On Our Failing Government (or Public, if you will) School System

Education success should, above all else, be valuated in the following simple terms: instill (1)the ability to critically think, to use logic, and to independently reason; instill (2) a firm and basic understanding of our US Constitution, our basic rights and freedoms, and the underpinnings of our government and civil society; instill (3) a basic understanding of classical western philosophy that shapes our civic society, in particular that of classical Greece (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle); and, lastly, instill (4) a basic understanding of historical patterns and major historical events (the fall of Rome, the rise of Nazi Germany, the American and French Revolutions, ancient and post-Enlightenment slavery, etc, the backgrounds of major religions, etc. Important stuff like that).

Here’s a sample template-a guideline, if you will- for the underpinnings of a solid education of a free-thinking civil populous living in an enduring constitutional republic:



1. Aristotelian logic and critical thinking.



2. Western moral philosophy, patterns of history, cycles of slavery and freedom.

I. Plato, Aristotle, Christ, Augustine, Locke, Jefferson, Madison, Thomas Paine,

I. Slavery

II. Nazi Germany/world Fascism

III. Communism (and its historical and global persecution of opponents)

3. The understanding and articulation of our Constitution & founding principles.



4. The Bill of Rights, with special emphasis on Freedom of Speech.



5. Civics and military history

I. American Revolution

II. Civil War

III. WWII

Simple enough? Or is it more of a priority to develop ‘—quote..’ If you appraise /value ..condom on a cucumber over Arsit..logica & critical reasoning. Perhps either you have an unconscious wish to lsoe your freedom or you need a (H Clinton) pre-kindergarten class.



AN ESSENTIAL STEP IN SAVING AMERICA



The logic of our damaged school system is overwhelmingly simple and clear to any critical thinker-they are run off of rare, counter-rational, bad incentives. Think about it-NOWHERE in the entire rest of society are people expected en mass to perform and improve at a job-any job-without any incentives to do so. Successful businesses use pay increases, or benefits, or increased participation, or combo thereof. The whiny leftist may respond (insert little-bitch nasal voice & smug undertone): “but the schools aren’t a business, there a public service, like the fire department”. Maybe. But the armed forces, police and fire departments (public services like the schools are) also have strong incentives for performance and career path. While they do have less of a pay range than the private sector, they have strong incentives of leadership, peer approval and unit respect (I know, I was 6 years army) built into their promotion systems. What works for one may not work for the other, but they all have their own respective incentives built into some sort of promotion system. ALL successful organizations-public or private-have some incentives for improvement built into their promotion systems. This is inherent in any successful organization and underpins our most basic understanding of success and efficiency. Schools UNIQUELY stand out as having NO real incentive for its workers to improve. They are locked into a mundane system of relatively static benefits and a unionized immunization from penalty that WOULD NOT BE ACCEPTED ANYWHERE IN THE REST OF THE ORGANIZED WORLD OF EFFICIENCY. IN THE WORLD OF PRODUCING RESULTS, such static approaches are almost always overwhelmingly rejected. So why do we use them in one of the most precious endeavors in our country? Take a moment and try to think of a good answer.

One has to be functionally dysfunctional in their critical thinking to miss this most clear and simple logic.

So, how do we fix our schools? Basic concepts that our land was founded on but that scare the living $%it out of big-government people left-wingers and right-wingers alike. Freedom. Flexibility. Right to choose. De-centralized execution from the grass-roots bottom-up. Let them work on the same quality-assurance incentives that tend to successfully work just about everywhere else in the world's free markets. Specifically, recruit, train and pay teachers like CEOs. Use the CEO training and development pipeline model on our teachers (situationally modified of course), so that committed and good career teachers get paid up to 6 figures. Obama’s for it, and that’s a start. Teaching should be just as respected as the other public services such as firefighting, military and law enforcement, and their standards and training pipeline just as respected and prestigious.

People ask, ‘how do we discover how to measure teacher performance?’ It’s possible in most organizations of any kind, chances are its possible in our schools-Obama himself said so, at the jeers of the teachers unions. THROUGH STATE-TO-STATE INNOVATION, WE CAN DISCOVER AND BENCHMARK SUCH WAYS. Bastardized government-run approaches like No Child Left Behind suck because they taint the freedom and flexibility of the experimental results-producing marketplace with top-down government interference, like forcing test scores as a benchmark for continued funding despite the almost unanimous criticism of teaching professionals against the efficiency of such a move.

Our ability to compare best practices and transparently track and run self-organizing efficiency panels has been multiplied exponentially by the modern world, notably by ever improving information technology (IT). Because of this and other reasons, including increasingly-flexible media outlets, we are in an unprecedented position in history for de-centralized bottom-up execution at the level of local governments and states’ rights.

