It appears that the Harris-Walz campaign to embrace “joy” has taken hold among educators in L.A. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted 4-3 to allow 10 schools to opt out of standardized tests and test preparation beginning in the 2025-26 school year. LAUSD President Jackie Goldberg declared the move was a blow to “corporate America” and would restore the “enjoyment of education.”
We have previously discussed how schools have been dropping the use of standardized tests to achieve diversity goals in admissions. That trend continued this month with Cal State dropping standardized testing “to level the playing field” for minority students. I have long been a critic of this movement given the overwhelming evidence that these tests allow an objective measure of academic merit and have great predictive value on the performance of students.
Many colleges and universities are returning to standardized testing after the much-acclaimed abandonment of the tests for a more “holistic approach” to selection.
However, public educators have continued to lower proficiency requirements and cancel gifted programs to “even the playing field.” The result has been to further hide the dismal scores and educational standards of many public school districts.
Goldberg lashed out at the “testing industry” which tends to expose the continued failure of public education to give these students a fighting chance in society. Rather than look at their own failures over decades to significantly improve scores, Goldberg said that she “hoped” the resolution would “begin to change how we look at student assessment.” In other words, students would be assessed without looking at how they actually perform on tests with other students.
Tests, it appears, are just a buzz kill for teachers and students alike: “Because the whole goal of life became not the love of learning, not the enjoyment of education, not the exchange of ideas, but whether or not your school could move up on its test scores. For at least 20 years, I have found that repugnant.”
It shows, Ms. Goldberg, it shows.
The retiring Goldberg has always been more focused on increasing budgets than improving scores. Her website declares
“California is the world’s fifth richest economy. There are 157 billionaires here who pay almost nothing in taxes. There is no excuse for why New York spends $29k per pupil while we spend $16.5k. It’s time to tax the great wealth in this state and re-invest in our children!”
That appears to be one statistical score that Goldberg does find relevant as a measure of education.
Others at the meeting noted that they have falling enrollments and this will not help.
I previously wrote about how public educators and teacher unions are killing public education in America. Many of us have advocated for public education for decades. I sent my children to public schools, and I still hope we can turn this around without wholesale voucher systems.
Teachers and boards are killing the institution of public education by treating children and parents more like captives than consumers. They are force-feeding social and political priorities, including passes for engaging in approved protests.
As public schools continue to produce abysmal scores, particularly for minority students, board and union officials have called for lowering or suspending proficiency standards or declared meritocracy to be a form of “white supremacy.” Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of “equity.”
Once parents have a choice, these teachers lose a virtual monopoly over many families, and these districts could lose billions in states like Florida.
This is precisely why school systems are facing budget shortfalls as families vote with their feet. These families want a return to the educational mission that once defined our schools.
L.A. will pursue a program under which they appoint a “lead teacher” for additional professional development from Community School Coaches and the University of California Los Angeles Center for Community Schooling. They will focus on an effort to “integrate culturally relevant curriculum, community- and project-based learning, and civic engagement” into their programs. The “relevant” curriculum would not include actual standardized testing.
It is about money and self-interest. If teachers get paid regardless of their actual ability to teach, then why teach? If universities rack in billions in ever increasing tuitions that are blindly paid by parents or student loans, why demand academic rigor? There is ZERO accountability for these obvious failures. Let parents vote with their feet and their money. Hold failing schools accountable- fire administrators and poor performing teachers. Tie raises to objective student performances. Quit loaning money to students pursuing majors that offer them no job opportunities. Make universities publish annual reports with income, expenses and salaries of teachers and administrators; graduation rates and first year employment rates and salaries by major of recent graduates. Let prospective students and their parents can see where their money is going and it’s worth. In other words, treat them like the multibillion dollar companies that they are. College is a business decision – start treating it like it.
@Jeff,
Its in part because these ‘top notch’ schools are living off their reputation and alumni.
