Rotten to the Core Archives

May 8, 2018

MORE BAD NEWS FOR AMAIRKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN

This is another one of those stories that so many sent me that I had to blog about it. And despite its bad news, I'm not going to rant about it. No, on second thought, it's not bad news; the news is downright apocalyptic, for it means that if the USA cannot turn its quackademic system around, the country is doomed. I'm at a loss here, because many of my friends and acquaintances are active professional teachers, so any remarks I might make about the systemic problems of the profession are bound to be personally hurtful, and subject to misinterpretation.

But there's no denying what this story is saying: after a decade of spending gobs of money on education, American school children's performance is dropping:

New Test Results Reveal A "Lost Decade" For Academic Progress In Public Schools

(Mr. C.S. spotted this version of the story:)

65% of Public School 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading; 67% Not Proficient in Math

The problem here hits close to home, for I live in a state where, recently, teachers staged a "walk out" to make their case for a salary increase. And, part of me is deeply sympathetic with their position, because in this same state, while teachers rank near the bottom of the pay scale, educational "administrators" are - in some districts - pulling in almost a million dollars, more money than the President of the USA, the Vice-President, a US Senator, or Congressman. And for doing what? Delivering to us this mess of stupid butthurt Bolshevized students (yes, I said Bolshevized), who cannot read, cannot write, cannot think. So at least a part of me can sympathize with the teachers. But by the same token, the other part of me most decidedly does not sympathize, for in all their demands for more money, not a word was heard about what might be wrong with the system, and how to fix it, and I've always contended that part of that problem stems from the whole idea of teacher certification, which means that one has spent "x" amount of classtime, not learning a subject, but learning method and theory, which usually revolve around cleverly-disguised systems of passive aggression. It's in those classes that teachers themselves are collectivized and turned into "team players" who should not "rock the boat" by failing a student for not knowing the material, for not being able to think clearly. That, after all, would affect their self-esteem, or be to impose a "white male patriarchal system" of value on their Kulcher... yes folks, it's that bad here. In fact, it's so bad that mathematics itself has come under fire for being a system of "white male privilege." I won't go into that, because I've blogged about it before on this site.

This idea of ending certification or standardized tests sounds ridiculous on the surface, until one recalls the inconvenience of history, which my co-author Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core: fully none of the great minds of our Western culture were taught by people who had a "teaching credential" from a modern American department of edgykayshun, and fully none of them ever took a standardized test: JS Bach, Mozart, Haendel, Haydn, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Robert or Clara Schumann, Beethoven... not even John Philip Sousa or Leonard Bernstein or Aaron Copland... were taught by people with an American Masters of Music Education, ie., by people who had studied not just music, but who had a teaching credential in the latest pedagogical theory. Poor Bernstein, daring to compose West Side Story and Candide and The Chichester Psalms and presuming to teach music on his television programs and lectures without a teaching credential! Alas, they were taught by people who had actually mastered their discipline. But were they sensitive to other cultures? (Well, actually, if one listens to Bernstein, he was, but perhaps that's because he had mastered his own first.)

Lawrence Stern, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Wolf, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Barret Browning &c &c were not taught English or English literature and poetry by people possessing a "teaching credential," and, by parity of reasoning, these people never took a computerized standardized test on English either. Shame on them!

Yet, to listen to the paragons and mandarins of the American quackademy, these two things - the credential and the standardized test- are essential, so essential that it's truly amazing that Western civilization, from Plato to Popper, ever got along without them!

We're told time and again that this country's educational system is the best in the world. I beg to differ, because history gives lie to the claim, as do the contemporary "results" of the system.

No, what more money, more technology means is really "we want more of the same."

I know I most decidedly do not more of the same, because what the implications of this study really means is that, within a generation, it won't do any good to talk about things like "the Constitution" or "constitutionality" or "the rule of law", because a large part of them will not be able to read it, much less think in anything resembling a coherent fashion about it. It will do absolutely no good to talk about the Heglian dialectic or "the concrete universal" or the Kantian Ding an Sich or the Thomistic proofs or the principle of parsimony or the "problematic of atheist theodicy" or the Austrian economic school's critiques of Marxism, because no one will even have a clue what you're talking about, because they'll be incapable of reading it. It will do no good to write or talk of Popperian verifiability in science and the problems posed for certain scientific theories; it will do no good to speak or write about Goedelian incompleteness or Hamiltonian spaces or quantum entanglement or double slit experiments or uncertainty principles, because no one will have a clue, because, after all, two plus two equals twenty-two:

(And sadly folks, the edykayshunal kulcher in Amairikuh is just about this bad, especially for a teacher who, like Mrs. Wells, thinks there are "correct answers.")

Indeed, viewed this way, the conclusion is unpleasant, but clear: the problem isn't a lack a funding. The problem is continuing to do the same thing, and to expect different results, which, as I recall, Einstein once said was a perfect definition of insanity. The problem isn't a lack of funds. The problem is, we continue to fund the same thing. The problem isn't the lack of funding. he problem is we won't even consider turning off the funding spigot to the departments of education, the corporate "textbook" suppliers, that are responsible for this mess.

No, not one more penny for this taurum excretum.

See you on the flip side...

May 1, 2018

TODAY’S EDGYKAYSHUN RANT, BUT THIS TIME IT’S NOT THE ...

It's been a long time since I've ranted about the state of edgykayshun in Amairikuh, and today I wish I could, but the trouble is, today's rant concerns a commonwealth comedy that Ms. K.F. was kind enough to send along. And it will occasion a little anecdote from one of my most hated activities: Grocery Shopping (for the millennials, that means when you go to one of those stores that has lots of food in it, and shop for and buy food). So why are my knickers in a twist?

Because in Great Britain, it seems, young people cannot tell time by reading an analogue clock! But wait, there's more!

Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers 'cannot tell the time'

And just in case you didn't click on the link, here's the basics:

Schools are removing analogue clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time, a head teachers’ union has said.

Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock.

Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said youngsters have become accustomed to using digital devices.

“The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” he told The Telegraph.

“They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they’ve got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere.”

Mr Trobe, a former headmaster, said that teachers want their students to feel as relaxed as possible during exams. Having a traditional clock in the room could be a cause of unnecessary stress, he added.

He said that schools are trying to make everything as “as easy and straightforward as possible” for pupils during their exams.

Well, the poor butt-hurt stressed-out dears! Note, the solution is not to teach younger people how to access that bizarre, strange, intimidating and occult world of the analogue clock, but simply to remove the offending artifacts altogether, which strikes me as a very un-British solution to things(speaking objectively here, as a colonial observer from across the pond).

And it brings up a social and cultural problem which, I suspect, could - if we're not careful - end up causing everyone harm if the world is eventually going to be run by people who don't know how to read analogue clocks. If this trend keeps up, one can imagine a couple of future Britons, standing in Trafalgar Square and looking up at Nelson's statue and opining that they "don't know who it is" or "why it's there", but "it sure is impressive" (that is, only if Lord Nelson's statue has not been torn down because it's an example of white male privilege and intolerance of Bonapartist self-expression and oppression of French culture and aspirations; he was, after all, simply protesting BREXIT. They'll have to rename Trafalgar Square too, something more "affirming" and "uplifting", like Franco-British Amity Square, or Unity Square, or something. Perhaps even build a memorial to Admiral Villeneuve in order to maintain balance and perspective).

