Elephants and Jackasses...

Presented without comment:

Spoiler

 

Departmen

 

It's not enough to say he's a fucking douche. He's just so fucking pathetically cringey. He's like an unironic version of the "How do you fellow kids scene" with Steve Buscemi.

 

President Musk is apparently planning to go to war with China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/musk-pentagon-briefing-china-war-plan.html

To bypass paywall, just open on Firefox and click the text icon on the address bar.

 

To be fair, The Pentagon has a plan for going to war with every country.

 

To be fair, these days they’re just concepts of a plan.

 

Anyone with any educational experience want to chime in on this?

I've got some theories, but I'd rather hear from some experts, first.

 

At the local level, the biggest line items on a budget are usually law enforcement and schools. There's been a decades-long campaign against DofE because of this and literally nothing else. There are some folks saying it's about education rights, or parents rights, but that is pretty fucking false: you can home-school and there are private schools abound. Aside from "I dunno, I'm just evil, I guess" the only rationale for dismantling public ed is about money.

There are three players here: the religious folks who want government money for their schools, because they are profitable. The Catholic church siphons of millions to pay for settlements out of their private schools, for example. The religious folks are staring at a demographic cliff, AND they have a political advantage in terms of riling up and organizing a base. The tech folks and investors who want to sell online classes (taught by the cheapest Indian they can find, a la the call center model), and strip mall schools. Strip mall, because if they are privatized, they can focus on only the group of students that are profitable to teach, and will sell an artificially limited class size as a selling point. Think "EduFun" next to a Chinese restaurant, that has a short bus and 20 or so kids trickling in in waves, with the rest of their education being done over Zoom. The government folks who view public ed as a waste of money, especially since Covid hit kids hard, and the folks overseeing it as left-wing competition. For a lot of local government, school boards are an entry point for elected positions, and the teacher's unions are generally not pro-Maga.

The thing to keep in mind is that privatization saves money. It does not. Gov contractors, dating back to a study released in 2012 are 3x more expensive than regular government employees and services.

When folks say privatizing ed will save money, it's almost always to the exclusion of a given population that is WILDLY more difficult or expensive to reach, such as the disabled, ESL learners, etc. that would not meet the criteria for a private school, and would get basically no education. A kindergarten class of healthy kids whose parents do not need bus service, already speak English, have attended preschools, and can already meet half of the state/federal requirements for 1st grade is absolutely cheaper to teach than a full public ed compliment. Their privilege subsidizes the rest of the kids in the community, so y'know...we have a community.

When the cost of running a school exceeds local tax capacity, DofE has a plethora of ways to keep the doors open, and funds specific programs. My mom's hometown in Union County, SC, for example has very little taxable industry these days, since the mills all closed in the 70's and 80's. But the mill villages, filled with families, remain. Some folks just work in another county, and the state irons out the difference. Some school districts, though, have fucking NO hope of staying open without federal support. Also, if a school or district suddenly has an influx of need, say for ESL, or renovations to remain ADA compliant, that money is there.

So, gutting DofE does three things:
1. Closes schools.
2. Renders others ineffective.
3. Harms all of us.

I say 3, because going back to the kids who are not going to be profitable students...they still fucking live here. Uneducated kids cost everyone more, if in no other sense, health. Public schools were where public health was monitored and maintained, everything from dental basics to vaccines to making sure kids fucking ate twice a day. Kids who don't get these interventions and need them will go on to cause larger issues that cost us more money.

That's the thing I go back to: the federal government is the largest force of redistribution of wealth. The kids whose parents can afford preschool, medical care, and to pick them up and drop them off twice a day should subsidize those that cannot, because if their kids do not grow up with some equity, we are all worse off.

Cutting these agencies and services means that this inequality will worsen, and it's already pretty fucking bad.

