just money. And until we, as a society, address these fundamental failures we will have nothing but a pipeline of the indebted ignorant.

So Why Do You Care?

Preemptive legislation is nothing new and we've seen it here in daVille with the recent ordinance outlawing party houses. Not that such a problem exists and even if it did given the city's reluctance to enforce any ordinance, especially quality of life ordinances, it would not and will not make a difference. Perhaps a diversion. Perhaps just political theater. 

It is happening at the state level as well with the proposed bill that would ban promulgation of divisive indoctrination in our schools. Really this should be as simple as requiring that all students read at grade level before any agenda driven programs are introduced. But both sides are engaging in semantic gymnastics. The leftist superintendent who signed an open letter against the bill they characterize as banning CRT. Yet they claim they are not teaching CRT and in fact there are no courses with CRT in the title or even the course description. But this IS a deceit and they know it. After all if they are NOT teaching CRT why do they care if there is a law banning it? They're not going to teach it anyway or are they?

The fact is that the tenets, the principles and the fundamental building blocks of CRT are driving curricula and the teaching of racial division. And this is happening in school systems across this state where an embarrassing number of students cannot read at grade level, lack skill in basic arithmetic and where over 16% don't continue to graduation.

Is there any doubt that public education needs a power-down reset?

Hackademics

How is your student doing? After all you are the parent and until recently everyone agreed it is also your student, though the education industry has leaked their deep seated disagreement with that proposition. This may be have you considering drastic measures. Private schools? Perhaps. Tutoring? Not a bad option, but it makes you wonder if you're encouraging government schools' bad behavior. Or maybe a bandaid on a bullet wound. 

You might be considering drastic, direct action. Taking the bull by the horns. Making learning a family activity and stepping away from a system telling your student what to think rather than how to think. If you follow this path there are lots of resources available, but we at The Other Dunwoody would like to suggest LibreTexts. Here you'll find freely available texts, course support and visualization tools. Of particular interest are the math resources, covering elementary skills, to algebra, calculus, data science, economics and even today's edu-industry trend: finance. But in this case your student will not be driven towards the collectives' group-think but instead will acquire the skills needed to make their own decision about their own finances. 

Embrace hackademics. You may well learn something too.

Reversing Osmosis

Over at the AJC, their bloggin' schools' apologist has had an epiphany: readin' don't just happen and it ain't like catchin' a cold. The decades old pedagogical orthodoxy was based on osmosis, the notion that by simply watching someone else read, or even having someone, particularly for a photo-op, read to you then magically those capabilities will transfer to you. As if our schools (which means teachers, admins, teachers of teachers, and yes, media apologists) have adopted a monkey-see-monkey-do approach. It has its advantages. For them. They offload responsibility for their inability to teach even basic reading skills, and NAEP has diligently reported these failures, onto parents claiming "there just ain't 'nuff readin' goin' on at home." And they still take credit for that third of students who are teacher-proof and will become proficient at reading, even though, as we all now know, this happens at home. 

The techniques (modalities?) that work require effort. On the part of the student who must actually spend significant time practicing and on the part of the teacher who must intercede, correcting any mistakes. These are the kind of draconian tactics Sister Mary Vattaveist  used back i the day. Effectiveness not withstanding, that just ain't the way learning gets done these days. Of course the NAEP reports that not much learning is going on anyway.

Maybe the problem is systemic lack of domain expertise. Given how long this failed pedagogy has been in effect it is very likely we have the illiterati "leading" in the classroom and school offices. How can someone who never encountered the teaching of reading in their own life ever figure out how to teach our children? Especially if they cannot even read about it.

Personal Finance For Your Kids

For some time there have been efforts to inject Personal Finance into public schools and here's a shocker: it has met with some resistance. Until now the resistance has come from parents who distinguish themselves by actually wanting to raise their children rather than just have a baby and turn the child-rearing over to anyone else. These traditionalists  firmly believe that they, and they alone, are responsible for key aspects of their children's development and this includes things they consider very personal like money and well, personal finance. These naive parents also think they are sending their children to schools to learn, particularly core skills like reading, writing and arithmetic.

