It's bitter sweet because my wife and I got a great public school education decades ago, but this was before common core, drag queen story time, and when boys can be girls and girls can be boys. If only we could send our little ones back in time to have a similar educational experience.
I think this entire approach of ending the DoED would be more tolerable on both sides if we could see where these cost savings are going. Are these billions of dollars saved going to help the public homeschool their children or is it going to be used to help build ai.gov? Who knows. Will we see? Probably not. These massive savings on all of these budget cuts are all going back to the behemoth of big government so we can be told that the Epstein list doesn't exist and that the clot shots are making us healthier.
The biggest conspiracy is that government cares about you.
I was in elementary school throughout the 1960s / into the early 70s. We still said the pledge of allegiance every morning (standing, hands over hearts), our principal started his daily message over the speaker with “duty, honor, country,” we had regular times in the auditorium to watch WWII newsreels, we learned cursive & if we did wrong we got paddled. O, & we had REGULAR art, music, home ec (shop for the gents) & PE as core courses.
LOL I was '70s. We also said the pledge, stood when ANY adult walked into the room, had an old TV rolled into the classrooms to watch the news... and were made to eat POWDERED SOAP--that just foamed and foamed the more you tried to rinse it out-- if we said anything disrespectful. (Ask me how I know... ;)
60’s-70’s in Canada. God Save The Queen and Oh Canada 🍁. God cannot and did not save the Queen. Oh Canada 🇨🇦, what a fecking mess you made of a spectacularly beautiful country.
Let me tell you our home punishment regimen: my parents hated words such as we siblings calling each other “stupid,” “idiot,” “dummy,” “shut up”. In those days my older brother had homing pigeons & so when any of us got busted for saying one of those words, we had a choice of having to swallow a nice clean, refrigerated chicken egg or a dirty, gross, warm but much smaller pigeon egg from the coop!
No matter which one any of us picked, we upchucked 😂
You put out some 'rich' content in this writing/posting/blog. My hat's off to you.
Love these:
"nearly 80% of American middle schoolers couldn’t tell you what the First Amendment protects… but they can probably explain why free speech equals violence and identify colonialism in the cafeteria menu."
Rich!! Very rich indeed.
DofED = DMV with clipboard and sense of entitlement. Love it.
Common Core really should have stated the truth:
Common Cor-ruption
Race to the Top?
Well, we've proven how that went, "race to the bottom".
No Child Left Behind?
Maybe "No Child left without indentured servitude" is more fitting.
Friends don't let friends educate children using DofEd agenda/curriculum.
Nail in woke’s coffin. i was out of graduate school before this monstrosity was forced upon us. We did just fine without it. In fact, most of the Federal funding was just wasted. And the idiotic rules they sent out. Frankly we need to get rid of teachers unions too. Never about the kids. Always about protecting incompetents and bilking the taxpayers.
I'm a retired high school teacher who retired 3-4 years earlier than planned seven years ago because I finally got so sick and tired of "teaching to the test," and being told from the ivory tower by people who had not been in a classroom for decades HOW to do my job.
Demolishing the DOE at the federal level is a great start. Blue state kids will continue to be dumbed down though when the blue states take control of the money & use it for their social experiments. I hope strings are attached to the fed money that will demand school choice to be made available. And that the money be used for kids education & not administration. Maybe we’re one step closer to dismantling the teacher unions whose members say “we don’t have time to teach reading - we have to fight Trump.”
Heck the red states waste a crap ton of $ too. Bottom line schools have gone from a place where you learned reading, writing and 'rithmatic, to social services centers, psychology visits on site, extracurriculars that cost a small fortune, before & after school care and a larger and larger # of superintendents and administrators to keep track of it all.
If you have any confidence in the ability of the US government to institute a “strong, centralized“ agency in anything other than surveilling its citizens, then you’ve missed a lesson along the way.
Four decades of incompetence in the DOEd proves that point.
Criticism of US governance from a putin-booster. That's too funny. We should probably start drilling the kids age 6 or 7. Military marching, school concerts with military songs, WW2 posters, then in middle school military history, gas masks, firearms disassembly. That sounds competent.
