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dienne77 says:

November 6, 2018 at 12:20 pm

Hilarious except for the dig at Montessori. The kinds of kids she worked with didn’t have parents whose self-esteem was tied to their children – they were too busy working to survive to worry about anything resembling self-esteem. That is what “Montessori” education has devolved into and I don’t think Maria herself would be pleased about that.

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Bob Shepherd says:

November 6, 2018 at 12:33 pm

hilarious

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Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

November 6, 2018 at 1:05 pm

Lots of truth in the article.

Thank you, Diane. 🌈

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Linda says:

November 6, 2018 at 1:07 pm

If Democrats gain ground today, it compels the eviction of hedge funders from the party. DFER influence explains the Center for American Progress donating the largest amount of its candidate spending to Cory Booker. For Booker to pretend he is a Sherman antitrust politician while promoting charter school chains, “different brands on a large scale”, should be exposed for the hypocrisy it is. CAP’s transparent window dressing, when it called for teacher pay increases (its V.P. of Education Policy is former TFA) and recommended that they be funded by advertising on buses was innocuous. But, CAP’s move, months later (Aug. 2018), to GOP policy, threatened the U.S. social fabric. In addition to CAP’s support for privatized education, for Gates’ Common Core (standardization for market scale), they are promoted a federal tax credit related to education. The goal of the richest 0.1% is to deny funding to the federal government for social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. CAP is a danger to the Republic.

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- GregB says:
  
  November 6, 2018 at 1:19 pm
  
  Yes, but I don’t have hope about this. They’re trotting out Booker everywhere, especially here in Ohio. When I explained to a Democratic candidate here the real situation about Booker, he was not interested and thought I was a flat earther. If we are serious about this, we have to fight within the party starting first thing tomorrow morning.
  
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  - Linda says:
    
    November 6, 2018 at 2:00 pm
    
    GregB- 100% agree.
    The first hard sell will be David Pepper, Ohio Dem. Chair
    
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  - GregB says:
    
    November 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm
    
    I’ve met him. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. As we both know, the Ohio Democratic Party is a toothless animal and he’s responsible for daily hygiene. I’m starting with my local party folks since I know who they are.
    
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  - Laura H. Chapman says:
    
    November 6, 2018 at 4:15 pm
    
    GregB, Linda, agree on David Pepper.
    Family wealth helped him into the Ohio leadership position.
    
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  - Linda says:
    
    November 6, 2018 at 9:19 pm
    
    Pepper interviewed today, at least mentioned the charter school rip-offs.
    
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  - GregB says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 12:45 am
    
    Well, we don’t have to worry about changing the Democratic Party in Ohio anymore. It’s dead. As are our issues in this state. I’ve been consistent here writing that education issues and ECOT have no traction among the voting population of the state. Unfortunately, I was on the mark. Public education had NO impact on electoral politics in this state. NONE. ZERO. NADA.
    
    In Colorado, the DFER darling became governor. In Florida and Texas, with few minor exceptions, the landscape remains unchanged or worse than it was yesterday. In Michigan we have a Democratic governor who doe not know the that “public” charter schools drain funds from public education.
    
    Cory Booker will soon be the presumptive candidate who will lose to our Dear Leader in 2020. That will mean public education issues will once again be forgotten.
    
    I know we’re supposed to believe in the future. In my adult life I’ve lived through the betrayal of the American Dream of Reagan, the latent racism of GWBush, the hypocrisy of Clinton, the criminality of Cheney (we all know Bush was never the president), the heartbreak of Obama, the fascism of our Dear Leader, and now I can look forward to another six years of this freak show. I’m done with politics except for the unrealistic goal of stopping standardized testing for the next generation of school children. But since I seem to be the only parent in my community who cares about this, not sure how much longer I can maintain my motivation.
    
    The next few months will be worse than anything we’ve ever see. As of now, I’ve lost my motivation to pay attention and try to do something about it.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 1:14 am
    
    Greg, hang in there. If for no other reason, do it for me.
    
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  - GregB says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 12:54 am
    
    And lying, especially about health care, seems to have little consequence. Lying is now a de facto legitimate campaign tactic. For the Dear Leader cult, it is a strategy.
    
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  - Máté Wierdl says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 7:33 am
    
    GregB, I felt the same yesterday after the Tennessee votes, but luckily for me I have gallons of dopamine in my system and by the morning hope came back. According Nancy MacLeans’s Democracy in chains, what we see in the republican party is not the old republican party, but a radical, libertarian, antidemocratic force took over the GOP from within. People are just faithful to their old party, no matter how it changes.
    
