The New York Times Mumbles [again] about Education and No Child Left Behind.

What is interesting about the NYT, famous for being known for skirting the outer levels of bankruptcy and for their most famous contributor [or infamous] Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty,[1] is the apparently accidental collision with reality on selected cases. The topic for the day is the never-ending quest for educational ‘results’ wherein the young are supposedly ‘educated’ to learn something not quite well defined. The educational arena [known in the state of California[2][3][4]as ejukashon[5] or the dust bin where 40% of their citizen’s tax revenues are summarily dumped[6]] is a hot contest for the hearts and minds of potential voters and a key entry point into the elegance of propaganda and its propagation.

What is even more interesting is the perennial announcement of new and wonderful advances in educational theory and the sweeping changes that are necessary to make the system work better even though the costs of education doubled before the Ronald Reagan terms ended and doubled again before the Obama Era.  One is tempted to point this out to ‘educators’ [ejukashonistas?[7]] but that only starts arguments.

In the glaring forefront of this grand arena stands the impairing monolith of ‘equality[8]’ gleaming in the sun wherein be writ that every child ought to get an even chance to succeed at something, grades occasionally included. The obvious solution is not to give out grades so that those who perform poorly on their exams might not feel bad. For some reason, this progressive option has not been implemented. If the exams were omitted we could, in principle, choose our brain surgeons by lot since all candidates would have an equal chance and would, of course, have equal grades by default.

In the spirit of continual improvement over education we must first read what the NYT has in mind:

“President Obama’s blueprint for reworking the No Child Left Behind Education Act of 2002 has good ideas, but it doesn’t have anything close to the rigor that the word “blueprint” would suggest. Whether the president’s plan will strengthen or weaken the program will depend on how the administration fleshes out the missing details — and how Congress rewrites the law.”[9]--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind  EDITORIAL Published: March 17, 2010 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]

We struggle for details here.  This is all hokum so far. The blast comes in the second paragraph:

“Teachers’ unions, state governments and other interest groups have long wanted to water down or kill off the provision of the law that requires the states to raise student performance — especially for poor and minority children — in exchange for federal money. They will likely gin up their lobbying. Congress must resist.”--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind

After reading this twice and calling for water, a search for the reason why feather-bedding unions and their supplicants might be ignored by the NYT reveals this:

“President Obama’s blueprint adheres to the principles first set by former President George W. Bush. The new proposal, however, would focus federal sanctions and monitoring heavily on the relatively small number of chronically failing schools and allow better-run schools more flexibility to fix themselves. That makes sense, but only if the latter group is not allowed to shortchange poor and minority children.”--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind

Ah, the hot spot is revealed. The spotlight thus would shine upon failing schools [read ‘schools’ with failing students to be more precise]. Performance standards tend to torpedo the egalitarian nostrum of ‘equality’ because it forces standardized tests upon students, and sometimes, indirectly, their ‘teachers.’ The process becomes more intractable when we sort test results by race only to find that Asian kids do better than whites on average on tests with high cognitive loading thus mangling the term ‘minority’ and prompting injustice in numbers and scores. Millions of test scores show that certain minorities cannot perform at the same levels as other people so the sticky nostrum that we can ‘fix’ this cognitive problem is impossible. The Times has this backward.

“The current system designates schools as needing improvement if they miss progress targets. The Obama proposal calls for employing a new model that gives schools credit for improving student performance, even if the schools miss the targets. This, too, makes sense, as long as the improvement being rewarded is significant.”--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind 

A sliding scale for equality it seems. This is like accepting an F on your test as long as the remote possibility exists that you might get a D next time. Abject failure is thus sanctioned by our government. We can always improve these schools even, we might suspect, when falling grade averages, crime and discipline problems that might double. All we need is some notion of a slight improvement in a single metric to pass the schools along the pathway to mediocrity. Now, the Times in on leftist track.

“The most exciting section of the Obama proposal deals with new strategies for getting states to measure, develop and improve the effectiveness of teachers, principals and programs in teacher-preparation.”--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind

Now, the problems with education become amplified so even the rocks shake and moan.