Then sebd them to die or get maimed in Ukraine. So competent!
Yes. Russia bad. putina very bad expansionist invader whose military targets civilians as policy. They're bad. If you don't think so, you're repugnant.
Here's a pro tip for y'all - anytime the media or your government consistently refers to a country by the leader of that country, you're being propagandized. North Korea - KJU, Russia - VVP, China - Xi, Israel - BN.
Sounds like Justice Sotomayor might be getting kickbacks from the Dept of Ed. Excuse me; USED TO BE GETTING 😁 kickbacks from the department of education. She sounds super angry about this decision to get rid of an organization that never did anything for kids education. Hmmmmm…. Me thinks the maiden doth protest too much.
Anything other than a 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court is often and generally an indication that someone doesn't understand the role of the court/judges. These lib justices are trying to decide policy (how they feel about DoEd) as opposed to Trump's authority to manage the executive branch.
They should re-familiarize themselves with their job description.
Observe these two quotes from ABC News' negative coverage of the Supreme Court decision. The first is from someone who worked in the Federal Student Aid office:
“We care about the work, we care about the people that we serve, and we believe in government,” Gittleman said in a phone interview. “I wanted to help people, and I believe the federal government is one tool to help people in this country.”
The next is from a former worker whose role or department isn't mentioned:
“It is very heartbreaking,” Núñez wrote in a statement to ABC News, adding, “I joined the civil service to build a career in service of others, to be part of the workforce making way for all students to have access to quality education.”
Common to both? Zero questions in the article questioning their premises. If i'm the journalist on this story, I'm asking:
"Why is it the federal government's role to participate in student education?"
"Doesn't this run the risk of indoctrinating students through institutional capture?"
"How successful has the department been at providing quality education in light of student reading and math scores?"
"Why can't education be more effective when local governments have greater control over it?"
I watched the accompanying video where Jon Karl reports the bad news to George Stephanopolous, and they make their antipathy for the decision clear: Karl editorializes that it "guts the department" -- he puts the drama into "guts" -- that helps low-income students, students with disabilities, and enforces civil rights laws to prevent discrimination.
Next: tees up Trump's statement about returning control to schools by saying schools already control curriculum, and that most funding is provided by state and local governments. That's his "womp womp."
Karl then gets to the de rigeuer "but critics say" part of his reportage, referencing "education advocates" who say the cuts will leave students without support services like special education and financial aid (basically a repeat of what he said earlier, by now attributed to a favored group).
As to whether he verified this with the people who would actually know, Karl reports that Linda McMahon said the core functions could be carried on by other departments. But the "narrative" was delivered as intended and weighted entirely on the side of "this is wrong."
And of course, Karl read some of the "scathing dissent" of Justice Sotomayor. At the end of that part of the segment, a glum-looking Stephanopolous quickly intoned, "And the majority of the Supreme Court didn't offer any reasoning at all."
So there you go, ABC News consumers: just six incompetent jurists making a decision so bad, they didn't even bother defending it.
Ha! I stopped doing that (rounding up technique to get fewer bills in change) a while ago because the cashiers today get so confused and they just count out 5 single dollar bills in change (true story).
Funny you would tell us that! I used to keep notes on funny things my students said in their blue book exams. So….. one exam asked them to describe the Manhattan Project. One kid said it was so secret that he didn’t know what it was. Another said that it was a secret project in Manhattan and thus he couldn’t say anything either. And so it went. They had literally just read about it the Friday before. Ok, so maybe they didn’t actually read it. Sigh……..
I kept a separate notebook for each girl for 20 years, filled with real-time scribbles. For the oldest's 21st bday, I transcribed every one of those stories into type and had books made (by year, instead of by kid, so the stories alternated Sophie/Sasha, and I included pix from each year). They were such a hit I wound up making copies for other relatives who saw and loved them. It was a ton of work but we cherish them!!! :)
You are, you’re, four, forty, to, two, too! Aww we had a gizmo that made four straight lines on the blackboard for us to diagram and practice the weekly word lists 😋
Thanks for pointing that one out, because I hear that all the time and it grates like nails on a chalkboard. I don't see why it's so hard to remember the correct form of the verb.