Then it went off the rails. 

Eyes were opened with the confluence of a pandemic that forced parents to see what was being served up in their children's school and wokeism (not wokeness, but wokeism), an evil corruption of something good (tolerance) with something very bad (hatred), threatening a complete takeover of school curricula. So in the prevailing context of 2+2=White Supremacy, and the willful innumeracy that entails, what the hell can personal finance even be? 

To put a positive spin on it, personal finance education may be teaching concepts. This isn't just because your child has been mathematically lobotomized by public schools but their teachers have been as well. So instead of learning how to use Quicken (or a ledger) to track a budget or a spreadsheet to determine total interest paid on a loan or compare buying, home or car, to leasing they may encounter buzz-word bingo. They may hear about dollar-cost-averaging. Maybe there will be discussion of investment returns vs inflation. Perhaps various self-funded retirement vehicles. These topics, associated with old-school personal finance, speak to a new taboo: individual responsibility.

So it really isn't likely to even be concepts. If we've learned anything during the pandemic it is that education did not abandon teaching and learning in favor of delivery of social services, but instead it was in favor of indoctrination. This will be no different and personal finance will be just more political proselytizing. Not making personal decisions based on your individual circumstances, but aligning your decisions with their dogma. 

If parents had a better foundation in personal finance themselves they would look at their property tax bill and we would soon be talking about public schools in the past tense.

Anecdotes And Analogies And Adverbs

The back and forth bickering between teachers, who're getting jiggy with the whole work from home model and parents, who want a return to school because parents may not enjoy the luxury of "pay without presence" has become [en]trenched warfare. 

Parents want their kids F2F in the classroom and are using many of the tried and true arguments of the great importance of socialization among their cohort and the benefits of communal settings for "collaborative" learning. Parents know that their kids learn best when they're in a classroom with a teacher that "cares about them." There is no more hard data supporting these conclusions now than there ever was so it is only the anecdotal mythology that is being repurposed. DeKalb's parents are pointing to other districts with in-person classes with envy and increasing anger. Perhaps they should have made that comparison before they chose to live in DeKalb.

Teachers, spring's heroes and fall's traitors, were initially blindsided and faced a two-front battle. One was the ongoing "we don't get paid enough for this," with this being online, remote work. When confronted with the possibility that they would be required to get their asses back in the classes, teachers attempted a quick pivot to "hell no! we won't go!" Unfortunately, their new position is undermined by their age old, self-supporting arguments. 

What is missing are hard data, raw data. There is a surplus of opinion, narrative and misleading comparisons. You cannot even discuss the evaluation criteria of LMS-es without it devolving into citations of industry-self-promotional awards rather than quantifiable metrics of various systems under consideration. Those unhappy with the selection are equally at fault with nothing more than personal preference gilded with adverbs, anecdotes and vague references to everyone else. 

Teachers want folks to believe that being in a classroom with the same snot-nosed kids they embraced every year prior puts them in greater risk that Father Damien. They simply cannot put together a coherent argument because in the past their rationalizations were accepted without question. No longer. When they make the comparison that they are at far greater risk, because they are around so many others, than, say a Kroger employee, most folks, especially Kroger shoppers, roll their eyes. They try to trot out studies, which must be cherry-picked as there are as many that undermine as support their position. They undermine international comparisons, where F2F schools are in operation, by suggesting these countries have better leadership. Again, by some untold metrics. 

What it really comes down to is there has been a serious disturbance in the farce. Parents may still think their little precious is the greatest gift to mankind, but teachers are no longer willing to go overboard to support this notion or to leverage it to their own ends--give us more money. The pandemic has cured the Lake Wobegon Effect with parents now firmly convinced that their children are NOT going to the best school on the planet, that they are NOT getting the best education if in fact they are getting an education at all. Because they're not going at all. 

Teachers are angry at the notion they are "free daycare," which only makes sense if you never see your property tax bill. Silence from the parents confirms the daycare assertion but teachers' surprise is laughable. Schools have been touted, and repurposed, to address every societal ill except teaching and learning. In the spring the education industry predicted a tsunami of undetected child abuse because it is the teachers who are the [only] responsible adult in many children's lives and they've taken on the role of social worker. So why NOT daycare as well? Learning fell off the To Do list when teachers shifted from "Sage on the Stage" to "Guide by the Side" and prioritized "fun" over knowledge and skills acquisition.

