This moment of pedagogical abuse sits at the feet of mothers and fathers across America.
There is now enough reform history that cannot be denied. If this comes to pass, parents own the moment.
This is what happens when parents become self-absorbed, uncurious, and lazy.
When they are so full-up in their own moments that they are disinclined to disturb their own convenience … and then allow their own children to be maltreated and misused by scammers who appears on the educational horizon.
So … “Baby PISA” is here … “the Program for International Student Assessment” … and just a handful of parents have any clue what’s all about … because most don’t care. And when some do find out … they’ll have endless excuses as to why they can’t care.
These are international assessments designed to rank nations by way of arbitrary and ambiguous devices that have become the most manipulated outcomes the educational world has ever known.
Now they have designed the same madness for pre-schoolers … for your babies.
These futile forays into the nonsense of comparing nations has taken on a bizarreness one can barely grasp … unless someone is in the pursuit of supporting data that can be all things to all people. Another chapter in the false narrative that American schools are dismal failures.
- This sort of exercise allows nations of a few million to be compared to a nation of hundreds of millions.
- It permits countries to be assessed side-by-side … without regard to factors such as heterogeneity, wealth, immigration, urban demographics, per pupil funding, teacher status, or dozens of other impacting components that filter into every classroom on the planet.
These results measure nothing of meaning … nor do they forecast the future.
These assessments are pursuits in educational silliness … given too much credence because they are so fungible and so easily glued to some crack-pot theory or premise. And that has been the quest of educational tricksters for the last decade.
This madness is here because because parents didn’t up their game … content with ineffective, feel-good tactics that did little to stem this reform madness.
But this is where the buck should stop.
The flood-gates of educational idiocy have been flung open … and now they’ve been door-stopped by showy politicians, fraudy education gurus, complicit school boards, self-serving unionists, panicky teachers … and unconscious parents.
Those forces have allowed this reform to slip into covert abuse.
When Pre-K children … less than 36 and 48 months old … are the newest guinea-pigs, well, we are surely in a very dark time.
And everyone forgets.
They forget that these children cannot knot their own shoes … and run the real risk of putting their underpants on backwards. But parents permit them to be swallowed up by this dangerous lunacy.
Why? For what?
Whose life was ever determined by the age of three? Whose life hung in the balance at 48 months of age?
What the hell are we doing?
And why aren’t parents in a rage?
These sorts of rankings … these PISA scores … are no more a measure of the educational health of a society than the size of hitter’s bat is the gauge of his swinging prowess.
It’s all nonsense. Gilded nonsense. Manufactured by a storm of orbiting edufrauds from every point in the educational galaxy.
This nation has been played … and parents have been numbed and dumbed.
The public education system … that youpay for and which now abuses your own children! … has been dismantled in the name of … in the name of what?
Certainly not excellence.
Or fairness.
Or common sense principles.
The system has been destroyed because some illusory creeps with too much time and too much money thought they could voodoo every child in America into a state of educational perfection.
And then they posited that it could be accomplished with whimsical computer algorithms and Etch-A-Sketch tablets … with teachers as sideline ornaments.
How sad.
How asinine to challenge all of history in such a pompous manner.
How dangerous to destroy a system that made this nation what it is.
How sad to sabotage childhood for such foolishness.
Is there a breaking point?
A real-deal moment of critical mass?
If this isn’t it … well … then we’ll all have to wait for the inevitable crash … the bottom bounce … the “hit the wall” moment.
But who’s gonna pick up the pieces?
And how do you put children back together again?
HT: Michelle Moore