A nail in woke’s coffin amd better than a school lunch pizza day, I say.
As a young teacher, I was given a huge catalog of stuff we could get for free to make our classroom better. I went through there circling stuff like a kid on a Skittles binge. The front office sent it back, telling me to order more. Gleefully, I did so. This happened 2-3 more times until I finally asked how much I HAD to spend. Seems like the must-spend budget was $3600, and that was 33 years ago. I was floored! How much construction paper does one teacher need? I did the math— without a calculator or phone, and the budget for GA alone was astronomical for each teacher to HAVE TO spend $3600.
When I asked why we had to spend that much if we didn’t truly need some of that stuff, the front office replied, “If you don’t spend the full budget this year, they lower the budget next year.”
“It’s the DMV with tenure and a clipboard.” Great line!
It’s plain and simple to me.
The DOE is another bloated DC department. I’m not sure sending it back to the states will make much difference in the quality of education that children will receive. The states have a smaller (maybe) version of corruption, depending on their political situation. Color me cynical.
Once again, you had me choking on my morning coffee with your hilarious sarcasm! 🤣🤣
Loved the breakdown of the DoEd’s ‘accomplishments’. So thankful we were fortunate enough to send our kiddoes to a part homeschool Classical Christian private school in TX. It is so sad what has happened to the public schools in a relatively short time.
Having spent 34 years teaching college students US history and American government, I have firsthand insight into just how little our high school graduates know about anything at all. I hope the states can do a better job, but I’m not holding my breath since I might turn blue and die. Lack of meaningful education has infected local school boards, too. Our district hasn’t taught handwriting, foreign languages, civics, or the literary canon for decades now. Destroying something happens very quickly, but creating something exceptional can take a very long time. Ignorance is the most difficult enemy to overcome, because it doesn’t need to do anything in order to succeed. Read John Taylor Gatto’s book “The Underground History of American Education,” vol.1. It’s not clear how a society can recover from a failure this catastrophic, other than maybe through home schooling, using something like the Charlotte Mason method.
I worked at a community college where the course offerings included several “0” level (below college) math and reading courses. The courses content began at approx 4th grade level. These were courses the students got loans to pay the tuition. The debt began to pile up taking courses the students should have taken/passed for free in elementary, middle, high schools.
The No Child Left Behind garbage just moved them to grade 13 at the local CC where they got loans to learn multiplication, division, sentence structure, etc. Of course there were students who registered for classes, got the loans, dropped the courses, and wondered why they had to repay the loan before being allowed to register for more classes.
Don’t get me started on what that Fed Student Loan money actually paid for…
It’s so much worse than people know. We also taught remedial writing and math. Many of the students enrolled in those courses wanted to go to med school, pharmacy, or nursing.Our academic dean changed grades for students who complained. Now I hear the president is doing it. I never advise kids to go to college anymore. Even Harvard is teaching remedial math now. No
Care to be a bit more detailed with your maga talking point? They do have a pre-calculus course intended to firm up students trigonometry and geometry, so they can take calculus for science majors.
Our remedial math courses were not at a pre-calculus level; they were remedial math, not even algebra. It's not a MAGA talking point, I was the president of the faculty senate when our remedial courses were added to the curriculum. The remedial writing course focused on writing complete sentences in the first half of the semester and writing paragraphs in the second half of the term. Failure rates were high in both the math and writing classes. This is the fruit of the "everyone should go to college" marketing scam.
I was responding to your Harvard ridicule. Sounds like you taught at a shitty school - of which there are plenty. Native English speakers there are not “learning how to write a complete sentence,” in their freshman writing classes.
For my kids - it was chicken pattie day! We lived in the Chicago area, they knew what real pizza was and it was not school lunch pizza 🍕 lol!!
