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Don’t matter what you call it. Ricochetti are a passionate bunch, and sometimes the fighting spirit takes over. Our first guests are Andrew Gutmann (hosts of the essential Take Back Our Schools podcast) and Ricochet member Michele Kerr who’s had some strong criticisms of the fellas’ takes on public education over the years. For those of you who like a little scrappiness on the flagship podcast: this one’s for you!
Next we bring on our favorite doctor (the kind that doesn’t ask if the bruises are Covid related), Jay Bhattacharya! He explains how he became known as a fringey pseudoscientific quack and the ins and outs of Covid’s last gasp.
With Peter out, James and Rob steer the ship through a Musk-y hostile takeover, NYC’s newest madman and the latest in Ukraine. And mark your calendars so you can join Rob for the America’s Future pub crawl on May 14th! Members only: so sign up today!
Music from this week’s podcast: Adult Education by Hall and Oates
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Most teachers a good and we are blessed with many good ones. Those I know who complain do so over a lack of discipline and disruptive students or the administrative burden.
I do think an area that has to be discussed is community involvement. I attended a mix of public and private high schools.
I attended private schools because my sister is dyslexic. While reading was a struggle for her, she could do math at an exceptional level. (She ended up getting an academic scholarship and became and engineer, winning awards for her work.)
Unfortunately, the public schools could not offer her the instruction she needed. She could either be in a “regular” class and struggle/fall behind in reading [but do great at math] *or* go into a special needs class and get the help she needed for reading, but get a math education that didn’t meet her talents.
Private schools offered that flexibility to assist with her reading needs, but challenge her with math; public schools did not for her. Simple fact.
However, she went to college, we had to move and I ended up in a public school. I was a year ahead of anyone else in my grade, but the instruction was still very good. I was challenged by the science classes I had. My senior year, things really took off and I was more than prepared for college. I’d go so far to say that freshman year of college was easier than the high school I’d attended.
How did that happen?
The community was an actual community, carved out of the neighboring city district so that they could A.) pay higher taxes B.) have those taxes go to schools and C.) Be involved — intimately — in the education of their children. I knew the parents of my classmates … because everyone just did that. Everyone got involved. There was great concern about “what the kids are learning.”
If a parent had a complaint, they’d always come in. They may not like the answer, but the teachers/school had to provide the answer.
The real question is if teachers today are really ready for that kind of involvement from parents? It’s an easy thing to say “yes” to in theory, but I wonder.
Getting a teaching certificate requires a year of instruction. That extra year of college is not long enough to indoctrinate anyone. By age of 22, before going to teaching school, most college graduates have their views set. If there is indoctrination, it occurs later in the teachers lounge. There are 3.2 million public school teachers in the USA. Don’t judge them by the nuts on TikTok.
They might get an extra year of “teaching” instruction, but if they went to a Teacher’s College and/or took a Teacher’s Degree program, they’ll get a lot more of it.
Also, if you figure that English courses etc, which everyone has to take to get any degree, are largely leftist now, that means the students who plan to go into teaching are getting that along with all the others. But while someone who has to take leftist English classes to get a degree in Electrical Engineering won’t be tending to pass along the Marxism they were taught too, someone who becomes a teacher will have plenty of opportunities.
And of course, those going into teaching won’t be taking ANY Electrical Engineering courses, which means they take not just Marxist English 101, they also take Marxist English 201, and 202, and 203, and 301, and 302…
Here is all you need to know about schools: Good families make good students and good students make good schools. It is just that simple. Unfortunately, it is very hard to create good families and we are lazy and don’t try. If as a nation we make a dedicated effort for 25 years to create good families, our education achievement would soar. The reason that private and charter schools do well, is because they are a self-selected group of good families.
Good schools attract good teachers (teacher skills vary), because it is satisfying to teach there and the schools can be picky about the teachers they hire. Good schools also attract more good families. It is all a virtuous cycle. As conservatives, we should focus on school choice and in general improving families. The good and weak schools will sort themselves out and we can focus improvement efforts on the weak schools.
We would be so much better off if we would account for this in public policy decisions.
But don’t the improvement efforts really/first need to be focused on the weak families?
