Default of the Government Schools

What industry can sustain 25% failure rate and still exist?  The average graduation rate across the country in our government schools is 75%.  In cities like Detroit (21.7%), New York City (38.9%), Baltimore (38.5%), and Milwaukee, where teachers are protesting (43.1%), it is much less.  This was from USA Today, 2006.  I can guarantee these figures have not improved and are most likely higher five years later.  And yet our governments continue to toss our money recklessly at the schools because people like those in Wisconsin scream the loudest.  The figures for per pupil expenditures are skewed by those people as well.  They claim, for instance, that cost per pupil in NYC was $13,755 per pupil.  My math tells me that I divide the total school budget by the total number of students.  This produces a figure of $18,340.  Even at that there are monies hidden. According to the Cato Institute, the average cost per pupil in this country is $25,000.  Nowhere will you ever see that high a figure shown in the MSM.  Also, the Cato Institute shows that government schools spend 97% more than do private schools.  In my district it is much higher than that.  For example, Bethel Christian Academy in Canton, NC, educates students for $4900 per pupil and they graduate 100% of their students!  Haywood County Schools spend $18,000 per pupil.

How did we get to the place where the schools have become worse than useless, they have become propaganda factories for the children of this nation?  It started with the “father” of public education, John Dewey, the man educators look up to as an icon, much as psychologists look to Freud.  John Dewy was the consummate progressive.  This comes from a blog by Larry A. Rice

It is from Dewey’s own words that you can see his true intentions. He wrote and helped write the Humanist Manifesto after returning from a trip to meet withothers of like mind in eastern Europe. Two books he wrote tell how he planned to accomplish the goals laid out in the Humanist Manifesto through America’s public school system. The first title is Faith in Education and the second is Democracy and Education.

B.F. Skinner jumped on the bandwagon, working to change the mold for American children through public schools and help that mold conform with many goals of the Humanist Manifesto. THE FATHER OF MODERN EDUCATION

This site will further education the reader on Dewey’s thoughts from his Democracy and Education of 1916

http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter02.html

For the uninitiated, read a test from the eighth grade in 1890.  You will find it more difficult to take than the normal college senior tests of today.

John Dewey was the beginning of the end.  The default was complete during the upheaval of the 60s.  Three things happened that created the present dumbing down of America.  I was a teacher in 1967.  At that time the NEA was a professional organization much like the AMA.  Male teachers wore suits and ties and females wore “Sunday go to meetin'” dresses.  You could distinguish the teachers from the students.  I sat in a meeting one day where the purpose was to discuss how the teachers could accomplish what the AFT, American Federation of Teachers was going after.  At the time, the AFT was the only union organization in the ranks.  Their membership was at about 3%.  Most teachers thought it was wrong for teachers to be union members.  The feeling was that it degraded them, making them blue collar rather than white collar professionals.  But they were changing their thinking at this meeting and like meetings across the country.  I saw where it was heading and quit teaching.  In a couple years, they transformed the NEA, National Education Association, to a union, to compete with the AFT.  I said at the time, to anyone who would listen, that in twenty-five years, America would be in deep trouble when the generation of union educated children became managers throughout the nation.  The dumbing down of America began.

The second thing that happened was foisted upon America by one woman, Madalyn Murray O’Hara.  This atheist was a one woman wrecking ball who somehow convinced legislators that she was right and the rest of the country was wrong.  She left a legacy still admired by progressives of removing prayer and Bible reading from the classroom.  I am not a Christian and do not advocate any particular religion being thrust upon any student body in a government school as doctrine.  But I attended a school that was 100% Christian or Jew (I don’t even know any Jews who were in my class).  But reading a passage from a Christian Bible and saying the Lord’s prayer offended no one and gave the class a moral compass.  It was the rudder on the ship that kept it on course.  I believe that if there were vocal Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, or any other sect, my school would have accommodated them in morning prayer and readings.  Now many schools have even eliminated the Pledge of Allegiance, which was also part of the routine in the 1950s.

The third disaster that ruined the government schools was desegregation.  I know there will be those out there who will denigrate me as a racist without reading further.  I state here that I am not racist.  I agree 100% with Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topekain 1954.  It was long overdue.  We had separate schools but they were not equal.  But after the Supreme Court ruled, the progressives could hardly contain themselves.  They saw their opportunity to finish the job of capturing the population at the first grade level and keeping them in tow for the rest of their lives.  When the schools started integrating, instead of the system pulling the black students up, as the original America would have done, they convinced the black population that they weren’t capable of reaching the heights the white population achieved.  Instead, they  brought the entire system down to the level the blacks were accustomed to in their less than standard educational environment.  Ever since that time, along withsuch insidious acts like Affirmative Action, the blacks have accepted the roll of dumber than thou.  With the help of race baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and more admired people like coaches John Thompson of Georgetown and John Cheney of Temple University, declaring that black basketball players shouldn’t be held to the same standards on SAT scores as their more “privileged” white players, the black population as a whole, has been convinced that they aren’t capable of rising to the heights they may aspire to.  And the blacks have been voting for these people for 50 years.  The dumbing down of America.

The final act that completed the job was accomplished by the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, and his bunch of legislators in 1977.  They created the Department of Education, which allowed the Federal government to capture the states with money.  Once the states got the addiction to the Feds money machine, they were hooked.  As billions of tax dollars have been funneled down to the addicts, the school success rate has continued to drop.  And the progressives still cry for more of your dollars.  How can any teacher who claims they are working for the children, allow a student he or she knows can’t read on a third grade level, pass them on to the sixth, seventh, eighth grade?  It’s unconscionable.  But it happens everyday in our government schools.  Today, the NC legislators are trying to raise the cap on charter schools and allow for vouchers to parents who want to remove their children from the propaganda machine.  But the progressive movement has accomplished one goal in their scheme.  To read the outcries of citizens today, one realizes they now believe the government owns your dollars and allows you to keep what they want you to keep.  The people write, “it is not right for parent to take tax money to promote religious schools.”  That money, if left to the parent, is not tax money.  It does not belong to the state until it is received by the state.  They do not own me or my time spent to earn money.  If I want to spend my money to send my child to a school other than a government school, in any society that call itself free, I would be allowed to do that.  Not in these people’s minds.  The dumbing down of America is complete.

Larry Porter

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