Category Archives: education

Who Interviewed These Folks?

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I have to ask because:

Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.
“How do I do that?” asked the young man.
So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101[.]

How was this newly minted mechanical engineer even hired when he didn’t know the basics of mechanical engineering (how was he able to graduate with a degree when he didn’t know such a basic thing, but that’s for a separate article.) Why wasn’t he given a quick test of the basics? Newly hired secretaries administrative assistants get tested on basics like typing and telephone etiquette and etc. Why wouldn’t any new hire be tested on the basics of the job for which he’s being hired?

Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

It isn’t just mechanical engineering, either, it’s

  • structural engineers unable to answer questions about the use of trusses in the construction of bridges and roadways
  • nursing students struggling to pass a certification exam
  • new call center workers have problems with soft skills
  • Zoo seasonal workers not looking to be productive; if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing

The list goes on. And on. And on….

In the alternative, instead of taking whatever noob wanders in from the sidewalk, or dropping too many dimes on ad hoc spot training, where are the employers’ more formal, organized remedial training programs? What are these employers doing to work with the schools to help them better train their students/recover more quickly from the effects of the Wuhan Virus Situation and the associated remote learning, which aside from failing generally, didn’t get the newly minted mechanical engineer the hands-on design training he should have had?

A Start

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But it’s a move that could—and should—be made irrelevant by a larger move.

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL) and Kevin Cramer (R, ND) have reintroduced their Protect Equality and Civics Education (PEACE) Act, which is intended to eliminate the ability of the Department of Education to commit tax dollars to any plan or program to push Critical Race Theory into our schools.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a larger solution that more broadly addresses this mess.

The US Department of Education needs to be eliminated altogether—not merely defunded, but erased from the Federal government. This is a Cabinet entity that our nation did without just fine for nearly 200 years. It was created out of whole cloth just 43 years ago in 1979, and over the last several years, all it’s done has been to interfere with our children’s education by moving teaching away from serious subjects and into inherently racist and sexist ideological indoctrination. Additionally, DoEd has become a facility that seeks to deny due process to students accused of sexual misbehaviors. DoEd’s usefulness has disappeared.

Moreover, DoEd’s FY2024 budget request of $90 billion is money much better allocated to other purposes: items like plussing up our defense establishment with equipment, logistics, and combat training, as well as our defensive and offensive cyberwar capabilities; strengthening our government and private cyber security capabilities outside of our defense establishment; strengthening our energy and water distribution networks; supporting relocation of our economic supply chain sources and intermediate stops away from enemy nations. The personnel of the department should be transferred completely out of Federal government employ into the private sector, where their existing experience will easily facilitate their finding gainful employment.

Maybe, Instead…

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Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, has decided it’s had enough of parent input regarding its program of “storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and same-sex romance for elementary-age children. The MCPS, in its magnanimity, had allowed parents to opt their children out of such things, but the parents, en masse, opted their children out.

MCPS responded by issuing a blanket policy of no exceptions and no notifications—no more opt out for all those uppity recalcitrant parents.

Never mind that

the storybooks…explicitly encourage[e] children to “question sexuality and gender identity, focus on romantic feelings, and embrace gender transitioning[.]
Pre-kindergarten students, for example, are required to read Pride Puppy, which “promotes pride parades as family-friendly events without cautioning about the frequent nudity and sexually explicit conduct….”

Maybe, instead, there should be a blanket removal of the program altogether. It’s time, also, for a blanket removal of the MCPS school board and its Superintendent and staff.

Optimism

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Scott Fitzgerald (R, WI) and Aaron Withe, Freedom Foundation CEO, have it in spades regarding the National Education Association. The headline on their Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed illustrates it:

America’s Largest Teachers Union Isn’t Beyond Reform

Yes, it is. The NEA is utterly beyond redemption as its managers insist on pushing CRT, child transgenderism, and more from its pantheon of woke ideologies onto children, all the while deprecating the role of those children’s parents in their kids’ education.

The failure is sealed by NEA President Becky Pringle’s hysterical rant earlier this month at the NEA’s 2023 Representative Assembly, excerpted here.

The NEA is a Congressionally chartered teachers union, and Fitzgerald and Withe think it would be sufficient to amend the union’s charter

by adding 11 accountability and transparency provisions commonly found in other federal charters, such as prohibiting the NEA from engaging in political activities and lobbying, requiring it to submit annual reports to Congress, and requiring that its officers be US citizens.

However, the relationship between a union so chartered and Congress is tenuous at best. Congress doesn’t even supervise its chartered organizations; it only receives nominally annual financial statements. In the NEA’s case, its Congressional charter enjoined the union to promot[e] “the cause of education in the United States.” Yet, by Fitzgerald’s and Withe’s own admission,

[t]he NEA has worked not to fulfill its original purpose but to promote a left-wing social and economic agenda at odds with many Americans’ values. The union has used its institutional heft as leverage to influence nearly every major policy debate, from the debt ceiling and abortion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Second Amendment. Meantime, it has opposed efforts to reform failing schools by such means as school choice, curriculum transparency and performance pay for teachers.

What makes them think the NEA’s management would do any better at obeying an adjusted charter?

No, Congress is better off withdrawing the NEA’s charter altogether. Fitzgerald and Withe and their respective colleagues should work more locally to get the NEA decertified in as many school districts as possible.

Do What I Tell You

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Nice little school you got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

In response to the Temecula Unified School Board’s decision not to adopt a controversial social studies textbook in May, California [Progressive-Democrat] Governor Gavin Newsom challenged the board’s decision and threatened it with legislative consequences if it does not reverse course.

Here’s Newsom putting it plainly:

If the school board won’t do its job by its next board meeting to ensure kids start the school year with basic materials, the state will deliver the book into the hands of children and their parents—and we’ll send the district the bill and fine them for violating state law.

Nor is it Newsom alone. It’s the Progressive-Democratic Party at large, as illustrated by State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D, 29th District):

The antics of the Temecula Valley Unified School District are intolerable and damaging to its students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed. Book bans betray the most basic of California’s core values. I hope the members of the school board are able to reflect on their decisions and come to make better decisions for our children’s futures.

Aside from the all-too-typical Progressive-Democrat lie—no books are being banned by Temecula—students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed depend on their being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic instead of being indoctrinated with the racism and the professional victimhood and oppressor class sewage of CRT.

The antics, to use Rivas’ distortionate term, center on protecting our children, and that’s something the Progressive-Democrat Governor and his cronies object to.