Category ►►► Educational Elucidations

April 14, 2008

Why women should NOT rule the world

Note: This is the first of what I intend to be a series on my premise that the decline of America began when women began being put in charge of the school systems of this nation. I’m beginning what I think is a novel experiment in the annals of blogging: I’m going to compose this series with, I hope, the help of my readers. I’m soliciting examples from the readers that, if suitable, I will incorporate into the series, and, which I eventually hope to use to create a much larger piece that I hope will find wider circulation in some publication that has the cajones to print it. (yeah, that’ll be the day!)

The title of this series was suggested to me by the recent publication by former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers of her book “Why Women Should Rule the World,” although I have been toying with the premise for several years.

It is given urgency by the (admittedly less likely) possibility that Hillary Clinton might become president.

It would be foolish of readers jump to the conclusion that I am in any way against the idea of women in leadership positions, or equal pay for equal work. I’m speaking of the rise to primacy and in fact dominance by women of our elementary and secondary education system in the last few years. Because almost everyone goes through the public school system, this accords women a particular opportunity to dominate a sector of our lives that has a profound affect on our society as a whole.

Think back when many of us were in school. Yes, women dominated the classroom. But usually it was a man at the head of the school, or of the district. When little boys would face off in the school yard, as little boys have a tendency to do, usually it was a man who would separate them.

“Who started this?” the principal would demand. He would send the guilty party to detention, or to sit out in front of the principal’s office for the rest of the day to consider the error of his ways. Or the principal might demand that the two boys shake hands and go back to class. The boy who was defending himself usually had leave to go about his business without further repercussions.

Compare that to the way we do things today in many schools around the land. Under the “zero tolerance” policies in force in many school districts, both boys, the aggressor and the defender, will be punished. Occasionally the police will be summoned. It is considered just as bad to fight, even if someone else threw the first blow. Presumably the only way to get out of being punished under these circumstances is to fall down in a faint upon being punched!

A second example occurs to me that comes from my real world experience as the editor of a small town newspaper. A few years ago our high school football team was preparing for the upcoming season. Each year the team poses for a group picture for a poster that carries the calendar of all the games. Each year the team plays under a slogan. One year it was “Get it Done!” (a particularly neanderthalistic slogan if you ask me). But this year it was “Cowboy Up!” That is a rodeo term that refers to the cowboy in a rodeo getting ready to mount the bucking bronco. So the football coach suggested that the boys of the team be photographed in cowboy regalia, on horseback. He added the touch of giving the boys Remington rifles to hold to make them look more like cowboys.

The superintendent, a woman, hit the ceiling. The photo was withdrawn and the team photographed again, this time without the offending firearms.

Twenty, or even ten years before, this episode would not have turned out the way that it did. Today, even if the superintendent had not been a woman, it would probably would have turned out as it did, because of the pervasive influence of the female perspective on schools. Even when men are in charge they frequently run schools as if women were in charge.

A third example will suffice to bring this introduction to a close. Just last week a 6-year old Virginia first grader was declared a sex offender for slapping another student on the bottom! The police were called and an incident report was filed. Now, I have no evidence that the top school officials in this case were women, but the unseen hand of a philosophy that we have all heard articulated by radical feminism is in evidence: the idea that all “men” no matter how young, share a group guilt.

You might persuasively argue that this is all simply political correctness run amok. But would political correctness be as strong as it is if the female perspective hadn’t become the dominant “rubric” (a favorite term among educators) in our public school system, and therefore in society as a whole?

TO BE CONTINUED

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, April 14, 2008, at the time of 8:51 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

March 7, 2008

Homescuttled: California Educational Establishment Squashes Homeschoolers

In a ruling almost certain to ignite a chalkboard revolution, a California appellate court unanimously (3 to 0 in In re Rachel L., et al.) held, in essence, that parents cannot homeschool their kids unless the parents have a valid teaching credential for the appropriate grades.