Which brings me to my anecdote. About a month and a half ago, I went out grocery shopping late at night (I usually do this to avoid the inevitable lines, where I always find myself behind someone with a bag full of coupons, and who wants to cash a fourth-party check in order to put it on their debit card to buy the groceries... sigh... ). Just as all of my items had been scanned, and I handed the clerk the cash for the goods, a momentary power outage or surge (or something) happened, and everything including the computerized cash register, flickered on and off and back on again. Of course, this wiped out my transaction, and the manager had to be called to bring the transaction back up again. In the meantime, I explained to the clerk that I was in a bit of a hurry, and could I please have the change (the cash drawer was still open). My purchase was some forty-odd dollars, and I had handed the clerk two twenty dollar bills and one ten dollar bill.

The look of utter mystification - shock, horror, perplexion, confusion, embarrassment - that passed over his face approached panic. He explained that he'd have to wait for the manager to come and pull up my transaction, because that would tell him how much change to give me. I said, well, my purchase was for (let's say) $46.92, right? The clerk nodded. So, I said, you can just count the change back to me.

Blank expression on clerk's face.

By this time the manager had arrived, keys were inserted, and my transaction recalled, along with the ever-so-comforting Change Due screen, which told the clerk to give me $3.08 in change. This was quickly grabbed out of the drawer, and plopped into my hand in one mass of coins and bills with the statement "Your change is three-o-eight."

Being a curmudgeon, I took the opportunity to show the clerk how to count change back, and said "See, you can do this any time the computer goes down, and it works flawlessly, no mistakes." The clerk was genuinely happy I showed him. The manager was apologetic, and she told me they just don't have the time to show clerks how to do it. One wonders how we ever survived without the computer.

And that's my problem with modern edgykayshun: its assumption that technology will always be around; its assumption that everything is on computers. Its assumption that testing should consist of multiple guess standardized questions graded by computers, where students are not taught to write out answers, and whose penmanship - if one can call it that - increasingly is an illegible scrawl. We have an entire generation that cannot read clocks, make change, write clearly, or for that matter (and much more seriously) knows how to use a card catalogue in that most analogue of archives, the library.

This isn't what built the empire, or the commonwealth. What it is is nothing more than a sign of impending cultural collapse, unless it's turned around, and soon. But don't look for the educrats to do so. They, in their stupidity, think all this technology is just wonderful. And they're producing invincibly ignorant and helpless people and removing those offending analogue technologies lest the poor dears be "stressed".

See you on the flip side...

December 22, 2017

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN STRIKES AGAIN: ACADEMIC RIGOR ENDANGERS ...

We're well overdue for another rant on Amairikuhn edgykayshun, and I was beginning to wonder when we'd have another one, when Mr. V.T., a regular article contributor here, found this one and passed it along.

I have to blog about this, because it hits close to home. It seems that a Purdue University engineering "profuzzilator" (sorry, I just can't call him/her/it a "professor") is saying that academic rigor is - you guessed it - racist and sexist and another example of "white male privilege." Why does this hit close to home? It's because my father was an engineering alumnus of Purdue, when it was still a respected engineering university.

But you can kiss that distinction goodbye, after you read this:

Prof: Academic rigor reinforces 'power and privilege

Sorry dad, all your hard work and sacrifice and education are now up for grabs. Academic rigor, according to Profuzzilator Riley, is really not about academic rigor, but about reinforcing white heterosexual male privilege:

“One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”

Hence, Riley remarks that “My visceral reaction in many conversations where I have seen rigor asserted has been to tell parties involved (regardless of gender) to whip them out and measure them already.”

Riley also argues that academic rigor can be used to exclude women and minorities, saying, “Rigor may be a defining tool, revealing how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students.”

She claims that rigor can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students,” adding that “decades of ethnographic research document a climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.”

She evens contends that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” asserting that in the field of engineering, there is an “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias...all under a guise of neutrality.”

The last bit of foamy blither might be news to Dr. Michio Kaku, Dr. Sylvester Gates, Dr. Shirley Jackson, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, Chen-Ning Yang, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and a very long list of other people who apparently had no problem learning their disciplines, suffused as they were, with white male privilege. And I have to wonder just exactly what a lesbian-gay-transgendered version of Foucault analysis or Bernouilli's equation or the Euler identity might look like. One shudders to think what an LGBTQXYZGHK interpretation of E=Mc^2 might result in when the terms of the equation are defined by such kookery.

But wait, there's more. While you're trying to wrap your brain around LBGTQXYZGHK versions of any number of outdated white heterosexual male mathematical theorems dating back to Euclid, that Procrustean bed of white male privilege, ponder for a moment what profuzzilator Riley's "recommendation" is to fix this dire state of affairs:

To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do away with” the notion of academic rigor completely, saying, “This is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

“We need these other ways of knowing to critique rigor, and to find a place to start to build a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education,” she concludes.

Uh huh.

Somehow, I can't see profuzzilator Riley getting a job any time soon actually engineering anything for anyone. Just for kicks, imagine such nitwittery presenting itself for a job interview with the design and engineering division of Airbus in Toulouse, or Mitsubishi in Tokyo, or for an engineering faculty position at the University of Moscow. None of them would let such nonsense through the door - much less on campus - for an interview. Imagine, too, just for real laughs, the curriculum vita of such an individual. Imagine, too, the state of mind of someone actually thinking such idiocy would be taken seriously by any self-respecting university, anywhere...

...except, of course, in Amairikuh, the exceptional nation, which is indispensable to everyone.

Bottom line: if your son or daughter has talent for engineering, don't send them to Purdue. Paying two cents for tuition there would be paying two cents more than any engineering education there would be worth.

See you on the flip side...

October 28, 2017

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN STRIKES AGAIN

It's been a while since I posted a rant about the sad state of Amairikuhn edgykayshun and the social justice Gramscian Marxist culture warriors running it. And you can cross another university off your list to send your kids to if you're interested in having them actually learn something for all that money you're paying out, because this week I was deluged by this story, and I have to confess it left me both angry - outraged in fact - and frustrated, for this Illinois professor manages to get just about everything wrong:

Professor Claims Math, Algebra And Geometry Promote ‘White Privilege’

In case you missed it, here's the part that provokes today's rant:

A University of Illinois math professor believes that algebra and geometry perpetuate “white privilege” because Greek terms give Caucasians unearned credit for the subject.

But that isn’t the professor’s only complaint. She also believes that evaluations for math proficiency perpetuates discrimination against minority students, if they do worse than their white counterparts.

Rochelle Gutierrez argues in a newly published math education book for teachers that they must be aware of the identity politics surrounding the subject of mathematics.

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness,” she argues with complete sincerity, according to Campus Reform. “Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.”

Yes, that's right, the whole field of mathematics has been unduly Hellenized and Caucasianized, and as a result, everyone suffers from mathematical microagressions:

“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned,” she says, claiming that minorities “have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

What pabulum puking cacaphonous codswallop!

