Reflections From a Murky Pond

The Obama Regime has finally admitted the endemic failure of educational system as run by the government in America. Of course the boy blamed President Bush, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Obama Regime has admitted that it’s schools can’t meet any objective standards or metrics for basic competency.

Obama and his handlers have released 10 states from the No Child Left Behind requirements that have been in place for 10 years. Those states are: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. At least 28 more states as well as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico are expected to seek and receive similar dispensation by the end of February, 2012.

Why are these waivers being asked for and granted? Because these states’ “school systems” can’t meet the 2014 requiring that all students be proficient in reading and math even though they had 12 years to raise themselves to that basic standard.

Obama, faced with having to apply the sanctions that NCLB requires and having failed to coerce Congress to lower the standards, has simply decided to waive the law as if it didn’t exist in the first place.

After waiting far too long for Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my administration is giving states the opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more flexibility.

– Barack Obama

Obama, his reelection bid always held firmly in his mind, can blame President Bush and Congress all that he wants. Doing so doesn’t change the fact that, even with over a decade to work with, the public school system has failed to meet basic objective measurement of their capability to teach math and reading proficiency.

Admitting failure is the first step towards fixing the problem. Sadly, Obama’s second step of removing the standard and allowing those who have failed to redefine they’re own standards and metrics is not in any way shape or form a step forward.

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The simple fact that America’s government-run school system is broken and that educational failure is their sole legacy can’t be truthfully argued against. The only arguments that can be engaged in are: why? who’s to blame? and how do we fix or remake it?

It’s easy to blame technology. After all, why should teachers actual teach what students can use modern technology to do for them instead?

But They Didn’t Teach Us That In Ethnomathematics!

I don’t think it’s fair to blame technology though since the average child in America could recite chapter and verse of the Liberals’ politically correct versions of history and sociology how America was wrong and how the country was based upon the evils of: racism, xenophobia, homophobia, religion, nationalism, and capitalism.

Oh yes! Religion (except for Islam post 9/11), nationalism, and capitalism are taught as “evils” in the modern (re)education camps the Liberals demand we call schools.

That same child could also likely parrot his “teachers’” chimera that teaching math and science and testing on those subjects is racist because it can’t take into account the differences in cultural backgrounds of non-White students. He or she could also offer strikingly similar rationalizations as why all the “teaching” was done to the lowest common denominators in his or her class.

No. Technology may be an enabler in this educational failure but it’s not the cause. The cause is the Liberals’ desire to indoctrinate children into their anti-American ideology.

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As The Commercial Appeal reports it, some two dozen or so Tennessee TEA Party supporters want the state’s history curriculum changed.  Specifically, they want slavery and issues with the Native American tribes downplayed as compared to how they’re handled currently.

No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.

~*~

The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at.

As one would expect, the MSM has made a lot of this request to the Tennessee legislature and, as one would also expect, the Liberals and their minority tenants are frothing at the mouth over it.

But are the requests of these TEA Partiers requests for historical revisionism or merely for a restoration of the curriculum as it was before the oikophobic Liberals corrupted the school systems with their own pernicious form of anti-American revisionism?

I know what the history curriculum was when I was in school and I know it didn’t hide the fact that the Founding fathers were slaveholders. It also didn’t make that, or any other societal flaw, the focus of the classes either.

That’s not, however, how history is taught in most states these days. The Liberals got control over the curriculum years ago and shifted it to focus on the negatives instead of the achievements of Americans. I can’t say for sure though that this is case in Tennessee or, if it is, how egregious the current curriculum is.

Restoration or revision? Frankly, I don’t know. Either seems possible.

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