The other thing is that efficiency and effectiveness are not an outsider's game, especially with something as central to a community as a school. The idea that a fed can dictate how a school should run, without knowing the community makeup, history, and just relying on demographics is asinine. There are some minimum standards the feds impose, and everything else, as much as possible is left to the locals to administer. The feds have limited resources, limited reach, and limited understanding, and so much of the federal mechanism functions on prevention, not intervention.

Prevention works in concert. Public health, for example, does not work if you rely on one mechanism. If I got vaccines for the first time, because I was travelling abroad, that's decades of potential exposure. I got them before I was thrown in a petri dish of an elementary school, because of fucking course that works better for everyone. I got them as early as possible to minimize exposure.

Public ed works along those lines. It prevents social decay (hardee har har), because it works in concert with other community elements.

Our education system is one of the best on Earth when you zoom into certain elements of it (Ivy League universities, or specific institutions), and one of the worst when you look at others (cost per student). COVID did it no favors, and our education system being stressed reflects much more than the dollars being put into it.

I wouldn't trust any elected official saying they know how to fix our education system and starting off with anything other than empowering locals to do what they KNOW, SEE, WORK AND LIVE to be the best thing for their communities and students.

Fuck all of this anti-social nightmare, and anyone who voted for it.

 

NYC will give you a quality education, if you go to the right high schools. Got a couple of "elite" public schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, can't get in without the grades. Of course why isn't every high school in the NYC DoE elite, you'd have to ask somebody. Mine was definitely not, just a concrete box on West 50th where broken toys were sent to storage.

 

Older folks complaining about younger folks being ignorant is one of humanity's oldest tropes, so it's hard to tell how true that is in general. On one hand, yes, education is rough right now. On the other hand, if you look at the data things are kind of the same? Check out our NAEP reading scores that were released in January.

Spoiler: huge image of graph

So after the Covid disruptions our scores basically stayed the same? There's a dip, but nothing insane. Math scores improved a bit. It's actually kind of good news. The bad news is just how hard it is to improve results. If you look at everything we have done from 1990 to 2025 in education and realized that it didn't really matter....ooof.

In general, the story of American schools has been economically secure kids do really well, and poor kids do, well, poorly. Schools that struggle are schools with more disadvantaged kids. Some states have been better at navigating this historically, but that seems to be flipping a bit (and for strange culture war reasons). Southern states are having some success leaning into changing the way they teach reading so that it's more phonics based. This is going to be weird to say, but right now the "right wing" is advocating for the teaching methods that will likely produce better results. Phonics, direct instruction, knowledge based curriculum, etc. They are kind of like RFK wanting to ban cell phones from schools. That's a good thing. Their reasons for doing so are kooky though in my opinion. I'm getting off track though.

As bleak as things look right now for education, the problem is that there is nothing really on the horizon that is going to help save it. There is an all out war on public education and the basic idea that every person in the country should receive a free and appropriate education. Hell, on Fox News, it is now acceptable to say that disabled kids should not receive educations. Watch the first fifteen seconds of this. Republicans are going to privatize it all, hell or high water. You can see this in Texas.

The school voucher push is a way to bleed and ruin public schools in the name of privatizing them. Ultimately, what they want is a way to make money on education and a way to indoctrinate students into their preferred dogmas both political and religious.

On the indoctrination front, they are already having a hell of a lot of success. The book bans across the country are truly insane, and the fever is not breaking at all. There's a pretty decent chance that in Texas next year an English teacher handing a student of 1984 will not only be a fireable offense, but will land the teacher in prison. In my neck of the woods, crazy folks have already tried to get librarians arrested for distributing pornography to children Fortunately, courts have pushed back on this so far, but I don't have faith that the Supreme Court will uphold any of the first amendment precedents regarding books in schools, obscenities, pornography, etc. It doesn't help that a) the current trend in books right now is for them to be spicy and smutty and b) adults are so illiterate that they prefer books that are essentially written and marketed for "young adults." I'm getting sidetracked again.

