This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Schools

  • A Ready Reserve to Keep Our Kids Alive

    I get weekly emails from old Army buddies about jobs available to former military personnel, primarily in the Middle East, jobs offering excellent salaries. Most ads are seeking the crème de la crème, the special operators, or at least those with the advanced combat skills that would be in the resume of any former or retired Ranger or Airborne/Marine infantry NCO. Playing down the potential downsides of these contracts, such as living in Muslim countries under Sharia law, these ads tend to emphasize the outsized recompense rather than the discomforts.

    I look at those salaries and wonder why is it we have federal contractors who are willing to pay these lucrative compensation packages for former warriors to assume huge risk and minimal conditions of daily living while, simultaneously, we have school districts throughout this nation that could be employing them and their skills to even greater effect. These experienced tough guys, who devoted their younger lives to protecting this nation and its principles, could well apply all that training and experience protecting the nation’s most sacred resource, our children.

    May I be so radical as to suggest that school boards all across this country take a hard look at their administrative trees and lop off a few of those really questionable deputy superintendents for this, and assistant deputy superintendents for that? Just what contribution do all these highly paid, administrative dead branches make to the education of the children these boards are responsible for? Do a little math and you’ll see that some judicious trimming of these bloated school district administrations could free up some funds to hire teams of those veterans I described above, the millions of potential applicants out there who possess the requisite firearms and security skills to walk the halls of our educational institutions from kindergarten through college, armed and prepared to neutralize any threat to our children. Celebrities hire these people all the time. Are celebrities more essential to America than her children?

    A school district wouldn’t even need to have highly trained and lethal security teams in every school at all times. Multiple teams could be rotated through all the district schools on a totally irregular and unpredictable schedule. That very unpredictability would give pause to many of the deranged when considering mayhem on a helpless schoolroom. It might drive these crazies to the mall food courts or theaters, true, but I believe right now, in view of last week’s horror, that’s a better option than an elementary school or a kindergarten, because there is likely someone in those places who is armed. Think about it, mall killing events don’t produce the high numbers of victims that campus events do. There’s a clear and simple reason for that: the schools are stupidly but publicly announced gun-free zones and the killers, well aware of that, know where they can inflict the most horror before they are brought down.

    We are a nation with schools with construction budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, managed by administrations with similar budgets. With all this tax money being spent to provide our young ones with such excellent learning environments under such expensive tutelage, are there no funds to do this one essential thing: hire, tough, seasoned, knowledgeable professional warriors to keep our children alive? All you liberal parents out there so afraid of guns should weigh this: who is more essential, some totally helpless, multi-degreed, deputy assistant doofus for dietetic planning or some hard-nosed, bad-ass, old pistol-packin’ Ranger who, when it all hits the fan, will, by his training and his core beliefs, give his own life to keep your kid alive?

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • 75% of American youths unfit for military

    A Stars & Stripes article reports that there are a number of retired generals who are a little miffed that a study by Mission: Readiness, an organization of more than 300 former military leaders which says that most Americans are ineligible for military service because they’re fat, stupid or criminals or a various combination of the three;

    “Many of our young adults cannot meet the military’s standards in math, reading and problem solving,” said [Retired Maj. Gen. Daniel] O’Neill, a member of Mission: Readiness. “The reality of our modern-day military is that young people in uniform must operate cutting-edge technology and possess critical thinking skills. So, just as in the civilian workforce, the military increasingly needs better-educated young men and women to run its weapons systems.”

    [Denise Cesare, president and CEO of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania] expressed the same concerns about a rising skills gap among young people, which she said also has a negative impact on businesses.

    Yet, those precious young people are always coming to TAH and trying to school us on law and the other realities of the world as they perceive it, steeped in their fat, illiterate ignorance.

    Of course, these do-gooders, who are clearly outside their respective lanes, recommend more early learning programs…more union thugs earlier in our children’s lives. What we really need is to reform our education system. Toss the unions out along with bad teachers. Throw out the computers and get back to basic education and learning techniques. Teachers did a better job of teaching when they made less money than they make now. We certainly don’t need more union influence in our children’s lives. That’s how we got here. (Does it sound like I’m baiting a particular leftist here?)

    I’m sure the recruiters in the audience can add some anecdotal evidence to support the report, though.

