Sunday, April 09, 2006

The kids learned their lesson well

American non-education as seen by an outsider

It has been years since I've seen the inside of an American school. But I was invited to give a lecture on economics to a suburban high school. I didn't know what to expect. Perhaps that was best. The teacher had warned me that students simply never paid attention. I was a bit taken back by that. The first thing I noticed at the school was two armed security guards. Considering that I last lived in New Zealand, where not even the police are armed, this was a bit unnerving.

I went to the office and told them that I was to speak to a specific class. The individual working the main information desk said he would call the teacher. While he was doing that I used the toilet. But when I came out he had still done nothing. I stood there for a few minutes and he finally called the classroom. I was told a student would come for me. A few minutes later a young women came to escort me to the classroom. On the way there she told me not to expect much as the students don't care. Adding her warning to the teacher's had me wondering how bad it could be.

As I started I could immediately see that about half the students were in a walking coma. They could walk, they could talk but they were oblivious to the classroom itself. As I started speaking, trying to get their attention as much as possible, I was surprised to see that now and then a student would simply get up and walk out. Maybe ten minutes later they would come back. Some went out and then came back and then went out again. They didn't have to ask permission or apparently have any real reason for leaving. They came and went as they liked.

I used my best tactics to get some attention from the students. And with a great deal of effort I finally had half of them paying attention. But it was a real chore. And here is what shocked me the most. At least five times the school interrupted the class with announcements over the loudspeaker. If they wanted one student, from one class, to come to the office they interrupted every student in every class . None of these announcements had anything to do with a student in the class to which I was speaking The interruptions made it difficult for me to concentrate and they interrupted the students. Each time they loud speaker went off I had to get the attention of students all over again.

Toward the end of my talk I made it very clear that I would try to answer any question on any topic related to political economy. I told the students that if they only learned what I thought they should learn they would remember nothing. But if we discussed the topics that interested them they would remember. And with a little prodding the questions started coming. And some of them were good questions. One girl, pierced nose, semi-punk look, who had been drifting for the first half had finally become interested. She wanted to know what are the differences between classical liberals and modern liberals. It was a good question.

Things were finally moving along and then the damn loudspeaker went off again. I had tried to speak over it the previous times. But it still created problems each time. And I thought I would do the same thing this time. But the announcement went on and on and on. Some man in the office was making announcements about which class won which game. And he literally meant games. He droned on about a "stick race" and dragged the announcement out. He announced which class came in fourth place. Then he would go "yaaa" and applaud over the loudspeaker. Then he went into third place, cheered again and applauded again. And then second and did it all over again. And then first and did it all over again. Now if you think it was tedious reading what he did you should have heard it live! And he had at least four such game results to announce and each time he cheered and each time he applauded. The students did learn who came in fourth, third, second and first in the all important "nacho macho" contest but what they were not learning was anything about economics.

I was quite angry with the school. I could see in that one period that with some effort one could get through to a fair number of the students. But at least five times I was interrupted for unimportant, inconsequential announcements. All I could think was: "No wonder the kids don't take learning seriously." Why should they? The school itself didn't take learning seriously.

In just that one period. the main school office sent the message to students that a "nacho macho" contest was more important than learning. They got the point across loud and clear that a "stick race" was more important than learning. Two other games, the absurdity of which I do not even remember, were both more important than learning. At least four other times the students were told that having one student come to the office was sufficient reason to stop the teaching of every single student on campus.

And that was only one period. Is it like this throughout the day? I don't know. I hope not. But I suspect that these interruptions are common. So the students have learned what the school went out of its way to teach them: class time is not important and learning is not important. For a good number of these kids that is the one lesson they really got from the administration.

Source





CROOKED VOTER REGISTRAR IN CALIFORNIA STOPS EDUCATIONAL REFORM

He serves the Democrat establishment, not the people

Capo for Better Representation (C4BR), a group of parents who initiated a recall of their school board for what they say is financial mismanagement, formally filed a Writ of Mandate in Orange County Superior Court today, Friday, April 7th, in an attempt to get their recall campaign certified.

C4BR filed papers in April, 2005 to recall all seven trustees of the Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD) in April, 2005. The group, led by recall organizer Kevin Murphy, a financial executive and CUSD father of four whose wife served as a PTA president in the district, collected the 20,000+ signatures needed for each trustee to place the recall on the ballot. Several hundred volunteers successfully gathered signatures at grocery stores, coffee shops, movie theaters and in neighborhoods throughout the district.