Teachers feel threatened and put upon. They're pissed and they are doing what they always do, at least in DeKalb: threaten to quit. 

Parents are equally if not more angry. Sure, in the past they deluded themselves into various beliefs that public schools were all good. Social skills. Best education anywhere. Athletics. There was some weird common, almost mass delusion, shared by parents and educators, all singing from the same hymnal, all preaching from a common text, speaking in tongues and spouting reflexive responsorial psalms. Hidden behind all this was a "social contract" that schools would always be there, that schools would care for (and about) their children and that they would be able to "have it all"--career and kids. 

Now teachers are rethinking their careers and parents are rethinking progressive philosophies that underpin public schools. Maybe both are heading in the best direction for all of society.

Gap Year

Teachers are in quite a bind. They absolutely do not want to go back to the classroom for fear of contagion. They kinda want to be considered "essential" in the hopes this guarantees their paycheck - hastag nofurloughdays and all that. In fact they'd like to see a pay raise and have compared themselves to...wait for it...doctors! Now, they are significantly closer to nurses both in level of education and ongoing training but it sounds so much better when you claim you're like an MD, eh? Ballsy move.

Here's an alternative plan: let's have a gap year. Just call off the whole damn thing. No furlough days. An entire furlough year. Spend the money saved on infrastructure. Facilities expansion. HVAC upgrades to include UV-C sanitizing. Might want to consider copper handrails and cafeteria contact surfaces.

Upgrades to content delivery may be in order. Books? Why? No books? No lockers? Current technology can do much to reduce dilly dally.

The timeout can also become the pause that refreshes. There will be time to ask and answer some serious questions. If we had nothing, as would temporarily be the case, is what we now have what we'd build? Is it really a good idea to use DeKalb Schools as some half-assed health care platform? Really? Should that be the county health department? And is a school system really a reverse Uber Eats, where you bring 'em over and we'll feed 'em. Is this really the best way to provide government funded daycare? This is a wonderful time for parents to get in touch with their little darlings and maybe realize they're not all you claim they are.

Maybe a gap year will help streamline social services, removing them from an already overburdened education system and move the teaching and learning back to front and center. Of course there would have to be a "hold harmless" policy for all students. All would receive a gap year promotion and with colleges and universities dropping requirements for objectively measured academic accomplishments it really would be no-harm-no-foul. Honestly, until we get serious about learning most students would be no worse off taking a gap year than going through the motions of the current system.

Nonessential Service

A recent post over at Stan The Man's Actual Factual blog is ostensibly about DCSD reopening plan but the comments are the real story [and no, TOD is NOT going to allow comments]. If you read them all and try to absorb the chatter it is as if your head fills with an explosive word map with biggest bubbles around things like "no furlough" and "daycare" but "learning" not so much. Of course this speaks to a growing realization that parents rely on schools for daycare and teachers rely on the paycheck with neither actually that concerned about real learning---actual academic performance. Throw SARS-CoV2 terror into the mix and there is a widening rift. 

At one point the moderator posed an important but seemingly innocuous question: is education an essential service? Some reflexively responded in the affirmative mistakenly thinking this would support the notion that not only should furlough days be banned but that perhaps pay increases could be justified. The more circumspect remained silent (the question was asked more than once) or noted that teachers have not signed up to go into harm's way. This is in contrast with others providing essential services in hospitals, as first responders or even at the grocery checkout. But not teachers. 

Education may not be an essential service, but it is mandated by Georgia's Constitution which requires that the state provide an "adequate education" to all residents. Because DCSD has diverted so much of the budget and efforts away from the classroom to admin and wraparound services their definition of "adequate" is a very low bar indeed. That becomes important as parents investigate their options. 

Since teachers, fearing for their health, are at the brink of mutiny (some expect to break their contract without penalty) parents who are presented with "virtual learning" delivered by ill-equipped and unenthusiastic classroom teachers are investigating other, better established options. And there are multiple choices.