“That means observing teachers more closely in their early years so that the less-capable ones are either trained up or weeded out. States also need to take a much closer look at the quality of teachers assigned to schools with poor and minority children — the primary focus of the No Child Left Behind law. Eight years later, federal data show that these children are still disproportionately taught by inexperienced teachers who have not majored in the subjects they teach.”--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind

No teacher will be fired. We may only recite the union mantra “Equal Pay for Equal Work’ as being an ignoramus or a parasite in education is clearly equal work if they just show up. In the California case, it takes years to document and discharge a teacher[10] and in L.A. only about 1/1000 is discharged and many get more than $100,000 in lawyer expenses to defend them even though some kept drugs, porn or had other disgusting habits and performance at school. Many firings are overturned later at more expense. It is clear that the ‘weed out’ and ‘less capable’ language in the Times article is subject to union influence, rules and bureaucratic processes that resemble swamps and is merely subjective. The brutal facts appear to be that the maintenance of union jobs is more important than mere education since the unions pay so much money to bribe greedy politicians at all state and federal levels. And, much of this fits the notion that this is more about employment than education since we don’t’ need highly educated students in the first place if this process leads to wealth inequalities in the final analysis.

Back to the Bell Curve and Urban Politics![11]

We can review the poor outcome of the Great Society that seemed to show that those with lesser cognitive skills could not compete well with their intellectual superiors. This caused frenzy and gross anger when revealed in the 1960s as now there was a cognitive ceiling that many could not breach and this effect was confounded by analyzing standardized test scores and sorting the results according to race. Many schools hide this data now. The Bell Curve debunks this phony theory of equality with numerous—nay millions—of examples.[12] President Obama is against standardized testing for the most part. Standardized testing proves the point that the phony liberal concept of equality is so much buncombe thus it cannot be allowed.[13] Extensive and comprehensive testing of teachers in poor schools would allow us more information, but that will be blocked by the NAACP and the unions [same thing as NAACP is a blacks-only union].

We all know that affirmative action is a tacit admission of the failure of ‘education’ to equip each of our citizens with an equivalent set of mental and entrepreneurial skills and opportunities so they can compete. Cognitive equality is an oxymoron. There is no way you can give standardized tests and ensure that everybody gets the average test grade with nobody getting a higher or a lower test result. The much maligned Bell Curve[14], sometimes accused of actually causing the ‘problem’ of cognitive distribution in the US, actually states the blunt facts about our societies and the distribution of mental skills. This salient fact that half the people who take the standardized test will score below the median is the rallying point for ‘change’ in ‘education.’[15] That is not fair. Society must be equalized.[16] Thus propaganda must replace education. The Bell Curve correctly predicts who will pass high school, college and who will excel in the work place—and who will not—on a group basis. It doesn’t work for individuals. This fact commits millions to menial jobs but is casus belli for the political left.[17] Politically, then, about half the populations are candidates for political exploitation based only on their intrinsic skills. This works well politically. That is 50% of the vote.[18]

The competitive arena of capitalism is even more interesting. Capitalism[19] is a natural process whereby jobs and leadership is determined by the outcome of profits. Indeed, the capitalistic process is founded on the salient fact that people are not equal and thus need different jobs and have different skills. Capitalism is a ladder system whereby those who attempt to play the game either win or lose and the losers are demoted and assigned other duties so the more successful can take over. Capitalism is a refining process where the system is continually tested for performance unlike Marxism and other socialist variants that tend to lock in ‘leaders’ at all levels of government with little regard to performance or successful outcomes. Thus capitalism is self-improving while bureaucratic government tends to stagnate as it promotes its members based on party loyalty or dogma rather than efficiency or success. For proof of this statement we need only review Congress or the White House staff members for a few decades.

Many teachers and other bureaucrats would not fare well for long in a capitalist system to they tend to teach away from such a process so they can keep their jobs and hold power. As such, ‘education’ in the modern liberal sense is vectored to produce ‘citizens’ who have been steeped in the political view that government can provide them with what they need. Such a process sullies the workforce for business and many must carefully select their employees and retrain them in necessary business skills and ignore their political legacy unless it becomes a problem in the workplace. Business frequently reeducates their employees and soaks out the Marxian fluff that so-called teachers teach. Much business has fled the US to Asia to expand and prosper.

