| Subject: What is Education |
Author:
Lynn
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Date Posted: 16:54:24 12/16/16 Fri
Dear Senators and Representatives,
As we near the open of the 2017 Legislative Session, I am hearing, once again, that Governor Inslee wants new taxes; he says we need to spend more money on education, mostly because of the McCleary Decision. To that end, he is proposing a litany of new taxes on already overburdened Washington taxpayers.
Before we can fund education, we must define what education is, if it is education. Is education 1) transgender bathrooms, sex education, school-to-work courses, social/emotional health triage, safe spaces, teaching Islam … school nurses, social workers, counselors, psychologists, paraprofessionals for every classroom; or is education 2) making sure the child has a strong, sound foundation in academics? And to be clear, academics are defined as Math, History, Science, English, English Composition, English Language, Reading, Civics, Geography …
Since the passage of ESHB 1209, laws of 1993, we have watched money being poured down the rat-hole that is systems education, comprised, more and more of #1 above. I will quote, here, from High Skills, High Wages, (WTECB, 1994):
Page 65: To succeed in high performance work organizations, today's students must master the new basic skills – teamwork, critical thinking, making decisions, communication, adapting to change and understanding whole systems.
It is pretty obvious there isn't one academic listed; that is all performance oriented. A performance, of course, is behavioral. The goal of all this, from the same WTECB publication, noted above:
Page 70: Knowing what we face, we are confident that Washington has the leadership, energy, and perseverance to make it to our destination, a world class workforce.
Unfortunately, the intervening years, since 1993, since the implementation of systems education in Washington State, via ESHB 1209 and peripheral laws required to align the state with the federal Goals 2000, School-to-Work and Workforce Investment Acts, we have watched academics go out the window and social/behavioral/psychological replace learning. Children are no longer taught how to think; children are being inculcated with what to think. When systems education was brought in, parents, teachers, taxpayers and citizens, across this state, tried to tell Legislators this would happen; further, that this system was going to bankrupt the state. We have watched the education budget grow steadily while the quality of education declined proportionately. We are not getting worth out of tax dollars spent.
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is, in part, the backlash from angry parents, angry taxpayers, angry citizens, because Legislators have refused to listen. In our own state, the Schools for the 21st Century Pilot Project made it very clear that education would no longer be about academics, about the child being able to access a broad spectrum of knowledge to formulate a reasoned conclusion as an individual. Instead, in the words of one business owner, these kids, graduating high school can tell you how they feel about everything; what they don't realize is how little they know. They can't do math without a calculator; their writing skills are atrocious; syntax is beyond their comprehension; they cannot articulate their thoughts; they know nothing of our nation's history, and nothing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Their synopsis of our Founding Fathers is beyond reprehensible. But these graduates can tell you how they feel about everything; and in doing so, it is very apparent that they are simply regurgitating what was inculcated in the classroom. Such is, after all, the purpose of direct instruction which is the process being used to teach under systems education. In the words of B.F. Skinner, who coined the term direct instruction, you can even teach a chicken to do what you want with the proper reinforcement.
This is what Governor Inslee wants to throw more money at. Systems education has been a failure everywhere it has ever been used. Yet our elected officials seem to think that all we have to do, to fix it, is throw more money at it. You can throw all the money you want to at systems education, you aren't going to cure the problem because the system, itself, is intended to produce not too well educated graduates who can compete with workers in third world economies and are willing to accept minimal wages. Such is the definition of world class. And that is becoming more and more apparent as American jobs, American industry is being shipped to third world counties; as more and more H-1B visas are given to foreigners to work on American soil for less than American workers; while we watch the American middle class being pushed into poverty as jobs become non-existent.
That was the intention, from the get-go. It will not change. Throwing more money at it will not change it, will not cure it. The only thing that will cure the problem is to get back to teaching academics and stop using the classroom as a glorified exercise in baby-sitting! Our kids would be far better off with no education than what is going on in the public schools today!
We don't need more money thrown at education, pushing our state closer and closer to bankruptcy. We need the teaching of academics put back in our schools and all the social/emotional garbage, now in classrooms, given the boot.
Nor do we need charter schools which violate our state constitution and are intended to do away with representative governance. Charter schools also violate Article IV, §4 of the U.S. Constitution which guarantees every state shall have a republican form of government. Such requires representative governance. Giving taxpayer money to private schools run by an appointed school board violates representative governance.
It's time we pitch systems education out, forget about expensive charter schools, and get back to doing what produces intelligent children – the teaching of academics. The cost to teach academics is far less than what is being spent now to babysit kids and feed their brains garbage for six hours a day.
Sincerely,
Lynn M Finney
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