No matter which country in the world you live in, the next time you hear government officials or public sector unions or special interest groups demanding more & more of your tax dollars, think back to when you listened to this. It’s an excerpt from the documentary, The Cartel, about the low performance of New Jersey public school students and the waste, and outright theft, of billions of dollars. Filmmaker Bob Bowdon carefully goes through example after example of corruption and incompetence and unaccountability.
Dismissing this as “only happening in the U.S.” or “only happening in New Jersey” is fine . . . if you’re an ostrich who prefers keeping his head buried in the sand. But for those who prefer to deal in reality, it provides a crystal clear example of the deep seated systemic problems with a bloated, unaccountable public sector, such as exists in every single jurisdiction in Canada.
I have recently started working closely with people from India.
When the topic of education came up, it was their opinion that their public school system had been destroyed by unions and communists.
If they want their children to have a decent chance in life, they need to spend 1/4 to 1/3 of their annual salary on private school.
The problem is world wide.
I recently watched “Waiting for Superman” – a documentary about the school lotteries in the USA. It’s not a perfect film – but I would recommend it for sure. Bottom line – you can never fire teachers, even those that refuse to teach. Best you can do is try to transfer them to another school – and the worse the school, the worse the teachers after the shuffling ends. The only way out is winning the lottery to a charter school – your chances of graduating go from 20% to 90%. If you lose – well, you lose.
The model we use for education is no longer necessary. Most of what is taught in the first nine years doesn’t require a textbook or a teacher (or a school bus, cafeteria, janitor or state-of-the-art classroom).
Reading and basic math can be taught in a few weeks, yet many students are illiterate even after thirteen years in the system.
Schools can’t be fixed. They need to be destroyed.
I feel for the REAL teachers trying to cope with an institutionalized form of Mafia by Union & School Administration. Who have in the name of personnel gain destroyed the school system. That at one time was the envvvy of the World. Is any administrators worth 400,000?
Its another ponzi scam gone to seed corn for politicians with the ever present decay of a bloated bureaucracy.
JMO
A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves
The Beautiful Tree
We do not have an education system in Canada,we have a socialist,union thieving system,run by aholes.
Fair difference in wages between the US and Canada. The teacher is paid $55k in New Jersey, in Ontario a senior elementary teacher’s top grid wage is $91k. My sister-in-law’s is from the US with several family members as teachers. Their pay is nothing like our teacher’s union wages.
`I interviewed three teachers last summer. One was a special needs teacher, one an elementary teacher and the other taught high school.
They all had just retired after thirty five years. I asked each of them the following question.
In your thirty five years in the education system, how many teachers had you heard of that were released for incapacity or incompetence.
The answer from all three was, “NONE”.
I then asked if they had heard of any colleague who was held accountable for their results?
They didn’t know what I meant.
Pretty sad! I think.
Milton Friedman pointed out all the flaws in government run schools 35 years ago in his Free to choose series, which is now on YouTube. The problems in education will not go away until the parent is given control over the funds for their child’s education.
College Conspiracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE&feature=player_embedded
“It’s just like that movie…Lean on Me.”
Folks, that comment is not about teachers. If you’ve seen the movie, you know it’s about students menacing other students: establishing clearly that school is not about learning but power. Power comes from bullying students and disrespecting authority.
Eager, talented, devoted teachers can only do so much to fix a system like that. Administrators can do a little more. The power to improve lies with students (who come to learn and work with other students), parents (who encourage good behavior in their children), parents (who teach respect), and parents (who support decisive and [usually tough] administrators).
The ultimate solution will, I think, involve getting the negative students out of the classroom. Then establishing that “out of the classroom” is a bad place to be.
That last part is likely to be the biggest challenge in a “caring” welfare state.
Related:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/men-not-work_560881.html?page=1
I was able to read and write before I even started grade 1 (which I skipped). Almost everything that I learned after that was a result of my reading the textbooks or solving the problems in the test, NOT from listening to a teacher. My daughter was also able to read and write before she started school, and she did not attend a kindergarten or pre-school. Teachers are, in my opinion, little more than babysitters.