This process forces a crevasse of immense proportions to exist between liberal education and the business community. The educational process cannot produce skill-ready persons for hire given   of the obtuse political baggage forced upon students. Business thus runs special schools and training courses that reset the attitudes and skill bases of employees and circumvent this problem for the most part. The country is actually better off if those with poor skills get jobs with the government if the vicious actions of such government can be controlled. Our government is clearly anti-capitalistic and anti business and rarely attempts to correct this obvious vision in public. The penalty for such antagonism toward a sector that provides 99% of the tax revenues is a poor economy or a flight from oppressive states by business such as California, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and many others. Socialism does not create wealth so the left beats upon their benefactor with mindless rage.

This is a global economy now where business can readily outsource jobs to Asia where the educational levels are very high compared to the US. Businesses will continue to migrate in force toward lower-cost arenas as the US has the second-highest corporate taxes in the world and is determined to be number one. The current health care follies will drive competent doctors out of the country [to places like Belize] and many of our citizens will travel abroad for various treatments.  This is essentially the reverse process of the colonial era in North American whereby the inefficient feudal system stagnated with remnants of centuries of inbred family members who made decisions. Those people finally lost out to the entrepreneurial people who dumped their social baggage on the trip across the Atlantic and were successful in America. If the US is polluted with a similar form of inbred social baggage from the public school system then the obvious tack is to go private with home schooling and other formal schools. This feature thus truncates the undesirables in the flow of labor and leadership to business and such and is desirable in many ways. Being ‘graduated’ from a poor school is a true stigma that signals employers to look elsewhere for talent.

The Obama scheme to concentrate on the problems of the problem schools is thus self-defeating and its only benefit is to advertise where not to look for talent after graduation if it occurs. We can spot a general trend in such ‘educational’ systems in inner cities where liberals have full power to implement any plans they wish. In a blog entitled Murder in the Cities[20] I cover what happens when liberals are in total control of education and other social factors. This leads to poverty, crime, sloth, celebrations of sodomy, drug addiction, prostitution, many socially acceptable diseases such as AIDS and chlamydia and many other ailments that tend to drive wholesome people out of the areas never to return. Whole states like California are trending toward the tenets of liberalism and now they want to grow and tax drugs to help pay for their failures. Other states will foster and attempt to tax crime and perversions. They are also going broke and will default from extending their ‘education’ to show that going green is socially and environmentally and cost effective.[21] More likely, such phony adventures will lead to more asset bubbles of the kind that will sink the states in debt.[22]

The NYT sums up here:

“Better systems for gathering and evaluating information about teacher and student performance are important. But states could use the information they have now to improve schooling for this country’s children.”--Mr. Obama and No Child Left Behind

The educational process now needs to be clarified for most citizens: If you want your child to be educated with skills and reasoning power to function effectively in business then you need to get your kids out of public schools and into something better. This list includes private schools and home schooling. In addition, our young must be taught that our government via the school system is not educating us on anything but only working the stale levers of propaganda in the socialist or Marxist sense. Many of our students must be cautioned that some ‘teachers’ are corrosive parasites and trundling propaganda cadres and that they must ignore the ‘truth’ in their screeds but carefully parrot back the rubber-stamped hokum and fluff from their educational agenda on exams. Extending this, our young must be taught to identify such parasites in the workplace or in social life and to avoid any contamination from their rants and distorted ethics. In contrast, we mush teach our kids who to trust for schooling, counseling and training and that usually vacates the left. Much of this will transpire on the Internet where government cannot, as yet, interfere with informational and educational processes. That may come later.

These proposed “systems for gathering and evaluating information about teacher and student performance” are phony.  Our government is now run by political hacks. The only thing they will or ever find is that capitalism is bad and blacks suffer from ongoing racism. They will not accept social failure that starts in the homes of certain minorities. They must always find other excuses.

Liberals are losers and promote failure and cannot compete in our society without your taxes and your compulsory acceptance of their destructive and sordid existence. They are simple caustic parasites and will consume all your wealth if they can and then announce that capitalism has failed. These people are the enemies of a great society.

rycK [a 5^th generation Californian in exile]

Comments to: ryckki@gmail.com