You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘“Stupid is’ category.
That study caused the leading Republican Hispanic in charge of the Florida’s outreach to Spanish speaking American citizens, to switch parties. He is now a Democrat. And he was in charge of convincing Hispanics to vote Republican!!!…
What caused the shift? A Republican study that specifically was aimed at the redneck hillbillies inside the Republican Party, but wound up hitting mainstream. The undeniable truth is it this what the Republican Party really does think about what it calls behind closed doors, it’s dirty little problem….
“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
So says the Republican Party of the United States of America.
Proving once again… that this party is nothing but the harshest racists..(Just watch Rick Jensen try to defend it by saying “he” is not a racist.) Truth is… he isn’t. He’s actually a great guy.. But the party he supports (though he does not represent) is undeniably racist…
A fact so driven home that the single most important Republican in charge of Florida’s Hispanics, NOT ONLY FELT COMPELLED TO RESIGN… BUT FELT IT NECESSARY TO ACTUALLY SWITCH PARTIES PUBLICLY….
Is every Republican a racist? No. But every racist is a Republican and the Republican Party of the United States of America is beholden to do whatever those racists want! ABSOLUTELY!!!
Every Hispanic Republican out of self respect, NEEDS RIGHT NOW TO CHANGE THEIR PARTY.... There can be no such thing as a Hispanic Republican from now on. Just Spanish speaking Uncle Toms… who should appropriately hitherto be called…. La Malinches
“Blah, blah, blah Obamacare”. say Republicans. I say “Get over it.” This day the House is going to vote on Michelle Bachman’s House Bill Number One, to completely abolish Obamacare…..
Of course it is ridiculous. And if the entire Republican contingent votes to undo it, the entire Republican contingent as I have said all along and most of America agrees, is ridiculous…. The best thing Republicans can do for their party is censure Michelle Bachman by having this bill go down to inglorious defeat…. Because this will bludgeon them in 2014.
My title said “Cherries”… So here is the cherry… an account from someone upon getting insurance for the first time… and reflecting upon how it feels…
Obamacare is good. People want it. We need it badly. We have it. No one is going to take anything away from the American People that they want without losing the fight….
Partisan Politics Above The Nation’s Good... That banner hangs in the RNC’s Washington DC Lobby…. and is the first thing one sees upon stepping in….
Bottom line in all cases I think everyone here would agree, is that we do what is best for the children. In certain cases in which you may find yourself in, a charter school scenario seems better to achieve that, than that situation’s public school alternative.
I guess the opposing point to your argument, would be that instead of allowing charter schools to siphon funds away from public school systems, hard changes are now needed to be implemented inside the public schools. Raise the revenue, invest in quality, and make the public school system move itself forward to do what is best for the children.
Then, the charter’s group counter-argument to THAT…, is: that is exactly what existed before charter schools were brought in! What you suggest didn’t happen then! Instead as situations got worse, administrators were told to deal with it; use good judgment. Charters are what brought in the necessary competition and now therefore they are responsible for today reforming public schools.
The retort for THAT, would be of what I spoke before: that too many mouths at the trough make thin pigs. No one benefits from too many hungry mouths fighting over too scarce resources…
And that is where this argument seems to lie. Am I seeing our differences now as question of perspective? Sort of like from where one is looking, sort of determines how one sees this problem?
Let me elaborate. charter supporters speak of charters making positive inroads on children lucky enough to attend their schools … So from the perspective of those particular kids (our number one priority) the charter moving in and siphoning resources from a neighborhood dying entity, is a very good thing… Seen from that perspective I’ll agree….
However,… as a society one has to have the broad approach. One has to look for the Ying that corresponds to the Yang… In this case, that Ying would be…. what is happening to those children NOT being put into a charter school?
The answer is….. drumroll…… that they are doing worse then when public schools alone ruled the educational fiefdom. And shockingly, students at charter schools seem across the whole to be doing worse than when public schools alone ruled the educational landscape as well….