This:
Because the only thing that’s gone up in the last 40 years is the budget—and maybe the number of college students swooning over socialism (probably because they’ve been told it’s shorthand for “student loan forgiveness”).
This is a giant leap (or first step) to restoring real education in the USA. Our family survived - barely - the horror that was Common Core Curriculum. My husband (Options Trader who worked on the floor of the CBOE) was the one I was most worried might have his head explode from the stupidity that was forced upon our two youngest children.
Just this morning on the news, it was doom and gloom for students nation wide because of this action, the biased news media could only crow like a loony tune that the sky is falling. They couldn't come up with one thing positive about this financial realignment, turning the control back over to the states.
The USSR is ahead! Our schools are way behind! We have to throw more money at them!
This was the outcry in 1957 when the USSR launched the very simplistic SPUTNIK a few months ahead of the USA's Explorer 1 (much more complex experimental vehicle) as one of our contributions to International Geophysical Year (IGY).
So fast forward and over a $Trillion later, we have some new pretty buildings, bloated administrations at every level, and powerful unions (who don't appear to really care about the students).
And what happened to the quality of the education that the students were receiving as compared to the rest of the world? You guessed it, average US student test scores dropped like a returning first stage before SpaceX.
While getting rid of the DoEd is a welcome first step, the states and local districts should follow thru and remove the majority of non-teaching administrators so the majority of moneys that are spent are directed toward Educating The STUDENTS!!! This includes non STEM subjects so that middle and working class citizens can develop appreciation for the classics and return to appreciate those principles upon which this nation was founded.
Better than a school lunch pizza day. (I never had pizza at a school lunch.)
I was lucky (although I really didn't appreciate it at the time). My public school education prepared me to get a full ride to MIT where along with science, engineering, and math we were required to study the founding documents including the Federalist Papers.
It's bitter sweet because my wife and I got a great public school education decades ago, but this was before common core, drag queen story time, and when boys can be girls and girls can be boys. If only we could send our little ones back in time to have a similar educational experience.
I think this entire approach of ending the DoED would be more tolerable on both sides if we could see where these cost savings are going. Are these billions of dollars saved going to help the public homeschool their children or is it going to be used to help build ai.gov? Who knows. Will we see? Probably not. These massive savings on all of these budget cuts are all going back to the behemoth of big government so we can be told that the Epstein list doesn't exist and that the clot shots are making us healthier.
The biggest conspiracy is that government cares about you.
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help” 🤑
(I'll keep her talking at the door while you come around the house and get up behind her with the ball bat...)
I was in elementary school throughout the 1960s / into the early 70s. We still said the pledge of allegiance every morning (standing, hands over hearts), our principal started his daily message over the speaker with “duty, honor, country,” we had regular times in the auditorium to watch WWII newsreels, we learned cursive & if we did wrong we got paddled. O, & we had REGULAR art, music, home ec (shop for the gents) & PE as core courses.
Those were the sane days
LOL I was '70s. We also said the pledge, stood when ANY adult walked into the room, had an old TV rolled into the classrooms to watch the news... and were made to eat POWDERED SOAP--that just foamed and foamed the more you tried to rinse it out-- if we said anything disrespectful. (Ask me how I know... ;)
60’s-70’s in Canada. God Save The Queen and Oh Canada 🍁. God cannot and did not save the Queen. Oh Canada 🇨🇦, what a fecking mess you made of a spectacularly beautiful country.
Mic drop!
Let me tell you our home punishment regimen: my parents hated words such as we siblings calling each other “stupid,” “idiot,” “dummy,” “shut up”. In those days my older brother had homing pigeons & so when any of us got busted for saying one of those words, we had a choice of having to swallow a nice clean, refrigerated chicken egg or a dirty, gross, warm but much smaller pigeon egg from the coop!
No matter which one any of us picked, we upchucked 😂
Lesson learned!
Stop it! That is hilarious and awful. Parenting used to be a whore different ball game didn’t it???🤣🤣🤣
It WAS a “whore” & whole different ball game! They’d be in jail today 😆😅😂
Bahahahahah I hate siri (but I'm not changing it or you'll look like the lunatic!) ;)
Jenna,
You put out some 'rich' content in this writing/posting/blog. My hat's off to you.