In complaining about whiteness in mathematics, Ms. Gutierrez appears to have forgotten the simple fact that algebra - the whole concept of using a formal symbolic calculus to reason mathematically - wasn't a white Euro-caucasian invention at all, it was an Arab one, which suggests that Arabs are now "whites" in Ms. Gutierrez's simulacra and facsimiles of reason and her gloriously tangled taxonomy of mathematical racial-mechanics. She also seems not to have noticed the contributions of Hinduism to the whole evolution of mathematics with its invention of "zero", and somehow the contributions of Indian genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan to mathematical analysis also escaped her attention. Apparently, too, she's not keeping up with the Sumerian and Egyptian contributions to the subject either. No, she simply glides right over the whole evolution of her own discipline, in order to make a cheap "cultural" point in a discipline we all thought was safe from the ravages of the self-righteous social justice warrior lunacy. (Oh, and incidentally, Ramanujan basically taught himself... think of him as "home schooled." An autodidact in the truest sense of the word. Good thing, too, for if he had gone to an Amairikuhn quackademy, he probably would have ended up not being able to add or subtract, and complaining about the undue Hellenization of mathematics, and learning that mathematics is about microagressions and social justice.)

Not so. Ms. Gutierrez is there to remind us that when it comes to witless Gramscian posturing and multicultural schizophrenia, the Amairikuhn quackademy is unequaled.

Give it time, folks: eventually these nutcases will call for a complete revamping of mathematical conventions to eliminate them and replace them with "something else" that is more "reflective" of "diversity" and "fairness" and eliminating "microagressions"... and that of course will lead to complete chaos. (One wonders how they're going to handle those pesky Arabic numerals, a prime example of male privilege and the undue Arabization of mathematical conventions; just think who it excludes: Chinese, Japanese, Jews, atheists, blacks, albinos, Tibetans, &c &c... the list of the potentially offended, in mathematics' case, is virtually endless).

Don't think it matters? Well, consider this: when her students start designing fusion reactors or airplanes or start programing your next generation self-driving car, when they start driving into oncoming traffic, or crashing to the ground, or the plasma containment breaks down or the missiles go off like bottle rockets, at least you can rest comfortably in the fact that they've experienced no microagressions, and are "sensitive."

As for me and my house, I shall continue using Hindu zeros, Arabic numerals, and Greek capital sigmas for summations, the letter pi for 3.14159, capital deltas for change, little curly-cue "d's" for partial differentials, and so on. Granted, I suffer tremendous emotional scarring by the microagressions of the undue Hinduization and Arabization of mathematics, and I'm dealing with it in my safe space with my therapist. The lollipops they give me during my electroconvulsive sessions help too, and if I have a lollipop while reading books of mathematics, I find I'm able to deal with the Arabization and Hinduization microagressions I encounter on almost every page without the nervous spasms of rejection that I used to have when encountering them.

See you on the flip side...

September 18, 2017

STILL ROTTEN TO THE (COMMON) CORE: “INSPIRATIONAL ROBOTS” ...

A few years ago, when Gary Lawrence and I wrote Rotten to the (Common) Core, two of our chief concerns about the whole program were (1) the possibility that the ultimate goal was to replace human teachers in the classroom with robots (a goal not, of course, ever stated explicitly), and (2) that the "individually-adapted computerized standardized tests" being touted for the program were not only building on the faulty foundations of the standardized test to begin with, but that the ultimate goal was to expand the surveillance state thereby, and possibly, to use technology for further mind manipulation and social engineering. To this we added a third concern, namely, that teachers would end up being nothing but classroom "proctors" and "robot maintenance" technicians.

Well, this article shared by Ms. M.W. seems to indicate that these fears might have been justified:

'Inspirational' robots to begin replacing teachers within 10 years

Consider just the opening paragraphs of this prediction:

Robots will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next ten years as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning, a leading educationalist has predicted.

Sir Anthony Seldon, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, said intelligent machines that adapt to suit the learning styles of individual children will soon render traditional academic teaching all but redundant.

The former Master of Wellington College said programmes currently being developed in Silicon Valley will learn to read the brains and facial expressions of pupils, adapting the method of communication to what works best for them.

And then there's this, a little further on in the article:

As part of robot-led learning, teachers would adopt the role of “overseers”, monitoring the progress of individual pupils, leading non-academic activities and providing pastoral support, Sir Anthony said. (Emphases added)

Sadly, Mr. Seldon appears to have corroborated our first two fears, as well as the third.

But it's the manner in which he corroborated Mr. Lawrence's and my third fear that really caught my eye, for note that the role of the "teacher", in his "vision", is to be a coordinator of "non-academic activities", whatever those are. We get a hint, perhaps, of what he means by this when he uses the phrase "providing pastoral support." It's the religious imagery and allusion here that, frankly, disturbs me deeply. In fact, the religious allusion here has a distinctly Christian reference, since "pastoral" is a word that stems from that religio-cultural matrix. To his credit, Mr. Seldon also issues this caution:

"The great danger is that it takes jobs away, and for humans beings much of our fulfilment in life comes from the satisfaction of work.

"If we get the technology wrong it will end up doing everything for us in the same way that satnavs mean we no longer know how to read maps."

Experts predict that automated teaching of maths and science will form the vanguard of machine-led learning, but that sophisticated algorithms would soon be devised to teach the humanities.

But in spite of this caution, one wonders exactly what "religion" Mr. Seldon has in mind that might be promoted by the reduction of the teacher to "providing pastoral support." I have no doubt that what he probably meant was simply that the teacher will be there to provide that all-important human-support-and-encouragement component of education. But I also have no doubt that his words also conjure a danger that "education" will become, courtesy of the "inspirational robot", a new kind of (probably secularized) religion, promoting faith in Almighty Technology and "values." And the chief value that will be promoted is isolation, and the increasing inability of students in such a system to carry on intelligent conversation and discussion with other humans about philosophy, science, history, and so on. Already we see the denigration of culture by these technologies, with "conversation" taking place with clicks on an ipad, with shortening attention spans, inability to conduct long arguments and analysis, and to carry on conversations of more than five minutes' duration (and that's already stretching it).

The other profoundly disturbing thing that emerges from this is the implication that the technology will be "interactive." This is a short way from, and in my opinion, euphemistic way of indicating what the real goal of such technologies in the classroom really is: surveillance of the individual from childhood through adulthood, violation of the individual's privacy, and ultimately, the active manipulation of the individual's thoughts and emotional processes, in short, social engineering on a massive scale.

The education revolution is, indeed, a revolution, but it is an increasingly dehumanizing one. What I suspect will happen is that the "elites" will continue to seek out traditional educational venues for their children, with real teachers teaching real subjects and demanding real human interaction, while they push "technology" and political correctness on everyone else, and call it an "improvement."

The bottom line is: the choice between real human education, or its ersatz technological substitute, is upon us now, and the choice cannot be delayed any longer.

See you on the flip side...

September 3, 2017

AMAIRKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN: MATHEMATICS IS UNJUST AND DISCRIMINATORY

You knew it was coming sooner or later: Amairkuhn edykayshun has finally decided to go after mathematics as being discriminatory and segregating and, well, one suspects that behind all this whining, there's a group of people that just don't "get" all those hieroglyphics on the blackboard or in their no-longer-existing hardcopy textbooks, but they'd very much like to pretend to get all the hieroglyphics, and be able to write them too. But in any case, you heard it here: math - in the latest lunacy to come from Doctors of Edublither and Edubabble Departments sponsoring courses in Methodoloboggle for that all important "license to practice methodoloboggle" on hapless students called the "teacher certification"... yes, math has come under fire, according to this article shared by a number of people this week:

Math is "Unjust and grounded in discrimination" educators moan

Now, believe it or not, I'm not going to rant about this. Rather, I'm going to say these teachers might be on to something, but alas, they're probably on to something in a way that robs their discovery of all possible joy, and opens the door for more psychobabble and edublither, with healthy dollops of pedagogimuck thrown in for good measure in the many Departments of Edublither in the Amairkuhn quackademy:

The National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) and TODOS: Mathematics for All “ratify social justice as a key priority in the access to, engagement with, and advancement in mathematics education for our country’s youth,” the groups declared last year in a joint statement, elaborating that “a social justice stance interrogates and challenges the roles power, privilege, and oppression play in the current unjust system of mathematics education—and in society as a whole.”

