Denver East High School - 1927
What every school should be
Showing posts with label public schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public schools. Show all posts
Sep 19, 2024
Wanna Get Something Back?
Let's go back to when a school was like a palace, and teachers were respected professionals.
Oct 31, 2023
Dumb & Dumber
The hollowing-out of public education in USAmerica Inc has to be getting close to where the whole thing implodes.
Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
A district-by-district look at home schooling’s explosive growth, which a Post analysis finds has far outpaced the rate at private and public schools
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.
Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.
The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.
The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.
Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.
Examination of the data reveals:
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.
“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”
In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.
Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.
Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”
‘Such a long way’
If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.
The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.
There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.
Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.
Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.
Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.
“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”
Corey McKeown owns and operates Trinity. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.
Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.
“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.
“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”
Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.
As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.
From Harlem to Kentucky
Home-schooled kids number more than 154,000 in Florida, the largest count among states with available data. But in no state have their ranks grown faster than in New York.
Its home-school population has more than doubled since 2017, rising to nearly 52,000. It was the largest statewide rate of increase in The Post’s database, and some of the fastest growth came in a place not necessarily synonymous with home education: New York City.
In 24 of the city’s 33 school districts, home-schooled children increased by at least 200 percent over six years. The largest growth was seen in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, where some districts exceeded 300 percent growth.
Afua Brown, who lives in Harlem, pulled her daughter out of a public elementary school in 2015 after she was bullied in kindergarten. Private school was too expensive, so Brown tried her hand at home education for her daughter and younger son.
She eventually became a leader in the New York City Home Educators Alliance, where she watched the local home-school community expand dramatically. But while their ranks can feel large at the organization’s science fairs, picnics and ice skating days, Brown recognizes home-schoolers are still a tiny fraction of the city’s school-age kids. Her children were among 377 in the fall of 2022 in a school district, including Manhattan’s Upper West Side and part of Harlem, where public enrollment is close to 20,000.
“It feels like there’s a bunch of us,” she said. “But in reality, there’s not that many of us.”
In only one of the city’s districts, Staten Island, are there more than 1,000 home-schooled kids.
The situation is very different in rural Pulaski County, Ky., where home schooling has grown 75 percent since 2017. There are now 908 home-schooled children in Pulaski — a number hard to ignore in a public school district with fewer than 7,800 students.
When Angelia Lamb stopped by the post office last summer to mail home-schooling notification forms for her 11-year-old son, the postal clerk glanced at the envelope — and then astonished Lamb by guessing its contents.
“You’re home schooling, aren’t you?” he asked, explaining that so many other parents had been sending the same official correspondence to the district that he recognized it on sight.
There is a kind of safety, or at least reassurance, in numbers for parents like 36-year-old Jessica Noplis, who lives in Crab Orchard, Ky. Noplis had misgivings when she pulled her 5-year-old son from a Pulaski elementary school: The boy loved school, and would habitually be ready in his backpack to board the bus at 6 a.m. — 50 minutes before it arrived.
But Noplis clashed with two of her son’s teachers over speech therapy (Noplis thought he didn’t need it) and grew upset when one of them didn’t seem to believe that the boy was reading better at home than in school. She soon discovered no fewer than six local and state Facebook groups devoted to home schooling.
“I was shocked to see how many people actually home-schooled,” she said.
Pulaski is one of 19 school districts in Kentucky where there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 enrolled in the public school system during the 2021-2022 school year. There were 48 such districts in Arkansas and 46 in California, according to The Post analysis. Most are rural.
Rural districts tend to struggle with especially tight budgets, and as more of their families turn to home schooling, some professional educators feel uneasy. Krystal Goode, a high school social studies teacher and head of the Pulaski County Education Association, said the district is already so strapped for cash that at least 30 students are now crowded into each of her classes.
In Kentucky, as elsewhere, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. Goode said she worries about Pulaski’s home-schooled kids, a few of whom joined her class last year substantially behind their peers in academic skills.
But she also worries about what home schooling’s growth will mean for the children in the public education system.
“If [home-schooled] students are not enrolled in our district, we are not getting funding for them,” she said. “And we are already underfunded.”
Leaving ‘excellent’ schools
After Cassie Hagerstrom moved to De Pere, Wis., last summer, she noticed her new neighbors had a favorite topic of conversation: the superb quality of their public schools.
“It’s the first thing they bring up here,” she said.
Other parents would often talk about how much better they believed the schools were than those in the nearby city of Green Bay.
In fact, students in the Unified School District of De Pere perform better on standardized tests than their counterparts not only in Green Bay but in 95 percent of districts across the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Three of De Pere’s six public schools were rated in Wisconsin’s highest possible category in their most recent assessment, while each of the remaining three “exceeds expectations,” state officials found.
But Hagerstrom never considered giving her new town’s renowned schools a chance to meet, let alone exceed, her expectations for her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. She began home schooling when they lived in Fort Myers, Fla., she said, after a girl in her older child’s aftercare program shared a video of her father showering on her phone. The experience reinforced bad impressions Hagerstrom formed when she worked for a year as a middle school counselor.
“I’m not really on board with the schooling process as a whole,” Hagerstrom said. “Too many negative influences.”
Hagerstrom isn’t the only home educator to spurn a high-performing school system. In the fall of 2022, more than 60,000 students were home-schooled in districts that rank in the top fifth of academic achievement nationwide, The Post found.
There are 505 such school districts in The Post’s home schooling database. Data on academic performance were drawn from the Stanford archive, which collects standardized test score results from thousands of school districts across the country. (The archive does not include information for about half the districts in The Post’s database.)
Another high-caliber school district with explosive home-schooling growth is Capistrano Unified, which serves a prosperous slice of coastal Orange County, Calif. In the fall of 2022, the district had 711 home-schooled kids — a dip from its high of 1,000 in the fall of 2020 but still a 139 percent increase from the 2017-18 school year.
Until last year, when she moved to neighboring Riverside County, Stephanie Peterson lived in Capistrano Unified, which outperforms 87 percent of other school districts nationwide on standardized test scores. Peterson describes herself as “very pro-public education.”
But Peterson found that her children didn’t thrive in Capistrano Unified schools. Her eldest daughter, now 20, eventually transferred to a charter school. Officials at the local elementary school didn’t properly accommodate her 9-year-old daughter’s severe peanut allergy, Peterson said, and she worried that school services for the girl’s autism were insufficient.
Since 2021, Peterson has home-schooled both the 9-year-old and her 7-year-old son.
“I think it’s an excellent school district,” she said of Capistrano Unified, “if you are a kid who doesn’t have any special needs.”
‘The heart of the community’
Parents and students break for lunch at Trinity Education Academy of Christian Homeschoolers in Tampa. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What lies ahead for American home schooling?
It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.
Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.
Concerns about school shootings, bullying, and the general quality of the school environment — intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve — were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.
Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.
Thanks in part to such policies, home schooling will increasingly compete for tax dollars with the public education system.
It could also undermine the role that public schools have traditionally played in American life.
“If you go to any public school, it’s the heart of the community in which it is situated,” said Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association. “People gather there for football games. They gather there for concerts. They go to celebrate the academic success of their students.”
Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people.
And some of what schools offer is hard to replace. When floods ravaged the Appalachian region where Campbell worked as a music teacher, he said, many turned to the public schools for shelter.
But many are also turning away. In Campbell’s Knox County school district, public school enrollment declined 16 percent during the last six years.
Over the same period, the county’s number of home-schooled students grew 80 percent.
