The NEA and the unions are working together to bring the new curriculum to your darlings, lest they have any untoward hangup in later life of aahhh, delicate matters. The Magisterial ONE wishes you to know he endorses the NEA/Jennings program and strives to infuse this love of learning in all K-6 classrooms.
We’ll call it Health Class to fool the parents.

Language skills are soooooo important. That is why in a multi-culti society, it is critical to be able to quickly translate from one language to another.

After all, you don’t want to come up short on the crack deal, precipitating a turf war.
An’ you doan wanna be usin’ no words like precipitatin’ neither!

Are your child’s reading scores too high and his sex ed class scores too low.
There is an answer. Obviously, your offspring is dallying in the wrong places. Parents, get un-involved! Get out of the house and let the kids loose. Or stay and show the young’n how…

The Team Obama “Head” field man Kevin Jennings freely gives pep talks for school rallies and promotes consensual pre-teen rituals not even hardened perverts think up.

Parents, while you’re signing up for ObamaCare, select the Optometry choice, if offered. Might as well get ready for those kids glasses!

GIS: the new State way!

You can see why the need for Guns In School (GIS) is a coming thing.

14″ barrels, hmmm, not available to the public, must be for the math class ‘tards.
Teaching school in Obama’s ‘hood is getting harder and more dangerous.
TEST: #00 has 6 balls in each shell. I shoot Homey and hit him with 2, how many were left to hit Ratface?
No bodies left behind.

Remington Shotguns

Solicitation Number: EDOOIG-10-000004
Agency: Department of Education
Office: Contracts & Acquisitions Management
Location: Contracts (All ED Components)

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14″ - PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT - XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID - 14″ LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.

Or maybe it’s Kevin Jennings and GLESN’S NEW Ed curricula that needs some “kinks” worked out.

Swell!

Just one question comes to mind. From where do the teachers come and who taught them? They went through the same system.
This from NYC, it’s here too.

More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn’t mean they can do college math.

Basic algebra involving fractions and decimals stumped a group of City University of New York freshmen – suggesting city schools aren’t preparing them, a CUNY report shows.

“These results are shocking,” said City College Prof. Stanley Ocken, who co-wrote the report on CUNY kids’ skills. “They show that a disturbing proportion of New York City high school graduates lack basic skills.”

During their first math class at one of CUNY’s four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn’t solve a simple algebra problem, the report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs found. Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal. [snip]

“I just did this earlier. Now I forgot it again,” Jennifer Fortune, 18, who graduated from Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School, said when asked to answer one of the questions. “I was only required to take two years of math in high school, but I forgot a lot of it.”

John Jay College sophomore Ahmed Elshafaie, 19, who graduated from Long Island City High School, said he avoids math classes.

“I don’t want to ruin my GPA,” he said. “High school standards were really low.”

Of course in Vermont, everything is fine because Act 60/68 spends tax money faster than pirates on shore leave.

Why not test them with a test common to all schools, not some esoteric measurement of their butterfly energy and fear of CO2.

You wonder what is wrong?
How about an “Education Test” before letting these idiots vote! Vote Green!

 She’ll be voting for more welfare so she has time to dig up the backyard.

Now that the monarchist pageantry of the inauguration is over - blessedly so - the business of confirmations and governing is at hand.  Except for the disgrace of confirming a tax cheat as Treas Sec, and Hillary Clinton’s tin-drum chattering about “robust diplomacy and development” as the engine of American influence, the rest has been mundane.

Obama closed the slick chute to government jobs for lobbyists - sort of.  And by closing Gitmo, he removed one of the left’s infected piercings.  A preemptive, second, oath-of-officing silenced the phony birth certificate hopefuls.  A rhyming black “civil rights figure” racialized  the inauguration (how unexpected ), George Bush was heckled on his way out, and the world is happier - at least during the triumphalist, suspension-of-disbelief that follows any progressive victory, however small.  All crap, it’ll sink out of sight. 

Obama’s victory is bigger than anything that happened, bigger than any phenomena from the inauguration. And its energy isn’t compressed into the firecracker ideas of socialists or Marxists; or in the intoxicated love people have for Obama. Its power lies in Obama’s “pragmatism”.  He calls himself  a “pragmatist”.  Hacks and media strategists of all kinds, some of them Republicans, call Obama a pragmatist.  John McCain, if he hasn’t said it, is certainly about to say it with bi-partisan affection.  Hillary Clinton calls herself a pragmatist too, but with a fraction of Obama’s brain power, poise and cunning, she couldn’t pragmatize a bread recipe.    

