For some inexplicable reason, someone at my local gym enjoys tuning a TV in the cardio area to the local CBS affiliate in time to “enjoy” the mindless prattle of CBS This Morning. Since said TV was within eye view during my morning run yesterday, I was treated to a delightfully uncurious bit of handwringing about how U.S. education test scores are continuing to fall behind in comparison to countries such as China, Finland, Canada, South Korea on math, reading, and science.
Here’s the original video, but, I’ll save you some time and brain cells: there’s some handwringing about falling behind, and that our current efforts to improve skills aren’t working, but then the proposed solutions are literally more of the same! Pay teachers more! Spend more on schools! Have longer school days and years! Get parents more involved! Basically, do the same thing we’re already doing, but harder and more!
If these intellectually uncurious, grass-fed morons would take a few extra minutes from worrying about whether or not their hair dye is going to give them cancer, they might actually find some real answers. Like, oh, I don’t know, have schools stop wasting time on stupid things like trans-gender restrooms? Maybe if schools weren’t so busy protesting standardized tests as being racist against minority students, and actually taught the kids, the test results might be better?
Not that I’m surprised by this behavior or anything. After all, this is the same CBS News bureau that published, without a trace of irony, a story with a Epstein rape survivor less than two weeks after colluding with ABC to fire the alleged whistleblower who leaked how ABC News had sat on the Epstein story for over three years.
Math scores might be a little better if major civic education systems stopped trying to do asinine nonsense like teaching “how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.” Yes, that’s an actual quote from Tracy Castro-Gill, the Seattle public school district’s “ethnic studies program manager.”
Then there’s the canard about increased parental involvement. Even the CBS article had to admit that students with parents who are already involved are actually trending slightly better. Who are the uninvolved parents? Are they the ones working three jobs and don’t have time? Are they the absentee fathers? Are they single mothers too busy looking for their next baby daddy to spend time with the kids they already have? I suspect the answers to one or more of these questions is rather inconvenient to the ongoing media narratives, and thus, we’ll never hear a conclusion.
I’d be willing to bet a pretty decent sum of money that of the countries currently kicking our academic asses, precisely none of them are wasting their students’ time teaching nonsense like Critical Race Theory, or how math is racist. I’d further wager that parents in these countries aren’t generally wringing their hands about whether their little darlings are being systemically oppressed by standardized testing.
And these empty suits wonder why more and more people are turning to charter schools, private education, and homeschooling the moment the option becomes available.