If I were a congress critter, from either side of the aisle… I’d vote to pass a higher education law that forces schools to spend at least 20% of their previous year’s alumni donations/reserves.
I think anyone spending 90K+ a year getting an Art History degree is an idjit or a trust fund baby.
Some of these other far liberal degrees should also be reigned in.
I’m not suggesting muzzling anyone’s freedoms, but really a PhD in Transexualism in the 18th century and its influence on British Foreign policy…
That’s nobody’s cup of tea.
-G
” I’d vote to pass a higher education law that forces schools to spend at least 20% of their previous year’s alumni donations/reserves.”
How about removing the tax deduction?
Yes, your tuitions are incredible. Someone should audit those schools
John
I am a believer in competition. Competition makes all of us better. Imagine a basketball team where they spend their days in the gym practicing the fundamentals – dribbling, passing, shooting, but never compete. They will be destined for failure because they will never know where their strengths and weakness are. Thus, they will never be able to adjust their practices accordingly.
In your article, you state your dislike the idea of wholesale vouchers. But that is precisely what we need. Vouchers will allow private, parochial, and other non-public schools compete with public schools for students. Forcing public schools to compete will make all students, even the weakest ones, better. Like college football conferences where the major conferences attract the best players while others attract the less talented, with vouchers, I would not be surprised to see some schools orient to gifted and talented students, while other schools aim their focus to teach weaker students. Just like a rising tide lifts all boats (Yes Jessie Jackson – even those anchored to the bottom) competition will improve the quality of all students.
Choosing a famous person, Albert Einstein, in saying he probably competed with no one. It’s doubtful he ever came across anyone he could even talk to most of the time. Not everyone has the same motivations as another.
Just when I thought the dumbing down of America could not get worse, once again, CA proves me wrong. And they wonder why it is such a failed state with hundreds of thousands of people, fleeing every year for better states. Companies fleeing from the high taxes, the regulation and crime in droves.
@Upstate,
The only downside is that when those who flee CA and its failed policies… they tend to not learn their lessons and take their overly liberal views to new cities.
-G
Of course, since you have destroyed culture and despoiled the education system, now you want a CYOA solution to give the impression that you merit that paycheck each week. We see the generational outcome of your progressive agenda and it is plain to see every night on the police report and the tax increases to pay for more failed social programs.
Educational Enjoyment over Standardized Tests
Its time for a TV show rerun, “Romper Room”. Playing with guns!
* long term ago. Rifles were put away in gun racks and cabinets. Pistols same. Father told you what can and not touch. Children always did as told. Anyway kids had BB guns for hunting small things and it was fun driving the pick up on country roads. 😉. When you came to bump it meant punch it.
In Other News: “LAUSD President Jackie Goldberg Declares ‘Three generations of imbeciles are NOT enough.'”
~+~
In a recent social media posting, LA Unified School District President Goldberg seemed to channel Justice Holmes’ alter ego.
“We have seen more than once that those on welfare may call upon the best citizens to support their dysfunctional lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State to make no sacrifices in order to promote the swamp in D.C. and its incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of allowing degenerate offspring to commit crime, or to let them to become fat, dumb and lazy for their imbecility, society can encourage those who are manifestly unfit by continuing to breed their own kind. The principle that sustains poor quality compulsory education is broad enough to cover sending society down tubes. […] Three generations of imbeciles are not enough.”
You and others might find the following of interest
The following scientific article was published in the most prestigious medical journal, “Nature”, in 2020. It has been cited > 600+ times since then:
Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2095-1
It was retracted June 2024. This is unheard of. Nature Journal does not have a history of issuing retractions. Lesser, predatory journals do but not Nature.
A medical science article is rarely cited over 100 times in its lifetime. > 600+ times in 3+ years? Staggering.
What’s more staggering is that the lead author is a well known microbiologist researcher. That’s the first red flag. He claimed that blood cancers can be detected via bacteria that attach to the tumor cells. That’s the second red flag. What the 600+ articles/authors missed, that cited this fraudulent “Nature journal” article is the third flag. Some of the bacteria mentioned do not exist in humans.