Most of us think the pragmatist is non-ideological; that pragmatism is a signal of open-mindedness.  That suits Obama’s purpose, because pragmatism for guys with Obama’s education is a system of thought that comes with a capital “P”.  The word was introduced in 1878 by Charles Sanders Pierce, who proposed that ideas be evaluated in terms of their consequences, and that the consequences constituted the meaning of the idea, or its value.  “Truth”, in other words, is pliable if not meaningless to the pragmatist.  The pragmatist has a goal, sometimes an ideology which will be asserted, and flexibility is strictly about the means, NOT the goal. 

Now I haven’t read Pierce’s work, only summaries.  But you can find developments of the pragmatic system  in William James and, especially the progressive’s progressive, John Dewey.   Dewey eventually posited, in instrumentalism, that the search for abstract truth is pointless.  If you trust Wickipedia, you can begin your search for knowledge here, or follow the trail.  Progressivism is a weed with roots everywhere.   It’s the philosophy of the modernist, the revolutionary, and it energized the great secular tyrannies of the 20th century.

With Obama, liberty of  process is simply a function.  The outcome is what matters to him, and always will.  Was it Mao who said that the color of a cat doesn’t matter as long as it catches mice?   The credo of the pragmatist.  Watch out.

(Continuing my regular interest in the silly place called England.)

Word “School” is out for new 4.7M (sterling) Sheffield Primary

The word “school”, you see, has “negative connotations”…probably because  English “schools” are staffed by idiots, or the word is too hard to spell. 

Or maybe when you’re marooned on an island in the path of a lethal typhoon, you tinker with your coconut shell and monkeypod place settings in order to distract yourself from your realities.

The word “school” is derived from the Greek word “skhole” or “skole”, which is roughly defined as “leisure” or the things done in leisure time.  More specifically, it applied to the place where serious intellectual exchanges occur between students and teachers.

We can rule out the second usage for anything that might happen at Sheffield Primary.  Instead:

There are no whistles or bells, or locked doors.  We wanted to de-institutionalize the place and bring the school closer to real life.

Someone has stolen the bells and whistles, and the locked doors wouldn’t stop a yob with the physique of Hugh Grant.  For “real life” in Britain, Google “Britain’s crime rate”.

Millions of people are acquainted with Edward Hopper’s painting  “Nighthawks” (1942).  You wouldn’t conclude from this painting that Hopper was actually a lousy painter.  He never mastered the art of drawing; he had trouble depicting the human form (the lady nighthawk’s arms?) and was clumsy with perspective and composition .  

He excelled in his depiction of light and shadow, and above everything else, he wrapped most of his scenes in a warm, restorative blanket of melancholy. Clement Greenberg wrote in 1946  ”Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter.  But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist”.  
 
Hopper turned his hand to scenes of the Cape, of Gloucester and other locales, but  his urban scenes pose the possibility that a brickfront walk-up with shear curtains over two open windows, a steam radiator, plaster walls and a few hardcover books could be a refuge from the clatter and cultural cannibalism of American life.  Or, you could sit on a chrome and leatherette stool at midnight and have a coffee without hearing a siren or the thundering speakers of a passing Acura with wheels like razor blades.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember places like the Nighthawk’s cafe. They existed everywhere  through the 1950’s; before the demons of urban renewal, flush with reformer’s gold and fanciful ideas about urban living, destroyed all of them, and most of everything else. Rustling up the inhabitants of the old neighborhoods, they herded them off to the soul-desolating brick and sheetrock iron maidens of ”the projects”. 

Now the third generation of these bereft pawns of progressive policy seek outlets in drugs and violence.   They have no refuge, no lonely personal place to restore themselves, no space to collect on the debts that progressive brutalism has imposed upon them.   A place to breathe without sighing.  We give them what we can, the tinsel of materialism and the fraudulent promises of more, and even more, education to force rational order from moral devastation.  It can’t be done.

We build mocking monuments to what we destroyed.  We gild the skulls and bones of the old cityscapes, scrub the surviving redbricks clean and lease the space to kitsch dealers.  We outfit malls and trendy shopping centers in the architectural image of the remembered store fronts, some of them even containing pieces of the real thing - retail Frankensteins, with a plinth here, a column there, and herringbone brick underfoot.    Disney does the same thing; the effect is fit only for children and undiscriminating adults.   

Everyone’s looking for a place to be alone, or to leave a mark in the hardening cement.  And something else they want, I think - a place free of cant, free of social commentary, free of the governing compulsions of reformers, free of a political class intending to service the contradictory demands of the spirit and the body, and a little silence that equals inaction on the part of our political masters.     