And this is where we have to be careful… we can say, look at this Charter… see how well it is doing?
But we must first know … is it doing well comparatively because it is teaching superlatively, or because the students it takes in were originally more highly motivated to succeed in the first place? Had those same students been in public schools, would they now be boosting the public school’s results upward?
So from a theoretical perspective, it appears that the only sane way to determine whether charters have a positive or a negative impact upon societal education as a whole, is to use the numerical data to see how well students are responding now.
Doing so is a lot more complicated than this upcoming explanation, but using a simpler model will allow me to communicate it more easily. … Think if we were to give each student a number based on whether they graduated or not, and make those numbers either a +1 for graduating, or a -1 for not…. and then add up all of an entire city’s students, we would have a number for that district. We could then compare that number with numbers of the past, and also have the future come back to compare with us…
If with Charter schools in the equation, our success (graduation) number for ALL combined Public and Charter students is lower than it was before the time that Charters came in, then despite lots of individual success stories, the concept of starting charters is over the total system, … disruptive… On the other hand, if with Charters our comprehensive success (graduation) number is higher than it was before Charters came in……. then thank heavens, someone brought in charter schools…..
Does that make sense? If we took all of Delaware and compared all the numbers of students who meet the graduation standards before Charter Schools came in to disrupt, and compared that with all the numbers of students who meet the graduations standards now, … we would see, flat out, if that disruption was a positive one, or a negative one! Is that clearer?
I think what has always quantified the difference in perspective between the two camps,… charter versus non-charter, is that one side is adding the negative numbers into the equation, and the other side is strictly only looking at the positive spectrum…
As in positive: … “look this kid was failing but now in a charter he is graduating… Isn’t that great”. Versus,“look over here, these two kids are dropping out of public school while one person graduates from a charter, that’s a combined score of a negative one… We should switch priorities, fund public education and then at least, should the charter wither and fail, we’d have a score of a positive one at the very least. Positive three if the kid in the charter succeeds!”
And if I’m a good writer, I’ve led you right to the solution that should be forming in your mind right now as you read this… The real solution is to refund education, period; allowing for both the successful existing charters to continue, and for adequately funding public education to provide increased opportunities to close the gaps still existing among our students. Remember again, our goal is our children.
Public education thrived post second World War! Only when the tax revolt began and people even considered lowering property taxes and cutting spending, did quality levels of education start declining. We once had a very robust educational system… How can we tell? Our nation today is the byproduct of that intergenerational system stretching beginning and end across the 20th Century.
But somewhere in the 80′s we began to make a conscious choice as a society that we would benefit more if we gave the wealthy more wealth and gave public education and other things… less..
Somewhere in the past we as a society made a conscious choice to allow our nation’s leaders to put less money into education, and keep more for themselves and their friends…. ( of course in fairness, we thought we were going to get some of it too…. Psyche!)
And the longer and longer I look at today’s educational problem and all the millions of pieces that need to be glued back together, the more and more I come to the inevitable conclusion that we simply really need to take that money back, invest it where it should have been all along, and still, keep that same fire in our bellies which we have now, and make education fun again so that great things can happen…..
Just like it probably did for each and every one of us… After all, we’re reading blogs for heaven’s sakes… Where on earth did THAT curiosity come from? Does that make us all sort of weird? lol.
It’s not the genetics. We are all pretty equal there.. It’s the environment. We’ve Got To Change The Environment. Standardization is not helping. Not helping one little bit.
I was just challenged by the owner of a gun blog to illustrate how well gun control works.
Challenge Accepted.
US = no gun control == 14078 gun homicides==0.00446% of the population==. 4.69 per 100000
Somalia = no gun control== 138 gun homicides==0.0000138% of the population==1.38 per 100,000
Yeman = no gun control== 990 homicides (by any means)==0.0000413% = 4.304 per 100,000 (this total includes deaths by swords, stonings, long curved knives and guns).