And of course, in order to get a valid teaching credential, you must attend a "multiple subject teacher preparation program." This requirement is only satisfied by getting a BA in Education, or else taking a post-graduate course of study for at least one year; and it must include student teaching.

In other words, for all intents and purposes, the court has ruled that only credentialed teachers can teach their own kids at home. Others who want their kids taught at home must hire a tutor with a state teaching credential, as above. This is a full-blown assault on parents who don't want their kids indoctrinated in the latest leftist fads in the public schools, but who haven't enough money for private tutoring or a private school, and who cannot find a low-cost religious school near enough for their kids to attend.

At this point, it appears the only option for parents who don't like what their kids are taught in the public schools is to form their own private school -- and then get the state to certify that school. This may be difficult, as it's in the vested interest of school districts to have as large an enrollment as possible in the public schools, since that is the basis of the school's budget as set by the state. In addition, the California Department of Education is in thrall to the California Teachers Association, and the CTA hates and despises homeschooling... because the moms and dads who teach their own kids obviously have no reason to join the union.

Tthus, there is little incentive for a school district to certify any private school that is not a big corporation who can take the district to court to force certification.

I'm not a lawyer, but I sometimes play one online, to my own amusement. (And to the hysterical consternation of real lawyers, such as Patterico, Beldar, and the lads at Power Line, who seem to believe that graduating from law school, passing the bar exam, and practicing as attorneys for decades gives them some sort of superior "knowledge" about the law. Faugh! Bourgeois credentialing fetishists.) Reading through the In re Rachel L. decision, it looks like the appellate court is on fairly firm legal ground... which only shows that "the law is a ass, a idiot," as Beadle Bumble observed in Dickens' Oliver Twist.

The mandatory schooling laws were enacted at a time when many parents saw no purpose in their kids learning anything beyond a 2nd or 3rd grade reading ability and "sums." And the law was also passed in the progressive/"liberal fascist" era, when those running the country firmly believed that it didn't take parents to raise a child... it took the entire nation, and parents were merely unhelpful roadblocks to statist indoctrination. It took... trained and credentialed "experts."

Nowadays, parents pulling their kids out of school almost never do so because they don't want them to be educated; they pull their kids out because they do want them educated, and they don't believe their pathetic public school system is up to the job. It's long overdue to revisit those laws and make some very significant changes... while we still can.

The court in the current case relied much on In re Shinn, 195 Cal.App.2nd. 683, decided in 1961; but part of that ruling found:

To qualify as a bona fide school, a place of learning must have competent teachers capable of teaching. The evidence indicates that appellants, in conducting their self-education program, failed to fully comply with Education Code, section 7901, setting forth the courses required to be taught at a private school. Dr. Shinn admitted that the children did not receive any instruction in civics or in California history. Home education, regardless of its worth, is not the legal equivalent of attendance in school in the absence of instruction by qualified private tutors. Accordingly, the juvenile court had evidence to support its finding that the Shinn children were not being instructed in a private fulltime day school by persons capable of teaching. It was justified in concluding that appellants violated the compulsory education law.

In the current case (In re Rachel L., et al), the appellate court noted the following:

The attorney representing the younger two children asked the juvenile court to order that the children be enrolled in a public or private school. The dependency court declined to make such an order despite the court’s opinion that the home schooling the children were receiving was “lousy,” “meager,” and “bad,” and despite the court’s opinion that keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where (1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children’s lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents’ “cloistered” setting.

Note that in both Shinn and Rachel L., courts found specifically that the homeschooling was academically inadequate. In addition, in the current case, the dependency court also found that the kids were kept in a "cloistered" environment and didn't interact sufficiently with kids outside the family.

So it's possible a better case could be made for homeschoolers being considered a "private school" if they did actually teach all subjects required in public school -- and also enrolled more than just the kids of one family. Thus, if a group of parents got together and created a private school, they might have a better case, even if they were not able to get the local school district to certify them. (They could perhaps appeal on the basis of bias, if they could show that their education skills were demonstrably as good as those of credentialed teachers at the local public school.)