I stated several years ago that Americans had given up. Their striving for perfection, living an honorable life, with passion for excellence (a once popular genre of books) have been supplanted with the opposite of the aforementioned qualities.
The “lie” is perfectly acceptable if not a “must do” to achieve power and control over others. Publishing a research article in the medical sciences that is cited hundreds of times connotes power: power of knowledge, of persistence, of solving vexing problems.
The Nature retraction is extremely troubling. But if I’m honest it is predictable that Nature Journal is also now publishing fraudulent science. The Big Lie is the way, the truth and the life
Caveat: The only reason Nature publishers retracted the article 3+ years later, was not because of an internal audit by their staff. They retracted it because readers who are scientists, ran their own experiments to see if they could replicate the original authors findings. Their findings were published not in Nature Journal but in another journal because Nature refused to follow corrective data. Here’s the big gut punch: it was published in October 2023.
Major data analysis errors invalidate cancer microbiome findings
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01607-23
2020 fraudulent article published
2023 alternative study proving it was fraudulent
2024 retraction
It took Nature journal almost a year to retract their fraudulent article, as readers/researchers continued to believe the article, cited it, and then published their own articles….now they must be retracted.
Again, Nature Journal staff should have caught the errors. When corrective data was brought to their attention, they waited almost 1 year to retract the article.
Until Americans return to living a life of passion, purpose, excellence, integrity, and as my parents often told us as kids, “hay que tener palabra” (your word is sacred), I expect America and the Western World to continue its downward trajectory. Kamala, Trump, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornel West, Dr Jill Stein, none of them can do it for America. Americans have got to do it themselves. Meanwhile political monsters in both parties are having a field day lying to Americans about…. everything.
DEI
Estovir,
I think that was one of your best comments here on the good professor’s blog.
Thank you.
Seems to me, as Americans we have become such a lazy bunch, any kind of challenge, struggle, has to be mitigated at all costs to the point of even dumbing down our children.
Just wait until these dumbed-down children become brain surgeons and airline pilots.
Well said.
I hate to correct an assertion here because I respect Estovir quite a bit. NATURE is not a prestigious medical journal. The prestigious journals through the years were New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine (Green Journal), Archives Of Internal Medicine, ARRD, Chest, GUT. Generally the journals of common societies in Pulmonary, Primary Care, Ob Gyn, Surgery, Trauma Surgery, Gastroenterology, Infectious Disease. Etc, etc. Nature may consider itself a prestigious medical Journal but it is way down the tier level of medical journals and rarely gets the top publications. Also the top publications have a far more rigorous peer review process. Not perfect but still rigorous. I never read Nature at all. Was not worth the effort with some many more reputable journals.
I never read Nature at all. Was not worth the effort with some many more reputable journals.
thanks for the feedback. I know you were a clinician but I do not recall if you were a researcher, pre-clinical arena. I wear 2 hats: clinical and pre-clinical. You are right that clinical studies are published in the medical society journals you mentioned, though I do not read pulmonary type journals given I’m in cardiology. However, pre-clinical research is generally published in none of the medical society journals because they are usually beyond the interest of clinicians, often use animal models and focus on molecular mechanisms. Nature, Cell, et al do publish these types of research articles. I know very few cardiologists (community & academics) who can have a fluid conversation on immuno-cardiology science, which is disappointing. Immuno-cardiology is a very hot topic right now.
Fun fact: I wrote a 17 page manuscript, single space, on the molecular mechanisms of cardiovascular inflammation in the sterile environment, with 300 references. I was only half-way through when I was told that it would never get published in a medical journal. I was told it belonged as a chapter in a textbook because few physicians would read it – “too complex” I was told. I was crushed. So now I am using charts and tables to summarize my key points thus far, and then go for the main thrust of my topic: the need to adopt epigenetic inhibitors. It will likely go over like a lead balloon but I have to believe.
