Father Santorum plays to the crowd.
Rick Santorum took a swipe at the president’s higher education push on Saturday.
“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob.”
The GOP candidate was speaking to a crowd of Tea Party activists in Troy, Michigan.
Fresh Loaf’s Gwynedd Stuart expresses some sympathy for Luis Rivera, the obviously contrite Gwinnett County math teacher forced to resign for crafting some rather ignorant word problems.
Rivera’s 20-question homework assignment used slave beatings and picking cotton to link lessons about ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to math computation. One of the problems read: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”
Reprehensible, no doubt, and the punishment, though severe, is not unreasonable. That doesn’t excuse the grandstanding by the perpetually indignant, especially when you consider there’s nothing to indicate the teacher, while clearly overmatched, is some Klansman. Last I checked the Triple K wasn’t too fond of guys named Luis Rivera.
Stuart:
A guy named Henry White — who, the AJC pointed out, doesn’t even have kids — called the incident an “egregious act of assault on the minds of a kid by an adult” at a Gwinnett County School Board meeting. And several parents said they wanted the school to make counseling available to their children. I don’t want to say they’re overreacting … but maybe they’re overreacting.
A commenter counters:
Would you feel the same if the homework questions were about the holocaust? I thought so.
It won’t be long before someone demands Stuart attend sensitivity training for her egregious assault on the minds of readers.
The counseling bill is in the mail, Gwynedd.
Forget, for a minute, the blinding agent that is partisan thought. Whether you agree with the aims of The Occupants or not, we should all be troubled by the the rambling incoherence produced by the American educational system.
I’m beginning to question evolution.
The new Texas textbooks have debuted and, thanks to the America deification crowd, history will now be viewed through a Palin-esque prism.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or John Adams? They are nowhere to be found in the new high school TEKS. Students apparently learned everything they need to know about them in eighth grade.
A Texas high school history teacher points out that “both the positive and negative impacts of … country and western music” will be taught, along with the historical importance of Estée Lauder.
If you think she is one of the 68 most important historical figures, you agree with the board. Yes, the board included her in the state curriculum, but not George Washington.
The new textbooks also vindicate alcoholic conspiracy theorist Joe McCarthy, confirming the findings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That’s patently false, and not up for debate, but in Texas it’s taught as fact — at least to the unwashed masses.
I will not have to deal with that issue in some of my classes because my Advanced Placement U.S. History classes are not required to follow the state curriculum. I am guessing that the Texas Education Agency realizes that students could never pass national exams while learning the state-mandated curriculum.
Hard to distinguish between reality and parody.
That’s Texas for ya.
It may not be long before George W. Bush’s title as worst president from Texas is usurped.
Rick Perry, often described as Bush on steroids, has spearheaded an effort to “re-engineer Texas’s leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability.”
The initiative stayed pretty much under the radar until last fall, when it became public that Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University, had compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money.
Well since everything must be run as a business, perhaps we should start ranking doctors by the profits they generate. That might discourage keeping people alive, however, a real quandary for the party of Terri Schiavo.
Perry, meanwhile, is getting ready to play host to a who’s who of Christian extremists at his non-ecumenical prayer meeting.
One of the endorsers of the event, for example, has gone after Oprah Winfrey. Mike Bickle, founder and director of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, says in a YouTube video that she is a precursor to the “Harlot Babylon” movement that he says will bring on the Antichrist at the end of this world. Winfrey, he says, is “a charming woman but has a spirit of deception, and she is one of the clear pastors, forerunners to the Harlot movement.”
One of AFA’s outspoken leaders, Bryan J. Fischer, confirmed in a brief interview with the Texas Tribune on Thursday that he would be attending the event. Fischer has said homosexuals “gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” He also once blogged that that social welfare programs made black women want to “rut like rabbits.”
My experience with public school teachers was decidedly mixed.
I had some good ones. A few were inspirational. I had a tough-as-hell advanced math teacher (one of the mistakes of testing; I had zero aptitude for math, and less interest) who coaxed a B- out of me. Ms. Summers kicked ass.
Regrettably, a sizable minority of my teachers sucked. One told me, in front of my mother, that she didn’t think I should become a writer. Wouldn’t say why, she just didn’t think I should pursue my dream. Seems she never forgave my critique of the new Baptist-only health club, the one where they’d kick out the little brown kids playing ping-pong because the minister was concerned they’d mess up the carpeting.