But a much better case can be made for what I consider the real answer to the question of homeschooling: The California state legislature should add a new teaching credential for non-institutional teachers.

This credential should not require attending Ed school or engaging in a year of student teaching... which would be beyond the resources of most mothers or fathers. But it should require the potential homeschooling parents to take a test to ensure they know the required subjects well enough to teach them, plus some standardized testing of the kids to ensure that the kids are not just "learning the Bible" (or the Koran) and nothing more.

With such a credential, parents would of course legally be allowed to teach their own children, even without having to turn themselves into a private school (a kludgey work-around for the obvious animosity of the Department of Education towards homeschoolers).

The same new teaching credential should cover another kind of teacher as well, one with relevant of "life experience" to take the place of the "multiple subject teacher preparation program" and student teaching. It's unconscionable that, for example, a military instructor with years of experience training officers and enlisted men can't teach high school; but a sheltered 21 year old with a BA in Education from Cal State and a year of student teaching -- even with only the bare minimum subject-matter knowledge -- is qualified to teach any subject in any public school, except foreign language.

Naturally, the majority Democrats in the legislature will kill such a bill in committee; but that's fine... because that will give Republicans challenging the Democratic incumbents a real issue to use to fight their way into the state Assembly or Senate... an issue that appeals across the board from left to right, and especially among black, Hispanic, and other minority parents whose children are stuck in dreadful school districts -- as well as suburban soccer moms who are increasingly unhappy with the local district's NOW, NARAL, GLADD-written curriculum on sex education; their AIM and La Raza-written curriculum on California history (Aztlan!); the AMA's push to distribute condoms and teach kids how to use them in middle school; and the American Psychiatric Association recommendations on drugging kids in classrooms without even parental notification, let alone consent.

California is a liberal state; there is no doubt about it. But it's not as liberal as New York or Massachusetts... obviously, seeing how the vote runs here -- not just for the Governator but for president, too. In 2004, John Kerry won California by only 9 points, compared to 19 points in New York and a whopping 25 points in Kerry's home state. It's absurd that Democrats utterly dominate both chambers of the legislature. But one reason is that Republicans haven't been able to articulate any solid reason why they should oust incumbent Democrats.

Well, now they can. If, that is, the GOP can get off the stick and on the hump and start proposing popular, party-line crossing legislation... like making it easier for parents who want to homeschool and retired professionals to get credentialed, without having to drop everything and go back to college all over again.

There are some fields where you only want trained experts to participate. But when it comes to educating kids, having a knowledgeable and caring teacher and a disciplined environment (where kids can be actually punished for acting out, for example), is far more important than "expert" credentialing.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 7, 2008, at the time of 7:36 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

November 1, 2007

Take Back the Right!

Front Page Magazine reports that yet another David Horowitz speech was disrupted by screaming left wing and Islamist thugs. I won't go into detail about what happened; it's the usual: Horowitz speaking as part of "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" at Emory University; bunch of Leftists and Islamists show up full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; event has to be called off. Horowitz compares them to "the fascists... in Germany in the 1930s." You know the routine.

The reason I call this "routine" is that it really is:

• Concordia University in Canada, 2002. (Note: YouTube, as is its wont, long ago censored the videos linked at the Power Line post.)

  A Jewish student group, Hillel, organized a talk inviting former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; to prevent this, violent antisemites from the Muslim Student Association showed up and literally beat members of the audience who showed up to listen. One victim was a survivor of the holocaust; he too thought it reminded him of the Nazis. Never in his life did he think this kind of thing would happen in Canada.

• Only a few days ago in Denmark, four members of Stop the Islamization of Europe were ambushed and beaten with iron pipes on their way to a peaceful demonstration.
• Jewish community centers at universities are frequently vandalized or even torched.
• Stacks of Jewish and conservative newspapers are seized and burnt, printing systems destroyed, editors threatened and roughed up.
• Conservatives are hauled before star-chamber speech-code tribunals, convicted on the basis of anonymous complainers, and sentenced to "re-education."