Parents and businesses paid for education in the past.
They weren’t into idiotic indoctrination.
Corruption is a target rich environment.
Big government small citizen.
The teacher unions need non-academic kids in schools to pay their salaries. Scumbag politicians need teachers unions.
If we truly cared about kids, non-academic ones would not be in an academic setting as soon as they are identified as such. Those kids should be gone from traditional school by the time they are ten years old. Then kids mentally capable of an academic focus but emotionally incapable of one should all be filtered out by ninth grade.
Of course that means that we have to create different day care systems because it was determined generations ago that two-parent families with one income earner was not gonna benefit your betters, so someone has to raise those children besides a parent.
And now the Morlocks train the children to be good Eloies.
It was discovered by politicians/government officials the less educated someone is they are more easily controlled decades ago. The U.S. is experiencing the by-product of more than a few decades of lower quality standards of educators in school district ACROSS the U.S. The U.S. is experiencing the by product of the current educators that are of age now to teach the current youth. The U.S. is in decline
ignorance is bliss
She should be indicted for reckless endangerment of children. She is a disgusting, despicable human being who is one of many of her ilk who has created a generation of miseducated ignoramuses who now infect our college campuses. The fact that she refers to her move as a blow to corporate American demonstrates that she is a neo-Marxist bent on destroying our educational system. I say send her to Gaza to ply her trade. She is the kind of leftist who pines for the types of governments that would put people like her in gulags or worse.
This article does not sound like you, Professor Turley.
It sounds like someone else wrote it.
On top of that, it massively over-simplifies the problems in education and assigns blame or asserts so-called solutions along agenda-driven, propagandistic lines.
The LA school district is not representative of public education throughout the United States. For one, it is in California. And, it is an enormous district with all the attendant problems of enormous school districts.
A few things hurting education:
–Broken, stressed families and kids
–Distracting digital devices
–Poor sleep habits
–Lousy nutrition
–Corporatized, career-readiness education
–Corporatized, career-oriented conception of education rather than what is necessary to educate people to be a free, self-governing people.
–Whole language curriculum
–De-emphasizing broad-based knowledge, and over-emphasizing “skills”
–Acting like we are measuring what matters when many of the most important things that really matter cannot be measured.
Most of those were present in the past. “Broken, stressed families and kids”, poor sleep habits, lousy nutrition, Corporatized (is that a word?), industry-readiness education (only slightly different), De-emphasizing broad-based knowledge, and over-emphasizing “skills”, measuring the least important things”. None of those are new, and several other items are not the problem of the now socialized school systems. “Whole language curriculum is a modern pipe dream necessitated by having a wide open boarder, combined with an atrocious Supreme Court ruling that if someone sneaks into New York harbor in a shipping crate or after they’ve knee capped a Border Agent and boarded a tax paid flight into the interior, we the taxpayer are responsible to see that they get a Harvard Law degree at our expense. “Distracting digital devices are easily dealt with by banning them in schools, or at least the actual classroom (leave them in the locker).
In essence, we the people have allowed the Marxist Socialists to infiltrate and run the education system. That never works out well…
“Broken, stressed families and kids”, poor sleep habits, lousy nutrition”
Families were not broken in the same percentages as they are today. People went to bed when it got dark and didn’t have the digital distractions late into the night until the 1990s to any broad degree. Nutrition fell off a cliff in the early 1980s with the rise of processed food and HFCS. Yes, too many kids had poor nutrition before that, but the inadequacy was different. It probably was not as laden with chemicals and the kids were not as exposed to chemicals, and, they got far more sunshine.
Industry-readiness education had not saturated public education throughout the nation. The Midwest apparently still wanted people to be generalists and to be prepared to participate in our republic. Some element of learning skills for employment is not bad (I do like Booker T. Washington), but educating toward these things should not be at the expense of educating people such that they can be free and shoulder responsibilities of living in our republic.