I expect to see a lot more of this as the progressive Obama years grind on.  Somehow the left thinks he can restore the good things we no longer have, and make us whole again.  By pressing hard enough, his beneficent state will turn ordinary human flesh into diamonds.   I guess we’ll find out.

Future “Captains of Industry” as advanced by NOW

Last Saturday, following Hartford’s West Indian Festival, shooting broke out and, in separate incidents, seven youngster were shot.   Among them, a 21-year old was killed,  a 7-year old shot in the head, and a 15-month old toddler was shot in the leg.  Saturday was distinguished only by its concentration of the behaviors and pathologies that grind on more slowly, year after year, in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and any other urban sinkhole of Progressive social policy.

This time, the city of Hartford has enacted a curfew, which naturally is under legal assault from the ACLU.   But that’s a natural coordinate on this map of misery, and also not the subject of this post.  There is no subject of this post, just desperation.  The ACLU is a freak liberal offspring of value-free rationalism.  It’s too late to kill it.  There could be dozens of other pests described here, too, all injecting their amoral poison into the bloodstream of the lost individuals and families snared in the web of the helping professions and that ludicrous system called “the schools”. 

Hartford spends between $11000 and $17000 per student depending upon your source, and has a graduation rate of 29%.  New Haven, as I recall, is higher by a few points.   The figures are always misleading, because the parasitic organisms that attach themselves to school funding today always consume a huge portion of the cash available for TEACHING.  On that subject, read this and this.  The City of Hartford carries only about 20% of the educational financing, while the State of Connecticut provides the rest.  

Among the moral absurdities of this distribution of responsibility is that the bureaucratic weight of the entire State of Connecticut is useless on the subject of school performance, and its reflection in pools of blood on asphalt.  The Devil has a sense of humor, however, in that he gave us the ludicrous Nanny-figure of Governor Jodi Rell as the bug-eyed, mocking gargoyle on the ethical rubble of  Connecticut’s capital city. 

Rell cares so much she’s regularly heard in PSA’s on the agony of 911 operators, or the use of child safety seats, or fuming about the tragedy of  pampered, upper-middle class kids killing themselves with the reckless use of high-performance automobiles.  Meanwhile, the walls of civilization are crumbling around her, and her smiles, bottle-blond coif and freckles console the already dead.

Childhood is was a time of testing one’s abilities and limits. Today, being a kid is banned as aggressive, antisocial and overtly masculine, Oh the shame, the shame of being Ritalin free.

At McLean School, Playing Tag Turns Into Hot Potato

Robyn Hooker, principal of Kent Gardens Elementary School, has told students they may no longer play tag during recess after determining that the game of chasing, dodging and yelling “You’re it!” had gotten out of hand. Hooker explained to parents in a letter this month that tag had become a game “of intense aggression.”The principal said that her goal is to keep students safe and that she hopes to restore tag (as well as touch football, also now on hold) after teachers and administrators review recess policies.

After her review, tag will be acceptable provided there is no running and being “it” is abolished. New touch football rules stipulate walking for a touchdown and saying in a modulated voice “you’re touched.”

Students will be gratified to know the:

The Fairfax County schools’ office of risk management maintains a list of activities that are prohibited at any school-sponsored events. In addition to bungee-jumping and scuba diving, students are not permitted to break dance or play dodge ball or tug-of-war.

Unregulated activities such as

A 14-year-old Arizona girl was arrested on suspicion of hitting another teen over the head with a folding chair…[snip]

are not part of written school policy. This seems to be of a more serious nature than tag. I guess proscribing this behavior might sully the student’s self-esteem. Better to raise girlymen.

One needs the awareness that the Constitution is silent on education. Since most schools at the time were church run with some private, the need for public education did not exist. Looking at what passes for education today, proves all those white men had smarts.
Catholic schools demand scholarship, ethics, parental involvement and student disipline, or else. The greatest lack in the Catholic schools is the lack of victimhood and the PC ethos.
Which is why they work.
Incidently, non-catholics are not required to take religious instruction.
Viewed this way, the demise of Parochial education is desired by the Left.

‘Crisis’ with loss of Catholic schools

[snip]
Since 1999, a total of 1,267 Catholic schools have closed and 374 have opened, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. The number of Catholic elementary and high schools fell from 8,719 in the 1989-1990 school year to 7,378 in the current year, according to NCEA data.

According to Fordham researchers, the NCEA data translates into about 300,000 students who have been displaced from Catholic schools, at a cost to taxpayers of about $20 billion as public schools absorb the students. In an interview last month with The Washington Times, Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington predicted that this trend would continue without government vouchers, saying the church faced continued challenges to “sustain all of these schools, particularly in the poorest, urban areas.”