  • Marines teach educators about the Corps

    The LA Times reports that the Marine Corps recruiters in southern California are trying to overcome bias against them in local schools by inviting educators (and I use that term in it’s loosest sense) to an orientation;

    Some teachers in the district have launched “counter recruiting” efforts, warning students of physical danger, regimentation and loss of privacy and individuality that come with military service. Others put students on “don’t call” lists.

    “The U.S. continues to fight in wars that are opposed by the public, and yet the military can recruit with little opposition because working-class kids have few job options,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers and a critic of the Marine Corps program.

    Yeah, well, then if wars and the military in general are opposed by the public, isn’t it parents’ responsibility to conduct their own “counter recruiting” programs in their homes. It’s a perfect example of teachers not staying in their respective lanes. They are public employees who are supposed to teach students, not indoctrinate at the students’ parents’ expense.

    After their hosts tell the educators to ask a lot of questions, this one pops up;

    An early question from one teacher was whether recruits may someday go to war.

    Dumbass. Who keeps telling people that there are no stupid questions in spite of these glaring examples?

    The program seems to have created some converts;

    “It’s impressive,” said William Lozoya, a music teacher and band director at San Fernando High School. “I had no idea that there are so many support programs, so many ways they can get an education or training.”

    Brian Metzger, an English teacher at Highland Park High, said that counselors at his school “actively discourage anyone from enlisting. Now I can at least provide a more balanced view for students to make up their own minds.”

    Miles Bonner, guidance counselor at Sun Valley High, said he planned to present military service “as a viable option that students should consider.”

    Teachers are having too much effect on children’s lives if the recruiters have to recruit teachers in order to recruit Marines.

  • McChrystal in the classroom

    TT sends a link from the New York Times‘ Elisabeth Bumuller who decides to take a look into General Stanley McCrystal’s Yale classroom to see how he faring among the pointy-headed crowd. It seems he’s doing better than an American general of the Vietnam era might have done;

    “The first day I came here, they were expecting a demonstration,” General McChrystal, who is retired from the military, said in an interview after class, shortly before heading out to a New Haven bar for beers with his students. “And I was mad because there were only nine people” protesting his appointment.

    But that isn’t the end of it. The students seem to be more mature than their teachers;

    At Yale the military is, for most students, a great unknown, and many in General McChrystal’s class say they signed up out of curiosity. “I would never have imagined myself three years ago in a course taught by a general,” said Erik Heinonen, one of General McChrystal’s students and a former Peace Corps volunteer.

    Some faculty members at Yale remain opposed to a retired celebrity general who does not hold their union card, a Ph.D., teaching at a civilian university, and say they are uncomfortable with his history of driving the secret commando raids that killed so many people in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also point out that the wars of the last decade have been unpopular on campus.

    But faculty members who support General McChrystal say that students distinguish between the warriors and the wars, and that Yale should include an option to learn firsthand about the military as part of a college education.

    “There is almost no antimilitary bias among students,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale history professor and the recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for biography, who has welcomed General McChrystal to Yale. “I wouldn’t say it’s true among the faculty.”

    I envy and admire those students for seeking knowledge from people who actually wrote history instead of just succumbing to the usual liberal drivel from people who only write about history. Yale is lucky to have McCrystal and I hope they continue to ignore the filthy 60s hippie beasts who are clinging to their tenure and sequestered behind the Ivy-covered walls safe from the realities of the world.

  • It’s OK to bully if you’re PC

    Bullying is the topic of the moment, obviously– although,  when the media gets bored with it they’ll just move on to something else that matters to them. Kids get bullied at school because of the nature of the beast: huge institutions used to house barely supervised children. School is Lord of the Flies, all day. Period.

    That being said, I read this story on Fox about the founder of an anti-bullying campaign, It Gets Better, that is evidently hugely popular– even President Obama has made a video for the group.

    It seems this founder, Dan Savage, who’s sexuality would be irrelevant if HE didn’t make it the POINT,  feels that it is the fault of Christians and, of course, the Bible that  bullying exists (specifically toward homosexuals) and he told a bunch of high school journalists so at a conference.  Many students walked out of his “rant” and were taunted by him.  Students report that he called them “pansy asses” as they left the auditorium.

    Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thought the speech was one thing – but it turned into something else.