Love these:
"nearly 80% of American middle schoolers couldn’t tell you what the First Amendment protects… but they can probably explain why free speech equals violence and identify colonialism in the cafeteria menu."
Rich!! Very rich indeed.
DofED = DMV with clipboard and sense of entitlement. Love it.
Common Core really should have stated the truth:
Common Cor-ruption
Race to the Top?
Well, we've proven how that went, "race to the bottom".
No Child Left Behind?
Maybe "No Child left without indentured servitude" is more fitting.
Friends don't let friends educate children using DofEd agenda/curriculum.
Thank you. Really loving your work/writing.
You sure know how to make a girl’s day.☺️
It all sounds great, with the possible exception of the WWII propaganda.
It would be super duper to know what the goof balls are doing with the billions saved, of course! Will we? Not likely.
I have a frigging plan. Stop all income and property taxes. Institute a consumption tax. Easy peasy. Consume and contribute.
The hard part is what consumables to tax.
Originally, the plan was for the money to be distributed to the states—at least some of it.
the most dangerous conspiracy is that we need government at all https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=the+most+dangerous+superstition+by+larken+rose+pdf&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Nail in woke’s coffin. i was out of graduate school before this monstrosity was forced upon us. We did just fine without it. In fact, most of the Federal funding was just wasted. And the idiotic rules they sent out. Frankly we need to get rid of teachers unions too. Never about the kids. Always about protecting incompetents and bilking the taxpayers.
I'm a retired high school teacher who retired 3-4 years earlier than planned seven years ago because I finally got so sick and tired of "teaching to the test," and being told from the ivory tower by people who had not been in a classroom for decades HOW to do my job.
GOOD RIDDANCE, D.O.E.!!!
👏👏👏
Demolishing the DOE at the federal level is a great start. Blue state kids will continue to be dumbed down though when the blue states take control of the money & use it for their social experiments. I hope strings are attached to the fed money that will demand school choice to be made available. And that the money be used for kids education & not administration. Maybe we’re one step closer to dismantling the teacher unions whose members say “we don’t have time to teach reading - we have to fight Trump.”
Heck the red states waste a crap ton of $ too. Bottom line schools have gone from a place where you learned reading, writing and 'rithmatic, to social services centers, psychology visits on site, extracurriculars that cost a small fortune, before & after school care and a larger and larger # of superintendents and administrators to keep track of it all.
Absolutely, and here in Texas school choice in now a thing.
Yes to school choice!
Excellent point. Those countries have "strong" centralized agencies. Ours is weaker than wet, single-ply toilet tissue.
Our government can no longer efficiently run a postal service. And that IS an enumerated power. Education is not one.
Re: my humorous subscriptions... it was a raucous list before I dropped Krugman and Reich.
If you have any confidence in the ability of the US government to institute a “strong, centralized“ agency in anything other than surveilling its citizens, then you’ve missed a lesson along the way.
Four decades of incompetence in the DOEd proves that point.
Criticism of US governance from a putin-booster. That's too funny. We should probably start drilling the kids age 6 or 7. Military marching, school concerts with military songs, WW2 posters, then in middle school military history, gas masks, firearms disassembly. That sounds competent.
Then sebd them to die or get maimed in Ukraine. So competent!
Spit some more kremlin talking points, Occ.
https://substack.com/@occam/note/c-134605226
Yes. Russia bad. putina very bad expansionist invader whose military targets civilians as policy. They're bad. If you don't think so, you're repugnant.
Look at these trolls below.
Russia Russia Russia!!!!!
Here's a pro tip for y'all - anytime the media or your government consistently refers to a country by the leader of that country, you're being propagandized. North Korea - KJU, Russia - VVP, China - Xi, Israel - BN.
Sounds like Justice Sotomayor might be getting kickbacks from the Dept of Ed. Excuse me; USED TO BE GETTING 😁 kickbacks from the department of education. She sounds super angry about this decision to get rid of an organization that never did anything for kids education. Hmmmmm…. Me thinks the maiden doth protest too much.