You get the picture. But this post isn't simply a recitation of the hundreds of incidents of Leftists and Islamists suppressing everyone else's freedom of speech (but especially the freedoms of Jews). That's a given. We all know they don't believe in a free society; they will resort to anything, including murder, to silence us.

But what should we do about it? Blogging about the evil alliance between the so-called Left and militant Islam is all well and good, but it changes nothing. "Exposing" their tactics doesn't hurt them; I rather think they enjoy the PR and believe it scares away conservatives.

So yes, we must speak up, mustn't be intimidated by scare tactics. But we must not be careless: We have to bear in mind that these people are terrorist sympathizers, and many are actually terrorists themselves... and they need to be treated as such.

Inviting conservative speakers to the campus is commendable -- but do it with eyes open. Know what to expect! Participating in anti-Islamist demonstrations is courageous; but you'd better be prepared for outrageous disruptions and intimidation, violence, and increasingly likely, the use of weaponry by the MSA and their surrogates and accomplices.

Here are a few tactics to consider:

Monitor enemy actions

When word gets around that your conservative student circle is inviting a conservative, pro-Israel, or anti-"Islamofascist" speaker, the leftist students are bound to mobilize "resistance" against you. Hold your nose and read their stupid flyers, monitor their websites, infiltrate their rallies (using friends unknown to the campus Left and the local MSA) and make note of their plans. While some of the professional leaders may keep their plans secret, in order to get a large number of students to attend and disrupt the talk, they have to go fairly public.

Keep copies of everything you find; they may prove useful when you get sued (as you likely will; it's a favorite tactic of Islamists nowadays).

Learn their plans, plan a counterattack. Your freedoms and liberties are precious; don't trade them for a pot of message.

Open your mouths and persuade private citizens to volunteer for security detail

You know your school won't provide adequate security; heck, the kind of security guards the school provides are probably in cahoots with the protesters anyway! So talk as many friends as you can into showing up (free ticket!) and helping keep the peace.

Special emphasis on ROTC members, athletes, alpha males, and most especially, combat veterans returning to university on the modern G.I. Bill.

Open your wallets and hire commercial security guards

If you've got the wherewithal, then raise the jacksons and hire some private security guards from a company with teeth.

Blackwater comes to mind; I wonder what they charge for a few hours of three or four security men without firearms? Maybe they'll give you a discount rate, considering who the enemy is.

Screen the audience

The best way to short-circuit disruptive protestors is not to let them into the building in the first place. They're usually pretty easy to spot: They'll be the ones wearing orange, Gitmo jumpsuits and/or pink t-shirts with obscene anti-Bush slogans; carrying Israeli flags with a swastika instead of Star of David and misspelled signs that read "No blood for ol!" and "Rascist, sexiste, anti-gay. David Horwits, go away!"; compressed-air horns sticking out of camouflaged trousers; or black ski masks covering everything but their hate-filled piggy eyes. Leftists and Islamist radicals are rarely subtle... they don't need to be.

So anyone wearing or carrying obvious disruption paraphernalia gets nixed. Even if they offer to leave the tools of their disreputable trade at the door, they still have no business entering the hall and should be forcible kept out. Refund their ticket prices, so they'll have not a single legitimate charge to make against you... they'll have to rely on the bogus charge that you violated their freedom of "speech" by preventing them from blowing air horns to drown out your hired speaker... make the university board of rights squirm.

Eject the first jackass forcefully and immediately.

This is very important. Any group like this has a leader, and the followers await his cue. When the first guy stands up without permission and starts doing something objectionable, unseemly, intimidating, or obscene, your security guards should swoop upon him and eject him with visible (but not injurious) force. The other cowards will then be reluctant to stand up themselves when they see their leader made into such a laughable failure.

In any event, the security force must overwhelm any violent protesters; they cannot let the crowd overwhelm them.