My mother was heroic that day.
Another teacher regularly mixed bourbon in her coffee before class. At 9 a.m. One of my high school counselors told a good friend she shouldn’t attend Berkeley because her parents couldn’t afford it. The university whose president just happened to be the counselor’s husband was a better option, my friend was told.
My sisters, who studied only to keep from flunking out, were on track to become teachers. Those who can’t … Fortunately, marriage prevented them from sharing their lack of intellectual curiosity with malleable minds.
Of course I have great respect for committed instructors. It’s a tough job, though not thankless. But we should accept the fact that many of our teachers are below par.
Now what are we going to do about it? More rationalizing?
According to a colleague, Atlanta’s former mayor was on the radio this morning blaming the media for the resignation of the city’s scandal-plagued schools superintendent, Beverly Hall.
Franklin and Hall have a lot in common. Their tenures as mayor and superintendent, respectively, started strong but ended poorly.
It’s the media’s fault.
Three more cheers for the American education system (via Shit My Students Write):
The Ohio Republican, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), will introduce legislation on Wednesday to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, the speaker’s office said Monday, making a school voucher initiative that Democrats, including Obama, have strongly opposed as a bargaining chip for beginning discussions on the administration’s desired education proposals. …
Teachers unions have fought against the voucher program and Obama’s budget pulled funding for new scholarships after 2010.
Supporters of the program, which currently funds scholarships for roughly 1,000 D.C. students, argue that it gives poor students access to better education.
De-funding the program would return many of those students to D.C.’s public schools, decreasing their odds at success. The stats prove it, but such change doesn’t jibe with a progressive orthodoxy that demands blind support for teacher’s unions — even when they’re a large part of the problem.
National and local teachers unions sharply criticized The Times on Sunday when the newspaper published a database of about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade city school teachers ranked by their effectiveness in raising student test scores.
“It is the height of journalistic irresponsibility to make public these deeply flawed judgments about a teacher’s effectiveness,” said a statement issued by United Teachers Los Angeles.
The rankings may indeed be “deeply flawed,” but the teachers unions have resisted performance-based reviews since their inception. They can’t be trusted, and the results speak for themselves.
Fortunately, two budding political stars in New Jersey — Newark mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat, and Chris Christie, the state’s Republican governor — seem determined to take on the unions without the usual equivocations. Booker, especially, deserves credit, as he’s taking on one of his party’s key constituencies.
Wanna know why our education system sucks? Guys like this are teachers:
This Wednesday, July 14, 2010 photo shows teacher and author Ray Sabini, who goes by the pen name Raymond Bean, during an interview about his book for middle grade readers, “Sweet Farts, Rippin’ it Old-School,” in New York. The book chronicles a 9-year-old boy’s multimillion-dollar science fair invention of tablets that can change foul-smelling gas into the culprit’s scent of choice _ summer rose, cotton candy, grape _ even pickles. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
In metro Atlanta and a few cities across the nation, some early childhood programs are giving their students a chance to experience prom, senior week and senior class trips before they march across the stage to receive their “diplomas.”
The pomp and circumstance is part of a growing trend to introduce 4- to 6-year-olds to what they can expect as high school seniors. It’s part dropout prevention, praise and picture-perfect memories for parents.
So are they going to take the young’uns to Panama City?
Seriously, who thinks this is a good idea?
Will conservatives take note? Yeah, right. Never mind that Obama’s plan demands much more from the education establishment than “No Child Left Behind,” pissing off all the right people:
In announcing the proposal, the President said, “What this plan recognizes is that while the federal government can play a leading role in encouraging the reforms and high standards we need, the impetus for that change will come from states, and from local schools and school districts.”
But the American Federation of Teachers says the fear is that the burden of student failings will fall on teachers. “[I]t appears that despite some promising rhetoric, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent authority,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said upon reviewing the plan.
They should be encouraged by the words of Barack Obama’s education secretary. Not bloody likely.
In deciding how to spend Race to the Top dollars, Duncan wants to reward programs that don’t see a child’s poverty as insurmountable, and that focus on raising academic standards, improving teacher quality and inspiring innovation.
“It is not enough to make the same investment in the same programs,” he said, stressing the need for innovation, quality and results. “We are not going to reward the status quo.”
He also intends to overhaul the landmark No Child Left Behind Act. The current system, which allows states to set their own standards, has led to a dumbing down of standards in many states.