The "wise latina", her words not mine, needs to seek mental health care or better yet - Retire!
Expiring would be the nobler course.
Anything other than a 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court is often and generally an indication that someone doesn't understand the role of the court/judges. These lib justices are trying to decide policy (how they feel about DoEd) as opposed to Trump's authority to manage the executive branch.
They should re-familiarize themselves with their job description.
AMEN
Sotomeyer, you’ll remember, fell hook line & sinker for the ridiculous Covid death count
Like most Americans, she has many co=morbidies.
Observe these two quotes from ABC News' negative coverage of the Supreme Court decision. The first is from someone who worked in the Federal Student Aid office:
“We care about the work, we care about the people that we serve, and we believe in government,” Gittleman said in a phone interview. “I wanted to help people, and I believe the federal government is one tool to help people in this country.”
The next is from a former worker whose role or department isn't mentioned:
“It is very heartbreaking,” Núñez wrote in a statement to ABC News, adding, “I joined the civil service to build a career in service of others, to be part of the workforce making way for all students to have access to quality education.”
Common to both? Zero questions in the article questioning their premises. If i'm the journalist on this story, I'm asking:
"Why is it the federal government's role to participate in student education?"
"Doesn't this run the risk of indoctrinating students through institutional capture?"
"How successful has the department been at providing quality education in light of student reading and math scores?"
"Why can't education be more effective when local governments have greater control over it?"
The golden rule of journalism: “don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
I watched the accompanying video where Jon Karl reports the bad news to George Stephanopolous, and they make their antipathy for the decision clear: Karl editorializes that it "guts the department" -- he puts the drama into "guts" -- that helps low-income students, students with disabilities, and enforces civil rights laws to prevent discrimination.
Next: tees up Trump's statement about returning control to schools by saying schools already control curriculum, and that most funding is provided by state and local governments. That's his "womp womp."
Karl then gets to the de rigeuer "but critics say" part of his reportage, referencing "education advocates" who say the cuts will leave students without support services like special education and financial aid (basically a repeat of what he said earlier, by now attributed to a favored group).
As to whether he verified this with the people who would actually know, Karl reports that Linda McMahon said the core functions could be carried on by other departments. But the "narrative" was delivered as intended and weighted entirely on the side of "this is wrong."
And of course, Karl read some of the "scathing dissent" of Justice Sotomayor. At the end of that part of the segment, a glum-looking Stephanopolous quickly intoned, "And the majority of the Supreme Court didn't offer any reasoning at all."
So there you go, ABC News consumers: just six incompetent jurists making a decision so bad, they didn't even bother defending it.
What those ppl care about is their government pension!!🥸
What is wrong with this government??
Founding fathers' take: We do not believe in government.
Half of the people who benefit from their vision: We believe in government.
(Thanks for that insight Anthony. Also liked "...the federal government is one tool...": Full Stop.)
It's that pesky "enumerated powers" thing again....
Forget math, simple arithmetic simply isn't taught anymore.
Example;
Variety store purchase of $15.65.
I hand the 20 something cashier a $20.00 bill and 75 cents...
Out comes the calculator to figure out $5.10 is correct change...
Seriously?
😭🙈
Ha! I stopped doing that (rounding up technique to get fewer bills in change) a while ago because the cashiers today get so confused and they just count out 5 single dollar bills in change (true story).
Happens all the time to me😳
I don’t think they teach spelling or diagramming sentences anymore either.
I keep "funny books" of the hilarious things my kids say. This is an actual entry (at the time, Sasha was around 14 and Sophie was 16):
Sasha: We didn't have science in elementary school.
Friend: You didn’t?
Sasha: Nope.
Friend: What did you do instead?
Sasha: I don't know, like just dressed up like pilgrims and made gourd ornaments.
Mom (eavesdropping): That's not true. You had science with Miss Malone!
Sasha: We went once a week and all we did was hold reptiles. Ask Sophie.
Mom (to Sophie): Is this true?