I saw a great deal in my Midwestern education that reflected the ideals of Mortimer Adler, E.D. Hirsch, and Neil Postman. Education was classically-oriented and included the Great Works.
Has industrialized education tainted education for a long time? Yes, sadly, but not as broadly as the last 20 or so years. Now, TPTB are trying to steer education into the 4th Industrial Revolution.
“Whole language curriculum is a modern pipe dream necessitated by having a wide open boarder”.
Not that modern, actually. That terrible idea was foisted on people long brfore today–but, thankfully, not everywhere. I got lucky and my “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) small town district taught phonics. Thankfully, that districts are slowly returning to phonics.
“In essence, we the people have allowed”…
I’d say fascists run the system because that term most closely fits with corporatists.
I agree, we the people have shirked our responsibilities expected of us by our Founders–to participate in a system of and by we the people.
“Families were not broken in the same percentages as they are today. “
“Thomas Sowell”
“A Personal Odyssey”
Prairie Rose- I think you need a history lesson. You may have forgotten the Great Depression which destroyed the lives of millions of Americans leading to malnutrition of a such a degree that young men considered for enlistment or in the draft were rejected at 25-33% rate because of severe malnutrition as a leftover effect of the Great Depression. Starvation was real throughout most of the US in varying degrees with the upper northeast and west coast escaping it the most. Loss of teeth was the major reason to deny enlistment because they did not have the necessary teeth to chew military food. Overall health was abysmal. Especially in many farming communities and small towns. The children of today have an almost idyllic life compared to the struggles of children in those areas in the 1920’s and 1930’s. And that was the white population. The lives of the black population was even worse. It was Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends who drove home the truly massive suffering throughout the US. My parents born in 1916 and 1922 have a story far worse than anything you see today.
Which is why the government started feeding impoverished children.
However, our food has changed. Kids in the 1930s weren’t drinking Mt. Dew and potato chips.
I think the Midwest escaped a lot of what you describe, too. My grandparents and great-grandparents had farms and large gardens that they said helped them. I recognize this was a blessing and insulated my family from some of the terrible hardships of the Great Depression. I know that wasn’t the case everywhere.
Lousy nutrition does make it more difficult to think, concentrate, and retain and recall learning.
What would standardized test scores have shown then if they had been the metric by which to judge everything?
There are certainly things to fix with the curriculum and resources and teacher preparation (etc), but if kids are not getting at home what they need to function optimally at school, to what degree can or should schools do to address it?
Same story here, luckily they resided on a 40 acre farm and could grow a garden and have a cow for milk and pigs for some salt pork. My grandpa dug coal for $5/day when available and worked on the jobs programs, digging holes and filling them in. My mother told me as kids they would listen to them crying at night as they fell asleep. Hard times make strong men snd women. We are now a nation of pusscakes that can’t leave conditioned space.
“I’d say fascists run the system”
At the highest levels. Corporations and NGOs and *politicians* should stop manipulating the system for their own gain (e.g., NCLB, Common Core, etc).
The school boards are mostly just regular people who care about education and want to serve their community…mostly this is the case.
You forgot one thing: Ineffective, sometimes incompetent, government public school teachers not weeded out by ineffective, sometimes incompetent government public school administrators.
This is complicated, too. And public schools aren’t the only schools that sometimes have lousy teachers. What a school can afford and what applicants they attract will affect whom they can hire.
School directors have the final vote on all faculty and staff. They need to be part of the weeding out process, too.
To improve the quality of teachers, it would help if 1) the teaching profession paid better, and 2) there wasn’t such sneering animus towards teachers. Clearly communicating and explaining things and getting people to understand something and, hopefully, be interested in the subject, and learn how to apply that knowledge and see how knowledge can connect is no easy task.
It would help, among other things, if graduation GPA expectations were higher, as well as subject knowledge expectations.