Math has "been used to educate children into different societal roles such as leadership/ruling class." Tweet This

Next month, NCSM and TODOS, along with a few other membership societies for math teachers, will host a free webinar drawing upon the principals noted in their joint statement, inviting any interested members of the public to join in hearing “A Call for a Collective Action to Develop Awareness: Equity and Soc....”

[RELATED: Teachers learn to use math as Trojan horse for social jus...

The president of NCSM, Connie Schrock, is a math professor at Emporia State University, and multiple professors serve on the board of TODOS.

While the organizations hope that math can be used as a tool for social justice in the future, they also believe that math has historically perpetuated “segregation and separation,” asserting in their joint statement that “mathematics achievement, often measured by standardized tests, has been used as a gatekeeping tool to sort and rank students by race, class, and gender starting in elementary school.”
(Emphasis added)

The real key here, to my mind, isn't all the claptrap about social justice and the other Bolshevizing cliches that pass for in depth commentary and social philosophy these days. The real problem is precisely the standardized test, which these teachers, in my opinion, get absolutely right: it is a sorting and slotting mechanism, because it was designed to be such at the outset, as Gary Lawrence and I point out in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core. The "project" was the brainchild of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant and his associate Henry Chauncey, who founded the Educational Testing (Dis)Service in Princeton.

I well remember these tests: we were told we could use scratch paper to "work out our answers," but we were never able to submit how we arrived at an answer as part of our "test." This was the exact opposite of the way we actually did it in my linear algebra or trig classes: there the teachers demanded we show our work, not just the answer. It was the process that interested them as much as it was the answer itself. Did we know the "useful shortcuts"? What steps did we use to solve the problem? Could we differentiate? Integrate? Did we even know what a differential was?

The standardized tests demanded none of that: they just wanted an "answer", and demanded that we, the students in South Dakota, somehow read the minds of the anonymous test-preparers in Princeton, minds which, as Mr. Lawrence and I pointed out in our book, were often agreed upon wrong answers and designing tests which, in the words of mathematician Banesh Hoffman, "punished the finer mind."

If these teachers are serious about their critique of standardized tests, then the answer is simple: get rid of them, altogether. Throw them and the whole rotten edubabble-textbook-Common Core "industry" out the door. But given the bolshevizing tendency of so much going on elsewhere in our culture, I'm not optimistic about what truckloads of nonsense they might be willing to drive through the opening. In this case, the cure might be worse than the disease. What we'll see instead, I fear, is more classes on methodoloboggle and pedagogimuck, with big dumplings of Gramscian "sensitivity" served up to attain one's "license to practice social justice in a mathematical context." The result, of course, will be more Navy crews that cannot steer a ship, more airplanes that don't work, and a federal budget that makes no sense, is missing trillions of dollars, because people, while being "sensivtive", can no longer add, subtract, multiply, or divide.

See you on the flip side...

August 16, 2017

HIDDEN CHAMBERS FOUND IN GREAT PYRAMID…

Every now and then a story is shared with me that involves not only one of my favorite subjects, but the subject that this website is (obliquely) named for: the Great Pyramid. Most readers here know that I am a "pyramidiot", as the lamestream quackademy likes to call us folks who think there's much more going on with that structure than meets the myopic quackademic eye. Whatever that structure really is, one thing it is not is "ordinary." Even "respected" archaeologists like Sir Flinders Petrie, the so-called "founder of modern Egyptology" were honest enough to make statements that the modern quackademy would rather forget they made, such as his observation that the "sarcophagus" in the "King's chamber" in the Great Pyramid looked to his late 19th century-early-2oth-century eyes as if it had been drilled out.

So whenever a story comes along that suggests there is more than meets the eye about the structure, I'm all ears, and such is the case with this story shared by Mr. F.L.M.:

Major breakthrough in the search for hidden chambers inside Pyramid of Giza

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN STRIKES AGAIN, THIS TIME IN CHICAGO

OK... it's time for another rant on Amairikkuhn Edgykayshun; we're well overdue for one, and my therapist told me after the last electroshock that if I didn't vent the steam soon, they'd have to up the amperage.

Back when Gary Lawrence and I were writing Rotten to the (Common) Core, one of our mutual concerns was that in establishing a kindergarten to graduate school tracking and surveillance system in the guise of an individually adaptive computerized testing system, that inevitably this system would be used to force people into "career choices" that they themselves might otherwise not make. We suspected then that the goal was to impose penalties on individuals for not following "recommended career choices". One can envision the new Common Core Conversation between an "Edgymakayshun Fasillytator" and a perplexed parent:

"Suzie has a talent for music? We're sorry, but that didn't show up on her test results. Those results show that her optimal career choices lie in the field of office sanitary services, or as a mobile sanitary services engineer."

"What's a mobile sanitary services engineer?"

(Nervous glances, and in a hushed voice): "A garbageman."

(Hushed response) "Don't you mean a garbagewoman? or better, a garbageperson? I'll report you for not being sensitive enough in your pars pro toto usage if you don't change those 'recommendations'".

"Huh? pars pro...uhm... What?"

"You heard me. Change that recommendation - I don't care how you do it, just do it - or else (evil grin) I'll report you and you'll have to undergo (maniacally evil laugh) sensitivity training or attend a continuing education seminar."

(Nervous pleading): "No! No! I beg you! Put bamboo shoots under my fingernails, peel my skin, but not another continuing education seminar or sensitivity training! I-I-I'll change Suzie's recommendation!"

And on and on we could go.

We didn't suspect, however, that the "follow our choices for you or suffer the consequences" would happen so soon in (where else?), Chicago (Mr. C.S. shared this article):

Chicago Schools to Students: Submit to Our Choices for Your Futures or No Diploma

These paragraphs say it all:

Hey, Chicago parents: Are you ready for a bunch of government officials to decide whether your teen has appropriate post-high-school plans?

If you're not, too bad. Your city's school district is pushing forward with its plan to demand—as a requirement to graduate—that seniors prove to the school that they have a plan for the future. What's more, this plan has to match what school administrators think your kid's future should look like.

Reason previously warned that this order was in the works and that Mayor Rahm Emanuel was fully supporting it. It is now officially in place, and it will start applying to students graduating in 2020. Here is a list of options that graduating seniors will be allowed to pursue:

College acceptance letter received and returned

Military acceptance/enlistment letter

Acceptance into a job program (i.e., coding boot camp)

Acceptance into a trades pre-apprenticeship/apprenticeship

Acceptance into a "gap year" program

Current job/job offer letter

The original version was less hospitable to the idea of teens entering directly into the workforce, so at least there's an improvement there. And it says waivers "will be developed" for students with "extenuating circumstances," however the district might eventually define them.

But note the insistent attitude here that moving forward into adulthood and being "successful" at it is assumed to involve putting one's self right back under the control or authority of others. Personal entrepreneurship is not an option. If your kid is a wunderkind in crafts or 3D printing and is making bank on Etsy, that doesn't satisfy the Chicago school system. Will administrators see private contract work as a "job" under this system?