Sophie: Yeah.
[Sophie leaves; comes back]
Sophie: Oh! One time in second grade we did a rock thing.
#SMH
Funny you would tell us that! I used to keep notes on funny things my students said in their blue book exams. So….. one exam asked them to describe the Manhattan Project. One kid said it was so secret that he didn’t know what it was. Another said that it was a secret project in Manhattan and thus he couldn’t say anything either. And so it went. They had literally just read about it the Friday before. Ok, so maybe they didn’t actually read it. Sigh……..
"I'd tell you, Ms. Caton, but then I'd have to kill you." ;)
In which case I am grateful for their ignorance. Whew!
Hahahaha, hilarious. 😂
I too have a book of funny things our kiddo has said. So fun to read back through it!
I kept a separate notebook for each girl for 20 years, filled with real-time scribbles. For the oldest's 21st bday, I transcribed every one of those stories into type and had books made (by year, instead of by kid, so the stories alternated Sophie/Sasha, and I included pix from each year). They were such a hit I wound up making copies for other relatives who saw and loved them. It was a ton of work but we cherish them!!! :)
It's been harder to keep up as the kiddo has gotten older. You're inspiring me to be more intentional about this.
That was about the extent of my science education. Now I am “Bill the science guy.”
Sorry, not sorry, but improper spelling/basic grammar really irks me.
Best example is misusing "there, their, they're".
You are, you’re, four, forty, to, two, too! Aww we had a gizmo that made four straight lines on the blackboard for us to diagram and practice the weekly word lists 😋
I loved diagramming sentences.
Mine is “lay” and “lie.”
Mine is “seen” and “saw”. I seen that movie already 😔
Thanks for pointing that one out, because I hear that all the time and it grates like nails on a chalkboard. I don't see why it's so hard to remember the correct form of the verb.
And that happens pretty much everywhere 😢
A nail in woke’s coffin amd better than a school lunch pizza day, I say.
As a young teacher, I was given a huge catalog of stuff we could get for free to make our classroom better. I went through there circling stuff like a kid on a Skittles binge. The front office sent it back, telling me to order more. Gleefully, I did so. This happened 2-3 more times until I finally asked how much I HAD to spend. Seems like the must-spend budget was $3600, and that was 33 years ago. I was floored! How much construction paper does one teacher need? I did the math— without a calculator or phone, and the budget for GA alone was astronomical for each teacher to HAVE TO spend $3600.
When I asked why we had to spend that much if we didn’t truly need some of that stuff, the front office replied, “If you don’t spend the full budget this year, they lower the budget next year.”
Brilliant.
Whittle away at bureaucracy harder, DJT.
“It’s the DMV with tenure and a clipboard.” Great line!
It’s plain and simple to me.
The DOE is another bloated DC department. I’m not sure sending it back to the states will make much difference in the quality of education that children will receive. The states have a smaller (maybe) version of corruption, depending on their political situation. Color me cynical.
Yes, another epic line from Jenna! Maybe Jenna could get a guest spot filling in as the White House Press Secretary?
Roberta, it WILL make a difference in half the states, and the other half will bankrupt themselves until it makes differences there as well.
Once again, you had me choking on my morning coffee with your hilarious sarcasm! 🤣🤣
Loved the breakdown of the DoEd’s ‘accomplishments’. So thankful we were fortunate enough to send our kiddoes to a part homeschool Classical Christian private school in TX. It is so sad what has happened to the public schools in a relatively short time.
☺️
Having spent 34 years teaching college students US history and American government, I have firsthand insight into just how little our high school graduates know about anything at all. I hope the states can do a better job, but I’m not holding my breath since I might turn blue and die. Lack of meaningful education has infected local school boards, too. Our district hasn’t taught handwriting, foreign languages, civics, or the literary canon for decades now. Destroying something happens very quickly, but creating something exceptional can take a very long time. Ignorance is the most difficult enemy to overcome, because it doesn’t need to do anything in order to succeed. Read John Taylor Gatto’s book “The Underground History of American Education,” vol.1. It’s not clear how a society can recover from a failure this catastrophic, other than maybe through home schooling, using something like the Charlotte Mason method.