Standard Operating Proceedure for 'conservatives' has been to cut school budgets and attack the Dept of Education, and then crow about what a mess the schools are -"See? Government schools are bad. We need to privatize the system - put it in the hands of a few noble entrepreneurs and let them raise us back to the heights of blah blah blah..."
- Fuck something up
- Wait a bit
- Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up. Vote for me and I'll fix it for ya."
Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
A district-by-district look at home schooling’s explosive growth, which a Post analysis finds has far outpaced the rate at private and public schools
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.
Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.
The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.
The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.
Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.
Examination of the data reveals:
- In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
- Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
- In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
- Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.
“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”
In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.
Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.
Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”
‘Such a long way’
If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.
The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.
There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.
Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.
Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.
Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.
“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”
Corey McKeown owns and operates Trinity. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.
Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.
“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.
“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”
Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.
As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.
From Harlem to Kentucky
Home-schooled kids number more than 154,000 in Florida, the largest count among states with available data. But in no state have their ranks grown faster than in New York.
Its home-school population has more than doubled since 2017, rising to nearly 52,000. It was the largest statewide rate of increase in The Post’s database, and some of the fastest growth came in a place not necessarily synonymous with home education: New York City.
In 24 of the city’s 33 school districts, home-schooled children increased by at least 200 percent over six years. The largest growth was seen in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, where some districts exceeded 300 percent growth.
Afua Brown, who lives in Harlem, pulled her daughter out of a public elementary school in 2015 after she was bullied in kindergarten. Private school was too expensive, so Brown tried her hand at home education for her daughter and younger son.
She eventually became a leader in the New York City Home Educators Alliance, where she watched the local home-school community expand dramatically. But while their ranks can feel large at the organization’s science fairs, picnics and ice skating days, Brown recognizes home-schoolers are still a tiny fraction of the city’s school-age kids. Her children were among 377 in the fall of 2022 in a school district, including Manhattan’s Upper West Side and part of Harlem, where public enrollment is close to 20,000.
“It feels like there’s a bunch of us,” she said. “But in reality, there’s not that many of us.”
In only one of the city’s districts, Staten Island, are there more than 1,000 home-schooled kids.
The situation is very different in rural Pulaski County, Ky., where home schooling has grown 75 percent since 2017. There are now 908 home-schooled children in Pulaski — a number hard to ignore in a public school district with fewer than 7,800 students.
When Angelia Lamb stopped by the post office last summer to mail home-schooling notification forms for her 11-year-old son, the postal clerk glanced at the envelope — and then astonished Lamb by guessing its contents.
“You’re home schooling, aren’t you?” he asked, explaining that so many other parents had been sending the same official correspondence to the district that he recognized it on sight.
There is a kind of safety, or at least reassurance, in numbers for parents like 36-year-old Jessica Noplis, who lives in Crab Orchard, Ky. Noplis had misgivings when she pulled her 5-year-old son from a Pulaski elementary school: The boy loved school, and would habitually be ready in his backpack to board the bus at 6 a.m. — 50 minutes before it arrived.
But Noplis clashed with two of her son’s teachers over speech therapy (Noplis thought he didn’t need it) and grew upset when one of them didn’t seem to believe that the boy was reading better at home than in school. She soon discovered no fewer than six local and state Facebook groups devoted to home schooling.
“I was shocked to see how many people actually home-schooled,” she said.
Pulaski is one of 19 school districts in Kentucky where there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 enrolled in the public school system during the 2021-2022 school year. There were 48 such districts in Arkansas and 46 in California, according to The Post analysis. Most are rural.
Rural districts tend to struggle with especially tight budgets, and as more of their families turn to home schooling, some professional educators feel uneasy. Krystal Goode, a high school social studies teacher and head of the Pulaski County Education Association, said the district is already so strapped for cash that at least 30 students are now crowded into each of her classes.
In Kentucky, as elsewhere, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. Goode said she worries about Pulaski’s home-schooled kids, a few of whom joined her class last year substantially behind their peers in academic skills.
But she also worries about what home schooling’s growth will mean for the children in the public education system.
“If [home-schooled] students are not enrolled in our district, we are not getting funding for them,” she said. “And we are already underfunded.”
Leaving ‘excellent’ schools
After Cassie Hagerstrom moved to De Pere, Wis., last summer, she noticed her new neighbors had a favorite topic of conversation: the superb quality of their public schools.
“It’s the first thing they bring up here,” she said.
Other parents would often talk about how much better they believed the schools were than those in the nearby city of Green Bay.
In fact, students in the Unified School District of De Pere perform better on standardized tests than their counterparts not only in Green Bay but in 95 percent of districts across the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Three of De Pere’s six public schools were rated in Wisconsin’s highest possible category in their most recent assessment, while each of the remaining three “exceeds expectations,” state officials found.
But Hagerstrom never considered giving her new town’s renowned schools a chance to meet, let alone exceed, her expectations for her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. She began home schooling when they lived in Fort Myers, Fla., she said, after a girl in her older child’s aftercare program shared a video of her father showering on her phone. The experience reinforced bad impressions Hagerstrom formed when she worked for a year as a middle school counselor.
“I’m not really on board with the schooling process as a whole,” Hagerstrom said. “Too many negative influences.”
Hagerstrom isn’t the only home educator to spurn a high-performing school system. In the fall of 2022, more than 60,000 students were home-schooled in districts that rank in the top fifth of academic achievement nationwide, The Post found.
There are 505 such school districts in The Post’s home schooling database. Data on academic performance were drawn from the Stanford archive, which collects standardized test score results from thousands of school districts across the country. (The archive does not include information for about half the districts in The Post’s database.)
Another high-caliber school district with explosive home-schooling growth is Capistrano Unified, which serves a prosperous slice of coastal Orange County, Calif. In the fall of 2022, the district had 711 home-schooled kids — a dip from its high of 1,000 in the fall of 2020 but still a 139 percent increase from the 2017-18 school year.
Until last year, when she moved to neighboring Riverside County, Stephanie Peterson lived in Capistrano Unified, which outperforms 87 percent of other school districts nationwide on standardized test scores. Peterson describes herself as “very pro-public education.”
But Peterson found that her children didn’t thrive in Capistrano Unified schools. Her eldest daughter, now 20, eventually transferred to a charter school. Officials at the local elementary school didn’t properly accommodate her 9-year-old daughter’s severe peanut allergy, Peterson said, and she worried that school services for the girl’s autism were insufficient.
Since 2021, Peterson has home-schooled both the 9-year-old and her 7-year-old son.
“I think it’s an excellent school district,” she said of Capistrano Unified, “if you are a kid who doesn’t have any special needs.”
‘The heart of the community’
Parents and students break for lunch at Trinity Education Academy of Christian Homeschoolers in Tampa. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What lies ahead for American home schooling?
It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.
Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.
Concerns about school shootings, bullying, and the general quality of the school environment — intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve — were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.
Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.
Thanks in part to such policies, home schooling will increasingly compete for tax dollars with the public education system.
It could also undermine the role that public schools have traditionally played in American life.
“If you go to any public school, it’s the heart of the community in which it is situated,” said Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association. “People gather there for football games. They gather there for concerts. They go to celebrate the academic success of their students.”
Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people.
And some of what schools offer is hard to replace. When floods ravaged the Appalachian region where Campbell worked as a music teacher, he said, many turned to the public schools for shelter.
But many are also turning away. In Campbell’s Knox County school district, public school enrollment declined 16 percent during the last six years.