As Catholic families increasingly moved to suburbs in the 1960s and ’70s, urban Catholic schools increasingly began educating poor, non-Catholic students, the report noted. There were solid academic results, it argued, citing evidence like Andrew Greeley’s 1982 findings, which showed achievement of minority students was higher in Catholic schools than in public schools. [snip](emphasis added)

The report authors also argued that private-school vouchers “are no panacea” — noting that programs in Milwaukee and the District have not really helped the Catholic urban schools there and the Archdiocese of Washington is turning seven of its schools into public charter schools. [snip]

Private school vouchers cannot be used at Catholic schools; that is forbidden by law thanks to the ACLU and the Donks.

As part of the study, Fordham also commissioned a survey of 800 adults. The majority of adults surveyed chose Catholic schools as the best to offer a disciplined learning environment and instill moral values, and public schools as the best to work with economically disadvantaged students. [snip] (emphasis added)

Mr. Lopez is the male, California version of an “override” mom. They can never get enough of your money to provide subsidized private school quality educations for their children. And when the hard times come for everyone, they’re quick to explain why that’s your problem and not theirs.

However, there are a few interesting things to note here:

I was sitting with Jeff Kelly, who moved into a costly fixer-upper last year just to be in the Ivanhoe neighborhood so he could avoid the cost of private school. He said he’ll pony up too, although on principle he’s conflicted.

Bet your last dollar that Jeff wouldn’t be “conflicted” about passing those costs onto his neighbors. “Override” moms myopically focus on their needs and never consider that other people are struggling to make ends meet too.

At nearby Micheltorena Street School, where more than 90% of the students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, the principal told me that of course she can’t match that kind of parental support. She’s hoping that given the greater needs of her students, she’ll be spared harsh cuts. But like other principals, she doesn’t yet know how bad the news will be.

If we replaced the teachers at Micheltorena with PhD educated, highly committed faculty, do you think the educational outcomes would skyrocket? I’d argue no. They’re missing a key element that’s staring Mr. Lopez in the face—parental involvement. You can have the best teachers, facilities, athletics, etc, but it’ll go for not if parents abdicate their educational responsibilities.

Mr. Lopez’s active engagement is a huge difference maker in the quality of his child’s education. It isn’t strictly about squeezing more nickels out of his neighbors.

I wonder if Vermont teachers went to NY to help? The scores look like they did. After one gets by the dazzling footwork in Vermont, the scores are very close to one another.

Understand, the teachers of today went through the same educational system. This goes far to explain the problems in and with our schools.

Writing Mastery Eludes Majority In Eighth Grade

Three-quarters of eighth-graders in New York City’s public schools cannot write proficiently, a problem demonstrated by more than two-thirds of students statewide, according to results from a federally administered test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, found that 55% of city eighth-graders scored at the basic level, meaning they had a partial mastery of skills, and 20% scored below basic. The national average was 57% scoring at basic and 13% scoring below. The New York State scores represent no significant progress since the last time the test was administered, in 2002. Nationally, eighth-graders made modest but significant gains, with the average score rising three points since 2002, though the percentage of students scoring proficient, 33%, did not change significantly.

There is no way to record change over time for New York City, because 2007 was the first year the test results were separated out from state scores.

The city’s scores can be compared with other large central cities. By that metric, New York City’s scores were statistically neither better nor worse than the average; they were lower than three cities that topped the average: Charlotte, N.C.; San Diego, Calif., and Austin, Texas.

The director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, Jason Brooks, released a statement comparing the NAEP results to results produced by New York State tests, which last year showed eighth-graders posting large improvements on a reading test, with 42% meeting state standards versus 37% the year before.

Mr. Brooks said the discrepancies prove state exams are “dumbed-down.”

A spokesman for the city Department of Education, David Cantor, pointed out that the writing scores are higher than the levels the city’s eighth-graders posted on national reading and math tests last year. On the 2007 reading exam, 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient, and 16% did so on the math. [snip]

I need an explanation. 42% score proficient in writing; 19% score proficient in reading. How can some one score higher on a writing test that the reading test? How would they know what they wrote?

On the writing test, 19% of New York City eighth-graders were tested with accommodations, the highest percentage of any city included in the study and above the national average, 9%.

Meanwhile, 2% of eighth-graders were excluded from the test, a lower number than several cities, such as Cleveland, where 11% were excluded.

Sample questions from the writing test can be viewed at http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/. One question asked students to write a letter describing what a backpack is.

The education historian Diane Ravitch, who has served on the governing board of NAEP, said, “The conclusion we draw is we have some serious issues having to do with reading, writing, and math by the time kids are in eighth grade.” [snip]

School vouchers are the only answer.