I don’t like Joe Biden being a lackey of the teacher unions, and I think the entire Department of Education should be eliminated.
That being said, intervention from Washington is the not the main cause of America’s education problems. The real problem is that we have an inefficient monopoly system that is – for all intents and purposes – run for the benefit of teachers and bureaucrats.
All of us should be upset that we see more and more money going to more and more employees, but we don’t get any progress in boosting academic outcomes.
I sometimes think the system can’t get any worse.
But then I read something that almost makes me think that politicians want the system to be a failure.
Here’s a story from Yahoo! News that I first assumed was from the Babylon Bee. But it’s not satire, it really happened.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation. Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744…, an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation, according to the Oregonian. …The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards… Backers argued…the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” …Republicans criticized the proposal for lowering academic standards. “I worry that by adopting this bill, we’re giving up on our kids,” House Republican Leader Christine Drazan said.
I don’t know which part of the story is more reprehensible. Should we be more outraged that state politicians wants to eliminate standards, or should we be more outraged that supporters are implicitly (at the very least) racist in thinking that minority students can’t perform?
This is equivalent to breaking your bathroom scale because you don’t like your weight.
In any event, we have more evidence that government schools squander lots of money and deliver very poor results.
Which means we have more evidence in favor of school choice.
P.S. Since I’m pointing out the failure of government schools, I can’t resist sharing a couple of older stories
Here’s a bizarre story from New Jersey (h/t: Reason).
Ethan Chaplin, a Glen Meadow Middle School student, told News 12 last week that while he was twirling a pencil with a pen cap on in math class, a student who bullied him earlier in the day yelled “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.” He was suspended for two days and then underwent five hours of a physical and mental exam at Riverview Medical Center’s crisis unit, his father told NJ.com.
We have another crazy example of political correctness run amok, as reported by the New York Post (h/t: Daily Caller).
Meet 8-year-old Asher Palmer, who was tossed out of his special-needs Manhattan school for threatening other kids with a toy “gun’’ — which he made out of rolled-up paper. …[His mom] was incensed that Principal Micaela Bracamonte told other staffers in an email that Asher “had a model for physically aggressive behavior in his immediate family.’’ Spadone thinks Bracamonte was referring to her husband because he served in the military during the Kuwait war. If that was the reason for the comment, she said, “I find it offensive and inappropriate.’’ As far as the toy gun is concerned, she said Asher, a first-year student, made it out of a piece of paper after discussing military weapons with his dad.
I’ve previously shared many stories of anti-gun political correctness in government schools (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Makes me wonder whether that kind of nonsense is even more counterproductive to kids that some of the excesses of critical race theory.
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Image credit: Ken Gallager | CC BY-SA 4.0.