Over the same period, the county’s number of home-schooled students grew 80 percent.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Sep 27, 2023
On Banning Books
 |
| The Kennedy family reads controversial books while waiting for a board meeting of the Hamilton East Public Library Noblesville IN 08-24-2023 |
(these people are about to be labeled "outlaw" because
they refuse to let a buncha pinch-faced, blue-nosed, puritan biddies
tell them what the can and can't read in a public school)
And BTW, this move against books is another aspect of the "conservative" effort to kill public education. If I can make you believe the schools are so thoroughly fucked up that your kids are being damaged, then it's going to be easier for me to convince you to privatize the system, and let me sell the whole thing to my brother-in-law, who, by some odd coincidence, has recently developed a burning desire to teach children what I think they should know.
Oy
Here’s your guide to the heroes and villains—plus a list of the 50 most banned books.
Citizens have led fiery campaigns against books they deem objectionable since before America’s founding. As early as the 1650s, Massachusetts Bay colonists banned and burned William Pynchon’s pamphlet “The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption” because it allegedly failed to adhere to Calvinist beliefs. Book bans were common in the South in the run-up to the Civil War, and nationwide during the McCarthy era.
But in the last few years, something changed. More people began writing complaints and demonstrating at meetings. They grew far more vocal. And they started to rally around the same texts, slamming them as “pornographic” or for supposedly preaching “critical race theory.” Since 2021, book banning—specifically, blocking access to books in schools and libraries—has become an organized movement, one backed by a powerful network of politicians, advocacy groups, and conservative donors.
More books are being challenged—for possible restriction or removal from libraries and curricula—than have been in decades. In the first half of the 2022–23 school year, PEN America, the free speech organization, tracked nearly 1,500 book bans nationwide, affecting 874 unique titles. Books centering on people of color and LGBTQ+ characters have been disproportionately targeted. In some GOP-controlled states, legislation has led to the widespread removal from schools of books with references to sex and sexuality, as well as race and racism.
The first week of October is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, and to mark the occasion, The New Republic will launch a Bookmobile Tour to distribute texts conservatives have decided children simply should not read.
CENSORSHIP CHIEFS
Ron DeSantis
Under Governor DeSantis, Florida became the first of many red states to enact laws making it easier for parents to challenge books in school libraries that they believe are pornographic, deal improperly with race, or can otherwise be considered inappropriate. DeSantis was applauded by a Moms for Liberty (see below) founder for “blazing a trail” on school book bans.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Governor Huckabee Sanders signed a law imposing criminal penalties on Arkansas librarians who knowingly provide “harmful” materials to minors—though a federal judge has temporarily blocked sections of the law, calling them too vague. In January, Sanders also signed an executive order to prohibit “indoctrination” and “critical race theory” in schools.
Greg Abbott
The Texas governor signed a law banning sexually explicit books from schools. The law requires vendors to rate books as “sexually relevant” or “sexually explicit” to determine if they require parental approval or full removal. During the 2021–22 school year, Texas districts banned more books than those in any other state.
Moms for Liberty
Founded in 2021, Moms for Liberty has rapidly expanded into a national organization with almost 300 chapters. Its strategy is to take over school boards and label dissenting teachers, librarians, and parents “groomers.” The organization has also endorsed legislation in line with its goals like “Don’t Say Gay,” the notorious Florida law hamstringing discussions of sexuality in many classrooms. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty an extremist group.
READING REBELS
Suzette Baker
In March 2022, Baker was fired as head librarian of the Kingsland Branch Library in Llano County, Texas, for “insubordination” and “failure to follow instructions,” which she said included her refusal to take down a display of banned books. Among the titles that have attracted the ire of local officials: Between the World and Me, the Ta-Nehisi Coates book that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
Debbie Chavez
Chavez quit her school librarian job in Round Rock, Texas, after a parent met with her to discuss Lawn Boy—a novel that includes a romance between two boys—and secretly recorded the conversation, sharing excerpts on Facebook. Critics claimed she was “grooming” kids and called for her firing. “It was so horrific to see that my words were being used as a rallying cry for the book censors,” she told The New York Times.
Summer Boismier
Boismier, an English teacher at Norman High School in Oklahoma, shared with her students a Q.R. code to Books UnBanned, a program of New York’s Brooklyn Public Library that offers access to books that have been banned or challenged. She received a torrent of abuse and later resigned, claiming there was no way for her to do her job amid passage of a new law limiting instruction related to race and gender.
Anonymous Utah parent
In a protest of legislation making it easier to remove “pornographic or indecent” content, a Utah parent filed a complaint with an eight-page list of objectionable passages from the Bible—successfully forcing a district to remove the text from elementary and middle schools. The decision was quickly reversed.
50 MOST BANNED BOOKS
(Books are listed in descending order by frequency of bans in schools nationwide.)
Gender Queer: A Memoir
by Maia Kobabe
All Boys Aren’t Blue
by George M. Johnson
Out of Darkness
by Ashley Hope Pérez
Gender Queer: A Memoir
by Maia Kobabe
All Boys Aren’t Blue
by George M. Johnson
Out of Darkness
by Ashley Hope Pérez
A Lake Travis, Texas, parent got a book purged from her school’s library after googling “cornhole,” a word that appears in Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez, explaining at a school board meeting what she’d learned: “Cornhole is a sexual slang vulgarism” and “means to have anal sex.”
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Lawn Boy
by Jonathan Evison
The Hate U Give
by Angie Thomas
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
by Jesse Andrews
Thirteen Reasons Why
by Jay Asher
Crank
by Ellen Hopkins
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
l8r, g8r
by Lauren Myracle
This Book Is Gay
by Juno Dawson
Melissa
by Alex Gino
Looking for Alaska
by John Green
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
by Susan Kuklin
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
A Fairfax County, Virginia, parent tried and failed to get Toni Morrison’s Beloved banned for allegedly being rife with explicit material. Still, the aggrieved citizen went on to star in a Glenn Youngkin campaign ad as he successfully ran for governor in 2021.
This One Summer
by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
Drama: A Graphic Novel
by Raina Telgemeier
Flamer
by Mike Curato
Jack of Hearts (and other parts)
by L.C. Rosen
The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel
The Breakaways
by Cathy G. Johnson
Nineteen Minutes
by Jodi Picoult
All American Boys
by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky
Tricks
by Ellen Hopkins
More Happy Than Not
by Adam Silvera
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health
by Robie Harris
Monday’s Not Coming
by Tiffany D. Jackson
A Court of Mist and Fury
by Sarah J. Maas
Sold
by Patricia McCormick
The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives
by Dashka Slater
Dear Martin
by Nic Stone
Speak
by Laurie Halse Anderson
Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen
by Jazz Jennings
Almost Perfect
by Brian Katcher
Real Live Boyfriends: yes. boyfriends, plural. if my life weren’t complicated, I wouldn’t be Ruby Oliver
by E. Lockhart
The Truth About Alice
by Jennifer Mathieu
Lucky
by Alice Sebold
Killing Mr. Griffin
by Lois Duncan
We Are the Ants
by Shaun David Hutchinson
I Am Jazz
by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel
How to Be an Antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi
Two Boys Kissing
by David Levithan
The Infinite Moment of Us
by Lauren Myracle
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds
Seven white school board members voted unanimously in Pickens County, South Carolina, to remove Stamped from libraries and classrooms. It traces the history of racism in the United States, but parents complained that it “promote[s] socialism” and “demonstrates radical Marxism infecting our schools and our culture.”