The economic inequality issues alone make the schools job impossible. Then you add in Republicans in an all out assault on the ideas of education in general from K to professors. And then you need to factor in the social lives of children with TikTok etc.

Speaking as an English teacher, we are also essentially captured by a lot of bad ideas due to bad incentives. For example, our students take 1 big test at the end of the year to determine their (and our fate). Well, the test has a bunch of excerpts and passages of articles on it. Therefore, admin wants us to teach a bunch of passages and articles. Unfortunately, that's not a good way to teach students how to actually read things that matter. In fact, in my district, teachers can teach no more than 1 novel per year. Students will graduate having read, at most, 4 assigned books (unless they are in AP classes, which aren't much better). We do a terrible job teaching students how to read and think.

And of course, then there are the problems with grade inflation and judging teachers and schools based on failure and graduation rates. In my school, failing a kid is a hell of a lot of work. It's easier to pass them, and it makes the school look better. Therefore, lots of kids get pushed through from 9th grade to graduation without doing much of anything. The junior English teacher bumps any kid with a 50+ to a 70 at the end of every grading period. Weirdly a good chunk of kids still fail. This actually starts much earlier as there are no consequences really for failing a class K-8.

All that's bad enough. But then hey, kids, there's a magic tool called AI that can complete any assignment your teacher gives you. From an English teacher's standpoint, I effectively don't know how to do my job any more as there's nothing I can assign that can't be cheated on, and we can't do everything in class. This is going to become a bigger story going forward. The AI companies are hoping like hell students become addicted to using their shit. But I want a journalist to start asking them if they let their own children use this stuff for homework. If I were a billionaire and had kids, I would be finding a private school that goes scorched earth on generative AI. Unfortunately, even in my school we have English teachers who think it's great and cool! We also have one who said, "Shakespeare makes my head hurt." She teaches honors classes, so things are looking bright.

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And I don't think things are going to get better for at least 20 years. I forgot to even mention the current teacher shortage and how no one in the country is taking steps to actually solve that problem because it would be incredibly expensive to do so. Then again, the other side of the AI coin is that a lot of places will replace qualified teachers with a combo of AI tool + body in the room. That will be so much cheaper, and you can control exactly what students are learning.

In summation, this how it is to be a teacher in 2025.

However, I know that if I look back on my own education there were a lot of these same issues. It's nice to think the past was better, but it probably wasn't all that great. I cheated on assignments. My friends largely didn't read shit. So who knows. It is a miracle that anyone learns anything.

There's a documentary called High School that was filmed in 1968. I watched the first few minutes a while back. I can assure you that as much as things change, they stay the same.

 

There are a handful of y'all that have kids >5 years old. What are your plans for schooling with all the shit that's going on? The grandson is just shy of 2 years old, so his parents have a few years to figure it out but if it's getting this bad, I wonder if we should start thinking of offering to help with private school. Although, I went to private school for 6th and 7th grades and it was a joke. The owner/principal wanted (needed?) the tuition money so it was basically impossible to fail. I literally played my GameBoy most of the year and still easily passed.

 

Just as a recommendation for parents, I see this book referenced all the time.

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

 

We're homeschooling, started back around the beginning of October last year. We also do a homeschool co-op every friday, where about 25 kids get together and have class, taught by some parents. They do field trips, yesterday we went to the Natural Science museum.

I can tell you, done property, our kid can learn in 5 hours what was covered in an entire week of public school. He learns more in the time it would take me to drive him to school. He's improved in leaps and bounds from where he started after we pulled him. Our rural school system is mediocre, at best.

I have a very flexible WFH schedule that allows us to do this. It sucks, that for many people it just isn't an option because of parent's work schedule.

 

I think the bolded part is very important. My younger brother did homeschooling for most of high school and back then, it was mainly self taught and he'd have to check in or take tests once a week or so from what I recall. I think it severally stunted his social skills through his mid 20's.