Like all such schemes, it looks good on paper, until one considers (1) the Mayor backing it, which should raise the needle on anyone's suspicion meter, and (2) the consequences that Reason is spelling out: Chicago's "solution" is meant only to keep graduates in debt and subservient to the edgykayshun system and its overpaid mandarins. The first "requirement fulfillment", i.e., a college acceptance letter received and returned" is the problem: why would anyone want their children to go to an American college, where they will be exposed to revolutionary Gramscian nonsense, learn how to mangle the English language by being forced to use "gender neutral" language, and spend more time learning how to be sensitive and not "offend" anyone, than they will learn history, literature, the arts, the sciences, or mathematics? where their overpriced tuition money will go to pay the salaries of fat and talentless administrators, who do nothing but mangle said academic disciplines, while underpaid adjuncts teach the courses that matter, and overpaid shills teach the ones that don't? Chicago's test bed program, in other words, only fuels the fraud and ensures its continuance. The real point here is that the end result of the Common Core system is being implemented, and, I suspect, Chicago is "the test bed."

But wait, there's more, because apparently this new "scheme" is just that, a scheme to raise more money for - you guessed it - more administrators, not teachers in the classroom, not textbooks, but administrators (after all, we have to supply jobs for the illiterate but sensitive people being graduated from the edykayshun system, don't we?):

Chicago school leaders don't really see that unintended consequence, because that's not their goal. As I noted the last time I blogged about it, this entire "plan" appears to be a mechanism to lobby for more money and more staff for administrative, non-education-focused purposes. The Washington Post's coverage of the policy on Monday makes it clear that this system is intended to shake out more money and support for guidance counselors and to create new programsthat further entwine administrators into students' lives. Here's what's going on at Morgan Park High School:

Given the new graduation requirement, seniors beginning this fall will take a year-long seminar on planning for life after high school. [Principal Carolyn] Epps said she hopes to reach younger students through assemblies, parent meetings and instruction in home-room classes.

...

The official description of this new demand notes that the mayor and district are attempting to raise $1 million to create new positions for "college and career coaches." This a jobs program for them. Installing this system is meant to create leverage to ratchet up administrative funding. It's not just about blackmailing students and parents into declaring they'll conform to a set of roles in order to get out from under the state's thumb. It's yet another way for the school system to demand more money by making it harder for students to graduate if those who hold the purse strings don't agree to more administrative spending.

Now, call me old fashioned, but I thought seminars on life after high school was the parents' job... oh, wait, I forgot, the progressivist nuts in edgykayshun don't like things like families, babies, children, fathers, mothers, &c.

The root cause, I submit once again, is having a class of "professionals" called "educators" that are allowed to foist all this progressivist claptrap and codswallop on people in the first place, and the root of that problem is the idea of teacher credentialization. This is at the central core of the steaming piles of horse puckey that Amairkuhn Edgykayshun - with its Doctors of Edublither and its "fasillytators" and "administrators" has become.

Surprise surprise: when the Common Core centralizing "one-size-fits-all-one-size-suits-Mr.-Gates" agenda is dropped, low and behold, things improve when teachers don't have "administrators" and Doctors of Edublither breathing down their backs:

Florida school dumps common core then skyrockets to number one in English Language Arts, with 90 percent scoring proficient

In other words, it's very simple: Want your son or daughter to learn English skills, and learn them well? Hire someone who knows English literature thoroughly. Want your son or daughter to learn math? Music and/or a musical instrument? Biology? Then one clue is: how much time did their teachers spend learning those subjects themselves? Clue: when you see "Ed" in their degree, that means they spent a lot of time, not learning the subjects themselves, but in classes of edublither learning how to fasillytate. And yes, I am being harsh, because that's the reality. Ask a teacher who has had to endure all that nonsense, if they had rather been able to use that time to learn more about their disciplines. Those that say "yes" are the ones you need to hire. Those that said "oh I wish I had more time to learn educational psychology, or pedagogy and methods," those are the ones to avoid like mad cow disease, for effectively, they're just as brain dead, and they're usually the ones you see out protesting something. Question them, and you will discover that they are amazingly, consistently, and thoroughly progressivist-bordering-on-outright-Gramscian Marxist in their ideology.

But there's good news: Illinois is going down the tubes financially. Other states will quickly follow. The trough is running dry; there will be less for the pigs to feed on, and eventually, nothing at all. That's when you'll have the opportunity, once again, to fire the administrators, the doctors of edublither, the professors of methodoloboggle, the lecturers on lavatory leveling, the educators of equality, the sensitivity squatters, and also be able to get rid of the pseudo-disciplines that empower them with paid positions in the quackademy. You'll be free to be insensitive again. And your children will be literate and educated. And they probably won't be sensitive, but they'll probably be courteous.

OK. Rant over.

See you on the flip side...

January 16, 2017

ANOTHER AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN RANT… BUT NOT FROM ME…

It's time for my first rant of the new year on Amairikuhn edgykayshun, and it's a doozie.

When Ms. K.B. sent me this article, I just had to laugh, and I knew I just had to pass it along to all the teachers that are part of the regular readership here, who are fed up with the constant centralization and federalization of Amairikuhn edgykayshun, and the constant tilt of the insanity meter into the red kooky zone of the dial. Apparently things are so bad in Amairikuhn edgykayshun, standardized testing, and the whole Rotten to the (Common) Core experience that even the corporate controlled media, in this case, the Washington Post, are sitting up and taking notice, and that's, well, bad, or rather, just how bad things really are. Don't believe me? Read for yourself, and remember, this is the Washington Post:

Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems

Sara Holbrook, the poet in question, notes that the State of Texas chose one of what she herself calls one of her "most neurotic" poems, and goes on to observe what doubtless became a standard response of the students taking the test:

Let me begin by confessing that “A Real Case” is my most neurotic poem. I have a pile of them to be sure, but this one is the sour cherry on top. The written evidence of my anxieties, those evil gremlins that ride around on tricycles in my mind shooting my self-confidence with water pistols. How in the name of all that’s moldy did this poem wind up on a proficiency test?

Dose of reality: test makers are for-profit organizations. My poems are a whole lot cheaper than Mary Oliver’s or Jane Kenyon’s, so there’s that. But how would your vulnerable, nervous, number two pencil-gripping seventh grade self have felt opening your test packet to analyze poetic lines such as this:

I’m just down with a sniffly case/of sudden-self-loathing-syndrome … an unexpected extra serving/ of just-for-now-self-hate.

Seriously? Hundreds of my poems in print and they choose THAT one? Self-loathing and self-hate? Kids need an extra serving of those emotions on testing day?

But wait, it gets - as you might suspect about any story about Amairikuhn edgykayshun - much worse.

Teachers are also trying to survive as they are tasked with teaching kids how to take these tests, which they do by digging through past tests, posted online. Forget joy of language and the fun of discovery in poetry, this is line-by-line dissection, painful and delivered without anesthetic. One teacher wrote to me last month, working after 10 p.m., trying to figure out the test maker’s interpretation of my poem “Midnight.” This poem isn’t quite as jarring as “A Real Case,” simply symptomatic of aforementioned neuroses: It’s about insomnia.

“Hello Mrs. Holbrook. My name is Sean, and I’m an 8th grade English teacher in Texas. I’m attempting to decipher the number of stanzas in your poem, ‘Midnight’. This isn’t clear from the formatting in our most recent benchmark. The assessment asks the following question:

“Dividing the poem into two stanzas allows the poet to―

A) compare the speaker’s schedule with the train’s schedule.

