If the kids are confused in school, maybe it’s the system and teachers

By David McElroy · July 13, 2012

The woman seemed confused from the beginning. She was attending a one-day teacher workshop on middle school math education that was being conducted by a prestigious national organization. But she seemed completely lost when it came to actual math.

At one point, an exercise required simplifying a fraction. Hers was 16 over 20. She had no idea that it simplified to four-fifths. She was then supposed to convert that into a percentage. She not only didn’t know off the top of her head that it was 80 percent — which most people could do — she also didn’t understand when someone punched four divided by five into a calculator and showed her the results.

It’s pretty bad for a math teacher to be this ignorant of the very simple math she’s supposed to be teaching, but it’s actually worse. The woman was at this workshop because she’s writing a specialized math curriculum for her entire state. She works for her state’s department of education — and this woman who didn’t understand the basic material is about to write what all the kids are supposed to learn from.

Are you scared yet?

I can’t tell you where this took place or what state the woman is from. I’ll just say that I had a first-hand report. How would you like to be the poor students who get stuck being taught her curriculum? And how would you like to be one of the teachers forced to use it?

I have a number of friends among teachers, so I know there are a lot of good and dedicated teachers. The smartest woman I know is a teacher, and some of my smarter friends are teachers or have been in the past. But the system they have to navigate is so insane that they seem to spend a large percentage of their time trying to simply fight off their own bad administration.

Here in the suburb where I live, the school superintendent was fired earlier this week. It’s a highly rated school system with a sterling reputation and high test scores, high graduation rates and low discipline rates. The fired superintendent was a finalist for national superintendent of the year just a year or two back. She was paid close to a quarter of a million dollars a year to run this education powerhouse. But it’s all a sham.

I talk to lots of people — students, teachers and administrators — in the local schools, so I have a reasonably good idea of what goes on there, mostly because all the stories line up. They’re all tales of a school system running hard to make things look good on the outside, but with little real regard for actual education.

Teachers tell me that discipline problems in some of the schools are ignored and the administration refuses to document them, because that would mean a discipline statistic. There was a grade-changing scandal a few years back — when a principal was caught giving students higher grades than they’d earned, in order to pass them — but it appears people above her were involved, but never were caught. And the middle school here is run like a terrorist fiefdom of a power-hungry control freak of a principal.

But because there are no alternatives — and the people who know what all is going on are afraid to speak too loudly — the scam has continued for years.

Over the past seven years, the local high school has had five principals. This is a model facility which was the most expensive high school ever built in the state when it was constructed about seven years ago. (That’s the front of the main building of Hewitt-Trussville High School on the right.) But principals keep coming and going once they find out about the reign of terror from the top. The principals who stay in the system are the ones who are quite happy being a part of the reign of terror.

If this were a private business, something similar to this could develop anyway. The difference is that there would be alternatives. Some parents would quit using the company and accountability from the top would require an accounting for why it was happening. In a government-run system, though, there’s a well-meaning school board that’s kept in the dark and kept ignorant by a superintendent who doesn’t want to get off of her gravy train.

If our kids are confused and aren’t learning, not all of it is their fault. Yes, there are lazy and stupid students. (There always have been.) But even the brightest students and the brightest teachers are handicapped by a system that rewards incompetence and political skills. There’s no market to discipline it when it’s off-course.

It doesn’t take a lot of incompetent people to ruin a monopoly system. It just takes a few ignorant people placed into positions of power — people such as a certain incompetent woman who’s writing a math curriculum for an entire state.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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