CAT Tracks for April 22, 2010
ONE ANGRY BLACK MAN

Another politically incorrect rant from Edward Hayes...

Edward trashes anybody and everybody...and when you read his columns, there is a definite cringe factor as to what he may say next.

That being said...

When it comes to "Arne the Duncan"...the enemy of my enemy is my friend!


From the Chicago Public Education Examiner...


Link to Original Story

Ignore the Arne Duncan hypocrisy: This is the real education solution

Edward Hayes - Chicago Public Education Examiner

In testimony before the U.S Congress last month, our uniquely unqualified U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, made several ridiculous statements that only an elected body of American pinheads would sit still and listen to. To their discred, they did.

Like most liberal snipers Duncan took his compulsory free shot at the George Bush education initiative, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as if the former president was the causal factor behind urban illiteracy. He said, ‘It was far too punitive - - everybody was going to be labeled a failure, eventually.’ Too punitive, Arne? Aren’t you the Obama hitman that jets across this country telling school districts how proud you are of blowing up bad Chicago schools, even though you replaced them with schools equally ineffectual? Aren’t you the same education elf promoting charter schools because you have no bloody idea in hell of how to improve a standing public school that needs reform? Therefore you just promote starting all over again in another building, with a reconstituted staff, that itself will need reform in a few years? I think you are that guy. Duncan’s Chicago methods have led to veteran teachers being displaced, removed, and humiliated as his successor carries out his celebrated school ‘turnaround’ scheme. Furthermore, after Duncan’s ‘turnaround’ schools also failed during the course of his seven-year tenure, he got promoted and left town. I have nothing against firing teachers or any other employee that cannot perform at an acceptable level, but Chicago teachers are at risk of losing their jobs and, based upon independent analysis, the system has not improved at all.

Sure NCLB was problematic. But it was unpopular because it forced school districts and their gutless superintendents to face the reality of their cowardly ineptitude. Unfortunately, since professional educators with all their fancy degrees and fat expense accounts could not figure out how to cure the moribund education system, Bush had to do it for them. Of course the Bush plan didn’t fit well, but it did, at least, expose the charlatans. Look, plumbers cannot do electrical work, but if the plumber won’t do his job, someone else has to step in and do it for him. A complete absence of education leadership is the reason NCLB was imposed on school systems in the first place. Stop blaming Bush, race relations, terrorism, or Mexico for stupid American children and look into the naked mirror of the education-poverty complex. You will see an articulate and well-dressed con game.

Back to Arne the Duncan, who also said, ‘Under NCLB, if you are a sixth grade teacher and I came to you three grade levels behind, if I left you a year behind, you’d be labeled a failure, and your school would be labeled a failure. That’s not fair.’

Well, uh . . . if it isn’t fair, then why Mr. Duncan, did you do it? Fact is, in urban education those of us who, unlike you Mr. Duncan, have actually taught school fully realize that nearly one half of all Kindergarteners that enroll in these student warehouses are unprepared for the school experience. Even those crumb-snatchers who have attended Operation Head Start pre-schools lose that advantage by grade four and regress to the urban mean. Real teachers know this. But you fired principals, ruined teacher careers, and bussed thousands of economically disadvantaged children across gang boundaries into hostile environments in your school turnaround debacle. And yes, you personally bear some responsibility for Chicago’s child homicide rate that nearly quadrupled after you began that senseless program. You were told what would happen and you ignored the advice. And now, under the glare of Klieg lights and the scrutiny of Congress, you say that it isn’t fair?

When the Central Falls, Rhode Island school board fired every one of its ninety-three high school teachers earlier this year, Duncan heralded the news as if the board members had just captured Osama bin Laden. He applauded the board for ‘. . . showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.’ Clearly Duncan’s one solution to education problems is to detonate an explosive. But what comes next?

Regular readers of this column and my subscribers know that I have already encapsulated the urban education issue by removing the lipstick from the pig. Bad schools are the inevitable result of ignorant adults making too many fatherless babies for any one neighborhood or community to absorb at one time. Wild children are hard to teach. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they can be taught, but blowing up their schools and firing their teachers does not make it any easier to do so.

Once an unprepared child enrolls in school, it’s too late to reconstitute the family, and it is illegal to discard the kid, so what is the answer? Simple: Find those rare people, and they are out there, who can actually inspire the children of semi-literate parents and who can also modify their teaching methods and techniques so that they are customized to the learning disorders that accompany poor, urban and usually minority children. I have seen teachers do this. You’ve heard of teachers who can do it; hell, I can do it. They are out there and they can be found.

However, since this skill is relatively rare, and the task is burdensome, we must reward these master teachers with double the pay we give the faculty at Winnetka’s New Trier High School where the offspring of successful people with refined DNA will learn regardless of how retarded their teachers might be. After you’ve doubled their salaries, inject frequent doss of incentive pay based up those evil and abhorrent standardized tests we bash about at every silly opportunity as if we could ever get away from them.

The social engineering solution to bad schools is obviously the elimination of froged-up parents, but since we don’t license Americans to have babies the way Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger originally intended, the next best step is to identify exceptional teacher talent, train it to handle dysfunction children from badly broken homes, and pay them big, fat salaries for the huge service they do for the rest of us by taking the pressure off of the legal justice system.

This we can do if we ever get the guts to do it. We don’t need Duncan’s failed Chicago experiments.