    “I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

    “The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”

    As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them “pansy asses.”

    I couldn’t care less if this guy is gay, and married to a man or anything he chooses.  It was publicly known he was gay before this incident.  Clearly he was not being bullied or in any way ostracized  for his beliefs and lifestyle choices– but he felt he had the right to bully and insult high school students for their beliefs and lifestyle choices.

    Hmmm. Students, some Christian,  were respectfully giving him a platform but he could not respect them in return.  Got it.

    CitizenLink sums it up, I think:

    So it’s significant—and extremely ironic— that Savage would feel the freedom to display such intolerance during a speech that was supposed to be about bullying prevention.

    Using profanity to deride the Bible—and then mocking the Christian students after they left the room—is obviously a form of bullying and name-calling. This illustrates perfectly what we’ve been saying all along:  Too many times in the name of “tolerance,” Christian students find their faith being openly mocked and belittled in educational environments.

     

    I’m a mother of high schoolers and a Christian (yes, I bleach my eyes after a day at TAH….  just kidding!)   I don’t  expect the government schools or the main stream to get it right. And I, especially,  don’t expect any government to legislate good behavior.

    But as individuals we can see right and wrong. We can see that painting ANY group of people with the same brush is bigotry, whether you’re insulting a gay man or a Christian high schooler.

    You don’t have to like me, Mr. Savage, just don’t BULLY ME.  Really.   And you damn straight better not bully my kids.

  • The military must overhaul its education

    There’s been a sea change in attitude of the US military when it comes to the education of its ranks. Not so long ago post secondary education was considered the exclusive realm of the officer corps. Today, not only is the military leadership encouraging its enlisted men and women to seek out higher education, they’re actively spending billions of dollars as a matter of deliberate policy in order to achieve that goal. Unfortunately for everyone involved, including the taxpayer, this policy has been pursued in fits and starts with half measures and aimless, profligate spending.

    As it stands now the military spends almost $8 billion a year more than service members have put in for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. That’s billions of dollars engorging a hopelessly broken, corrupt and often anti-military academic system in order to attempt to educate troops who have already left the service, to very mixed results. To put that number in perspective, that’s about 50% more than the 42,000 student, globally ranked Top 20 University of Washington spends in the same time frame , including it’s $1 billion research budget. Or, it’s the collective endowment of the entire University of California’s eleven campuses serving a quarter of a million undergraduate and postgraduate students. This is, largely, a consequence of The GI Bill being a law structured to garner political support by feeding the beast and institutional military support by attracting recruits during the hard years of 2005-2008. What it should be is designed to educate service members for the purpose of empowering the force, improving retention and setting up them for success when they transition out of the armed forces.

    Not to mention, do you really want your tax funded GI Bill paying the tenured salary of the likes of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky?

    All that’s not to say that the military is only spending money on vets. In 2011 the military spent $542 million on tuition assistance for active duty troops and some of their dependents. TA grew so quickly and to such heights that Congress moved to slash it by 25%. With this deluge of largely unaccountable money, online and distance learning schools have popped up on bases around the world. On nearly every base you can find a learning center with several different, often for-profit, schools offering all manner of courses. The for-profit American Public University System, which runs the popular American Military University, alone has over 100,000 students. Unfortunately there’s little to no coordination between the military and the school’s faculty when it comes to the individual service member’s needs or academic progress. Consequently, these money gobbling schools are often difficult for young troops to complete and most have graduation rates well below 50%. As for the actual course work? It’s not pretty.

    This sad state of affairs is even more astounding when one considers that the US military has successfully been in the business of higher education for over 200 years and is, today, the largest educational apparatus in the country. The Department of Defense and it’s various bureaucratic affiliates are directly responsible for, or directly pay for, the post secondary education of more people than any other entity in the country. The Department of Education can’t even come close to providing the educational impact for adults the DoD does and it most likely never will. This doesn’t even touch the almost 9,000 staff in 200 DoD schools who are responsible for the K-12 education of almost 90,000 military dependents.

