Educational Politics

YES!!! Less than a week and this election crap will finally be over and we can get back to our regular lives of television without fear of being interrupted by a debate or updated poll counts or some other silly scandal. So that being said I’d like to put through perhaps for the next election or maybe even an amendment since so many people keep coming up with amendments to screw up peoples’ lives that I might as well come up with one that should help people. I propose that whenever we elect a new Government Administration we also elect a panel of children to sit alongside these officials. These children would then have the responsibility of going over anything the President, his cabinet, the Senate or the House comes up with to change a law or other decision that would affect the country. If these children couldn’t understand what was said in the documents then it goes back to be revised and simplified until these children can understand it. Now I haven’t got all the details worked out yet like child labor laws or how they’ll be able to go to school while these government bodies are in session, but this is still a rough draft of an idea.


How many of us have gone to vote and had to re-read one of the amendments or listened to a news broadcast about a new law and said to yourself, “Oh well I’ll know if I do it wrong when they arrest me for it”. I early voted last week and to be honest I x-mas treed the sections I hadn’t heard of before or just couldn’t understand the wording without having to read it over and over in my head until a blood vessel almost burst. “Repeal the Reform of the Addendum to the Proposition for the Reform” What the hell does that mean?


I say that if a 10 year old can’t understand what is said in the documents then the majority of America can’t either. The reason I say that is my wife is a teacher at a high school and every day when I pick her up I get to hear the daily gossip and stories of what has happened. That being said, this is what I have learned about the state of at least my local school system; there are teachers in the classrooms who do not have the training to teach some of the classes they are assigned to teach, students at the high school level repeatedly have shown that they haven’t received the necessary background teaching to be successful at the high school level (because there are teachers who don’t know the subjects they are assigned to teach), counselors who are supposed to know the best placement for the students rarely put them in classes that they need or are able to do (resulting in continuous shuffling of students and classes for nearly half the school year), and placement of “learning difficulty” students into classes where they will not fail which would hurt the school’s success grade but they don’t learn anything either.


When I was going to school there were the placement problems all the time but they never happened after the first month of school and if they did it was because of a discipline problem. These days teachers just don’t know how to deal with obnoxious and unruly students in the classroom. One teacher I’ve heard stories about has a single student that gave him trouble once, and now the teacher sends this student to spend his classroom period in another teacher’s class. He never wrote a referral to be sent to the office to be disciplined for that first time and refuses to keep the student in the class to even find out if he will act up again. Just sends him out and the child doesn’t get any credit for what was done in the class that day. He participates in the class he is sent to but that is just because the teacher he goes to doesn’t want to see him sitting there doing nothing. However what he does in the second classroom has no effect on his grade from the first room and of course neither the first teacher nor the counselors will do anything about the problem. Another teacher doesn’t have the training to teach the class she teaches and is always asking for help in figuring out how to do this project or that lesson. There is an automotive class that is offered at this high school so naturally when we learned of this my wife and I were eager to turn our vehicles over to them for any minor maintenance like an oil change or windshield wipers (don’t look at me like that, I’m mechanically stupid). We were even hopeful when she broke her little VW last month when the water pump blew up that the advanced class students would be able to fix it for us. But alas when she inquired of the instructor if any of his students would be able to work on a VW or even a water pump he told her that not only were none of his students able to work on the problem but they weren’t even allowed to go near a car. As it turns out this automotive program, which is touted as an academy of sorts, is where the school and the counselors put all of the “educationally challenged” students. This is the class that they put students into so that they get credit for passing a class and I suspect it is one of the loopholes that the schools use to increase their passing rates so that they can continue to be graded well on this A-school grading system. You are not a school if all you do is put students into classes where they don’t learn anything, that’s what is called a day care facility.


Now I’m all for bonuses to teachers but it shouldn’t depend on how many students graduated or how many improved on a statewide test. Don’t ask me how it should be done, I didn’t go to college the teachers did so ask them how it should be done. And from that the administrators should be smart enough to make something that is fair and works for everyone. Okay that’s it from me for now time for some nice yummy bacon (and not that nasty turkey bacon).