I’d say bring together everyone opposed to the crap going on, underline the fundamentals you all believe in, then fight like hell and fury to make it come back.
This DeVos character (do I recall Nasty DeVos’s scene was cut from 101 dalmations … ?!) is a menace and a danger. Watch her like a hawk and pounce hard on anything she does wrong.
Church and state should be separated to maintain balance. That’s going to pot! That’s a danger.
I read an article the other day - probably led there by BB - about right wing christian fundamentalists gaining control of the country. Sheesh - that’s just wrong! Fight 'em off!
But fight is the key word. Fight, fight, fight. These people have every intention of taking away what you believe is best.
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Just to inject some calm here, the feds can’t dictate curriculum - at all. So while I look “forward” to seeing the DOE mismanaged, possibly fucking up Pell Grants and the like, they aren’t going to be re-writing history.
Similarly, a lot of people had push back about Common Core because they saw it as the Feds trying to dictate curriculum or what have you. But pretty much NONE of the criticism I saw leveled on CC was actually based on any fact. Simply put, they didn’t know what it was, they just knew it was bad because of the government.
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Fair comment - but note what the Feds can do is peddle influence - an age-old political tradition! As in - get in line with the program, or … frozen out.
They know the ground, and will just shoulder-in to cause the path of the USA to shift towards their objectives. Unless they get caught at every possible instance doing the naughty stuff - which they most definitely will be doing!
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Admittedly this is based on personal memory, but in the 1970’s, civics classes were still the norm and graduates understood the concept of research from legitimate sources to back up any claims. So yeah, big difference, as we’re seeing.
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Not really. As I pointed out, States fund and control MOST of the K-12 education system. The Feds only account for ~10% of a states budget. Each individual state has all the ability and power to control curriculum. Lack of federal funds would strain a State budget, but hardly end their program.
I guess as others pointed out, Texas seems to have some added weight, as their buying power influences what gets put in to some text books. But at the same time, there isn’t just one science or one math book being made either, so options exists.
Personally I worry less about the Feds in this, and more about certain states, like Kansas which is going through some idiocy and short shortsightedness cutting education budgets.
This is also what Common Core was about, at least with Math and English, to get all the states on a common set of standards on what each grade will learn. But it didn’t control curriculum either. Each state could agree that a third grader should know how to multiply, but it didn’t out line HOW they should learn to multiply. Curriculum was still all up to the state (an CC wasn’t a federal program either - despite the common misconception.)
The main/most important jobs of the DOE is higher education funding, with Pell grants and the like, oversight of the state programs use of federal funds, oversight of issues like civil rights and discrimination in state programs, and the gathering and analysis of education stats from all 50 states to try to get a gauge on how we are doing. So for sure they do some important jobs, and DeVos is hardly qualified to manage a banana stand, but this isn’t the same thing as burning the library of Alexandria either.
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I’m an educated, cis-het, protestant, white male who sends his kids to private school. I’m sitting on every f*ing privilege there is other than the giant pile of money…It’s STILL going to suck.
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Oh, good. Kissing the president’s ass is totally in the job description. I guess someone needs to re-educate themselves on how “checks and balances” work.
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Gah now you’ve got me going… My older son’s a big kid but, merciful heavens, he has everything in that backpack. This is in part because he stashes every single piece of paper in there, and that’s where it stays. But he has every single textbook in there, as well. They’re out in temporary buildings this year and there is no room for lockers/cubbies.
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I have to say that, for all my other grievances with my experience in Texan public schools (and boy do I got 'em), they gave an even-handed account of Islam. We briefly studied it in 6th grade social studies; this would’ve been 1981-1982. I am not sure whether this was handed down as part of the official (state-wide?) curriculum, or the teachers decided that it would be useful given current events. Though if the latter, I’m not sure specifically what specific event may have triggered it: the 1981 conflict with Libya? The return of the Sinai to Egypt? The attempted assassination of the pope? Only one of those had anything to do with religion. Anyway, as I recall they weren’t judgmental about it (for context, this was in what would later become Dick Armey’s district, in a school where the majority were Protestants and most of
those were Southern Baptists). ETA: I do not recall any mention of terrorism nor jihad.
In contrast, one thing they taught me about Communist countries was that they all had curfews, which they enforced by letting attack dogs loose every night. It only occurred to me later that this was impossible, as they most likely couldn’t round up and capture those dogs the next morning. I suspect they would’ve told me that that’s how evil the Commies are: they don’t even round up the dogs!
I could go on with the airing of grievances but Festivus is months away. IIRC @IronEdithKidd also has experience in that particular school system.
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Meanwhile when I was in highschool (96 - 2000) Islam was taught as having progressive for the time stance on women’s rights, communism portrayed as a failed system used by despots, and China was turning capitalistic because communism wasn’t incintivizing work.
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So you are saying that education has gotten worse since the Dept of Education was created? I think many would agree.
Can I ask you my second question: Would American K-12 education be better off with DeVos as Secretary of
Education, or with no federal Department of Education at all??
Yeah, but it was earlier grades, where the damage done was trauma cause by the “open classroom” layout. You knew who the shouty teachers were before you got assigned them. 
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You can ask, but I won’t answer. Your faux-Socratic condescension is too fucking tedious to merit my engagement.
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Me too, but some here seem to think that DeVos’ confirmation is close to K-T extinction event disastrous.
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Fine, I’ll make it a plain statement then.
If you are truly concerned about the damage that can be done by a Secretary of Education, then that job has too god damned much power.
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Plato did a good job talking up Socrates’s wisdom as too brilliant for his contemporaries to endure. Now that an endless stream of arrogant and condescending internet posters have shown me what his method actually sounds like, I begin to understand Anytus and Meletus a bit better.
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It is due to a concerted effort by one half of the political system to undermine the department’s ability to do its work properly. You can’t just say that because the department exists, therefore anything it hasn’t been allowed to do is its fault. It’s like complaining that Obama left the Supreme Court position open for a year. Not his fault.
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So hemlock for all the gadflies or what?
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Are false dichotomies the best way to win online debates or the bestest?
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So then, you’re in favor of getting rid of the entire department, instead of making sure that there’s actual responsibility and accountability to go with that power.
I’m not saying that the Dept. of Ed. is a sterling role model for government accountability or effectiveness, but it does, or at least did more good than harm. Getting rid of it because you think that it has too much power is very much throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or burning down your house to get rid of termites.
[sarcasm] But, hey, at least the coming libertarian utopia will be free to indoctrinate your children in the Christian prosperity gospel of your choice, DeVos or no! [/sarcasm]
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