A friend was rated as the worst middle school math teacher in his district. They transferred him. In the new school, the new principal visited each teacher when all reported back in September. Told my pal that, if needed, he would NOT be in his office, but in some classroom or hallways. Asme with other administrators, guidance counselors. The place was run like a Catholic school.

My pal's students scored highest in the district: same kids, same families, he used the same pedagogy. The difference was management: highly-paid personnel got off their posteriors in their generously-cushioned office chairs and used MBWA (managing by walking around) and broken-windows strategies. Kids quickly learned that the adults, not they, were in charge.

1. Great, now Forbes has fallen to the Marxists.
2. The US does fairly well on international assessments when you control for student backgrounds. Asians beat all but a few carefully selected Chinese provinces, Europeans beat all but one country in Europe, Hispanics beat all Latin America countries, and it appears based on limited evidence, African Americans beat sub-Saharan Africans. But that doesn't sound good to some people, so you don't hear it.

Exactly correct. The real absurdity is the idea of human equality in all things. White people aren't being discriminated against in the NBA. They just aren't as good at playing with a ball. Conversely, blacks and Latinos don't produce as many physicists as whites and Asians. That's called reality. The modern equality religion is based on belief and faith at odds with reality.

All men might be created equal in the eyes of their God and deserve equal treatment by their government. But saying everyone is equal in all things (like learning ability) is childlike thinking. But that silliness is what drives policy of the Left and Right today.

The notion of 'equal' applied outside of mathematics is misapplied. Nowhere does one look and find 'equal' anything, including 'equal treatment'. 'Equal' is an intellectual miasma that obscures what is really doing on and, more importantly, distorts our ability to say what we really want.

'Equality' has always been as mask for the powerful getting what the powerful want under the guise of Christianity-Without-Christ. I can recommend Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement to give detail to the myriad ways in which 'equality' has served no one but the powerful.

Government education should be defunded. Let the free market operate.

I was reading "Pogo", the old comic strip, earlier, and one of the strips talked about education ca. 1957:

"Maybe the Federable Gummint will build us a new schoolhouse."
"Some people fears that if the gummint pays for new schools, they'll decide what we get to teach our kids..."
"Perhaps these people think it would be better to teach nobody anything at all, so no one can be offended!"
What do you know, they turned out to be totally right. The government DID totally take over education, in spite of the fears of the conservatives. What a shock. And they still use the same argument when anyone complains: it's better than NO education, and obviously only the Federal Government can be TRUSTED to do it properly. The very idea that the Feds might try to interfere was still worrisome and new back in 1957, today it's taken for granted. And look where we are.
Of course Walt Kelley was totally a Democrat. And it shows. Which is too bad, because the strip is pretty good when he's not trhying to bash Conservatives and promote Democrat policies. He makes some half-hearted attempts to poke fun at Communists, but they seem more like he was doing it to deflect criticism for his leftist stance rather than serious attempts to illustrate the problems and evil crimes of the Communists.

when bolshevik operatives within the teachers union and the Department of Education allow people like those behind the Frisco based Haas and Zellerbach foundation funded tranny for children library hours to promote gender dysphoria as a lifestyle choice do you high school children so they can get kids hooked on drugs from Teva pharmaceuticals, the entire department of education deserves to be dissolved.

We are better off without it.

Until/unless we get rid of gov schools, we need more cons/trads in the classrooms teaching. I've been there--my husband is still there -- we can tell you that a lot of people are there doing the right thing, but are greatly outnumbered -- esp by admin bloat, which gets worse with every education "raise" in the budget.

The numbers would make all the difference. When there were only 6-7 of us disagreeing with the rainbow stickers on our doors ("for gay students"), it was one thing -- if that had been 40 out of 50 of us, it would have been completely different. We could take back the schools.

Pls, if you know someone who wants to make a difference--esp career-changers who know how schools used to be and could be again -- suggest it. We don't have to just shrug and give up. This isn't Hollywood, where it takes millions and connections to get in.

A bitter southerner from post Civil War pushed the public school system to kill off the Catholics and their schools, who were thriving as a result of the quality. Woodrow Wilson blamed the Catholics for the Civil War outcome.

Today is the law of unintended consequences. George Bush only fueled the fire. Cut their funding-- it is what has destroyed France.

Ten years ago we passed a bond issue for schools. "Rebuilding" them. Well...last year it expired but got renewed once again for "music and art". It never stops.

And most of it goes to new administrators (or raises for current ones) who get in the way of people really trying to teach.

We have over a century's worth of data to weigh the costs and benefits of publicly funded government schools. What we understand now is that this system has evolved to largely benefit adults rather than children. Beyond basic daycare, literacy and numeracy there is little value to government schooling. In fact there is much harm to the children themselves and society at large.

Most of this is due to the fact we conflate schooling with education. Just because you attend school for 13-20 years doesn't mean you are very well educated. We can see that everyday with college graduates forced into mediocre jobs because they lack the skills to make them more valuable employees. These are folks in which society has invested over 100,000 dollars per person. And their are millions of them.

What a colossal waste of resources. They should have had their schooling stopped after the 8th grade so they could enter the workforce to continue their education. By their mid-twenties, they'd have already had a decade of work experience making them more valuable than many of their college schooled peers. In short, we are subsidizing an extended adolescence simply to benefit the government schooling industry.

This is in aid of what Hayek called "The road to serfdom."