Protect the speaker

Protect the speaker with a beefy blocker, and don't ever let protesters get anywhere near your guest.

On a nutshell

We must be vigilant -- and we must be prepared to fight back, to "take back the Right." Either that, or our enemies will just escalate until they're picking us off one by one, as we see happening in Lebanon today. There are many Islamists, and possibly a few Western Leftists, who would even kill you to gain your silence: Remember Theo Van Gogh, Salman Rushdie, and Daniel Pearl. Murder means nothing to members of the Muslim Brotherhood or any of its offshoots (such as Hamas or the Muslim Student Association); what's one more human sacrifice among so many?

Fight bravely; but more important, fight wisely. And let's be particularly careful out there...

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 1, 2007, at the time of 7:17 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 5, 2006

Anutter Grutter Cutter?

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that has at least a good possibility of reversing what was arguably the worst Supreme-Court decision of the Bush era... a position that was ardently supported by the Bush administration itself.

The Supreme Court agreed today to consider an issue of enormous importance to parents and educators across the country: the extent to which public school administrators can use racial factors in assigning children to schools.

The court accepted cases from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., for its next term. The school districts in both cities defeated challenges to their assignment procedures in the lower courts.

"Looming in the background of this is the constitutionality of affirmative action," Davison Douglas, a law professor at William and Mary, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "This is huge."

The earlier case to which I alluded was Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), in which the Court held that the "affirmative-action" (racial preferences) in the University of Michigan's law school were constitutional. And the reason I think there's a reasonable chance to chip away at that awful decision is that it was 5-4... with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor writing for the majority.

O'Connor has since retired, of course, replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito: if Alito actually opposes racial preferences, as I suspect he does, then he could be the crucial flip-vote that might begin wrenching the country towards racial sanity.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in the meanwhile and was replaced by Chief Justice John Roberts; but Rehnquist was in the minority in this case. So assuming that Roberts is as opposed to "affirmative action" as Rehnquist was, this will result in no change. But the O'Connor retirement could lead to racial preferences moving from a 5-4 win to a 5-4 loss.

Seattle school administrators have wrestled for decades with the de facto segregation that tends to mirror the housing patterns of white, black and Asian families in the community. Students can pick among high schools. But since some schools have more applicants than they can handle, the district relies on tie-breakers, including whether a sibling attends a certain school, distance from a prospective student's home and race, to decide who gets into the over-subscribed schools. A group called Parents Involved in Community Schools sued in 2000, contending that it was unfair for the school district to consider race.

There are two cases here, and it could end up with another split decision (like Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger -- the latter involving U of M's undergraduate admissions, where the Court struck down racial preferences). The problem is that in the Kentucky case, there is an existing federal judicial order to desegregate:

The Kentucky case arises from a suit filed by Crystal Meredith, who contends that her son Joshua was not allowed into the neighborhood school because he is white. The Jefferson County school district has a history different from Seattle's, in that the Louisville schools operated for years under a federal order to desegregate. In 2001, the district began using a plan that includes racial guidelines. The plan was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

I have always argued that the way to combat official segregation is by the complete lack of segregation... not by segregating in the other direction. It's as unfair to the white Joshua Meredith that he's kept out a good school because he's white as it was to black kids during Jim Crow to be kept out of good schools because they weren't white.

But we'll see how the Court sees it. Keep your eyes on the prize....

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 5, 2006, at the time of 5:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 24, 2006

Stop the Party - Crack Those Books!

We neglected to comment on the May 12th decision by a goofy California state judge to overturn the rule in the public schools requiring students to pass an "exit exam" before they can receive their high-school diplomas. (It was the press of other issues, honest!)

High school seniors who flunk the controversial state exit exam may be able to graduate next month anyway, according to a judge's tentative ruling issued late Monday.

Setting the stage for heated debate in court today between supporters and opponents of the California High School Exit Exam, Alameda Superior Court Judge Robert Freedman said he is likely to rule that the test cannot take effect this year as scheduled....