B ) ask questions to keep the reader guessing about what will happen

C) contrast the speaker’s feelings about weekends and Mondays

D) incorporate reminders for the reader about where the action takes place.

The answer is C) to contrast the speaker’s feelings about weekends and Mondays.

How many stanzas are in this poem? Where are they located? I would appreciate your help. Thank you so much!”

Oh, goody. I’m a benchmark. Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.
(Emphasis added)

Say what? the "professional" quackademic and (always) anonymous test-making committee did not even bother to contact the poet herself to query her about her own intentions and meanings and why she composed her poem in a certain way, with certain stanza breaks, images, diction, and so on and simply imposed their own consensus "correct answer" on the test (and therefore, on the poet herself about her own work)? Why, I thought (and was actually taught back in the day when schools actually taught things like how to do proper academic research) that when one was doing things like, oh, say literary criticism and analysis of, oh, say a text by someone that was, oh, say, like you know, like still alive that it was, like (notice my attempt to be trendy and, like, with it and use accepted colloquial, like, diction, ya know?) a nice idea to, like, contact the authoroid (note my attempt to be, like, gender-neutral here because, like, terms like author and authoress are so, like sexist and, like, stuff) and find out what it (like, notice again how, like, politically correct I'm being, as I, like, virtue signal my raised like consciousness and stuff by adhering to an artificial, like, linguistic agenda like thing, ya know?) like intended?

,Well, of course they did. That's the name of the testing game: imposed anonymous consensus. The actual authoroids be ~~damned/~~recommended for retraining at a continuing teacher education workshop.

Apparently, Ms. Holbrook has the same issues as I and many others do with these absurd guessing games called standardized tests, and she proposed her own question:

Meantime, here is my question:

Does this guessing game mostly evidence:

A    the literacy mastery of the student?

B    the competency of the student’s teacher?

C    the absurdity of the questions?

D    the fact that the poet, although she has never put her head in an oven, definitely has issues.

Let’s go with D since I definitely have issues, including issues with these ridiculous test questions.

Well, I could think of a few standardized test questions of my own for the quackademics preparing such tests, but since we all know that they probably all have a degree abbreviation that probably includes "Ed." somewhere in it, I won't bother you with them.

Holbrook goes on to note the same complaints others have noted about the testing "business", Todd Farley included(and if you don't know Farley's book, which my co-author Gary Lawrence and I reviewed briefly in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core, I urge you to read it, for its sheer hilarity about the testing business):

The same year that “Midnight” appeared on the STAAR test (2013), Texas paid Pearson some $500 million to administer the tests, reportedly without proper training to monitor the contract. Test scorers, who are routinely hired from ads on (where else?), Craiglist, also receive scant training, as reported by this seasoned test scorer. I’m not sure what the qualifications are for the people who make up the questions, but the ability to ride unicorns comes to mind.

Holbrook, with her unicorns comment, probably is unaware of Farley's book, but it actually is much worse than riding unicorns, since Farley documents case after case of such scorers sitting around and debating the acceptable, and non-acceptable, adjectives for the flavors of pizza, ice cream, and whether the proper words for certain chemical reactions is "fizzles", "fizzes", "splatters," and so on.

It's that bad, folks, and that nutty. And that real.

But Holbrook points out something equally nutty, and when I read this, and her conclusions about all this nonsense, I had to give her three cheers (and the Washington Post two cheers just for the guts it took to report her story):

Now comes research that reveals that a simple demographic study of the wealth of the parents could have accurately predicted the outcomes, no desks or test packets needed. Educator and author Peter Greene reports,

“Put another way, Tienken et. al. have demonstrated that we do not need to actually give the Common Core-linked Big Standardized Test in order to generate the “student achievement” data, because we can generate the same data by looking at demographic information all by itself.

Tienken and his team used just three pieces of demographic data—

1. percentage of families in the community with income over $200K

2. percentage of people in the community in poverty

3. percentage of people in community with bachelor’s degrees

Using that data alone, Tienken was able to predict school district test results accurately in most cases.”

And voila! we don't even have to administer those costly tests, nor pay for them. We can just study the demographics and assign district test scores based on that! (And just wait folks, it won't be long until some genius in Washington will actually think that's a good idea, and that we should distribute grades accordingly). Since we're talking "distribution" here, I suspect this will come from the kooky socialist snowflakes of the political left. However, chances are equally good that the hysterical lunatics of the political right will - I'm thinking of John McCain or Lindsay Graham here - will think it's a good idea because it will save money.

Ms. Holbrook ends her sortie into the hallowed halls of Amairikuhn quackademia with this conclusion and prognosis:

The only way to stop this nonsense is for parents to stand up and say, no more. No more will I let my kid be judged by random questions scored by slackers from Craigslist while I pay increased taxes for results that could just as easily have been predicted by an algorithm. That’s not education, that’s idiotic.

...

Idiotic, hair-splitting questions pertaining to nothing, insufficient training, profit-driven motives on the part of the testing companies, and test results that simply reveal the income and education level of the parents – For this we need to pay hundreds of millions of dollars and waste 10-45 days of classroom time each year to administer them? More if you consider the amount of days spent in test prep?

To that conclusion, Ms. Holbrook, I can only add my own hearty "Hear Hear!"

The only question remains how would we ever sell such an idea to the corrupt wankers in the Demoratic and Republithug parties?

I know! Why not blame standardized testing and failing American education on that evil-Machiavellian-super-genius-that-is-behind-everything, Vladimir Putin, and the ongoing Russian interference with American testing scores and hacking the computers that grade them and infiltrating the testing companies' "scorers" with sleeper cell speznaz units, a plot hatched by Sergei Lavrov in always-Byzantine-never-to-be-trusted-heart-of-evil-neo-Stalinist-Putinist-Russia!!?? Throw in a couple of memes about Chinese hackers, and with a few faked (and of course, Top Secret) investigations and appropriate pronouncements in the press, it's a sure thing. A Russian standardized testing-hacking plot will be something that Demorats and Republithugs and corporate media could all agree on.

Like, ya know?

See you on the, like, flip side...

December 21, 2016

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN STRIKES AGAIN! WE NOW LEAD CROATIA AND ALBANIA!

Well it's been a while since I've ranted about the deplorable state of Amairikuhn edgykayshun, but now there's another study indicating that Amairkuhn childrun have slipped once again in over-all rankings, according to this report from Zero Hedge and shared by Mr. V.T.:

U.S. Kids Keep Getting Dumber; Ranked 31st Of 35 Developed Nations In Math, New Study Reveals

Frankly, I'm surprised... NOT!

The article even cites an article from the Washington Post, with which I rarely agree on anything, but even they in their intellectual mediocritude cannot miss this one (is mediocritude a word? I don't have one of those word-book thingies handy, you know, that kind of book where you look up words... it begins with a "D" I think) :

The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss summed up the problems nicely:

There are many reasons children aren’t learning anything during the long hours they spend in government schools. Sometimes, their teachers don’t show up to work because they’re out on the teachers union picket line demanding taxpayers pick up the tab for their plastic surgery. Other times, students are forced to sit in classes led by totally unqualified teachers who will never leave because they’re protected by tenure.

For every disgraceful teacher, though, there are tons of good ones who are doing their best. The problem often isn’t teachers’ incompetence, it’s that they’re forced to instruct kids using rubbish. Look at the Common Core State Standards, which were adopted initially by 46 states because their federal education funding depended on it. The math is backwards, confusing, and, as the National Review so suitably dubbed it, “dumb.” The reading standards fill students’ minds with filth in the form of raunchy books and with yawn-inducing “informational texts.”