In early November, the group delivered to (acting) Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley over 177,000 signatures; 25,000+ signatures per trustee. In a surprising move, the registrar informed Kevin Murphy at 5 pm on Friday, December 23rd that the group did not turn in enough "valid" signatures to certify an election. This despite the fact that they delivered over 25,000 per trustee, when only 20,000 were required. The registrar had invalidated an unprecedented 35% of the signatures.

Recall volunteers went to work inspecting the signatures to find out what went wrong. What they found was disturbing. As many as 3,650 signatures per trustee were invalidated because the petition circulators wrote in the address for some of the signers when asked for assistance in doing so. Even though OC Registrar Neal Kelly's office told the petitioners on eight different occasions this was allowed, Mr. Kelley apparently reconsidered at the eleventh hour and decided to disallow these signatures.

In addition, volunteers who reviewed the signatures found that the registrar made errors on roughly 30% of the invalidated signatures. The registrar invalidated voters' signatures because he claimed they were not registered when in fact the recall volunteers discovered that they were indeed registered in the district. Other examples of errors include invalidation of signatures because the "signature does not match" the voter rolls. Many of the signers had registered decades before, so their signature would indeed appear different today. In addition, voters were asked to sign seven times, once for each trustee. By the time they got to the seventh signature page, their signature often varied widely. These voters' signatures were summarily disallowed however. It appears that the benefit of the doubt clearly was not given to the voter in these instances. Murphy also pointed out that the temporary staff hired by the registrar to review the signatures were not trained handwriting analysis professionals.

The registrar appears to have been overzealous in invalidating signatures and in fact, appears to have gone out of his way to invalidate, rather than validate, signatures. This raises the issue of whether the will and intent of the voter was truly respected.

The recall campaign was initiated after several poor decisions made by the trustees. The board voted 7-0 to spend $52 million for a 126,000 sf luxury administration building for only 134 administrative employees, while about half of CUSD's students languish in portable classrooms, many of them 10 to 20+ years old. Local Mello-Roos and redevelopment dollars that should have been spent for classrooms and older campuses are now being used to build the largest, most expensive administration building in Orange County.

The trustees also voted unanimously to spend $130+ million (and climbing) on building the new San Juan Hills High School, which is currently the second most expensive high school ever built in California, after the Belmont Learning Center in LA. According to Murphy, the new high school is being built on 85 to 130 feet of fill on the site of an ancient landslide, next to a dump that services several counties, virtually under high voltage transmission lines, on a road not meant for public use that has 600 daily trips from trash trucks on a steep grade, across the street from a green waste facility. For this, the district paid nearly $1 million dollars per acre. Worse Murphy says, the district (i.e; taxpayers) paid the developer who sold them the property to grade exactly the number of acres the developer needed for his residential development, and used that dirt to fill in the canyons for the school site.

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that CUSD Superintendent James Fleming is paid close to $300,000 a year; the highest paid Superintendent in the state. Fleming, the recall group says, regularly turns a deaf ear to parents' and kids' needs, cutting basic programs and services in the district due to "budget cuts" while moving forward with hugely expensive and unnecessary projects. Murphy says Fleming and the trustees had many parents fooled into believing that the district didn't have enough money, until construction began on the beautiful new administration building. When parents complained that their kids were in old portables while the trustees and Fleming got a $52 million building, Board President Marlene Draper's response was "kids can learn in anything". That pretty much sums up the board and Superintendents' attitudes towards the parents and children in CUSD, says Murphy.

The group is asking the court to either validate the signatures based on the errors uncovered by the recall volunteers, or for a recount of those petitions invalidated due to registrar error. They will ask that signatures be allowed where the circulators completed addresses at the signers' request, as the group relied on the registrar's advice regarding the completion of addresses by circulators. C4BR's lawyer anticipates a judicial review will not take more than 30 days.

Source




Minding our manners: "My parents had conflicting views about the nature and origin of good manners. My father took the Romantic view that they were the expression of man's natural goodness of heart and that they therefore emerged spontaneously -- that is, if they emerged at all. If they didn't, it was because of the social injustice that inhibited or destroyed natural goodness. My mother took the classical view that good manners were a matter of discipline, training, and habit and that goodness of heart would, at least to an extent, follow in their wake. The older I grow, the more decisively I take my mother's side."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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