CSotD: Scandal for Schools
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Looks like we’ll be saying good-bye to the Department of Education, which is less a matter of making our federal budget more efficient than it is a sign of how little we understand and value education.
Testing is as good a starting point as any. The main problem with testing our students and comparing them to students in other countries is a difference in samples. Here, we have compulsory education for kids up to an age that varies from state to state but is generally around 16, and, in most states, something of a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
Elsewhere, you may have wealthy and middle-class kids in school and the other kids in sweatshops, while in most advanced nations (but not this one), there is a division between university-bound students and voc-tech students.
So when the nation’s test scores come out, you have to ask who was tested, because here it’s everybody except (maybe) some of the special-ed kids. And, BTW, my suspicion is that those overseas voc-tech kids can kick our asses in math because their education is more engineering-directed.
But certainly, if only a portion of kids are in school, and if only a portion of those kids are being tested, you won’t get the same results as in a system where all kids are present and tested.
I’d say it’s comparing apples to oranges, but one of our few leaps in education came in the 1920s when we realized the kids weren’t all going to be farmers and needed to learn more than how to keep track of bushels and pecks.
The other came when we realized the Soviets were launching things into space that were staying up there, which has f-all to do with test scores but is a good indicator of how much it takes to get our attention.
And so Ramirez echoes the notion that the Department of Education isn’t educating kids, which ignores the fact that actually educating them is up to the states and the department mostly furnishes the help they need to do things their own way.
There is no national curriculum. There is only limited guidance and a system that attempts to even out financial ability to reach reasonable goals, which states still set for themselves.
Whamond notes that losing the support of the Department could leave states on their own, returning to the grim days when certain states — particularly those with segregated school systems — were all but missing in action when it came to educating their children, leaving their kids roughly in the position of those nations where some kids are in school and some are in sweatshops.
And we’re not talking about the 19th century. Shannon Sharpe joked that he and his siblings had one pair of shoes and took turns going to school, but when he got serious about his life, he outlined a story of privation that was only overcome by his grandmother’s determination to give those kids a solid start in life. That wasn’t a century ago: He left home for Savannah State with his belongings in a pair of grocery sacks in 1986.
Whamond is joking about states dropping schools entirely, but we’d better hope Trump isn’t joking about spreading educational aid around other departments and then delivering it.
Nobody is going to come out and say they’re against education, but it’s not hard to read the signs, and Trump has just announced an executive order to ensure that museums with federal backing, including the Smithsonian but also museums of women’s and African-American history, eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology.
If that doesn’t sound like George Orwell to you, perhaps you’ve never read “1984” or “Animal Farm,” where only proper ideology was permitted.
Perhaps you admire the ordered upbringing of the children in “Brave New World”:
Now that’s education!
Think I’m exaggerating? Panicking over nothing? Ask the grad student who was seized on the street and dragged off to a Louisiana prison because she expressed an improper ideology by putting her name, along with others, on a column in the Tufts student paper.
Secretary of State Rubio explained that she was a lunatic who had caused a ruckus. That’s the official explanation for why she was not permitted to question Israel’s bombing of Gaza or US support of that policy. It qualifies as “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology and mustn’t be permitted, though, in fact, the piece criticized Tufts University rather than, specifically, either Israel or the United States.
Still, this Fulbright scholar had violated the Anti-Ruckus Clause of the First Amendment.
And note that calling political dissidents “lunatics” was what the Soviets used to say when they were shipping pro-democracy troublemakers off to the salt mines.
You might suspect that we’re currently only sending non-citizens off to hell-hole foreign prisons, but a few citizens may begin to be charged with being lunatics and creating ruckuses.
Deering points out that we will no longer tolerate languages like Spanish or Vietnamese in official places, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we began outlawing foreign languages — including those spoken here before English — and not just forbidding them in government documents.
But probably not, because this is America and we don’t do those sorts of things. And if you disagree, you could win an all-expense-paid trip to El Salvador!
Meanwhile, the little girl’s question is pertinent: Who will teach them?
There are college professors who apparently know enough history to be able to tell which way the wind blows, and right now it’s blowing them north to Canada.
Those three Yalies who left studied fascism, not science, but Oliver’s addressing more than just that trio, since European universities are actively recruiting American scientific researchers who wish to work in a more open and tolerant atmosphere.
And if that little girl gets sick, or, god forbid, pregnant, she may have to travel north to find medical care, where British Columbia is actively recruiting doctors and nurses, not only offering a less restrictive legal atmosphere but making it easier to gain Canadian credentials.
What’s that old song? For some reason, it’s making me think about a whole other St. Louis.
Baby, we’ve still got a long way to go.
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