I never listened to my teachers either; boy did I suffer.
Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Oh look…a new bam bam action figure, kewl!
I am the product of private education of the 60’s. The school that I attended had the highest graduating average the year I graduated in the province and that was when we all wrote the same exams. I am also from a single parent family which didn’t deter me from attending a private school.
I have both worked in industry and been an educator having taught high school in the early seventies then worked in industry through to the late ninety’s and the teaching in post secondary since.
The cost (based on hours worked) of education has gone up drastically since the sixties and the quality of the product has severely gone down. The graduates of today by the standards that we had to achieve in english are functionally illiterate, they can not perform simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division without a calculator and have no idea what critical thinking is.
Most students today have never experienced failure (or for that matter the elation of success) and are not ready for further training or the work place.
My generation could not wait to get out of their parents home and start a life of their own, while today many children camp out in their parents basement playing video games or vegetating into their thirties and even forty’s.
I believe this is because the schools and society have such a low expectation of what they are capable. It is time we look at what we are doing to the future generations that will be expected to provide care for us in our old age.
I sure hope Christie fixes this up. I’ve seen a lot of good but also some bad from him so far. I might add that not only is the public education near-monopoly bad, but so is the assumption that every child belongs in school. A class is really just a room with desks in it. Also, I think the situation in Canada is somewhat-somewhat-better because of our more provincial system where spending is less centralized than in America.
I like the guy in the trailer who wonders why parents are not “lighting fires and breaking windows”.
I think a lot of people are slooooooowwwwwwly waking up to the fact that we, the entire Boomer generation and the XYZs too, have been taken for a f-ing SLEIGH RIDE by Leftists since WWII was over. Since the 1930s really, when I think about it.
Right now, home schooling is the way to go. We -will- be seeing the Big Machine start clamping down on that in the next five years, it has already started in Quebec. That’s a hill I’ll be happy to die on, personally.
They take people’s money and their guns and their freedom to speak, it isn’t really changing our live all that much. They come for the kids, that’s -different- isn’t it? Molon labe.
The private schools are not much better.
They have to adhere to the public curriculum.
They have to obey political correctness too.
The solution is parents. The kids who have involved (preferably two) parents will do well. The kids who don’t, through no fault of their own, will not.
cartel.
oh, like the structure the early capitalist corporations started with various commodities in the early days.
but apparently in right wing circles when incompetent schmucks do EXACTLY the same thing that is to be reviled.
oh the hypocrisy.
SS, monopolies and oligopolies are tightly controlled. Who’s objecting to that? More of your straw men, I assume.
How anyone can be okay with the thievery, incompetence, and unaccountability of anyone in the public sector, as you clearly have implied you are, is truly breathtaking. And telling.
THE CITY OF SASKATOON comes to mind. Bloated. that’s our mayor Don Atchison.
There is no convincing a lefty of anything,its the herd thingie in the other post.
bob, sometimes they do respond to evidence if presented in just the right way. You’ve heard the old saw, there’s no hawk fiercer than a liberal dove who’s been mugged?
Education is at the forefront of the ideological battle that conservative must wage is we expect to turn back the tide of cultural rot and PC BS.
Socialists have long known there is little point in wasting their time trying to convert some 40-something voter. Much better is the strategy of going after young impressionable minds.
Education reform is not an option. It MUST be done if we want to return to some semblance of fiscal, social and cultural responsibility.
Sadly, it’s never about the students. It’s always about the salaries and benefits of the educational admin, teachers, and teachers’ unions — that is, the educational establishment.
stupidshooter….when a so called teacher can’t fail a kid because it may upset his/her poor little feelings,you are setting them up for entiltement from the get/go,which is what the unionistas/liberals want.You can’t add,you don’t move on.Suck it up,princey-poo.