Oh, the horror…
There are private schools with really bad policies. These are with so called good teachers and good families. Teachers like Mr. Rossi are fired. Bad teachers who don’t mind teaching (indoctrinating) students stay and get paid well. NYC teacher booted from ‘woke’ classroom, says boss has ‘grave doubts’ (nypost.com)
It goes back to my comment about how I was made to feel very unwelcome at my children’s schools. Parents who complain run the risk of bad teachers taking out their displeasure on the child. And heaven forbid if you attend a school board meeting. Then you are branded a terrorist. I don’t think blaming students and their parents for bad teachers and schools is the answer.
Teachers, bad school administrators and their unions are the problem. Also putting morons on school boards. Hopefully they will be voted out.
I gotta say that Michele did as much interrupting as Rob, which she acknowledged. What I super appreciated is that she didn’t fall into ad hominem.
That said, she made many more umbrella assertions than actual points, IMO. One of her main assertions was that people like the public schools. But if that’s the case how did this happen? Surely this level of unenrollmcnts doesn’t happen every year.
Added after posting. The article says enrollments have been steadily declining since 2014 but blames the pandemic for this “spiral.” I doubt it was from COVID-19 per se but from kids leaving public schools for private schools that were open for in-house instruction and residents fleeing that state at least in part as a result of California’s responses to the disease.
I don’t do TikTok. I know the two loonies on TikTok who showed up on Twitter don’t represent all teachers but that they exist and feel bold enough to boost on social media tells me there are problems out there.
Education requires more than a year in college. Those courses are scattered over several years. They teach students what kind of teacher they are expected to be. They are dealing with young skulls full of mush. Many of them are impressionable just like many students in the liberal arts.
Wow this is great. I logged in after being away for a week and when I replied to a comment on *last weeks’s* post it was posted to … PAGE 11?!? WOW that was quite the conversation!
It is only Saturday now and we are already on page 4. Glad to see so much conversation.
It does seem that from what I am hearing these things are true:
I’m totally cool with both being true.
And if what I get about #1 is over the target – how does one go at that? I guess local actions are where it is at. We shall see.
Look forward to more of this thread. Thanks to the guests, the hosts, and to the Ricochetti!
https://bigeconomics.org/the-hardest-and-easiest-college-majors-full-list/
Possibly more suggestible than most…
In 1910, only 13% of Americans had a high school diploma. In 1895, the number was even less. So in 1895, the vast majority of Americans couldn’t even read the test, much less pass it. The only thing I can say for sure is that far more Americans could pass that test today than could in 1895.
Stina (View Comment):
Seriously? What is this supposed to mean?
It’s supposed to mean that until you’re in higher level math, the math goals are pretty straightforward and ideology won’t affect it much.
They don’t need to use the textbooks the district mandates. I don’t use textbooks at all.
That’s true, but the textbooks don’t matter for content. We can use whatever book we want–copy pages from it or whatever–or no book at all. We have tremendous freedom.
Stina (View Comment):
This isn’t true. School boards decide curriculum. Teachers are flexible on how they teach it, but for the most part, they are limited to a curriculum. Like Common core.
Common Core isn’t a curriculum, but a standard. And in high school, we largely ignored Common Core altogether. k-8 was different because they were tested every year. But in high school, Common Core reduced tests to 11th grade only and we generally ignored standards.
The latter, sure. But as I just pointed out in my last post, the average teacher isn’t far from center, and 1 in 3 teachers, give or take, is Republican. Relatively few are far left, even though ed school is *very* far left. Ed school doesn’t indoctrinate. Not because they don’t want to, just indoctrination is very hard to do in a free society.
I think the public fear of “indoctrination” is loopy, whether it’s teachers or kids.
They’re really not. Unions and teachers don’t have much influence on policy unless someone else agrees with them. The Democrats started valuing teachers unions in 2016 in no small part because the public started agreeing with unions. But even now, they don’t have much influence.
DonG (CAGW is a Hoax) (View Comment):
Also, in a school with multiple grades per class, there is pressure to have the classes synchronized. This allows the school to move kids around to avoid behavior problems.
There might be pressure, but they can’t require it.
Privates and charters don’t do better than public schools, controlled for SES. Selective charters do somewhat better, but that’s because they are selective.
I have to say, if you think good families and good students make good schools, and that good families are rare, then you really aren’t blaming schools. You’re blaming America for not being the place you want it to be.
The ease of education classes are irrelevant. To get a teaching credential, you have to pass a credential test. Elementary school test is about 10th grade in each subject (which is not a given for college students these days). Middle school and high school tests are at college level knowledge. And a large chunk of high school teachers don’t major in education. Using any factoid about education majors is really pointless. You can’t get a degree or credential in education for the most part unless you pass the credential test (something like 90% of BAs and all MAs work this way), so the difficulty of the credential test is the only issue that matters, not some nonsense about which degree is tougher.