==============
Japan = good gun control == 11 gun homicides== 0.00000866% of population == 0 per 100,000
S. Korea = good gun control ==14 gun homicides == 0.0000290% of population == 0 per 100,000
Spain = good gun control == 67 gun homicides == 0.0000565% of population == 0 per 100,000
Finally, Australia. a single country on both sides of the spectrum! One that had no gun control, then passed legislation which controlled guns. In similar terms out of 100,000, it went from a high ratio of 4.71 to 1.06…. Gun control where you make it illegal to own a military grade weapon works deliciously well…
Now, Mike W. Prove how homicides go down when you give everyone a gun … Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…
The stupid NRA has their head wedged so far up their butt, I bet it hurts bad when they try to sit down…
I don’t think I did. At least I don’t remember ever crying over the taking of a test… I know towards the end of my academic life, where I stretched myself a little too far, I felt like crying, but you’d be hard pressed to call me a kid then… Even if a couple of former lovers would disagree.
But stories abound about these tests being dispensed. All in the name of Common Core. Here is the logic.
Our kids are not doing as well as kids in Shanghai. We need to turn them into Chinese. The Chinese are brutal. We need to be brutal to compete. We will make our test so hard and pump so much knowledge into our child’s heads, that we will do as good or better….
They have come and shanghai’d our kids…..
Someone in the Department of Education must hate kids. That is the only conclusion a sane person can draw… Making kids cry over a test? For what? Does that make them better citizens? Does that make them better customers?
It has become obvious at least to this human being, that our Department of Education is interested only in the Department of Education. It has lost focused.
We are supposed to be educating our children so they can compete in a future world. Making them cry is the exact opposite approach that is needing to be taken….
Instead, our resources need to go to an 11 to 1 student teacher ratio. Teachers need to be rated if anything on whether their students are or are not engaged…. It is hard not to be engaged as a student when you have a student teacher ratio 11 to 1 ratio….
And the reason they fight this concept of having more teachers teach students? It is because there is no corporate money in hiring teachers… Wall Street does not get rich like they do whenever a school district buys a test….
And if you can make a child cry when taking a test, there is a good chance they will all take another one to redeem their self-esteem…..
I can remember very academic arguments with David Anderson way back when as we each sought to determine for the next twenty years, how property rights should be divided up ethically and morally….
One view is that libertarianism should be the rule. Do what you want as long as no one gets hurt.
The other view was that society should rule. We are getting hurt so we now have to dictate what you can do….
Funny thing is, we were both arguing the same thing, except from two different ends…
People should be allowed to do what they wish as long as others are not hurt, When others feel hurt, there needs to be an arbiter or judge who looks at both sides before siding against the property owner. I think that makes sense….
We see in West, Texas what happens when people like Delaware’s own Christian Hudson and Mark Baker get their way. Anything goes. Everyone else be damned…
In the town of West, Texas a fertilizer plant exploded across the street from a school, one block away from a nursing home, and two blocks from an emergency services building.
This is what zoning is in place to prevent. It also prevents too much runoff, to much commercialization, too much traffic, too much sewage, too many stoplights, too much congestion, and too much time out of our lives. And when things go horribly wrong, like a corporate entity like Christian Hudson or Mark Baker, cuts a corner or two like a fertilizer plant did in West, Texas…. BOOM! We’re all dead.
Some of you have lived in Delaware more than ten years… You fondly remember the excitement building up in your car as you raced through the forests that lay between Lewes and Rehoboth. Good zoning could have left them an still created the business that provides the tax base now.
But good zoning was cast aside for misplaced words like “freedom” and “liberty” and “property rights” …. Those have there place, but not in zoning situations. There at least, some type of thought process should ahve played a part, instead of knee-jerking when either Christian or Mark jerked the chain.
You probably don’t need good zoning in the tundra of Alaska or the Yukon. But you do need it in Delaware.
