An Education Bureaucrat Accidentally Spills the Beans

Bruce Deitrick Price has another great piece today at the American Thinker on the plight of our young students as they try to learn to become adults.  The piece is entitled K-12 Parent X Takes On Principal Zero Here is Price's money quote, pulled from the letter written to Price by Parent X:

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them. He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else.

He was emphatic that neither I nor the school board member could change anything.

Many teachers today believe that the average person sits around all day drinking beer and watching NASCAR races. Such people believe that the average person has no knowledge or experiences that may pertain to what a student might need, or how to impart this to them.

I recently came across a "teacher" of English in one of our local High Schools. Having just gone down Six Forks Road and noting the cross streets, I noted that there were a number of English and American authors, particularly Coleridge, Barrett and Browning memorialized by naming streets after them. When I met her, I pointed this out to her, and learned that she did not know of Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Samuel Coleridge. She was also not familiar with William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, or Ezra Pound. She had heard vaguely of T. S. Eliot and Alfred Lord Tennyson, though Robert Frost and Walt Whitman might as well have been neighbors at the beach. So, what did this person learn herself at school, and what, if anything of use, can she impart to her students?

My Granddaughter recently entered a local Christian school because the County would not place her in a school with a decent academic record.  Rather, for their own convenience they want to scatter students like my Granddaughter around to help raise the otherwise poor academic results of their school system.  The public schools had not been teaching cursive writing, leaving students with stick and ball printing skills only.  Fortunately, the Christian school does teach cursive, and my Granddaughter is picking it up fast.  I worry though that she may already have succumbed to cruel punishment they inflicted on her in an attempt to teach basic arithmetic.

More from Price:

What does this principal do all day? Put another way, what is his real job? I think the best word is enforcer. His job is to lay down the law to irritating parents who are slow to get the message. If they or their kids still have any dreams, they should give them up. Accept average.

My impression is that all the bureaucrats in education, such as this principal, make $50,000 more than they could make in the real world. His main skill is not technical, professional, or educational. His main skill is bamboozling parents. He tells the community how much education they can have. He has to deliver this message: You want education? You can't handle education. You're peasants. Mediocrity is good enough for you. Eat cake"

...snip...

But let's look even deeper. What is a Progressive? That's just a fancy word for Socialist or Communist. They set low goals, especially in education. Apparently, they want people to be permanently weak and controllable. They don't want to educate people who might replace them or compete with their own children. Progressives always seem to be training an underclass who will be happy to stay at the bottom, so that Progressives can 00rise to the top.

Just so.