First DeKalb Schools run their own Virtual Academy but this only covers upper level classes. 

The most obvious is the appropriately named K12 which covers all of K-12. Another K-12 option is Georgia Cyber Academy. If you are not interested in elementary school Georgia Connections Academy handles 5-12. Another option for middle and high school is Georgia Virtual School. These are organizations built from the ground up with the staffing, the training, the technology and the pedagogy for distance learning. If your children are learning online shouldn't it be from capable educators? These options also offer the advantage of "the money follows the student" which may free up some DCSD teachers to work for Instacart. 

Education Is Bankrupt

The AJC reports that Rudy Crew and 67 others applied for the job as Superintendent of DeKalb schools. And Crew was the clear winner. Really?

Let's review some key facts:

• Crew has not been a superintendent in over 12 years
• Crew left district leadership for a statewide public education position
• Crew left K-12 education for a leadership role at an urban college
• Crew has been accused of APS-calibre score manipulation
• Crew has been accused of financial mis-appropriation
• Crew has been accused of obstructing auditors and investigators

We are somehow to believe this is the track record best suited to lead DeKalb schools. It is now time for those who advocated for Crew to fully disclose in a quantifiable, score-able fashion, those qualities they saw in this candidate that not only overcame, in their judgment, these obvious handicaps but also made him superior to 67 other applicants. Otherwise we are left to conclude that the education system is fatally flawed, incapable of producing leaders of great capabilities and great integrity. Or perhaps it is not humanly possible to lead a system of this size and it is time break the problem, and the system, down into more manageable components.

The Education Industry's "N-Word"

It is as if Oprah is managing the national lexicon: "Everybody Gets An N-WORD!" And the verboten word-that-will-not-be-spoken in earshot of a teacher? That would be "Accountability." This little nugget was inadvertently dropped by the AJC's Edu-cheerleader, Maureen Downey, in a fairly recent op-ed piece bashing Kemp for not being a lap-dog for Public Schools. In her piece she ascribes to Georgia teachers dissatisfaction she claims is voiced nationwide leading off with:

"Too many mandated tests that hold too much sway over how students, teachers and schools are judged." 

Sure, they wedge "teachers" between "students" and "schools" to create an obfuscating trifecta but let's be honest, teachers' top five priorities are: (1) teachers; (2) teachers; (3) teachers; (4) schools; and (5) students. And the latter two are only a important to the extent that teachers are impacted.

Teachers are  more than a little obsessed with pay/compensation and are always positioning themselves as under-paid, often suggesting that with a similar degree they would make much more in the real world. Clearly they've kept their distance from that reality. Fact is there is no "similar" degree as the real world eschews subtractive programs resulting in "major"-education degrees as they truly are less than a real degree. It is more than a little baffling where they think they'll get a job with tenure (official or merely by tradition), with guaranteed pay bumps just for hanging around or a defined benefit retirement. Given all that we now learn that they want to never confront a reasonable performance evaluation or accountability of any sort whatsoever.

But this one little line from the AJC begs a very important question. EXACTLY how should we, parents and taxpayers, judge teachers? How do we hold teachers accountable for doing the job the profession demands and the public expects of them? Maybe the teachers have an answer for that one. 

It All Adds Up

The AJC has a rather disturbing but unsurprising blog post on how "we" expect kids to be on grade level in math but a lot of them aren't. The education industry has ginned up a report, with its own website, arguing that this expectation, that children stay on task with math, actually causes them to lose ground in math. Though there is an observation that "math is cumulative" they dare not identify very real, systemic, pedagogical problems within the education industry and consequently offer no meaningful solutions.

Math is cumulative: a student will not progress until they have mastered pre-requisite skills. Not "demonstrated once after cramming for a test," but acquired enduring proficiency. And we're talking skills here, not merely "learned concepts." Think of it this way: you could study the rules, history and great players of cricket and even ace tests on all these areas, but would that make you a great cricket player? Or even a competent one? And after the test would you even bother to remember the rules? And this is the pedagogical paradigm dominating the education industry: get it, then forget it. It works for history. It works for english, grammar, writing and literature. The only thing embraced by the education industry that it does not work for is sports, and well, math. But with math, a classroom endeavor, they will use only the get-it-forget-it approach. And should anyone or anything try to upset that applecart they will fight it tooth and nail. Consider that the kind of practice required to acquire proficiency in sports, and math, is required for the former and given the pejorative of "drill and kill" with the latter.