Let a 10th Amendment commission figure out how to turn schools back to state-to-state bottom-up competitive experimentation and unleash the self-organizing properties of successful benchmarking that works so well across the business world and the scientific community, instead of fixing it from the top down by self-interested burocrats. This principle would run off of bottom-up flexibility and freedom of choice, freedom of experimentation, not from top-down constraints and limitations.

For example, one school of thought says that principals should have a pool of money from which they can pay their teachers. They could then pay individual teachers whatever they wished. This would allow them to reward teachers for helping with the peculiar needs of the particular school. This is just one approach. There are many. One shoe size does not fit all. Let school districts work autonomously and flexibly to custom-tailor their best approaches through a shared participation of government, teachers, parents, staff, and non-partisan experts. Then let friendly political competition and information-technology and transparency catalyze the success or failure of this approach. Other schools can apply different approaches, since they have the FREEDOM to test NEW IDEAS in their respective autonomous school districts at all levels. This involves what liberals claim to value most-the freedom to CHOOSE (‘pro-choice’) and the freedom to apply new ideas to the status quo. These words, these concepts-change, new ideas, and freedom of choice-describe the rhetorical underpinnings of a ‘change liberal’ … and to be against such innovative bottom-up approaches to new and fresh ideas due to the support of an unwavering status quo is to fundamentally undue these so-called liberal values. In other words, liberals against these innovative new pro-change, pro-choice approaches should be called out on their bull$%#t as hypocrites and self-refuters.

To say that one shoe size fits all, and that such a thing can be custom-tailored from the top down by the federal government is a functionally innate statement devoid of any semblance of logical thought. Like any other form of self-organization we see in the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of results, having many approaches-differing and even competing approaches-tends to broaden the possibility of good ones being discovered in the continual quest for improvement. This healthy version of cumulative selection across the frontier of possibilities works off of the same principles on which we base the evolution of organic life, the evolution of a successful business, the evolution of thought and ideas, the evolution of scientific discoveries, the evolution of engineering innovations, the evolution of martial arts through MMA, the evolution of one’s personal character, the evolution of pretty much anything at all.

Giving Students the Best Teachers

I am no doctrinaire supporter of the GOP-far from it. But the GOP website had it right in a way that the democratic platform simply does not. Briefly, it said:


“For students to meet world class standards, they must have access to world class teachers, whether in person or through virtual public schools that can bring high-quality instruction into the classroom. School districts must have the authority to recruit, reward, and retain the best and brightest teachers, and principals must have the authority to select and assign teachers without regard to collective bargaining agreements. Because qualified teachers are often not available through traditional routes, we support local efforts to create an adjunct teacher corps of experts from higher education, business, and the military to fill in when needed.”


Amen to that.

I want freedom of choice. I want our schools to work on the same quality-assurance incentives that tend to successfully work just about everywhere else in the world's free markets. I want our schools to work of the principles of the 10th Amendment and the faith our Founders put in the innovation, hearts and minds of the people. That is being a true progressive, not a self-refuting regressive in support of an indefensible status quo. Obama himself agrees with me on this, and believe me I am no textbook right-winger by any means-I am a true liberal, by the classical definition. And I live to keep my fellow liberals in check against their recurring hypocrisy and static modes of thinking.

SO, how do we get these teachers unions to see the light..mirror liberal progressive language BACK TO THEM...refer to ourselves as

'pro-choice',
'pro-change',
'underdogs',
'generation with the new ideas',
'brave dissenters',
'fight for the children', etc..

and refer to them with words like

'outdated crusty conservatives
'status quo conservatives'
'anti-progress'
'closed-minded'
'anti-choice'
'anti-change'
'set in thier ways'
'big bully status quo machine'
'you arent for the children' ( ;oP )

Mirror-psychology works at every level. Just a thought for future teach-union bashing



Remember, I firmly believe that an ignorant population incapable of or unwilling toward critical thought is more dangerous than most any external threat to the freedom and sovereignty of a free republic, and republics have been historically destroyed from the inside just as they have been from the outside. a suitcase nuclear bomb from Al-Qaida could decimate a major city; we could recover from that, albeit unthinkable tragedy. A generation of children brought up in a mediocre schools system that promotes minimal conformity over free thought can decimate a free Republic from the inside in a way that Al-Qaida could never do from the outside. the military protects us from external threats, while a sound education system protects and secures us from the tyranny of encroaching government from within. the mandate to fix our schools is just as important as the mandate to fix our foreign policy and secure this country.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. the natural trajectory and path of government is to gain and secure more power at the expense of individual freedoms, regardless of partisan leaning or party affiliation. education and free thought is the prime backstop to such encroachment, regardless of the country or type of government.



Too much common sense from a citizenry is any government’s worst nightmare; just enough dumbing down of that citizenries’ education system is any government’s wet dream.

By God, let's fix our schools.


-The Boondock Citizen