That was a good comment and I agree with a lot of it. My main objective here is to say that as a *party*, it makes no sense for GOP to run against public schools as total failures. The people who post on online forums are wildly atypical of actual Republicans, and public schools are pretty popular with Republicans–even if they, like the public generally, would like to see changes. But GOP is mostly interested in ending public schools, which means they aren’t in the game, really, when it comes to school policy.
1. Only about 33% of jobs need college diplomas. Too many students need remedial English or math when they get too college. There is a mismatch and/or a problem at the secondary level. Students who graduated high school in the early 1900s could read Shakespeare, write in cursive, and do math. Now, schools want to eliminate these things.
2. Saying you can use whatever materials you want and that critical theory indoctrination isn’t happening is not credible. If you know teachers have liberties, you can’t say they don’t slip the indoctrination into their studies. I have no problem with teachers supplementing books. Textbooks have been declining in quality for years.
3. We aren’t concerned with most teachers but are concerned with the healthy dose of them who do indoctrinate. You are too protective of your peers and profession to see the problem. It ruined college. We know HS isn’t as bad as college, yet. We are stopping it before it gets bad there, too.
And maybe most of those wouldn’t either, if High School was as effective as it’s been in the past.
As I hear it, the lefty governor of Oregon, where I grew up, recently signed legislation removing all high school graduation requirements.
Posted without comment.
Take THAT, Michele!
California.
L –
It used to be that kids learned to read before high school. Still do in most places. The pilgrims had formal schooling in 1620. Reading the bible was considered a necessary skill.
I didn’t say CRT isn’t happening–not “indoctrination”, because you can’t indoctrinate kids. Hell, if we can’t teach reading to grade level, how can you argue we’re successful indoctrinating? I said transgender nonsense is happening far less than people seem to believe.
But yes, I agree that teachers’ freedom means they can teach a lot that might violate community standards–until they get caught. Better is to be very explicit about what they *can’t* teach.
Kids still learn to read before high school.
Wrong. The “lefty” governor of Oregon ended the high school graduation test requirement, like many other states, except a lot of them weren’t “lefty”: Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana,Oklahoma, South Carolina
Doesn’t it ever bother you to get your facts so wrong?
I doubt you can find a single mention of where I protected my peers, and if you knew anything about this, you’d know the problem with indoctrinating teachers is more common in elementary school, not high school. Also, if you had the sense to be worried, you’d be worried about the standards for college, which are dropping by the day.
That’s kind of the problem. What sort of fool would consider that evidenced?
I am worried about college and whether I want to continue to fund education savings accounts for my grandchildren. There wasn’t much indoctrination going on in college until there was.
Good families are more common than “rare”, but we need a lot more. I read that if 80% of kids have an attentive father that is sufficient to cover for the other 20%. Perhaps 80% will work for improving school achievement. I have never blamed schools for bad achievement. Nor the teachers.
Bring back trade schools and vocational tech schools! Germany does it right.
Changing culture must be worked from the top and the bottom. We need to work through churches to make strong healthy families from the bottom and we need government and culture to promote policies that strengthen families from the top down. The Left is working to destroy families and turn us all into serfs.
Of course you can.
How is that different? If you’re not testing to see if students learned what they’re supposed to learn, but they get a diploma anyway? Do they even have to meet ATTENDANCE requirements now?
You think schools basically advertising that stuff, isn’t evidence?
I am comforted by Michele’s assessment that the youngster gender thing is not that prevalent. What I have difficulty understanding is how that concept gets introduced to grade school teachers.
If a guy hung around a playground talking to 6 year olds about gender identity, whether their behavior was perfectly consistent with their equipment and suggested that there were options – he’d get locked up. And he might be better off if the police got to him before the parent. The normal experience of a child that age has nothing to do with sex beyond ick and cooties. This type of parental behavior and the law enforcement around it is not some prude cult inclination, it’s a natural response to some outsider who is involving himself is a child’s sexuality.
I can’t get my head around the teachers meeting where they’re introduced to a curriculum that includes gender discussions designed to identify the rare kid who might want to turn it around and make sure the parents don’t know. Doesn’t somebody call the cops? Are moderate Democrats ok with that?