The court's preliminary injunction against the state would allow students to graduate this year if they've met all requirements for graduation - other than passing the test of basic math and English skills. It would mark a huge setback for state officials, who are eager to implement the test they see as the cornerstone of California's school accountability system.

What's worse, the judge refused to stay his own ruling while an appeal was heard. He clearly hoped the wheels of law would grind so slowly that it would be impossible to require the class of 2006 to actually know what they had been taught.

The basic problem, according to Judge Freedman, is that the test is "discriminatory" -- because predictably, different groups will perform differently on the test. But this same argument can be made for any test in any class, any grade, any imaginable method of evaluating the progress of students: some students will perform well, others will not.

Any evaluation whatsoever is fundamentally based upon "discrimination": discriminating between those who have learnt the knowledge and those who have not. And sadly, so long as different racial subgroups have different, culture-based attitudes about schooling -- and so long as boys are different from girls -- those differences among students will tend to clump into racial and gender classifications.

To be perfectly blunt about it, black and Hispanic male students whose subculture is less oriented towards sedentary study and more towards aggressive, even violent interactions will not do as well on the test (as a group) as Asians, and Jews, whose subcultures are precisely the opposite on this issue... or even black and Hispanic female students, who perform markedly better at this level. The performance of white students will be somewhere in the middle. So far, at least, nobody has found a way to change this.

Thus, for any academic test, Asians and Jews will perform the best (again, as a group), whites and black and Hispanic girls in the middle, and black and Hispanic boys at the bottom. But often, teachers are appalled at the pattern they see... and they use grade inflation to make up for this disparity. Many teachers -- perhaps unconsciously, perhaps in response to school rules -- will "re-norm" black and Hispanic male students upwards, awarding them grades that they do not deserve by their individual performance.

Many of those unfairly re-normed students (and of course individual, poorly performing whites, Asians, and Jews as well) have gone all the way through 13 grades of kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools, received a high-school diploma -- yet have been unable to read, write, or compute at even a middle-school level.

The solution of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit is to keep doing that, but more and harder:

If the tentative ruling stands, "this will be a historic ruling for all children in California because Freedman is telling the state, 'You cannot deny a student a diploma if they have not received adequate classroom materials,' " said Arturo Gonzalez, a San Francisco attorney representing students who have failed the exit exam but passed all other graduation requirements.

"You just can't do that," he said. "Its unfair, and it's illegal."

One of the major purposes of the California exit exam is to serve as a last chance to smoke out those students who have managed to duck education for years... aided and abetted by soft-hearted, soft-headed parents, teachers, and school administrators. When these kids fail the exit exam and realize they won't be graduating until they learn the material, it puts huge pressure on these students to take remedial classes and actually bring themselves up to the standards.

That good benefit was lost when Judge Freedman removed the requirement; he became the chief "enabler" of the cultural rejection of learning. Fortunately, however, some of the adults in the California judiciary are less interested in enabling destructive attitudes that in making sure kids are actually, you know, educated. Today, the California State Supreme Court itself issued a preliminary stay on Judge Freedman's ruling... and they did so in plenty of time to make the requirement possible for this year (since the test has already been given).

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated the state high school exit exam as a graduation requirement for this year’s senior class, leaving 47,000 high school students who failed the test in danger of not graduating.

The high court ordered a state appeals court to hold hearings in the case, but with schools ready to hold commencement ceremonies as soon as this weekend, a resolution appeared unlikely before then....

This year's class was the first in which passing the test of 10th grade English and eighth grade math and algebra was required for graduation.

Five of the seven justices sounded very skeptical of Freedman's decision:

Still, the justices said they were not convinced that Freedman ruled correctly. "At this juncture this court is not persuaded that the relief granted by the trial court's preliminary injunction ... would be an appropriate remedy," five of the seven justices wrote.

