re: Nat's Teachers union’s LGBTQ+ Caucus website for how-to on anal, fisting, bondage, sado...

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This could be, but I doubt it's true across the patch, or at a level that's driving the low academic achievement we are seeing nearly everywhere.

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Also, agreed. 1) We have a culture of failure in public education where we don’t expect good educational outcomes from economically poor students. And the teachers hired for these hellscapes that purport to be schools are barely capable of reading themselves.

I have a friend who is a principal. They had a teacher whose stated goal at the beginning of the year was to get 25% of her students on grade level for reading. My friend said “go back and try again. That’s an F.” Prior to that year and under different administration, it would have been an acceptable goal.

2) We’re using methods of teaching reading that literally don’t teach kids how to read. We have decades of data and we ignore that data because education colleges like the theory behind the methods. It used to be called whole language. Now it’s called something else because everyone had to finally admit whole language sucked.

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The organization I was helping (along with others) was ready with stepped up funding and designs on bringing this service to all the students in this elementary school. In the end, it was the teachers and admin that didn't want it and the program died. That experience was instructive for me. There is something very wrong in the education industry.

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A culture of failure.
And someone else’s success is anathema because it only proves that failure isn’t endemic to the student or the system. Just the current system sucks.

You have academies like Ron Clark or charters like KIPP and public school teachers can’t shite on them fast enough. They’re reminders that they’re turning out a shite product.

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They’re reminders that they’re turning out a shite product.

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Exactly. And it's not like the bar for success is high/difficult right now. Unfortunately, simply not aggressively sucking arse is a huge success today.

Close the national Department of Education Trash and bring each school solely under state control and then the national progessive, communist bitches can go to hell to teach their trash....

they should all be deprived of their teaching certifications

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This could be, but I doubt it's true across the patch, or at a level that's driving the low academic achievement we are seeing nearly everywhere.

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Let's step out of the urban area, which is highly violent, and go to more rural where similar low levels of achievement are occurring.

If it's not behavior and discipline issues, then what is it? Is it public education as a system? If it's the system, then we'd see widespread failure across the board. But we know that's not the case because many school systems are successful.

The individual teachers? How can we attract good teachers to the Black Belt? To the sticks of Mississippi? Only way I can think of is to pay people more to work there. Are we willing to raise salaries to attract better teachers?

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Let's step out of the urban area, which is highly violent, and go to more rural where similar low levels of achievement are occurring.

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South Dakota is one of the poorest states but has one of the highest literacy rates in the country. When you carve out the two (modest sized) cities of Rapid City and Sioux Falls (which have more money that the small towns) + the reservations, academic achievement is even better.

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If it's the system, then we'd see widespread failure across the board. But we know that's not the case because many school systems are successful.

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This isn't true. We absolutely have widespread failure across the board. That the public schools in my town (Gilbert, upper-middle class) are substantially better than those in south Phoenix, doesn't mean that the Gilbert school district is successful. Gilbert is having difficulty teaching kids basic reading and math to a reasonable level. Arizona has the most liberal charter school laws in the country, and there's a reason parents are piling their kids into them in droves.

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Only way I can think of is to pay people more to work there. Are we willing to raise salaries to attract better teachers.

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Depends on where the money comes from. If it's taken from bloated school bureaucracies, knock yourself out. But broadly, public education's problem isn't a lack of funding. In fact, I'd argue it's actually overfunded and that's part of the problem. Not different from the pentagon, for example - when you have too much money, you end up doing stupid shite and that stupid shite ends up being a drag on output.

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What are the classics? Who decided we should study them? Why those particular choices?

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And here the mask falls away. Why Shakespeare? Why Dante? Why Wordsworth, Dickens, Proust, Cervantes, Chaucer, or Tolstoy? Who decided on these authors and deemed their works classics?

Questioning the Western Canon by “liberal” educators is a hallmark of the Progressive quest to dismantle the cultural literary, artistic, and philosophical attainments of the Christian West and replace it with…what?

You question the Canon and those who created it and have sustained it but I’ll wager you have no problem providing your own ideas of who should replace Tolstoy. Who gets to question you or your ideas and preferences?

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I’ll wager you have no problem providing your own ideas of who should replace Tolstoy. Who gets to question you or your ideas and preferences?

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I operate via student choice. There are parameters to help students see how novels can fit in with particular standards, and they choose on their own.

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So... Andrew Tate, the TikTok influencer, was legitimate then?

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For a student’s practice with rhetorical analysis? Yep.

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I operate via student choice. There are parameters to help students see how novels can fit in with particular standards, and they choose on their own.

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That’s a reasonable solution I suppose. Or it could be the patients running the asylum. Are there choices limited to at least some semblance of the “classics”?