The Master Plan
The former president and his children have done their part to attack public education and those that work in the industry. Everyone knows I’m one of those people. His son called us losers and the former guy said no one should let us watch their children for 20 minutes much less teach them anything. We’ve heard all this before and the important thing is understanding why. It is also important to understand exactly why U.S. public schools don’t outperform their counterparts in Europe and Asia and why most private schools outperform their public counterparts.
See, that’s the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to make public schools so unpalatable that most people won’t have a choice but to go private. So, we allow pay to lag for teachers, we insult them and belittle them, and then when there’s a teacher shortage we begin to water down the qualifications teachers must have. Both Arizona and Florida have announced that teachers don’t have to have a Bachelor’s degree.
Most red states are not far behind. Our very own governor threw a commission together to see why there’s a teacher shortage and initially included only one teacher. We could have saved him the money. All of this is by design. They know very well what they are doing. They can offer vouchers and school choice, but that will end up being a band-aid for a gun shot wound. Of course, given the recent mass shootings in our schools, such an euphemism is a little on the nose.
Private schools work for one reason and one reason only. The schools get to choose who goes to school there. It’s the same reason that schools in Europe and Asia outperform our public schools. When you get to choose who takes the test it is remarkable how well they will perform collectively. Imagine an English class where the teacher can pick 20 percent of his or her class to be exempt from the test. We’d have nearly 100 percent passing rate. Boy would we look great.
Simply put, the minute you tell a private school who they have to take is the minute you negate their primary advantage. Plus, a 5000 dollar voucher does little when the average tuition in Texas is over 10,000. Many of the top parochial and Catholic schools can cost more than twice that amount. A lower middle class family can’t afford to send even one child to such a school much less multiple children.
Even if you subsidized the entire tuition costs, the child still has to meet the admission requirements. What happens if they have intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, or physical disabilities? What happens if they have behavioral problems? A private school can simply say no. As a former private school teacher, I can attest to this. Some of their margins are so thin that they can’t afford to pay specialists. If your kid needs extra help he or she will need to go to public school.
Yet, we will be stripping those same public schools of crucial resources. We will be flooding their classrooms with only those students that were too poor or somehow not fit enough to be accepted to one of those schools. They can’t explain what happens to them and they don’t particularly care. I’ve also been in schools that were the last choice in a school choice district. Someone has to care about these kid
So the Rublican Master Plan is to maintain power over idiots, by minimizing education, and dumbing down the electorate. Potential future Republican voters should heed Groucho Marx:
“I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member”
1That works in the UK, too. Going to a “State School” is just a path to nothing.
Public school teachers have always been disrespected and underpaid.
2Privatizing is a knife in the heart of academic freedom, too. This is all so very appalling. We have so many fronts to fight on, and they are relentless.
3The reason they don’t want the masses to be educated is the same reason slaves were forbidden to learn how to read and write.
4They don’t want the serfs to figure out how much they’re getting screwed.
I remember back in the 1980s when I first started following politics, the label they hung people with was “liberal.” To this day you’ll notice Republicans hang the moniker of conservative on their campaign posters like it’s a badge of honor. You don’t see us doing the same with liberal. Now anything they want to disdain becomes socialist or Marxist. What do these words mean? The MAGA crowd has no clue. They just know it sounds bad.
They’ll call us fascist if they want without one hint of irony or shame. Their followers wouldn’t know the difference anyway. This has been their long game since the 1980s. Make working for the government seem shameful. Make teaching seem shameful. Sooner or later the best and brightest will choose something else. When you have the mediocre and less you can’t help but watch it decline. See, I told you government doesn’t work. See, I told you our schools are failing. Except, who’s really responsible for that? Oh, that’s right. We don’t know that either unless someone tells us on YouTube or TikTok.
5@Rick; If I recall correctly, Groucho’s remark came from him being rejected for membership in a Hollywood country club because he was Jewish.
6As for Nick’s theme, would it make sense to attack the premise that appears to give fetuses some kind of control over their births; ie, parents, ancestors, race, physical and mental attributes, timing? Or is it just the luck of the draw?
“I love the poorly educated!” proclaimed the former guy in 2016.
RE #4 “This has been their long game since the 1980s.” Spiral-down contract tracing usually leads to individual #1 in this national unravelling: Ron R.
