Off The Editor’s Desk – 12-11-2019
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I will not question my liberal professors!
I have over the years written that I believe that students in colleges are brainwashed into a liberal socialist agenda. One only has to watch national TV over a period of time and witness the number of college campuses that turn out students to protest anyone that has a conservative view. Some of those protesters become violent and property is damaged and worst yet, someone gets hurt.
It was just recently that protesters caused a disturbance in the Twin Cities where President Trump was campaigning.
Now comes a group at the University of Notre Dame, who are asking for the removal of white authors from the university’s curriculum in an attempt to eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarships. “The End Hate at ND” group demands that the curriculum be revised so that minority authors will makeup for at least 50 percent of the required reading.
The demand states, “No course or program or study should have a view limited to white, western, and/or male voices. We demand that people who are Color, Indigenous, Black, queer, or not male are represented in the authority of at least half of course and major required readings.”
I think that schools have a course set on sugar coating everything, we can’t keep score on the ball field, kids can’t tell it like it is, and we have lost prayer in school. At my high school graduation, many years ago, a local religious leader gave the invocation at the opening of the program, and a minister from another faith delivered the Benediction. Now, all that is gone.
As I traveled my emails the other day, I came across a post on the website “The Conservative Mom,” about our local schools. The person making the post started out with, “Your kids are getting liberal indoctrination in school long before college.”
I would like to reprint some of that post. “It is well known that conservative voices are all but non existent on most college campuses these days. Other students often ridicule republican and conservative clubs, and on the rare occasion when a conservative thought leader is asked to speak, he or she is met with boisterous violent protests.
“What might come as a little more of a surprise, is that your kids are being indoctrinated with the liberal agenda long before they get to college.
“Our schools no longer educate because an educated populace is less easy to control. So, instead of teaching critical thinking, so that our kids can come through the system ready to lead, and take our country to new heights like the entrepreneurs and great minds of a generation ago – our kids are ‘taught’ the rote answers to statewide standardized tests.
“And why is that? No teacher I know likes this idea, but they say their hands are tied because ‘merit’ as measured by those tests, is tied to federal funding of public schools. You want those government dollars then you had better get that A rating. It’s no surprise that a system that is state-funded and state run, advocates for a bigger government.”
I guess that is telling it like it is!
I have in my office a 16-page “Waste Report” put together by the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management (FSO) Subcommittee for Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (ASGAC) for the Fall of 2019. The Chairman of that committee is U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). Paul is continuing his efforts to stop runaway spending and reduce a sky rocketing debt by releasing a special edition of the “Waste Report.”
Included in this report is a topic that addresses Standardized Testing called “A Crisis in American Education”. I have long felt that local schools teach students toward these tests and here is what the Waste Report has to say about the results of these tests.
According to a 2018 report by TNT (The New Teachers Project), for which it partnered with five diverse school systems in the U.S. to conduct direct observation and other research, “Students spend most of their time in school without access to four key resources: grade-appropriate assignment, strong instruction, deep engagement, and teachers who hold high expectations.”
The report stated, “students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them – the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject.”
According to The Hechinger Report, which addressed test results and stated, “Since the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, was first administered in the early 1990s, student achievement, particularly in math, steadily improved until the late 2000s, then flatlined. Reading scores stagnated. In 2015, scores dipped in math among both fourth and eighth-graders, and these math scores did not bounce back with the 2017 test. Average student’s scores remain well below what test overseers consider to be ‘proficient’ for each grade level.”
TNTP found that “the students in the study demonstrated mastery of grade-level standards, 17 percent of the time, despite meeting the demands of their assignments 71 percent of the time, and spending 88 percent of class time on class-related activities. However, the majority still received As and Bs.”
The “Waste Report” lists eight items where American Taxpayers money was wasted. Those include spending $16 million to improve the quality of Egyptian schooling. The federal government also gave $153 million to the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority; $300,000 to fund a debate and Model United Nations competitions in Afghanistan; $708,466 to fund research that involves hooking Zebrafish on nicotine.
The federal government bought a statue from Bob Dylan for the embassy in Mozambique for $84,375; spent $4.6 million to study the connection between drinking alcohol and winding up in the ER; $33 million on text books for Afghan students, which are still in storage. And, topping off the list is a spending of $22 million to bring Serbian cheese up to international standards.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton