Crappy Idea

This is what you can call extreme recycling. In China toilets are being recycled into school desks! Maybe that is what the U.S. Department of Education needs to buy when providing their crappy education.

Okay. That's unfair. This month they are promoting appreciation and study of the Arts in school.

That is fine and dandy except for a more recent release of some statistics, to which I want to say:

RACISM PREDICTION

A new blog post at ED.gov is titled "New Data from U.S. Department of Education Highlights Educational Inequities Around Teacher Experience, Discipline and High School Rigor." The very first paragraph is as follows:

Minority students across America face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school curricula, and are more often taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers, according to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

You can see how this will become the next big racism story. The problem is that the government that pushes for equal outcome, not equal opportunity, are the ones running the schools. Their own policies are producing unequal outcomes. [ See the inequalities in chart form. ]

So why did I mention the Arts? Because Calculus is mentioned as the lacking rigorous high school curricula. The way I see it is "you cannot have everything. What do you want? Art or Calculus?"

If we want to be honest about this study, can we get some literacy rates with this too? What if the schools lacking Calculus have low literacy rates? Remember the following quote/saying/meme:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

To state the obvious: the results in these statistics are not based alone on the availability of certain classes and teacher pay scale. The social and economic makeup of each district drive these numbers. Cost of living is different everywhere. What will the DoE push for? A flat pay rate?

There will be no flat pay rate. Unions control the education system. Seniority equals pay increase. Low seniority teachers are first to get cut. So if the problem schools and children have low payed inexperienced teachers, blame the teachers with seniority for not requesting transfer to these schools. Blame the unions for ensuring a balance of seniority and new teachers. Blame the DoE for not ensuring a balance.

That is not going to happen. The system will keep the inequality alive and blame it on racism. Next they will say they need more money to fix the problem. How? Probably promising to give teachers more money to teach in the problem schools. That would be followed by seniority staff complaining about not making as much and demanding a raise.

But that is just a prediction. The good news is most predictions are wrong, and I am just a cartoon dog.

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UPDATE: March 10th,2012

It seems that this wasn't much of a prediction. This story actually started hitting sites the day before my prediction. It has just gone unnoticed and not made big news front pages.

But the stories out there are claiming racism.

I will try to get my predictions ahead of the curve next time.

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