7Thanks Nick! But Conservatives have been purposely sabotaging and destroying Public Education for 3, THREE main reasons. Yes so they can admit whoever they want and 2. so they can TEACH whatever they want so they can control the message (Jesus was a Republican and wrote the Constitution, Republicans are good, Liberals are bad doncha know) and 3. for $$$$ Profit and Power. Can never charge too much for a good education lol.
The Powell Memo outlined how to control Education down to the local PTA for complete control of the population.
‘The Powell Memo (AKA the Powell Manifesto)’
“Secondary Education
While the first priority should be at the college level, the trends mentioned above are increasingly evidenced in the high schools. Action programs, tailored to the high schools and similar to those mentioned, should be considered. The implementation thereof could become a major program for local chambers of commerce, although the control and direction — especially the quality control — should be retained by the National Chamber.
What Can Be Done About the Public?
Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term. Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term. The first essential is to establish the staffs of eminent scholars, writers and speakers, who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing and the speaking. It will also be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public. Among the more obvious means are the following:”
8https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Nick, old school teacher here. Back in the day where I come from, vocational ed teachers did not have to own a degree. Veterans of the construction and auto industry could actually retire from those areas and teach their trades in high sfhool programs. This worked fine for them. They were solidly at work five days a week during the school year and often doing private jobs during the summer and/or actually going to the lake and fishing for about a week.Private achools in my area (that includes parochial) often hired teafhers who were within a year of obtaining a degree. They were kept on the payroll as long as they took summer classes and actually get a degree. Thus they were “experienced” practicioners Religious orders (nuns) often sent out non-degree personnel to teach in schools run by the order. However, these nuns usually had already packed away at least two years in the colleges run by the same orders as part of their noviciate. And they too spent their summers back at the colleges until they got their degrees. Parochial schools eventually experienced a major derth of teaching nuns and turned more and more to hiring from the major pool of applicants. That is when parochhial school tuition started to grow. There are now parochial schools asking per year as much as a state university. These schools do provide special rates for those who can’t whip up $22,000 per year. These classes are usually smaller than public schools. Back in the day, parochial schools were a cross between the famed schools in England like Eton, Harrow and Rugby and an American militry academy. Their study covrage was accelerated. Any kid coming from a parochial school to a public school had a hard time adjusting inasmuch as what they had already experienced was two years ahead of th4 public school curriculum. Ditto in reverser for a public school kid suddenly in parochial school.
9I retired after teaching 33 years in high schools in GA. Last week, the district in which I live in Middle GA had a recruitment program for retired teachers. The district has a teacher shortage. Fewer college students are education majors, so the district now wants retired teachers to return to the classroom. I have credentials [including passing state scores in Middle Grades Education that would allow me to teach in Middle Grades here,] but I won’t because of the way teachers are treated in GA. They need me, I have what they’re looking for, but I will not reenter any classroom and open myself up to being harassed and possibly sued by some parent or group that wants to control everything that is said and done in my classroom. A few years ago, a young teacher was teaching English in a high school in a district here in GA. She had a Facebook page. She went to Italy on vacation during a summer break and posted a pic of herself seated at a table with a bottle of wine and a glass on it. When some parents saw that pic, they went nuts, and the young teacher was fired. She wasn’t even holding the wine glass or shown drinking wine, but that didn’t keep some in the district from attacking her and causing her to lose her job. There are entirely too many people who, imo, think they know more about teaching than the teachers who are actually trained and certified in their fields. These are the same persons who would never choose to become an educator. I don’t care how many future retired teacher recruitment events my district has, I’m not going back into a classroom here in the state of GA.
10Nick, your last sentence “someone has to care about these kids” is exactly the opposite of what characterizes the maga far right crowd. You could use that sentence and substitute just about anything for “kids” when it comes to what many people need. That crowd doesn’t give a shit what people need. Substitute health care, people that depend on social security, Medicare, and on and on.
11Bingo!- “The schools get to choose who goes to school there.” My son teaches at a (remarkably liberal) Catholic school. Kids are suspended for infractions, period. The headmaster told an entire class that if he heard of any more racism of bullying he’d throw out the entire class. So yeah, it’s peaceful and high achieving, and sought after.
O/T @SebastianMurdoc of Huffington Post is live tweeting the Alex Jones trial.
12Capitalism 101.
$$$$$$$$$$
If the government was to provide every child with a $5000 voucher for education every private school in the country will just increase their tuition by the same amount.
$$$$$$$$$
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