Our schools no longer teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Rather than be taught how to think and problem-solve, children are thought what to think and how to feel. All these money-making and money-spending schemes tend to sound nice, of course, but they inevitably fall flat.

Of course, there's the usual "blame the teacher" meme going on here, in a subtle way. Don't get me wrong though: there are bad teachers, and they are far too numerous to count; they're the ones who, as the Zero Hedge article indicates, get their tenure, and then proceed to collect their paycheck and do only the minimum amount of work to pass their students through the Amairikuhn edgykayshun degree mill and satisfy government statisticians that the whole process is operating smoothly.

The result? According to the latest PISA study, US children and youth lag behind all significant advanced and industrialized countries(even tiny Israel), and are "ahead" of countries like Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, Albania... you get the idea. This is a nice euphemistic way of stating that our kids are just plain stupid, which might account for the hand-wringing, butt-hurt entitled snowflakes we see reacting to being "triggered" and demanding their "safe spaces" in Universities, which now insist on collective gnosticism with faddish experiments in "gender neutral language" and other such claptrap. Even our politicians don't know standard English, and are determined to call The Ukraine simply "Ukraine." Watch out, Great Britain and Holland, you're next in line for "definite article deletion" when "The United Kingdom" and "The Netherlands" become simply "United Kingdom" and "Netherlands"!

But there's something more in this article I want to rant about. Consider that last statement from the Washington Post once again:

Our schools no longer teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.Rather than be taught how to think and problem-solve, children are thought what to think and how to feel. All these money-making and money-spending schemes tend to sound nice, of course, but they inevitably fall flat.
(Italicized emphasis added.)

Our kids are not being taught "how to think and problem-solve" but rather "what to think and how to feel." Part of this problem lies in the fact that what used to be rigorous exposure in "the good old days" to literature, the arts, music, and so on, (i.e., to those disciplines requiring one analyze texts, compositions, and so on, and deal with subtlety and ambiguity and then to be able to argue and articulate both in original written and oral form) have been shunted aside by our stupidly technology-obsessed society into a catch-all pseudo-discipline called "humanities" or "social studies." And those "disciplines" are, of course, straight out of the suggestions contained in the progressivist playbooks and studies of the 1930s. When I went to school in thankfully behind-the-times South Dakota, I was required to take things like advanced English grammar, English Literature, American Literature, World Literature (oh how I remember those days in Mrs. Connor's World Lit class, slogging through Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment my freshman year in high school!), art, and even music theory in high school, again, slogging through the rules of two, three, and finally four voice counterpoint and figured bass from Mr. Arden Foss (the band leader) and Mr. Paul Fialkowski (the orchestra leader). But now, I would just have "humanities" and a boring course in "music appreciation" listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture for the umpteenth time("Can you hear the cannons? Can you hear the French national anthem, which is called the Marcy-something-or-other?" I can hear the equally bored teacher explaining now, as Napoleon marches into Russia to be defeated at Waterloo "by that Russian general whose last name began with a K but whose name I can't recall right now because I never learned it in my edgykayshun classes", nevermind that Waterloo is in Belgium and Russian generals were nowhere in sight. You get the general idea, and in Amairikuhn edgykayshun, that's really all you need to know, the "general idea." Details be damned).

So why are our kids being taught what to think and how to feel, and not to problem solve? Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the blame lies with the requirement for teacher certification, which requires future teachers to sit through mind-numbingly banal courses in educational psychology, pedagogy and methodology where they are - you guessed it - "taught" by a variety of perfected passive aggressive techniques in "what to think" and "how to feel," and of course, most of those things are of the progressivist variety. If your child doesn't know how to think, to reason, to argue, and to articulate, it's probably because his teacher, by and large, doesn't either. The shift in Amairikuhn edgykayshun has over the past century or more, been deliberately away from content to methodological claptrap, and that move began with the teachers' colleges, and certification. The two are inextricably intertwined, and one cannot expect a return to "content" without getting rid of what has been driving the move away from it: teacher certification.

So, to echo John Taylor Gatto once again, fixing this or that aspect of the "system" won't work. The whole thing, not just Common Core, needs to be scrapped, and that includes the certification system and process itself. Sounds extreme, doesn't it, until one remembers that no teacher, prior to the American "invention" of this hideous system, had to have any special certification from an "education department" at a university, but rather, a real degree in a real discipline, you know, in those old fashioned things like Mathematics, Philosophy, Literature, Art History, and so on. As my co-auther Gary Lawrence and I put it in our book Rotten to the (Common)Core, people like Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, Gottfried Leibniz, Fanny Mendelssohn, and so on, never attended an American school being taught by someone "certified" in the latest methodological nonsense by an Amairikuhn university "department of edgykayshun", or ever took a computerized standardized test. And that's the most damning thing that can be said about it all.

And sadly, our system, and its ideological preoccupations, are now being wholly adopted in Europe and elsewhere, as if those nations were experiencing a "lunacy and stupidity gap" and are in a race with us to the bottom.

See you on the flip side...

October 31, 2016

PHILIP K DICK’S DEPARTMENT OF PRE-CRIME A REALITY… BUT IT ...

Occasionally I've blogged about the increasing reliance of various law enfarcement ... er... enforcement... departments using computer algorithms not only to predict crimes, but also to profile those who might be inclined to become criminals. If it sounds like the science fiction fantasies of sci-fi master author Philip K. Dick, that's because it is. Dick's fiction has, of course, been the subject of numerous movies, from Bladerunner, to Total Recall, to the Tome Cruise movie Minority Report, which is all about psychic prediction of crime, and about people being arrested before they even commit the crime itself. OK, it's not computer prediction or profiling, but it might as well be, if this article shared by Mr. T.M. from Mother Jones is any indicator:

The Legal System Uses an Algorithm to Predict If People Might Be Future Criminals. It's Biased Against Blacks.

Before we get to the high octane speculation of the day, in order to have a backdrop for those speculations, consider these paragraphs from the article:

On a spring afternoon in 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid's blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs.Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances—which belonged to a 6-year-old boy—a woman came running after them saying, "That's my kid's stuff." Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away.

But it was too late—a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of $80.

Compare their crime with a similar one: The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting $86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store.

Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.

Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden—who is black—was rated a high risk. Prater—who is white—was rated a low risk.

Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars' worth of electronics.

And as if that is not bad enough, the anti-black bias of these programs appears to be endemic, and one suspects, perhaps even innate or even deliberately pre-programmed:

In forecasting who would re-offend, the algorithm made mistakes with black and white defendants at roughly the same rate but in very different ways.

The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.

White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants.

Could this disparity be explained by defendants' prior crimes or the type of crimes they were arrested for? No. We ran a statistical test that isolated the effect of race from criminal history and recidivism, as well as from defendants' age and gender. Black defendants were still 77 percent more likely to be pegged as at higher risk of committing a future violent crime and 45 percent more likely to be predicted to commit a future crime of any kind. (Read our analysis.)

The algorithm used to create the Florida risk scores is a product of a for-profit company, Northpointe. The company disputes our analysis.

In a letter, it criticized ProPublica's methodology and defended the accuracy of its test: "Northpointe does not agree that the results of your analysis, or the claims being made based upon that analysis, are correct or that they accurately reflect the outcomes from the application of the model.