From my knot hole, I do think that some of the problems with current education at the primary and secondary levels can be traced to enlightened self interest propagated by the university departments of education and a general social agenda.
For example, during a parent teacher conference with my youngest’s 5th grade teacher, I gently suggested that he should feel free to give the children more homework as homework was rarely assigned. Homework, in my view, has two helpful objectives. It provides the parents a concrete glimpse of what is being taught at school and it reinforces in the student the concepts being taught. The teacher was not having any of this though. He stated quite definitively that homework had not been shown to be correlated to learning by some university department of education researchers. After rubbing my jaw from having been scraped on the floor in utter astonishment at this foolishness, I read the paper. Even though I am not in the education business, I could poke lots of holes in the conclusions and supporting “research” of the paper. My thinking is that this “teacher” found a justification to support his laziness at not having to grade homework – in other words enlightened self interest.
My second anecdotal example is from my youngest’s high school senior English class taken during the COVID pandemic which provided me with unusual visibility in the class syllabus. Now this high school boasts a very large number of students who take advanced placement courses. This public high school is probably in the top 100 of the country. One third of the year for Senior English was devoted to a study of Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, and other such social “theories”. I don’t object having the high school offer an elective on those subjects. But I object to teaching this in a required course at the opportunity cost of missing out on exposing students to an incredibly rich library of American and English literature – 21st century and otherwise. Based on my direct observation, the students at my youngest’s high school are graduating with severe deficiency in a knowledge and appreciation of American and English literature. My point of comparison with my youngest senior English curriculum was the number of novels, plays, and poetry reading assignments that I endured and later treasured decades ago in a small rural high school was about double that of my youngest.
While I am a firm believer in the concept of public education, I know the value in competition. The voucher system seems to me the most likely driver of education reform. I don’t think that we can expect it, in general, from university Education departments or from teacher union controlled state and local education boards.
Democracy is exploited in darkness is a recurring meme in recent weeks.
I am shocked…SHOCKED… to find that so-called elites send their kids to private schools.
These abysmal rates of proficiency in reading and math in the public schools are because public school teachers are unable, or unwilling, to instill a desire for learning in their current students, and unable to teach to levels of academic proficiency. Removing the tests that document this failure will do nothing to improve the lives of these student as adults. But maybe that is the objective of the party of slavery, American Indian genocide, and segregation.
“These abysmal rates of proficiency in reading and math in the public schools are because”
kids are on their phones all day and would rather watch TikTok or Mr. Beast for that nice, fast dopamine kick than read a book or work through a math problem when a phone can just tally stuff and spit out an answer.
Vincente, a study was performed in NYC, comparing charter and public schools of the same grade in the same building. The failures of the public schools were dramatically reversed. Instead of failing, many ended up in college. There is much BS about what the causes are, but without question, at least in NYC, the lack of competition is the most significant single cause. Some of the other things would help, but they are insignificant compared to what happened with charter schools.
An interview of Sowell, whose book is Charter Schools and Their Enemies,
is at: https://sowell.org/videos/16
The raw data comparing all the schools based on proficiency in math and English are at the back of the book. Before I read the book, I thought the charter schools were better, but I was amazed when I saw the data.
Hmm. Other states are not seeing the same results.
New Orleans is definitely not. Neither is PA.
ELA Proficiency/Advanced for PA brick and mortar charter schools is, on average, about 37%, compared to the PA state prof/adv of about 55% for ELA. Students scoring prof/adv for ELA at cyber charters is, on average, about 27%. Math prof/adv at brick and mortar charters is, on average, about 18%. Math prof/adv at cyber charters is, on average, 9%. The PA State Math prof/adv is 38%. Science prof/adv is, on average, about 42% for brick and mortar charter schools. Cyber charters are around 28% prof/adv for science, on average. The PA state average for Science prof/adv is about 59%.
Pennsylvania Cyber Charter, which put an ad (with taxpayer dollars, presumedly) in the Penn State Town & Gown has about 13% of students scoring prof/adv for Math, 31% prof/adv for ELA, and 35% prof/adv for Science.
