President Obama recently commented that the reason American K-12 education is falling behind other industrialized nations is because kids don’t spend enough time in school. His plan to save our education system from its slow death spiral is simple: on a national basis we should make school days longer and extend the average school year into more of the summer months. Really? The answer to returning our school systems to their once greater glory is to force our children to sit through even more hours upon hours of the liberal indoctrinal drivel that has displaced real teaching in our nations schools? Give me a break. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The spine of our public education system is broken, and no amount of Federal intervention is ever going to fix it. Why? Because it is the full weight of the U.S. Department of Education riding our education system pony style that broke it in the first place. Want to know how to fix it? Read on.

Primary school in open air. Teacher (priest) with class from the outskirts of Bucharest, around 1842.

Before we do anything, we as parents must step back and take stock of the fact that it is our individual responsibility to provide a quality education to our children, not the responsibility of the government. School districts were formed as tools to allow communities to pool their resources in order to assist parents in meeting that responsibility. The current system, which is governed by federal regulations and union contracts, has perverted that original purpose and replaced it with a behemoth of a machine whose goals have more to do with societization than education. The very school systems that we created to assist us have now usurped us, and dictate to us how our children should be taught instead of the other way around. The education of our children is our own individual responsibility. It easy to ignore that fact, but until we face it again as a people our education system is doomed.

What do we do about it? Simple. We take it back.

First of all, the U.S. Department of Education as it exists today needs to be abandoned. The federal government has no place in our public education system, and the very existence of this bloated, rotting bureaucracy is a slap in the face of every student, parent, teacher, administrator and locally elected school board member in America. Our school boards are elected by us to manage a school system that is owned by us, and they need to act that way. When the federal government decides that they are in charge, the elected members of our school boards have to stand resolute and do what they were elected to do. Represent us. If they won’t, they must be replaced. The U.S. Department of Education won’t go away on its own, but if communities across the nation turn their backs on them, and ignore them, they will become functionally impotent, with no more hold on our schools.

Part of the reason the U.S. Department of Education has gained such a stranglehold on our failing school system is that we became lazy. It’s too easy to sit at home, complaining that the system is a mess, and wondering when the government is going to fix it. As parents we have to hold our schools accountable again, and not to some federal agency, to us. We entrust our children to the school system because we believe that the specially trained teachers employed there are better able to teach our children, but how do we know? What do these people actually teach our kids? Reading? Writing? Math? Arguable considering the trending test results. Volunteerism? Activism? Socialism? Those seem to be common themes, but again, how do we know?

It is time that we demand an accurate accounting of everything that our educators are teaching our children. Every teacher must be required to inform every parent of what they intend to teach our children in their classrooms. Their syllabuses and talking points should be posted publicly, and be subject to parental review. If a teacher plans to spend their hour teaching my child how to solve simple algebraic equations, then the pre-class report will be nice and simple. A copy of the worksheet can be posted online on that class’s web page. If a teacher plans to explain to my child why a single payer health care system is preferable to a free market system, then they can post those talking points to the website as well. If the teacher plans to spend their hour teaching the proper construction of a functional irrigation system and instead the conversation turns to the effects of federal endangered species regulations on the local economy, that can be posted to the online class notes, too. These online class notes can be preserved year to year and be a tool for parents to decide what kind of a person they want teaching their kids. If we read them and find that a particular teacher manages to turn daily discussions of Shakespearean literature into daily discussions about the benefits of strong labor unions, we will be able to make educated decisions as parents as to whether or not this is the kind of person we want educating our children.

I know…you teachers out there are reading this and are up-in-arms right now screaming at me that we have no right to hold your occupation under a microscope. Too bad. You chose a profession where your actions will have a profound effect on the direction of the lives of our children. My children. And I want a say in how that education is provided. If putting your occupation under a microscope is the only way to do that, then so be it.

These are simple but important things that we can do to return our education system to its greater glory. Take back control of our childrens’ education from the federal government. Require adequate representation from the school board members that we elect to steward our schools. Demand accountability and transparency from our teachers. Not so tough, right?

Remember, your child’s education is your responsibility, and the school system is nothing more than a tool to help you provide your child the best education that you can. We can sharpen that tool, we can throw the tool out and get a new one, or we can throw the tool out for good and teach our kids at home. In the end, it’s our call. Either way, arbitrarily lengthening school days and school years on a national basis is just face makeup and yet another ploy to keep the power out of our hands and keep it in the hands of government.  That’s what got us into this educational conundrum in the first place.

What a crock. I’ve seen dozens of editorials and artlicles over the last two days that claim the Bush administration is ignoring science in it’s new overhaul of rules regarding Federal agencies and how they adhere to the Endangered Species Act. The reality is that the Endangered Species Act hasn’t been ruled by science for decades. It is ruled by over-financed wildlife and environmental groups who cherry pick the the judicial system and manipulate their lawsuits to make sure a judge favorable to their causes forces the implementation of the Endangered Species Act in a way that benefits THEIR agendas.

It’s been over a decade since wolves were forced down the throats of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, with the reintroduction of an “experimental” population. It was determined that a “successful” population would consist of about 300 wolves roaming Northwest Wyoming, Yellowstone Park, and the bordering areas of Montana and Idaho. It wasn’t until the poplulation reached over 1800 that the feds finally turned over management of the wolves to the individual states, and now a federal judge in Montana has decided that those 1800 wolves don’t represent a large enough population and has returned management control of the wolves to the feds. The numbers were obviously good enough for the “scientists” that planned the reintroduction in the first place! But it isn’t about the science is it? The ESA has never been about the science.

The Endangered Species Act has always been about one group of people forcing their agendas upon another group of people. If it was about science, animal species would be removed from their places on the endangered species’ lists when their populations increased and their risk for extinction was reduced. That’s not the way it works, though. When a species recovers enough to meet its goals, the socio(enviromenta)lists sue and get a judge in some ubiquitous federal court somewhere to change the goals.

Now, being endangered isn’t even a requirement to be put on the list. Now, the political perception of a species’ endangerment is enough to get it on the list. There are more polar bears on this planet now than in any time in history, or at least since we’ve been counting them! But, based on projected models created by politicians – not scientists – that the ice they call home MIGHT disappear, they have been listed as endangered. So, because something might or might not happen somedaym because of something that might or might not be happening in the environment, that might or might not be caused by something that humans are doing, the socio(environmenta)lists have one more piece of ammunition in their litigious warchests that they can use to shove even more of their marxist crap down our throats.

So, the Bush administration’s decision to allow one bunch of bureaucrats instead of another bunch of bureaucrats to administer decisions concerning the effects of the ESA on federal projects isn’t any different than allowing one judge to decide how the ESA is administered instead of another.

The Endangered Species Act was broken before it was enacted in the first place and is just one more example of how the federal government shouldn’t be usurping the Constitutional authority guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment – “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” I’ve read and read the Constitution, and nowhere does it say that the federal government has the authority to manage wildlife to the exclusion of the authority of the States.

In the end, all the ruling by the federal judge in Montana means is that people who shoot wolves will just go back to not reporting it.

-Wisdom

Editorial – An Endangered Act – Editorial – NYTimes.com