    Fortunately, within that depressing realization is also the answer to, not only fixing the military’s broken education promises but, reforming the entire way higher education works in the United States. (more…)

  • Honors for graduating enlistees

    The Washington Post reports that parents in Fairfax, Virginia are putting pressure on the school board to honor their children who are graduating from high school and enlisting in the military like other students who have mapped out their first few years after high school;

    These parents are pressing the county school board Thursday night to acknowledge that volunteering for the armed forces is a commitment worthy of a public display of respect, with red, white and blue “honor cords” that graduates would wear around their necks as they receive diplomas.

    “In this area, it seems like if you don’t go to college you’re almost not worth as much as someone else,” said Carolyn Kellam, one of the Fairfax parents who has been lobbying the board. “But I don’t think college is the end-all be-all for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be. There are other choices out there.”

    The board is a little tentative about pushing back against the pressure. No one wants to be seen as voting against recognition of these honorable students, but pushing back they are. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I think if the individual schools decide they want to something, that’d be fine, but having the school board push it down their throats, how much of an honor would that really be?

    For example, this principal has his head screwed on straight;

    “I feel remiss that we haven’t been doing it,” said Robinson Secondary Principal Dan Meier. “I commend these parents that brought it up. Robinson has been a school for 40 years — why this hadn’t come up previously, I don’t know.”

    Change is already in the works at Robinson, a school named after a soldier who died in combat in Vietnam.

    No matter how the school board votes Thursday, Meier said, this spring Robinson enlistees will wear an honor cord and will be asked to stand for applause at graduation.

    That’s more of the kind of reaction that I’d encourage than some sort of mandate from on high.

  • An aside for those of you with college age kids

    Please forgive my deviation from the regular theme of this blog but I figured it behooved those of you intending to send your children onto college to take a look at this particular series of events I’ve seen unfolding. Following a post from Roger Kimball, the editor and publisher of the excellent cultural review The New Criterion, on the sad state of affairs at Williams College, I fell into an interesting set of student postings.

    It’s a rather bittersweet series, really, in that a pionering student at the arch liberal institution of Williams College uncovered one of the many veins of politcal cooruption within American “higher education”. The student, “David Michael”, discovered a former admissions officer and current head of the Multicultural Center at Williams College, Lili Rodriguez, making this facebook post:

    Sigh…same thing would happen to me when I was reading applications for admission. So many listed Ayn Rand as their favorite author..I would set those apps aside, clearly they were lacking in critical thought abilities.

    This clear violation of her duty as an admissions officer was countered with this nervous attempt at levity (with some grammatical formatting on my part):

    No one admissions officer can make a decision on a student or “Black List them”. Decisions are made by the whole committee, and yes, we are people with our own likes and dislikes…Ayn Rand enthusiasts were one of many pet peeves I had as a reader, others included essays written about Prom, Pets, favorite historical figures, etc. Other readers were annoyed when students wrote about video games, comic books, or dungeons and dragons (hobbies I totally dig). Luckily, apps are read by two readers and hobbies matter significantly less than academic achievement, writing quality, and recommendations. So long and short of it is this: Ayn Rand sucks in my opinion (unless you are a 12 year old seeking individuality and needing to complete your summer reading list) and even as a college employee, I do have the right to hold that opinion and voice it to my personal friends on facebook–which clearly I need to be much more careful about. Luckily, the opinion of one person cannot make or break an admissions decision at this college. Otherwise, we’d have no Ayn Rand enthusiasts able to start this WSO post or the awesome people that play D&D weekly. Go Dungeons and Dragons! Boo Ayn Rand!

    Cute, no?

    It’s clear that as both an admissions officer and as a “multicultural” leader Rodriguez has grotesquely failed in her duties. It’s revealing to me that she’d so effortlessly discriminate against students who deviate from her own political and ideological prescriptions regardless of their SAT scores, GPAs or the actual content of their essays. Or even, gasp, ethnicity. It’s even more revealing that she would make these comments in full and clear view of her both her friends and professional peers, without the slightest self consciousnesses.

    All of this is not to say that I’m an Ayn Rand devotee, far from it. It’s not even to say that Rand typifies the conservative or right wing of the spectrum, doing so would be lazy and inaccurate. It does make clear, though, that those who oversee their children’s admission process would be well advised to consider having their children be intellectually dishonest or even flat out lie in order to stand their best possible chance of admission to the widest range of academic institutions in this Republic. The very same institutions which are supposed to provide a conductive environment for varied, honest and robust intellectual discourse. Sad, isn’t it?