And Tango Makes Three
by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Source: PEN America data from 2021–22 school year
MORE RIDICULOUS STORIES
Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation
An illustrated adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl was banned from a high school library in Florida because, critics bizarrely claimed, it minimized the Holocaust and—perhaps more important—captured a young girl’s thoughts about other female bodies. A county chapter chair of the far-right group Moms for Liberty led the charge for removal over its “sexually explicit” material.
Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes
The director of a Florida police union targeted this book about a Black boy killed by police. “Our members feel that this book is propaganda that pushes an inaccurate and absurd stereotype of police officers in America,” he wrote. Further use of the book was paused in a classroom in Broward County.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
A Leander, Texas, parent went after Machado’s surreal memoir about domestic abuse, brandishing a sex toy at a school board meeting while decrying portions of the book detailing a lesbian relationship. “This is what we’re asking our children to read,” the parent said, taking out a pink dildo. The book was ultimately removed from school libraries in the district.
Maus by Art Spiegelman
In January 2022, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban this Pulitzer-winning graphic novel from its eighth grade curriculum. The book depicts Holocaust victims as mice and Nazis as cats. One board member took offense at illustrations of naked mice in the book. “All the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity.… If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it,” he said.
Jul 18, 2023
Today's Deep Thought
If teachers have been indoctrinating kids in public schools, then more adults would know the correct usage of commas and apostrophes.
Oct 24, 2022
It Gets Worse
I'll say it again:
(pay wall)
Opinion
DNA kits for kids show Texas’s twisted priorities
Members of the U.S. armed forces are fingerprinted, their DNA is collected, and the information is kept on file and in storage. It is a precaution for those terrible situations in which a body needs to be identified and an acknowledgement of the danger inherent in serving in the military. That Texas officials think schoolchildren should take the same precautions as troops who go into battle speaks volumes about the twisted priorities that have protected gun rights at the expense of children.
“A gift of safety, from our family to yours” reads the message printed on fingerprint and DNA kits that are being handed out to parents of Texas public school students to help them identify their children “in case of an emergency.” Parents who opt in — the program is free and voluntary — will be able to keep their child’s DNA and fingerprint information at home, and can later provide it to law enforcement agencies in emergency situations if needed. The 2021 law establishing a “child identification program” doesn’t explicitly say it’s for identifying victims of school shootings, and text on the kits only references missing children. But five months after a gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., it is hard not to make the connection.
“I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?” said the mother of a Texas second-grader. “Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted on Twitter. Among the gut-wrenching things we learned about Uvalde was that authorities had to ask for DNA samples from parents because it was hard to identify the bodies due to the devastating damage caused by the high-powered rifle the gunman used. A pediatrician who treated Uvalde victims told Congress what he witnessed: “Two children whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is running for reelection this year, has refused to even entertain the idea of trying to do something about the availability of weapons of war that did such unspeakable damage. Such as banning them or, at the very least, changing the law so that someone such as the Uvalde shooter wouldn’t be able to legally buy an assault rifle just after they turned 18. Instead, the state hands out kits that make it easier for parents to identify their slaughtered children and has the gall to do it in the name of safety.
Somewhere in Texas, someone has recently discovered he has a passion for DNA testing and all he really wants to do is help those poor unfortunate people in their time of need - and for only about 60 bucks a pop.
$322,295,160.00
in somebody's pocket
if they send out a test for every school kid.
A nice fat payday,
potentially for years to come.
(pay wall)
Opinion
DNA kits for kids show Texas’s twisted priorities
Members of the U.S. armed forces are fingerprinted, their DNA is collected, and the information is kept on file and in storage. It is a precaution for those terrible situations in which a body needs to be identified and an acknowledgement of the danger inherent in serving in the military. That Texas officials think schoolchildren should take the same precautions as troops who go into battle speaks volumes about the twisted priorities that have protected gun rights at the expense of children.
“A gift of safety, from our family to yours” reads the message printed on fingerprint and DNA kits that are being handed out to parents of Texas public school students to help them identify their children “in case of an emergency.” Parents who opt in — the program is free and voluntary — will be able to keep their child’s DNA and fingerprint information at home, and can later provide it to law enforcement agencies in emergency situations if needed. The 2021 law establishing a “child identification program” doesn’t explicitly say it’s for identifying victims of school shootings, and text on the kits only references missing children. But five months after a gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., it is hard not to make the connection.
“I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?” said the mother of a Texas second-grader. “Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted on Twitter. Among the gut-wrenching things we learned about Uvalde was that authorities had to ask for DNA samples from parents because it was hard to identify the bodies due to the devastating damage caused by the high-powered rifle the gunman used. A pediatrician who treated Uvalde victims told Congress what he witnessed: “Two children whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is running for reelection this year, has refused to even entertain the idea of trying to do something about the availability of weapons of war that did such unspeakable damage. Such as banning them or, at the very least, changing the law so that someone such as the Uvalde shooter wouldn’t be able to legally buy an assault rifle just after they turned 18. Instead, the state hands out kits that make it easier for parents to identify their slaughtered children and has the gall to do it in the name of safety.
Tell me there's no real probability that this little stunt is aimed at making parents less likely to support public schools, and more likely for another brother-in-law to pop up and sell his ideas for privatizing education "for the sake of your children's safety".
- or just -
Sorry, folks, but we can't afford to keep the schools open because we spent all the money on School Resource Officers, steel doors, combat arms training for teachers - and DNA tests so we can identify what's left of your kids once all of our other stupid ideas fail.
Oct 20, 2022
Today's SMFH
Somewhere in Texas, there's a well-connected brother-in-law who's recently discovered he has a burning passion for DNA Testing, and that he'll be needing another vacation home.
BTW, there's nothing here to change my thinking that Republicans are doing everything they can think of to make public schools disappear.
Texas schools send parents DNA kits to identify their kids’ bodies in emergencies
After the mass shooting in Uvalde, the kits are making many parents feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
The state of Texas is sending public school students home with DNA kits designed to help their parents identify their children “in case of an emergency.”
In 2021, the Texas state legislature passed Senate Bill No. 2158, a law requiring the Texas Education Agency to “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
The law passed after eight students and two teachers were shot and killed inside Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and almost a year before 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were gunned down inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The Texas public school system will provide ink-free fingerprint and DNA identification cards to all K-6 students who are eligible. Parents are not mandated to use the kits.
The three-fold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children’s DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies in the event of an “emergency.” According to the legislation mandating the kits be provided to qualifying Texas families, the fingerprint and DNA verification kits were intended to “help locate and return a missing or trafficked child.”
In the wake of the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the botched police response that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Texas parents are apprehensive about the kits and the message some are saying it sends to Texas families.
Many of the children gunned down inside Robb Elementary were not easily identifiable as a result of their catastrophic injuries. Some close family members provided DNA swabs in order to positively identify the children’s remains.
Tracy Walder, a former CIA and FBI agent and current college professor who taught high school history for 16 years, said she was “devastated” when she heard her second-grade daughter would be sent home with a kit.
“You have to understand, I’m a former law enforcement officer,” Walder, who has lived in Texas for 14 years, said. "I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?”
Walder said she has tried to “find the right words” for how she feels, but she doesn’t think she can “because sometimes it’s beyond comprehension.”
“This sends two messages: The first is that the government is not going to do anything to solve the problem. This is their way of telling us that,” Walder said. “The second is that us parents are now forced to have conversations with our kids that they may not be emotionally ready for. My daughter is 7. What do I tell her?”
Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, shared his frustration over the kits on social media.
“Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Cross posted on Twitter.
Texas State Sen. Donna Campbell, who sponsored SB-2158, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said in a written statement provided to TODAY that “Senate Bill 2158 established the Child Identification Program, a grant to supply child I.D. fingerprint and DNA identification kits to school systems to provide to families in their respective school communities,” adding that “parents can voluntarily request these kits.”
“To fulfill this statutory obligation, TEA is collaborating with the Safety Blitz Foundation, National Child Identification (I.D.) Program, Education Service Centers, and school systems to provide families who had children in kindergarten through sixth grade during the 2021-2022 school year and kindergarten during the 2022-2023 school year with child I.D. fingerprint kits,” the statement added.
Some parents say they feel uncomfortable sending their children’s DNA to anyone for privacy reasons. And after the tragedy in Uvalde, the kits are making many moms and dads feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
“It makes me physically sick,” Wendi Aarons, a mom of two who has lived in Texas since 1999, told TODAY Parents. “I have a hard time even grappling with this as a real thing that is happening. Parents of school kids should be worrying about (parent-teacher organization) sign-up sheets and grades and if their kid likes whatever they’re serving in the cafeteria that day, not their child’s murder and if they’re shot so many times their body cannot be identified.”
Aarons has two children, ages 18 and 20, who attended Texas public schools from the time they were in kindergarten until they graduated high school. She said she’s grateful her children will not be sent home with DNA and fingerprint kits, and said she “can’t imagine the panic and anxiety parents face sending their kids to school every day not knowing if they’ll return.”
“It’s astounding, to realize that not only has the state of Texas done absolutely nothing to protect our kids and teachers, they’ve taken the callous, heartless, cruel measure to send DNA test kits so we can identify their bodies if or when they’re victims of a massacre,” Aarons added. “It sends the message that guns are more important than us.”
In June, Emily Westbrooks and her family moved to Texas from Ireland, where she said “gun violence is negligible and sending children to school wasn’t a daily terror.”
“It infuriates me that these kits are being sent to families in lieu of any concrete action to prevent such terrorizing tragedies from occurring,” said Westbrooks, who has a 5-year-old in kindergarten and a 7-year-old in first grade. “I think the only way you can reasonably send your children to school is simply to tell yourself this won’t happen to your kids, which is of course just lying to yourself.”
Westbrooks adds that the kits shatter that lie and are an “incredibly triggering, in-your-face reminder that our kids are at risk of being obliterated by automatic weapons to the point they won’t be recognizable.”
“Elected officials, both national and Texan, have given up,” she added. “They’ve decided our kids aren’t worth restricting guns, but they’re offering us this as some kind of consolation. It’s disgusting that they can’t do any better than to admit that they won’t protect our children.”
BTW, there's nothing here to change my thinking that Republicans are doing everything they can think of to make public schools disappear.
Texas schools send parents DNA kits to identify their kids’ bodies in emergencies
After the mass shooting in Uvalde, the kits are making many parents feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
In 2021, the Texas state legislature passed Senate Bill No. 2158, a law requiring the Texas Education Agency to “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
The law passed after eight students and two teachers were shot and killed inside Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and almost a year before 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were gunned down inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The Texas public school system will provide ink-free fingerprint and DNA identification cards to all K-6 students who are eligible. Parents are not mandated to use the kits.
The three-fold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children’s DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies in the event of an “emergency.” According to the legislation mandating the kits be provided to qualifying Texas families, the fingerprint and DNA verification kits were intended to “help locate and return a missing or trafficked child.”
In the wake of the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the botched police response that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Texas parents are apprehensive about the kits and the message some are saying it sends to Texas families.
Many of the children gunned down inside Robb Elementary were not easily identifiable as a result of their catastrophic injuries. Some close family members provided DNA swabs in order to positively identify the children’s remains.
Tracy Walder, a former CIA and FBI agent and current college professor who taught high school history for 16 years, said she was “devastated” when she heard her second-grade daughter would be sent home with a kit.
“You have to understand, I’m a former law enforcement officer,” Walder, who has lived in Texas for 14 years, said. "I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?”
Walder said she has tried to “find the right words” for how she feels, but she doesn’t think she can “because sometimes it’s beyond comprehension.”
“This sends two messages: The first is that the government is not going to do anything to solve the problem. This is their way of telling us that,” Walder said. “The second is that us parents are now forced to have conversations with our kids that they may not be emotionally ready for. My daughter is 7. What do I tell her?”
Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, shared his frustration over the kits on social media.
“Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Cross posted on Twitter.
Texas State Sen. Donna Campbell, who sponsored SB-2158, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said in a written statement provided to TODAY that “Senate Bill 2158 established the Child Identification Program, a grant to supply child I.D. fingerprint and DNA identification kits to school systems to provide to families in their respective school communities,” adding that “parents can voluntarily request these kits.”
“To fulfill this statutory obligation, TEA is collaborating with the Safety Blitz Foundation, National Child Identification (I.D.) Program, Education Service Centers, and school systems to provide families who had children in kindergarten through sixth grade during the 2021-2022 school year and kindergarten during the 2022-2023 school year with child I.D. fingerprint kits,” the statement added.
Some parents say they feel uncomfortable sending their children’s DNA to anyone for privacy reasons. And after the tragedy in Uvalde, the kits are making many moms and dads feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
“It makes me physically sick,” Wendi Aarons, a mom of two who has lived in Texas since 1999, told TODAY Parents. “I have a hard time even grappling with this as a real thing that is happening. Parents of school kids should be worrying about (parent-teacher organization) sign-up sheets and grades and if their kid likes whatever they’re serving in the cafeteria that day, not their child’s murder and if they’re shot so many times their body cannot be identified.”
Aarons has two children, ages 18 and 20, who attended Texas public schools from the time they were in kindergarten until they graduated high school. She said she’s grateful her children will not be sent home with DNA and fingerprint kits, and said she “can’t imagine the panic and anxiety parents face sending their kids to school every day not knowing if they’ll return.”
“It’s astounding, to realize that not only has the state of Texas done absolutely nothing to protect our kids and teachers, they’ve taken the callous, heartless, cruel measure to send DNA test kits so we can identify their bodies if or when they’re victims of a massacre,” Aarons added. “It sends the message that guns are more important than us.”
In June, Emily Westbrooks and her family moved to Texas from Ireland, where she said “gun violence is negligible and sending children to school wasn’t a daily terror.”
“It infuriates me that these kits are being sent to families in lieu of any concrete action to prevent such terrorizing tragedies from occurring,” said Westbrooks, who has a 5-year-old in kindergarten and a 7-year-old in first grade. “I think the only way you can reasonably send your children to school is simply to tell yourself this won’t happen to your kids, which is of course just lying to yourself.”
Westbrooks adds that the kits shatter that lie and are an “incredibly triggering, in-your-face reminder that our kids are at risk of being obliterated by automatic weapons to the point they won’t be recognizable.”
“Elected officials, both national and Texan, have given up,” she added. “They’ve decided our kids aren’t worth restricting guns, but they’re offering us this as some kind of consolation. It’s disgusting that they can’t do any better than to admit that they won’t protect our children.”
Jul 14, 2016
Metal Working
They never told me I could put Shop Class together with Art Class and maybe end up with something this fucking amazing.
Mar 7, 2016
What We Really Need
"... are fewer people who think there's one single thing that will solve all of our problems ..."