In Canada we have an option to deal with some of this spending and it’s known as school boards which are elected. Wouldn’t it be interesting if property owners got upset and elected a school board which refused to go along with teachers unions and gave people the option of what school they wanted the educational portion of their property taxes to go. This is where we should be focusing our attention now to start countering the marxist focus of education.
Every year in Calgary the school board asks for more money, they got a 4% increase, still over budget, their solution, fire teachers. The facts they never mention:
1. Just signed a 200 million dollar lease for a new adm office downtown
2. Close inner city schools including the ones that house adm and support workers for free rent, to move adm downtown
3. No adm staff fired, just teachers and support workers
4. Taxpayers covering their underfunded pensions on the last contract deal.
5. Keep promising more new schools in the suburbs, instead of telling people to buy houses near existing schools if they don’t want to bus.
Our school boards live in a fantasy world where they are never accountable for their stupid decisions.
Snappy Dresser,
Sorry about your school days, but you’re not alone. A lot of us went through that crap and know exactly what you;re talking about. I don’t know how many times, I have thought about meeting that special teacher on the street one day, or bringing everything up in court to make everyone aware that these people were not the cool people others thought them to be. I have excelled at everything in life. I have degrees (education and music, computer programming), own a business, speak several languages, home school three amazing kids, play about 15 musical instruments, am very well off financially, build violins in my spare time, and consider myself an adept tradesman. All this in spite of dropping out in grade 11. My demons have followed me my whole life, and they all originate from the same place. School. The lessons taken from that place, I wish I could erase from my mind. You wonder, what if you never attended that school, or what if your parents had you home schooled or whatever, you think about your own lost potential that what beaten out of you. Dam it, I could have been a better person, and happier. But,……… I have two choices, to either let those S.O.B.s take the rest of life as well, or show everyone that you can knock me down but I’ll keep getting up.
snappy dresser, your school daze closely follows my experience. Except I didn’t win the fights until I was in highschool, and nobody hung themselves. I grew too big to f- with, basically. Then I started studying martial arts and became a frickin’ menace. 🙂
Still don’t “fit in” of course, as an adult my coping mechanism is self employment. It is the only decent path for those of us square pegs that can’t be pounded into the round hole. Its harder, but compared with being one of those f-ing herd animals it rocks. Success is the best revenge.
My child is on the substitute teacher list and gets called in to sub at high schools. She has had some longer term assignments filling in for extended leaves of various types so she has seen a number of different schools over different teaching periods. She went into the job with very high hopes. Now she is very disillusioned and does not want to teach in our Public education system.
The reason?
It is not the parents (though some of them can be a treat she says), or the unions. It is the administrations. While some of the school administrations do have high standards, most of her experience has been otherwise. The administrations do not appear to have a key performance indicator built around the percentage of students who entered and subsequently graduated with certain externally verified achievements including in the core areas of reading, writing and arithmetic. They come in to work, they administer things, they go home. They do not measure their success or failure.
A teacher gets to see every day how they are performing – – if they are interested in that. If my daughter is representative of the group, they feel frustrated and blocked in their attempts to get the kids to produce. My daughter knows about carrots and whips as motivators. She is restricted in her use of both. Show up. Babysit. Teach those who want to learn. Forget about those who don’t. That is the message that is being delivered by the administrations.
She is not able to hold the teenagers accountable to the learning plan she has set up for them. Unexcused failure to get assignments in on time cannot result in a zero or reduced mark on the assignment. Kids get moved along so they will not be stigmatized. This reduces the quality of education for the rest of the class. It has a lowest common denominator effect – gradually dumbing down the quality of the education experience. There is only so much time in the class and it has to be spread around to the laggards and to the leaders. She feels bad for the kids because she knows that when they get into the real world they will experience a painful failure or two that could be avoided if they were held accountable in high school.
Interestingly enough, her high school experience, of about 10 years earlier, was a lot different. Of course she went to a Catholic High School (even though we are not Catholic) because we wanted her to be exposed to some Judeo-Christian values. Now she can’t teach in that system without converting.