Peter Cunningham, Assistant Secretary of Education under Barack Obama, tweeted this in response to the Santa Fe shooting.
https://twitter.com/PCunningham57/status/997498464542978048
Yeah, it’s that stupid of an idea.
Then I saw this tweet.
https://twitter.com/kaleidoscopeken/status/998098804107874304
Obviously Ken here thinks that the NRA is publicly funded. Why? I dunno. Maybe because Planned Parenthood is publicly funded.
If she doesn’t think that the NRA is publicly funded, than she thinks that she has to right to tell other people how to spend their money and that political donations are not protected free speech.
She must also believe that the problem with our educational system isn’t that it is being strangled by the iron law of bureaucracy.
Take for instance Illinois where money that should be going to students is being dumped into retired teachers because of the unfunded liability of the pension program fought for by the teacher’s union.
The reason young Ms. Smith is claiming that she is underpaid is that old Ms. Crabtree has been teaching for 40 years, all her lesson plans are laminated, her tests have been the same since the 80’s, but she won’t retire because she gets summers off and is collecting near six figures from old union deals.
Maybe our academic problems are due to schools, again like in Illinois or California where they had to take out math and science to teach LGBT history. Because who needs to know basic things like addition and subtraction when there is important stuff to know like which founding father’s liked it in the butt.
Maybe that’s why half the schools in Baltimore and DC have zero – as in not one student – proficiency in math and reading.
So I think Ken here is justifying Cunningham’s tweet.
Not just are our schools not teaching kids anything useful, the can’t even keep them safe.
I say, just take all the money that should to go the school system, pay it out back to parents in education vouchers, and I’ll stick my kids in the best private school I can find.
I think Cunningham was being sarcastic, but in his snark, was honest about just how bad this goverment solution is to a problem and along comes Ken to prove his point.
Cunningham has the right idea except for one missing word: it should be “public school” rather than simply “school”.
Why zero proficiency in math and reading? Because the teachers are not allowed to fail anyone. The kids know this, so why try? There is also no peer pressure to succeed. Why? There is likely to be *reverse* peer pressure! I experienced this myself, for a couple of years, but it was many years ago, and it seems as if things are as bad as possible now. I don’t know the answer, but it may get a lot worse before it gets better.
Not to interrupt your 2 minutes of hate, but teacher bashing from gunowners is every bit as annoying as gunowner bashing from liberals (and usually about as accurate). I’m too busy trying to get kids to understand math and basic problem-solving to be pushing any other agenda. As far as 6-figure salaries, the max our district will pay is $46K, and that’s after 25 years and a PhD.
I’m not sayIng public schools are awesome, but I am honestly trying to help the next generation.
Hate? Where?
I’m not sure why you read my comment as teacher bashing. The fact that I specifically mentioned public schools could be a clue: both public and private schools have teachers, but only public school have public education bureaucrats and public education politics. Those are the issue. We know that it’s quite doable to find competent teachers, private schools do this all the time.
Interesting… I don’t see a Teacher Bashing in the general sense but quite specific.
Of course, if you feel any attack to any teacher is bad, then we can’t help you there.
My wife was a teacher. You confuse hating teachers as a group with hating what the iron law of bureaucracy has done to public education.
I have written about this in greater detail here: https://gunfreezone.net/index.php/2017/11/29/laws-of-nature-and-the-laws-of-man/
and here: https://gunfreezone.net/index.php/2017/11/30/natural-outcomes/
In a nutshell, what the Iron Law of Bureaucracy says is that the bureaucracy will always protect itself.
There are good teachers who really want to help kids. I agree.
But the PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM as a system exists to protect itself. The bureaucrats in charge want their salaries and pensions. They will lie, cheat, and defraud to keep them. They will fudge test results and create “no fail” policies to keep the money coming in because protecting the bureaucracy is more important than the job of educating the kids.
You see this all over the place. Whenever there is a question about reduction in military spending, no General ever suggests cutting a worthless and outdated program. It’s always some program vital to national security that gets put on the chopping block? Why? Because then they can justify a budget increase by holding security hostage.
In the private sector, this is how the UAW killed GM. The Union protected its workers even though what it was demanding made GM insolvent.
I hate the bureaucracy of pubic school system and the bad teachers and administrators it protects. Now my comment about overpaid teachers may not be your district, but it was in Chicago. The old teachers didn’t have to abide by new ruled, so teachers hired before a certain date got the mandatory raises the union fought for while teachers hired afterwards didn’t.
This is why I like private school. When parents wanted an AP Chemistry class, for the tuition they were paying they got it. If the board didn’t want to hire an AP chem teacher, the parents would have voted the board down. There is no bureaucracy to protect them.
If power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely, than a bureaucratic power transmogrifies people into garbage.
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My mistake. You said, “Not just are our schools not teaching kids anything useful, they can’t even keep them safe.” Since schools don’t actually teach and teachers do, I took the first half of that sentence personally. (The second half is obviously true.) Your statements were categorical in nature. Since you did not qualify it in any way, I read that as “no school anywhere is teaching anything useful.” (I tend to be literal.)
I admit I’m a little raw on this subject. I’ve been hearing it all spring long between the school shootings and the teacher strikes, even from my own family.
Miguel, there are good and bad folks in any cross-section of society. I never said that all teachers were qood. All I am saying is that it would be nice if the gun community admitted there are public school teachers who wake up every day and want to do a good job.
I totally agree with you on bureaucracies.