I worked at a community college where the course offerings included several “0” level (below college) math and reading courses. The courses content began at approx 4th grade level. These were courses the students got loans to pay the tuition. The debt began to pile up taking courses the students should have taken/passed for free in elementary, middle, high schools.
The No Child Left Behind garbage just moved them to grade 13 at the local CC where they got loans to learn multiplication, division, sentence structure, etc. Of course there were students who registered for classes, got the loans, dropped the courses, and wondered why they had to repay the loan before being allowed to register for more classes.
Don’t get me started on what that Fed Student Loan money actually paid for…
It’s so much worse than people know. We also taught remedial writing and math. Many of the students enrolled in those courses wanted to go to med school, pharmacy, or nursing.Our academic dean changed grades for students who complained. Now I hear the president is doing it. I never advise kids to go to college anymore. Even Harvard is teaching remedial math now. No
words.
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Care to be a bit more detailed with your maga talking point? They do have a pre-calculus course intended to firm up students trigonometry and geometry, so they can take calculus for science majors.
Our remedial math courses were not at a pre-calculus level; they were remedial math, not even algebra. It's not a MAGA talking point, I was the president of the faculty senate when our remedial courses were added to the curriculum. The remedial writing course focused on writing complete sentences in the first half of the semester and writing paragraphs in the second half of the term. Failure rates were high in both the math and writing classes. This is the fruit of the "everyone should go to college" marketing scam.
I was responding to your Harvard ridicule. Sounds like you taught at a shitty school - of which there are plenty. Native English speakers there are not “learning how to write a complete sentence,” in their freshman writing classes.
SMH. 😖
I picked pizza day because pizza is about as relevant to getting a good education as the DoEd was. Jenna, this one is a keeper.
Brilliantly funny analysis! I have no need to read other news 🤓.
For my kids - it was chicken pattie day! We lived in the Chicago area, they knew what real pizza was and it was not school lunch pizza 🍕 lol!!
This:
Because the only thing that’s gone up in the last 40 years is the budget—and maybe the number of college students swooning over socialism (probably because they’ve been told it’s shorthand for “student loan forgiveness”).
This is a giant leap (or first step) to restoring real education in the USA. Our family survived - barely - the horror that was Common Core Curriculum. My husband (Options Trader who worked on the floor of the CBOE) was the one I was most worried might have his head explode from the stupidity that was forced upon our two youngest children.
Just this morning on the news, it was doom and gloom for students nation wide because of this action, the biased news media could only crow like a loony tune that the sky is falling. They couldn't come up with one thing positive about this financial realignment, turning the control back over to the states.
cut... cut... CUT! (I feel like a movie director)
These cuts are just barely scratching the surface. We need to gouge deep into the muck if we are seriously going to turn things around.
SPUTNIK!
The USSR is ahead! Our schools are way behind! We have to throw more money at them!
This was the outcry in 1957 when the USSR launched the very simplistic SPUTNIK a few months ahead of the USA's Explorer 1 (much more complex experimental vehicle) as one of our contributions to International Geophysical Year (IGY).
So fast forward and over a $Trillion later, we have some new pretty buildings, bloated administrations at every level, and powerful unions (who don't appear to really care about the students).
And what happened to the quality of the education that the students were receiving as compared to the rest of the world? You guessed it, average US student test scores dropped like a returning first stage before SpaceX.
While getting rid of the DoEd is a welcome first step, the states and local districts should follow thru and remove the majority of non-teaching administrators so the majority of moneys that are spent are directed toward Educating The STUDENTS!!! This includes non STEM subjects so that middle and working class citizens can develop appreciation for the classics and return to appreciate those principles upon which this nation was founded.
Better than a school lunch pizza day. (I never had pizza at a school lunch.)
I was lucky (although I really didn't appreciate it at the time). My public school education prepared me to get a full ride to MIT where along with science, engineering, and math we were required to study the founding documents including the Federalist Papers.