It is time to start shouting down the nincompoops in Sussex County who have only a three word vocabulary when the show up at County meetings: liberty, freedom, and property rights….
The rest of us have rights too, and we are far greater in number than those three people who created the logjam that begins south of Federal Route 9.
Next time someone wants to take away your liberty, your freedom, and your happiness by wanting more and more for themselves… tell them to go to hell…
Courtesy of Sprinkler Scape.
Republicans gorge themselves over having a second black couple to diss….
Yum,Yum,Yum.
And now it is Michelle Rhee herself. The DC darling who was praised by both McCain and Obama during the 08 campaign, now has to contend with the fact that she knew all along the cheating was beyond the parameters of normal and did nothing about it… It is one thing if you don’t know, and your underlings who you have told to “produce or else” change their scores underneath of you, but it another to actually know and understand the implications (that she and her principals erased and changed the answers from wrong to right), that what you may be proposing is false and to then go forward and propose it anyway using the compromised data to back you up….
Just this year, we had Texas acknowledge that the test results then under then George W. Bush governorship, were faked. That pilot project went on to become the “No Child Left Behind” which left a whole generation behind.
Again just this year we had almost the entire district of Atlanta whose amazing results sold the rest of the nation into diving towards Common Core and RTTT , indicted under falsifying all the test results…
You see.
This new fangled educational system does not work unless the results are fabricated.
This is the same new fangled educational system which the Markell administration and Mark Murphy seem to be forcing upon Christina School District as we speak. This system is dependent upon holding teachers accountable to standards that don’t work…. Then pulling out these faked test results from Texas, DC, and Atlanta, waving them and saying… we want results like these….
Ummm. No thank you. Things used to be much better before corporate got involved…
Anyone who has ever worked in any corporation, no matter what geographical spot you live or work in, knows very well your success depends on how you look doing it, not on whether or not things get done ethically… On the other hand, our sports teams have the opposite philosophy. To them, it is what you accomplish that matters, no matter how you look in achieving it.
It is time we switch and use the sports model, not the corporate model for our educational needs. Our children deserve the best.
The News Journal in an attempt to muddy the resolve of the few attending parents actively involved in their children’s education, is trying to roll out the case for RTTT sponsored by Jack Markell…
The overall primary question is who is best to run our schools? Corporate for profit entities? Or people who get voted in by members of their district?
Big question. Should we even trust these school board members who have been involved with education most of their lives? Shouldn’t we instead, trust companies who will make millions off the tests they forced upon us?
Hmmm……
The issue is simple. RTTT funding must have qualifiers attached. That was needed to make this not look like the stimulus it really was. One of those qualifiers is that teachers must be paid low, and if successful, receive a big bonus. However, all teachers get paid low, only a priveleged few who are well connected, get the big bonuses.
Recognizing this earlier than most other districts, probably due the the wisdom of having worked with Eli Broad candidates before, one who bankrupted the district by $19 million dollars, the Christina District wants to refuse that money. However they will take it if they can instead break that $20,000 dollar bonus and spread it out to twenty well deserving people, who will receive bonuses of $1000 dollars each. The Department of Education is balking at that, because it spolls their plan of giving $20,000 to a certain person…..
Now there is one more thing. It will cost the Christina District some of their own money to implement the things the DOE wants done. In otherwords, the DOE allots say $500 for a Career Fair, but, the actual cost is something like $2,500. That mean that to receive this RTTT money in question, … on this one event, it will cost the local board an additional $2000 they weren’t planning to spend. Does that make sense?
Bluntly, it is like a loan shark came to your door to give you $20 dollars, yep, $20 dollars just like that. Just for nothing… Just sign on the dotted line to say you got it… As you read you see this: Contractee must pay back money along with $30 borrowing fee. So, if you take that $20 dollars, … it’s going to cost you $50….
This is why the board is debating getting woo-hoo free money. It is not free.