“Other states are not seeing the same results.”
Prairie, if the other states cripple the ability of the charter school to function, why would you expect the same results? We discussed Louisiana before. The government didn’t permit the charter schools the freedom NYC did, and if I remember correctly, even with that problem, the school’s testing improved but was lousy.
Why don’t you provide me the link you used to the data for PA schools? The link may provide adequate data for evaluation. The public system is likely making sure the charter schools fail. The last I looked, the Teacher’s Union, Public Schools System and Democrats were doing that in NYC.
Many of your complaints in the last round concerned fairness and the advantages charter schools had. I say let the public schools adopt those advantages, but the Teacher’s Union and other actors won’t permit that. They believe the Public Schools are there for their benefit, not the students.
You need to review the data for the NYC schools. To reduce the study’s variables, random students in the same grade and building were compared.
Why would you want to use charter school systems that failed when a tremendous successful system is available?
James Dewey Watson
I dunno, eliminating testing seems like an open acknowledgement of the reality of too many of our “schools” today: glorified day care centers.
I’m not the first to remark on the increasing resemblance of high schools to prisons, but there is a certain symmetry between warehousing social misfits in prisons with no attempt at rehabilitation and warehousing youth in schools with no attempt at education. Arguably, one feeds naturally into the other.
And, in case it’s not obvious, yes both institutions are badly broken.
As we vote to legalize recreational cannabis… more roads to stupid.
Now now, ole George Washington himself was known to pass out jugs of his distilled whiskey at political rallies. A drug which today, is responsible for more deaths globally than all the illegal drugs combined.
you’re supporting my view. Live life for what it is instead of in a distorted state.
Won’t argue with that. Be high on life.
@Traveler
No doubt. That was an absolute disaster in my former state, like an overnight zombification. It’s a free for all right now, but I suspect stronger regulatory measures and laws are on the horizon, and users are not going to be happy about it; the last thing they’ll blame is their own inability to be responsible grown ups with it.
Then again, this is what modern progressives do: because they lack the real life experience for foresight or the ability to think critically and project outcomes, they insist on going COMPLETELY over the cliff before the, ‘Oops. That was a mistake. Sorry about the societal rot that’ll take generations to fix.’, and in their narcissism they drag the rest of us along with them. 🤷🏽♂️ They are children.
It is never wise to give a toddler a knife.
“I dunno, eliminating testing seems like an open acknowledgement of the reality of too many of our “schools” today: glorified day care centers.”
Except, following NCLB, standardized tests were used to bludgeon schools, rather than get used as a dipstick to monitor progress. To achieve the required “growth” necessary to keep funding, schools districts too often hyperfocused on easily measured math and reading metrics, downplaying history and the arts (which were not measured cause they didn’t matter to those controlling the money).
Now schools are being criticized for wanting to get rid of the tests that are being used to bludgeon them? The tests aren’t necessarily bad if they are being used only as a dipstick, but that’s not what is happening. The scores on the tests have become the end, the goal, as though they encapsulate what being educated actually means.
Democrats need people to fill their failed plantations…without failure they don’t get extra money!
The Democrat Party needs to be ABOLISHED! 2 Civil Wars are 2 too many!
Also End Public Unions…they serve ZERO purpose…excepting bribing Democrats to Reward teachers for failure!
* That’s actually true. Low performing schools are rewarded for failure with extra money to fix the problem. Higher performance doesn’t need extra money. That’s actually true.
It appears everyone is an expert. After all everyone’s been a pupil at some point.
Democrats are fighting a Civil War to Destroy the WEST!
Stop funding it
End ALL Federal Aid to cities, states, colleges, NON-PROFITS!
Truly excellent piece, and it’s all accurate. We are creating a workforce we couldn’t possibly pass the torch to or rely on, in a decade or two, this is going to be a big, big problem, and for *everyone*.