Lily Eskelsen, NEA President:
Lily Eskelsen, NEA President:
Gimme what we'll spend the next several years on a coupla fully-loaded Ford class aircraft carriers, and I'll turn every public school in this joint into a fucking palace. Not by painting the walls and landscaping the parking lots, but by helping the people who struggle sometimes just to survive in the neighborhoods where those schools are.
You can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods. And you can't fix the neighborhoods without giving people solid reasons to believe we're not gonna turn our backs on them and allow their kids to be mangled and pulverized by the cycle of poverty ignorance and crime.
Sep 13, 2015
Schools
We "tried" desegregation and integration for about one generation, and just as the "achievement gap" was closing in a very significant way; just as minorities were beginning to manifest the side bennies of education (longer healthier lives, net worth, etc), we bailed. We gave in to the whiny-butt pussies of the Radical Right and we fucking bailed - on ourselves.
hat tip = Ta-Nehisi Coates via twitter
hat tip = Ta-Nehisi Coates via twitter
Jun 10, 2014
This Business Of Teaching
Most 'conservatives' will say (ie: just repeat whatever they heard somebody say that they think sounded kinda smart) - anyway, they'll say they want a school (eg) to be run more like a business. And then they usually go on to say a lot of things that leave most of us wondering if they have the first fucking clue about running any kind of anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to a business. From what we've seen of American Management in the last 20 years or so, I'm not holding out lotsa hope for anything to improve any time soon.
Accountability only works when it flows in both directions; it requires the boss to be accountable as well - for setting reasonable goals and expectations; for sticking with the plan until or unless changes are truly warranted by checking real results against those reasonable expectations; for not changing the plan in the middle of everything just because it's politically expedient for you to fuck over somebody's union, or because you need to get up over the next bonus hurdle to cover the down payment on your new boat, or because your 2nd cousin suddenly discovered his burning passion for student assessment and testing technologies that require a "quick and substantial investment of tax dollars in our children's future blah blah blah".
And gosh - it suddenly occurs to me that what we need the teachers to do is what teachers try to do every fucking day of their careers - assess needs, set goals, make plans, implement their plans, check each student's progress, measure their own effectiveness and tweak their plans as they go, etc etc etc. And what we need the Admin to do is what the teachers try to do every fucking day of their careers.
I can read. I can read a whole buncha stuff on education and teaching and all that, and I can make it sound like I know more than I actually know about almost anything - cuz I'm a good salesman. But I'm not a school teacher, so I actually know exactly jack shit about what it takes to be a good school teacher.
Ya wanna know who does know something about being a good teacher? Teachers.
Maybe we could find some of those teacher people - AND FUCKING LISTEN TO THEM.
Here's Curmudgucation on the subject of evaluating teachers:
Before you can judge teachers, you have to decide what you want them to do. That turns out to be really complicated and difficult and wildly varied from parent to taxpayer to administrators to bureaucrats. It even varies within families-- what I want you to accomplish with my oldest child may be way different from what I want you to accomplish with my youngest.
Because this is so hugely difficult, we mostly just don't do it. We collective wave our hands in the general directions of students and say, "I don't know. Go do teachy things." If you want to evaluate people on job performance, you have to decide what job you want them to perform.And there ya go. First things first. What is it you want those teachers to do? What are the benchmarks? We have to stop stoopidly insisting that a job description can be "do the job I want you to do" and that's all it needs to say.
Accountability only works when it flows in both directions; it requires the boss to be accountable as well - for setting reasonable goals and expectations; for sticking with the plan until or unless changes are truly warranted by checking real results against those reasonable expectations; for not changing the plan in the middle of everything just because it's politically expedient for you to fuck over somebody's union, or because you need to get up over the next bonus hurdle to cover the down payment on your new boat, or because your 2nd cousin suddenly discovered his burning passion for student assessment and testing technologies that require a "quick and substantial investment of tax dollars in our children's future blah blah blah".
And gosh - it suddenly occurs to me that what we need the teachers to do is what teachers try to do every fucking day of their careers - assess needs, set goals, make plans, implement their plans, check each student's progress, measure their own effectiveness and tweak their plans as they go, etc etc etc. And what we need the Admin to do is what the teachers try to do every fucking day of their careers.
I can read. I can read a whole buncha stuff on education and teaching and all that, and I can make it sound like I know more than I actually know about almost anything - cuz I'm a good salesman. But I'm not a school teacher, so I actually know exactly jack shit about what it takes to be a good school teacher.
Ya wanna know who does know something about being a good teacher? Teachers.
Maybe we could find some of those teacher people - AND FUCKING LISTEN TO THEM.
May 9, 2014
Is Our Children Learning?
Yes - they're learning how to take the shortcuts necessary to get the money without having to do the work, which is almost exactly what the Law of Unintended Consequences is all about, which is in full flower when it comes to the straightup bullshit that so many people like to call "School Reform".
Here's a new site I stumbled upon today: CURMUDGUCATION
And here's a full post that lays it all out:
Since the president has declared this week National Charter School Appreciation & General Ain't Charters Swell Week, you are probably thinking, "How can I be part of the charter school excitement?"
In the past, many charters were launched that focused solidly on providing unique and exciting educational experiences for their communities. These schools were innovative. These schools were connected to their communities. These schools were icing on the public school system cake. And these schools were run by chumps. There's only one question you need to answer to gauge the success of your charter school -- am I making money.
Here's how to properly cash in on the charter school movement.
Diversify!
Not the school -- your portfolio. Set up multiple companies. Create a holding company that owns the building, and charge the school rent and facilities fees. Create a school management company, and hire yourself to run your school. Form your own custodial contracting company. Write your own textbooks, and then sell them to yourself. Buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and set yourself up as a lunch concession with ten dollar sandwiches.
Don't Overlook the Obvious
"Non-profit" just means "not wasting money by throwing it away on stockholders." Taking money hand over fist that you can't call profit? Just put it all in a big wheelbarrow and pay it to yourself as a salary. There's no legal limit to what you can be paid as the charter school operator. The only limits to your salary are the limits set by your own sense of shame. If you have no shame, then ka-ching, my friend. Ka. Ching.
Ain't Too Proud To Beg
Have a fundraiser. When you wave schools and children at people, they fork over money like crazy, whether you actually need it or not. The only way it could work any better would be if you found a way to work in the American flag and puppies.
Students Are Marketing Tools
Students have a job at your charter, and that's to make your charter look good and marketable. If they won't do the job, fire them. If they aren't for sure going to graduate, fire them before senior year (100 percent graduation rate makes great ad copy). If they are going to create bad press for disciplinary reasons, fire them.
Students Are Also The Revenue Stream
The other function of students is to bring money in while not costing any more than is absolutely necessary. Never take students with special needs (unless you can use them to make the school look good without incurring extra costs). If a student will require extra disciplinary or academic intervention, fire him.
Always remember, however, that students need to be fired during Firing Season -- late enough to hold onto the money they bring, but early enough that they won't hurt your numbers.
Only Use McTeachers
Personnel costs will eat up your revenue. Make sure your teachers are young, cheap, and easily replaced. Remember -- with the proper programs in a box, teaching requires no more training and expertise than bagging up an order of fries. Why pay New Cadillac wages when all you need are Used Yugos. It should go without saying, but they should never, ever be allowed to organize. Keep them too demoralized to cause trouble, and if someone insists on causing trouble, fire her. Pro tip: TFA can be a great source of people who don't even want to be teachers and will gladly take themselves out of your way.