This post is to see if the Board can get along without it? The information was created and publicized by the News Journal Opinion piece to make people upset money was being turned downed. Here is what that money would go to……
Let’s break it down, shall we?
college and career fairs at high schools and middle schools, … Put some tables up, invited people to come down and speak about their schools. That can be done without additional funding.
college and career centers in each high school,…. Just curious. If the focus is supposed to be on those “not graduating”. why is RTTT money being diverted towards people who will graduate? And, none of our schools growing up, had college and career centers. We had college catalogs on a shelf.
STEMs program focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics – two high schools, one middle school and two elementary schools that struggle in those subjects; ok, this could use funding. More later.
revisions to career and technical pathways at high schools that are aligned with state and federal job market data. Career and technical pathways? Revisions? This can be done in the DOE office in one afternoon. Just look at the Federal Guidelines, and change the district to meet them…. (you go here, and you go there). Not necessary for any child. Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t see how this helps one child who is otherwise happy to be doing what he is doing.?
expansion of Advanced Placement coursework and extra supports to help under-represented groups in those core areas; again, if we aren’t graduating enough, how does advance placement change that? This is money going to the top, and again, leaving Jea Street’s, Tom Gordan’s, and Dennis Williams’ constituents in the dirt. Expansion of Advanced Placement Coursework, sounds like a purchase, a buy in, perhaps allowing for the transfer of state money into one more private firm selling the us the untested course material. Not sure if that helps the problem we have in education. Not sure what the extra support mentioned would be, however, if it were teachers or tutor working with Advance Placement, that could be beneficial…
“graduation guides,” to help students meet graduation requirements – this is particularly important for ninth-graders, where state data shows the potential for leaving school begins. I am glad they focused on 9th grade. But here is my problem. We are giving “graduation guides” to explain how to navigate upwards to a graduation requirement, but the problem students are the ones having trouble with division and multiplication… Basics. A better utilization would be to pour the money into a tutor program, and all ninth graders have to pass through it. Once cleared, they don’t have to continue and can go on to something else. For what good is a graduation guide, if you don’t KNOW enough to graduate? Those passing their courses do not need guides. They are graduating anyways.
a series of professional development courses for teachers and school leaders, including a pilot project to allow teachers who have mastered their subject skills to boost the instructional deficiencies among their peers. Again? More courses? When are they ever going to get time to plan their lessons? (Oh, we didn’t think of that, we’ve never been teachers) Teachers have been taking courses ever since the 80′s. Every year a new program. Every year a new name, and they have to take a course and get a new certificate. Each year they get promised it is the best they are being taught, there will be no more, and then next summer, oh, we found this one, it’s the best there is…. One could argue what is wrong with education today, is that teachers are far too busy jumping through hoops, to teach… However, pairing old teachers with new teachers is good for both. The pilot program should be safe to fund, but the mentors should be picked by the mentoree. Having someone score high on a test, then picked to mentor when they have very little experience, shames the program. The mentoree should pick someone they respect, as a disciple picks his master.
project-based learning at four high-need schools and community forums for parent engagement. I can’t comment on this right now. I really don’t know what they are trying to say….
So should Christina fore go 2.3 million in fund for these items which will cost them roughly 1.1 million in additional funding? Probably, for based on the items above, that money is not going to where it is needed… These are mostly fluff programs. Programs that sound good enough, one can get General Assembly to fund them, because they sound good.
On the other hand, if Christina CAN spend the money better than the DOE, and can apply that money directly to programs that will serve their purpose, and steer children who are failing into successful lives, … should the state arbitrarily refuse to give it simply because the board is trying to do the right thing for its kids?
For you see, there ARE two sides to this argument. So far, all we’ve heard is that Christina should comply with the state. But why should the state withhold the money when Christina can do it better? Isn’t that the state’s fault, and not the Christina School Districts?
I hope this was enough to show you that the state money if put into programs they want, is just a waste of money. The money could instead go into programs where it is sorely needed.