Northpointe's software is among the most widely used assessment tools in the country. The company does not publicly disclose the calculations used to arrive at defendants' risk scores, so it is not possible for either defendants or the public to see what might be driving the disparity.

In a way, one is looking at the judicial equivalent of those computer voting algorithms, and in a season where the reports of voting fraud are coming in fast and furious, to the extent that many states are reporting such a pro-Darthillary voting bias, that they have moved to paper ballots. (Maybe that's because Darth Soros owns stock in companies providing such machines to twenty-two US states, by some estimates. But not to worry! We have the Department of Homeland (In)security and the UN supervising elections, because according to Fearless Leader, such a thing as voting fraud simply doesn't exist in the USSA). In this case, the bias against blacks, as Mother Jones is alleging, is clear and palpable, and it is being used for "sentencing guidelines." Of course, having such biased algorithms around is a pretty handy thing, especially when one is trying to fill up the private for-profit prisons that the same bunch of Neocons foisted on the country back in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s. (And I'll give you two guesses about which two famous political families were pushing this.) And like those computerized voting machines or the computerized individual adaptive assessments of Common Core, we're not allowed to see the algorithms because they are, of course, proprietary. All of this to my mind argues persuasively that it's high time for the American fascination with technology in the classroom, voting booth, and courtroom, to come to a screeching halt. It's time to end it. But there's another reason to be concerned...

...which brings me to my high octane speculation of the day. In the past few years the USSA has been under increasing cyber attacks from... well, from somewhere. We've seen attacks on Sony, on major banks, even on the US Federal Reserve, and most recently, an almost complete takedown of the the internet on the east coast via DOS attacks. I've also blogged recently about the fact that some US intelligence analysts are concerned that all of these cyber attacks are really reconnoitering operations designed to "map the internet," possibly for the ability to launch cyber attacks that can take the whole thing - or at least a significant segment of it - down. All of this suggests that these systems are far from secure. Hillary Clinton's campaign has strongly suggested that Russia is behind much computer voting hacking. Of course, the idea in itself is ludicrous, as Mr. Putin has recently pointed out. But by raising the issue, she has really suggested that none of these systems is secure. Want to rig an election? Hack it. Want to influence the outcome or sentencing stage of a trial? Hack it. Want to interfere with international financial clearing? Hack it. Want to influence a stock or commodities market and the high frequency trading algorithms that now dominates them? Hack it. Want to manipulate international currency markets? Hack it.

Raising the issue of markets indicates the problem: for if trading is increasingly done by high frequency trading algorithms, how can it be maintained that these markets are genuinely reflective of actual human market conditions? Similarly, how can a computer algorithm reflect human elements in sentencing? Or for that matter, in profiling? The Mother Jones article notes that questionnaires given to defendants forms a component of the process of computer evaluation and profile scoring. And of course, this means to a certain extent that the multiple choice standardized test has now sprouted in the justice system. It will only be a matter of time before computer monitors are put in the jury boxes to "guide and inform" jurors on their deliberations. The biases inherent in the programs, as pointed out by Mother Jones, are also there for anyone to see who has examined their appearance in standardized tests.

It's high time to dethrone the computer, and put humanity back into trading, into teaching, into assessments, and into evaluations of guilt, innocence, and sentencing.

See you on the flip side...

October 19, 2016

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN AND RUSSIA

With all the very strange things I've been logging about over the past few days and the past couple of weeks, this one almost became lost in the shuffle, but it was shared by Ms. J. d. F., and since I haven't ranted about the state of Amairikuhn Edgykayshun in a while, I thought it was high time.

The only trouble is, the world is so upside down any more that I don't know whether to rant or not, or just let the article speak for itself, but in either case, while I'm making up my mind, here's the article:

Goodbye USSR - Hello Home Education!

Well, I decided to rant, but maybe only just a little bit.

Let me begin by making myself clear: philosophically I have nothing whatsoever against homeschooling. Studies seem to show children do better in such environments. My problem has always been the idea that it is being done by Americans, who, especially now, are some of the dumbest people on the planet. And by dumb, I mean truly stupendously and colossally stupid, and by truly stupendously colossally stupid, I mean lobotomized zombie-like craziness that one could only expect to see paraded on display in a comedy or a television series sitcom. And I'm being entirely serious. One can find online "congresspersons" or in this case, more preferably, "congressentities" quite literally opining, to a set of Pentagon officers, with mystified (and thankfully, bemused expressions on their faces as they struggle to suppress their laughter), about how the island of Florida(!) might "capsize"(! again) and "sink"(! yet again) should the always-shifty-never-to-be-trusted-Rooskies and their Criminal Genius Master, the Evil Mr. Putin, launch a missile and punch a hole through the bottom of the island of Florida.

I kid you not. It's there. I heard it listening to a well-known American talk show host whom I never like to listen to, but someone sent me the link, and when I read the header on her email, I thought "it can't be true" so I went and listened to it. It's there. To my simultaneously horrified and laughing delight, it was there.

Now, I've been maintaining for years that the "elite" in the USSA have so succeeded in dumbing down the vast population of this country that they've even dumbed themselves down, and there's the proof.

But wait, it doesn't stop there: in yet another recent display of intellectual prowess by a Congressentity, a US general was asked what the big deal about those-darned-Rooskies being in Syria was. Well, the general responded patiently, we endanger our pilots' lives if we insist on bombing those-darned-Rooskies and their advisors, troops, etc. Well, then, the congressentity replied, why not just use drones or missiles to do it? The general, like any rational and relatively well-educated person, again looked mystified, and responded, well, if we do that, it would essentially mean war, and they will retaliate. Perhaps the word "retaliate" was a bit beyond the congressentity's "vocabulistics", and perhaps the congressentity had no conception that Russia possesses something called a "military". In any case, the general had to go on to explain what all of this meant: it meant a fullscale war, and that was not a decision he wanted to make. Presumably the word "war" was not beyond the Congressentity's knowledge of "vocabulistsics".

With that in mind, you can see why I'm a little skeptical of home schooling in the American context, for soon we'll have a bumper crop of congressentities believing that the world was created in 4004 BC (that's in the Bible, you see), and Russia is the Great King of the East that the good ole USSA has to defeat at Armageddon to bring in the reign of the Imam Mahdi... er... the Anti-christ...er... oh well it gets kind of confusing at this part. Other home schoolers would probably learn what a wonderful thing uploading our consciousness into computers will be, as they're cryogenically frozen to be revived when the cure for invincible ignorance is discovered and everyone can be vaccinated by the CDC against it.

Of course, that said, I'm still not opposed to home schooling, because the fundamentalist transhumanists in Silicon Valley and the evangelical fundamentalists in Appalachia will soon come chin-to-chin with a little phenomenon called "markets" and discover that they're not much good for anything other than a career in goobernment as a Congressentity.

Enter Russia, which, according to the article, is all for home schooling. Let that one soak in for a moment. We're told all the time that Vlad the Mad is some sort of neo-Stalinist. Actually, this is a rather clever plot on his part to allow all those "true believers" in the Communist Party to home school their kids in preparation for stellar careers as ticket takers and conductors on the state railways. Fortunately, Russian schools have not succumbed to the point of teaching that Florida is a capsize-able sinkable island, and is now hosting the next global home schooling conference. Something tells me that the Russians will be reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevski and Solzhenitsyn, and studying Sakharov and reading those indispensable Russian mathematics texts and not taking standardized tests run by what's-his-name's company.

See you on the flip side...