Remember -- You Are A Public School
You are entitled to public money, public resources, public buildings, public anything you can get them to give you. Never pay a cost out of your pocket when you can get the taxpayers to foot the bill. You also want to accent the "public" in your marketing, as it helps reduce parents' reluctance to screw over the actual public schools.
Remember -- You Are A Private School
Never let anybody see your financials, ever. This is your business, and nobody -- especially not the taxpayers who pay you -- is entitled to know anything about how you run it. "Transparency" is a dirty, dirty word.
In general, rules are for chumps. Make sure you are only playing by the ones that best serve your ROI.
Make the Right Friends
It's true that not everybody can afford to buy, say, an entire legislature or the governor of a state, but even outside of New York, it's possible to use the giant pile of money you've accumulated to help important people understand what a great public service you're performing.
We've come a long way from the days when charter school operators made the mistake of thinking that their schools should focus on educating young men and women. In Modern Times, we better understand that a well-run charter operation can contribute to an important job -- the business of taking money away from undeserving taxpayers and putting it in the hands of the deserving rich. By focusing on the One True Function of charter schools -- making money -- you can develop a robust business that will make it possible for you to send your own children to real private schools that provide the kind of education that, thank goodness, you will never try to incorporate into your own charter operation.
Here's a new site I stumbled upon today: CURMUDGUCATION
And here's a full post that lays it all out:
Since the president has declared this week National Charter School Appreciation & General Ain't Charters Swell Week, you are probably thinking, "How can I be part of the charter school excitement?"
In the past, many charters were launched that focused solidly on providing unique and exciting educational experiences for their communities. These schools were innovative. These schools were connected to their communities. These schools were icing on the public school system cake. And these schools were run by chumps. There's only one question you need to answer to gauge the success of your charter school -- am I making money.
Here's how to properly cash in on the charter school movement.
Diversify!
Not the school -- your portfolio. Set up multiple companies. Create a holding company that owns the building, and charge the school rent and facilities fees. Create a school management company, and hire yourself to run your school. Form your own custodial contracting company. Write your own textbooks, and then sell them to yourself. Buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and set yourself up as a lunch concession with ten dollar sandwiches.
Don't Overlook the Obvious
"Non-profit" just means "not wasting money by throwing it away on stockholders." Taking money hand over fist that you can't call profit? Just put it all in a big wheelbarrow and pay it to yourself as a salary. There's no legal limit to what you can be paid as the charter school operator. The only limits to your salary are the limits set by your own sense of shame. If you have no shame, then ka-ching, my friend. Ka. Ching.
Ain't Too Proud To Beg
Have a fundraiser. When you wave schools and children at people, they fork over money like crazy, whether you actually need it or not. The only way it could work any better would be if you found a way to work in the American flag and puppies.
Students Are Marketing Tools
Students have a job at your charter, and that's to make your charter look good and marketable. If they won't do the job, fire them. If they aren't for sure going to graduate, fire them before senior year (100 percent graduation rate makes great ad copy). If they are going to create bad press for disciplinary reasons, fire them.
Students Are Also The Revenue Stream
The other function of students is to bring money in while not costing any more than is absolutely necessary. Never take students with special needs (unless you can use them to make the school look good without incurring extra costs). If a student will require extra disciplinary or academic intervention, fire him.
Always remember, however, that students need to be fired during Firing Season -- late enough to hold onto the money they bring, but early enough that they won't hurt your numbers.
Only Use McTeachers
Personnel costs will eat up your revenue. Make sure your teachers are young, cheap, and easily replaced. Remember -- with the proper programs in a box, teaching requires no more training and expertise than bagging up an order of fries. Why pay New Cadillac wages when all you need are Used Yugos. It should go without saying, but they should never, ever be allowed to organize. Keep them too demoralized to cause trouble, and if someone insists on causing trouble, fire her. Pro tip: TFA can be a great source of people who don't even want to be teachers and will gladly take themselves out of your way.
Remember -- You Are A Public School
You are entitled to public money, public resources, public buildings, public anything you can get them to give you. Never pay a cost out of your pocket when you can get the taxpayers to foot the bill. You also want to accent the "public" in your marketing, as it helps reduce parents' reluctance to screw over the actual public schools.
Remember -- You Are A Private School
Never let anybody see your financials, ever. This is your business, and nobody -- especially not the taxpayers who pay you -- is entitled to know anything about how you run it. "Transparency" is a dirty, dirty word.
In general, rules are for chumps. Make sure you are only playing by the ones that best serve your ROI.
Make the Right Friends
It's true that not everybody can afford to buy, say, an entire legislature or the governor of a state, but even outside of New York, it's possible to use the giant pile of money you've accumulated to help important people understand what a great public service you're performing.
We've come a long way from the days when charter school operators made the mistake of thinking that their schools should focus on educating young men and women. In Modern Times, we better understand that a well-run charter operation can contribute to an important job -- the business of taking money away from undeserving taxpayers and putting it in the hands of the deserving rich. By focusing on the One True Function of charter schools -- making money -- you can develop a robust business that will make it possible for you to send your own children to real private schools that provide the kind of education that, thank goodness, you will never try to incorporate into your own charter operation.
Feb 26, 2014
Here's A Thought
Nobody likes Foreign Aid, and nobody much likes Uganda's prez, and practically nobody's at all in favor of spending tax dollars to help fuck people over (well - not out in the open anyway).
So let's take the $485 Million we'd normally wrap neatly and ship to Museveni's bankers in Switzerland; and instead, divvy it up and give $150 to every public school teacher here at home. Can we try that just this one time?
So let's take the $485 Million we'd normally wrap neatly and ship to Museveni's bankers in Switzerland; and instead, divvy it up and give $150 to every public school teacher here at home. Can we try that just this one time?
Nov 13, 2013
Schools Matter
So what happens if we don't slap a nation-wide school system with all the crap we've been dumping on our public schools?
Schools Matter takes a look at it - and finds that the DoD schools were exempted from NCLB etc etc etc, and gosh:
Then we have the bunch in the middle where there's no appreciable difference between these schools and the Nation Average:
Did ya happen to notice where the DoD schools happened to rank in all o' dat?
Almost forgot - isn't a school operated by the Department of Defense very much the epitome of a "Government School"? And since those Gubmint Skools are doing just fine without all that massive boondoggle, can we drop the bullshit now?
Schools Matter takes a look at it - and finds that the DoD schools were exempted from NCLB etc etc etc, and gosh:
So what do we see as a result at the DoDEA schools (see earlier post here) after all these years of living without corporate charter schools, teacher evaluation based on test scores, value-added assessment, corporate missionaries for TFA, AYP, Reading First, scripted parrot lessons, DIBELs, segregation based on test scores, corporate tutoring, venture philanthropy, required testing to graduate or be promoted to the next grade, total compliance classroom, test and punish, test prep, withdrawal of funds from those who need it most, rewarding schools that don't need it, nervous breakdowns, vomiting students, nosebleeds, suicides by principals, school children dying from toothaches as billions are spent on testing, and on and on....How have the DoDEA schools survived without all this?This first group includes the schools that have been scoring better than the National Average:
Then we have the bunch in the middle where there's no appreciable difference between these schools and the Nation Average:
And lastly, here's the group lagging farthest behind the National Average:
Did ya happen to notice where the DoD schools happened to rank in all o' dat?