The case itself was not decided; it still must work it way through the appellate courts, and only then will one side or the other appeal it to the Supreme Court. But this still is very encouraging; such a clear signal that the State Supreme Court is likely prepared to strike this decision down should make the appellate court less sanguine about upholding it.

Accountability and responsibility must be integral parts of education; because in the end, education is not about teachers teaching... it's about students learning.

Keep your fingers dry and your powder crossed....

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 24, 2006, at the time of 4:51 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Fre-School For All

The elfin Daniel Weintraub reports that Rob "Meathead" Reiner has paid for enough goons to gather a million signatures for his socialist initiative to give "free" pre-school to all children in California -- subsidized by "the rich," of course; Weintraub avoided using those prolix and tendentious adjectives, however, so you may find the Big Lizards take more exciting.

Every four-year-old child will receive "free" pre-school, paid for by a special tax on individuals earning $400,000 or couples earning twice that. If this succeeds, I'm sure Reiner will next move an initiative to give every child breakfast and lunch, new, fashionable clothing, a G4 Power Mac, and in high school, a brand new car (hybrid, naturally).

Presumably, children who don't actually need pre-school because they can already read will be told to forget everything they have learned and sit through the stultifying classes anyway. Big Bother has spoken.

Weintraub also dryly notes that the money required for this safari into deepest, darkest nanny-statism -- about $2.4 billion per year -- has already been earmarked by state legislators for higher spending on K-12 education and also earmarked by California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides for paying down the massive California budget deficit. In other words, this now would be the third way that same money would be spent.

The first problem is that California's state income tax is already one of the highest in the nation... and every rise sends another huge batch of wealthy job-creators fleeing to other states, thus reducing the tax base and increasing the misery index. But liberal do-gooders like Rob Reiner never care much about the actual consequences of their bursts of taxpayer-subsidized generosity: what matters is the good intentions; the actual grubby effects are left to someone else, someone less "creative" and more proletarian to sort out. It is enough that Reiner is willing to dig down deep, deep into the pockets of some other guy's trousers to show his compassion for those downtrodden, uneducated ignoramuses who don't even know the whole alphabet by the time they're being potty trained.

But of course, as Karin Klein argues in a Los Angeles Times op-ed,

We don't need this. Preschool is already more "universal" in California than you might think. Somewhere within that patchwork are an estimated 70% of all the 4-year-olds in the state — about 63% in preschool centers, and a handful in family child care. The universal-preschool crowd hopes to raise that to 80%. So to get an additional 10% enrolled, taxes would pick up the bill for the other 70% as well. California's nonuniversal system already covers a bigger percentage of its 4-year-old population than Georgia's universal pre-kindergarten system, now in its 12th year. [Emphasis added]

She also argues that the standardization envisioned by the Reiners of the world would likely decrease, not increase, the positive effects of such pre-kindergarten education:

Consider Doggett's description of what happens in a quality preschool class:

A little boy is happily building with blocks. The teacher (who has a bachelor's degree, of course) comes up to talk with him about the structure he's building. She suggests that he bring some model cars over to incorporate with the blocks. If the blocks make a roadway, how would the cars get to the road? In this way, Doggett says, the child is engaged in critical thinking on how to build a ramp. (In reality, he probably decides with the perfect wisdom of his age that cars can fly.)

Some parents might love this little "teachable moment" scenario. I feel like screaming, "For pity's sake, can't 4-year-olds play with blocks anymore without some teacher trying to turn them into future transportation planning administrators, GS-12, Level B?"

The Reiner initiative's "statewide preschool content standards" would be devised by the state schools' superintendent. These would be "aligned with statewide academic standards" and carried out and supervised by county education departments. It makes you want to weep for those tots.

It makes me want to weep for my home state.

So I guess the rule is that four year olds are best taken away from their parents to be indoctrinated educated by the government -- while fourteen year olds are best taken away to give them abortions without the parents even being so much as notified.

Am I the only one who detects a pattern here?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2005, at the time of 1:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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