And this is not going to change. Our current crop of educators are themselves products of this system.  They know nothing else and cannot make any meaningful change. Frankly they have no reason to improve as long as they can "pass" their failures (AKA "students") to the next grade without any responsibility or accountability. Should anyone bring in outside evaluations they will undermine them in any way possible, even to the point of cheating. They will suggest that math competency is unnecessary or unattainable and generate documentation supporting those claims. They will deride any objective measure as unfair because they know that no amount of cramming, no teaching-to-the-test will overcome three or four years of mathematics retardation.

And what happens when your child gets to college? Well, they (and you) will expect the same treatment, the same unwarranted praise and advancement, the same lack of rigor that they received in high school. And since colleges have been pulled into the education industry that is exactly what will happen. Just don't be too surprised when your child gets into the job force and has their ass handed to them by co-workers with a foreign education--where math counts. 

Trust, Do Not Verify

That is what Georgia's teachers and educators want. Of course they're hiding behind what they claim to be student frailty (but don't call them "snowflakes") and hyperbolic rhetoric (e.g., "deluge of tests"). But student testing is not their real issue. What they are really upset about is being called to task on actually educating our children. Not just passing them thru a system but ensuring that each and every step along they way these children have learned what they need to progress. Educators will not stand for that.

How do we know this? Well, cruise on over to Stan Jester's "No Joking" blog and check out the post on AP Exams - Return on Investment paying attention to the comments. One commenter outs DCSD on an institutionalized platform for grade inflation exposing "the county’s grading policy of Guided/Group practice being 45% of the final grade" also pointing out one of the main reasons for this obsession with subjectivity: "students are able to maintain their A’s and B’s and keep their chance at the HOPE scholarship alive (even if they fail every test)!"

But if you have objective, third party evaluations (testing AND grading) then your subjective evaluations will be exposed for the sham that they are. Why aren't parents appalled? Because the HOPE scholarship is based on grades, not independently verifiable knowledge. And they fully expect colleges and universities to continue this subjective grade inflation all the way thru the Bachelors program. And they do. 

Ask Not For Whom The School Bell Tolls

It tolls for the death of learning. This is no surprise to anyone paying attention but the eradication of learning, and teaching, from the education industry is all but complete. Systems like DeKalb have long focused on "wrap around services" emphasizing what goes on outside the classroom using this as a cover for ignoring what goes on inside the classroom. At the college level the transformation to a customer-focused service industry has been deliberate and tragic. Turning the keys to the asylum over to the inmates began with end-of-course teacher evaluations--that these often ask students who may have barely scraped thru the material "does the professor know the material?" and that these evals are a significant portion of tenure criteria pretty much tells you that academia have decided that happy students are more important than knowledgeable ones. Even knowing the depth of ignorance of these transient, self-entitled students, academia has placed their fate at the mercy of whatever incites their whiny indignation. One need look no further than Oberlin College to appreciate the existential threat academia has created for itself.

More pervasive is the societal tragedy know as the 504 Plan as this sits at the confluence of over-labeling ("diagnosing" as a disease or disorder that which cannot be shown to have a physiological basis), celebration of those so labelled and accommodations for those with "psychological impairments." The 504 scheme affords special concessions to those "students" who stress over tests and since qualifying for this program is based on wholly subjective evaluations parents are doc-shopping to get their kids in. And the "subjectivity only" evaluation model mimics what goes on in our public schools. Simpatico. At least one knowledgeable observer contends that by 2020 almost every child will have a diagnosis at which point there will really be no point. At least not where schooling is concerned.

Where will we be when our entire workforce requires time-and-a-half because they are just so stressed out? How will we compete in a global market of products, services and ideas? Maybe it just doesn't matter. That seems the message coming from the education industry.