Almost forgot - isn't a school operated by the Department of Defense very much the epitome of a "Government School"? And since those Gubmint Skools are doing just fine without all that massive boondoggle, can we drop the bullshit now?
Nov 11, 2013
A New One For Me
Schools Matter:
I guess I should clarify what I think has failed - these attempts are not making for better students or for better teachers, and they're not making for a better work force, and they're sure as shit not making any given community better. It is, however working beautifully when it comes to making some well-connected "entrepreneurs" quite comfortably wealthy. Don't you have to wonder why Neil Bush suddenly discovered his long-dorment passion for Student Testing and Assessment right about the same time his brother was busily sliming No Child Left Behind thru congress?
See, it kinda works like this here: When you make the endeavor about The Public Good, then you build in an incentive to do good things for The Public. When you make the endeavor about Profit, then you build in the incentive for Rentiers to take profit.
(I can't believe anybody has to say it out loud like that, but fuck me, there it is)
Anyway, schools need a lot of help in a lot of ways, but a lot of the ways we've been "helping" them is straight up shameful. Let's try something else.
hat tip = Democratic Underground
This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasizing testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build. JH August, 2005I'll tell y'all up front that I don't know how to "fix the schools". But we've been trying this melange of Charter Schools and Magnet Schools and For-Profit-Public-Private and Casino-Style-High-Stakes-Testing etc etc for something like the last 20 years or so, and I think it's time to admit that practically every attempt to shoehorn the operations of a Public School System into the Standard Business Model has failed.
I guess I should clarify what I think has failed - these attempts are not making for better students or for better teachers, and they're not making for a better work force, and they're sure as shit not making any given community better. It is, however working beautifully when it comes to making some well-connected "entrepreneurs" quite comfortably wealthy. Don't you have to wonder why Neil Bush suddenly discovered his long-dorment passion for Student Testing and Assessment right about the same time his brother was busily sliming No Child Left Behind thru congress?
See, it kinda works like this here: When you make the endeavor about The Public Good, then you build in an incentive to do good things for The Public. When you make the endeavor about Profit, then you build in the incentive for Rentiers to take profit.
(I can't believe anybody has to say it out loud like that, but fuck me, there it is)
Anyway, schools need a lot of help in a lot of ways, but a lot of the ways we've been "helping" them is straight up shameful. Let's try something else.
hat tip = Democratic Underground
Aug 22, 2013
So, Here's A Question
What if Antoinette Tuff had been laid off?
If the school district in Decatur had come up a little short this year (because of a thoroughly bizarre problem we have of not being able to figure out that we have to pay for stuff), then there's a real probability that this one turns out just a bit different.
PS) Ms Tuff can "give it all" to her god if that's what she feels the need to do - for myself and (I'm bettin') for the 870 kids in that school, and the thousands of their family members, we're just pretty grateful for Antoinette Tuff.
If the school district in Decatur had come up a little short this year (because of a thoroughly bizarre problem we have of not being able to figure out that we have to pay for stuff), then there's a real probability that this one turns out just a bit different.
PS) Ms Tuff can "give it all" to her god if that's what she feels the need to do - for myself and (I'm bettin') for the 870 kids in that school, and the thousands of their family members, we're just pretty grateful for Antoinette Tuff.
Jun 10, 2013
Today's Dismal-ness
For all the time we spend blathering on about how rotten the schools are; and for all the inked up dead trees that eventually serve no purpose except to keep our Christmas decorations safe - for all of that over-stated and under-informed rhetoric, we still seem not to have any good ideas about what we might do to keep 'our precious youth' from rising up and slaughtering us in our beds one night when they finally get hip to how bad we're fuckin' 'em over.
From Salon, by David Sirota (hat tip = Facebook friend DC):
From Salon, by David Sirota (hat tip = Facebook friend DC):
Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.
For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.It's a big hot gnarly mess that doesn't get any better any time soon if we just continue to beat a starving mule, and while there is no solution for a big hot gnarly mess that fits neatly on a bumper sticker, this one thing is certain: you can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods.
May 11, 2013
Teaching
Next time you feel the need to dump on the schools because the teachers are nuthin' but a buncha lazy stupid entitlement-sucking bureaucrats who get a free pass at taxpayer expense, I'd like you to stop for just a brief moment - and then go fuck yourself with a pinecone.
(hat tip = my darling daughter and her 10th grade Psych teacher, Mr Ramey)
Apr 9, 2013
Fun With Sousaphones
It took us years to understand that the 'Band Geeks' were actually pretty amazing.
Aug 5, 2012
Parade Of Stupid
Stoopid shit we say about teachers:
"Teachers are just glorified babysitters."
"My kids never act out at home, I wonder what the teachers are doing wrong in the classroom."
And the big one - "We pay those teachers with our hard-earned tax dollars."
What you really need to remember is that Nostalgia was once classified as mental illness.
"Teachers are just glorified babysitters."
So let's pay 'em according to current babysitting rates.
($10/hour x 6 hours) = $60/day
($60/day x 5 days/week) = $300/week
($300/week x 36 weeks) = $10,800/year
($10,800/year x 30 kids) - (30% discount group rate) = $226,800
"My kids never act out at home, I wonder what the teachers are doing wrong in the classroom."
This is most strange. Maybe if the teachers came to observe you in your home for a few days, they could figure it out. When's a good time for 30 teachers to drop by your house to get some solid tips on how you go about controlling one or two children? Or maybe it'd be better if one teacher brought 30 kids to your place and just sat back to watch you work your magic.
And the big one - "We pay those teachers with our hard-earned tax dollars."
Speaking for myself, I pay about $4,200 per year in local taxes (property, sales, car, etc). I'm not dumb enough to think that all of that money goes to the high school where two of my kids are going this year, so I did a little fairly easy digging, and found out that the school budget total for 2012-13 is about $151 Million, out of a total budget for the whole county of $313 Million. The arithmetic is pretty simple at the top here. Schools account for about 48% of what I pay in local taxes - that's $2016.
Now let's pretend the whole $1008 (per kid) goes to "my" high school - what are the basics that I get for my contribution?(Plus, the joint is clean and safe and well-maintained; the kids get Annual Eye and Hearing tests, and a full time on-sight School Nurse; it has a new turf field, and the building was recently upgraded/updated with a bunch of other new goodies - plus they provide door-to-door transportation every day)
- 1260 hours of instruction (for the year) in English, History, a foreign language, Geometry, Algebra, Earth Science, Chorus, Phys Ed, Applied Computer Science, Graphic Design and Marketing, Intro To Psych, etc
- In-school tutoring
- Mentoring, coaching, counseling, etc
But let's just take the main point here, and further pretend that the whole cost of the school is devoted solely to the teaching of one of my kids for the year. 1260 instruction hours + 20 (or so) tutoring hours = 1280 hours. Divide that into the 1008 bucks I pay, and suddenly it starts to look like I'm gettin' a pretty good fucking deal at less than 79 cents/hour.At some point, we have to start to understand that we deserve a much better debate than this endless carping about bad government, unions, taxes; and how everything'll be peachy if we just apply some common sense and remember how great it all was back when Grandma was girl.
What you really need to remember is that Nostalgia was once classified as mental illness.
Jun 23, 2011
Oy
The question is "Should evolution be taught in school?"
If you're scoring at home*:
Yes = 16
No = 2
Yeah But -or- Both = 28
WTF = 5
*50 states plus DC
If you're scoring at home*:
Yes = 16
No = 2
Yeah But -or- Both = 28
WTF = 5
*50 states plus DC
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