    So something similar could happen to the dem party. The teeth possibly won’t come from within the party but need to be planted there. The difference from the radicalized GOP is that instead of the libertarian Koch brothers, the fast growing progressives will be the dentists.
    
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  - Linda says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 9:53 am
    
    Greg,
    (1) The Dems taking the House was a very big deal. In this roaring economy, Trump should have been expected to keep the House.
    (2) For there to be a run-off between a Black woman and an oligarch-funded racist for Georgia Governor, a Deep South state, is amazing. (3) For a Black man to lose by such a small margin in Florida, which is loaded with old Republicans from the midwest, running from their obligation to pay state taxes, gives every reason for hope.
    (4) The governorships that turned blue is a testament to the fight against plutocrats.
    Unexplainable, unless a person believes in conspiracies, is how Dems allowed themselves to be defined by the immigration/refugee situation, when the party is fighting the clear and present danger to democracy.
    
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  - Máté Wierdl says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 12:52 pm
    
    Yeah, so in the long run it doesn’t matter if some states, like OH or TN, are left behind by the more progressive wind. Whatever good is happening in other states will spill over. And the big picture I think is positive for the future. For example, the proportion of young people voting dem has increased by 10%.
    
    Also, the number of women running for political positions has increased a great deal. I dunno what this means,, though, since in TN we got a very conservative new female senator.
    
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  - Linda says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 4:42 pm
    
    In other words the female senator newly elected in Tenn. is either dim witted or crassly selfish…. or both.
    
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  - Máté Wierdl says:
    
    November 7, 2018 at 5:05 pm
    
    A very good, quite conservative friend of mine told me that she didn’t vote for Blackburn because she is “as slimy as they come”, so she ended up voting for the male democrat opponent.
    
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Scisne says:

November 6, 2018 at 2:04 pm

Our United States culture has long had an aberration that I call “The Ichabod Crane Syndrome.” The character of the teacher Ichabod Crane in the classic “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” embodies the disdain in which education and teachers have been held throughout our nation’s history, in spite of lip service that says otherwise. This disdain principally arise from two aspects of our history: One is that from the very beginning of colonization and for most of our history, the vast majority of people coming to America were fleeing oppressive social conditions in Europe — and the oppressing class there was the educated class.

The other main contributing factor to The Ichabod Crane Syndrome is that for most of our history it has been possible to earn a good living and acquire property without having very much education; in fact, millions of laborers earned more than teachers. So, who needs higher education or teachers, especially elementary school teachers who are just overpaid “babysitters,” aren’t they?

Over the decades and even today our movies and TV shows reflect our nation’s cultural Ichabod Crane Syndrome: In most instances where a teacher of any level or a scientist is in the story, the person is either a buffoon, a schemer, or an outright villain.

Today, of course, education is essential in order to be employed in good-paying jobs — but America’s cultural attitude toward still hasn’t budged. In fact, it has worsened because now teachers are seen as the main problem with our public schools, with very little attention given to the issues of student poverty, student hunger, student homelessness, chronic underfunding of schools, and a host of other factors that are really at the root of the problems in our school systems. Teachers are easily scapegoated.

The nations against whose students our students are compared typically hold teachers in high cultural regard, viewing the teaching profession on the same level as professions such as engineering, attorneys, and financial professions — and teachers are paid in accord with that cultural view of the teaching profession.

We’ve got a long, long way to go before we exorcise ourselves of The Ichabod Crane Syndrome and to elevate the teaching profession to the level of our rival nations.

In addition, genuine education is no longer the purpose of schools: The purpose today is to train — not educate — children to grow up to become “useful” cogs on the machinery of the economy. Truly educate people learn history, philosophy, literature, civics, the arts, and other languages. Kids today are taught and tested on practical skills that are useful in careers that serve the economy. The genre of education that our Founding Fathers possessed and wanted future generations to acquire is dead.

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- retired teacher says:
  
  November 6, 2018 at 2:26 pm
  
  To ignore the arts, humanities and social sciences is to live life wearing blinders. Those that do not know history will likely repeat the errors of history, as we well know. We need to produce “whole students,” or we will wind up with a nation of hedge funds, tech geeks and bullies with tunnel vision like Trump. Yuk!
  
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retiredbutmissthekids says:

November 7, 2018 at 2:30 am

2015 is my favorite! Truthfully, though, it’s not so satirical–more reality-based.

Overall, though, this is the usual great stuff from The Onion. (It was also fun reading the election stories flashing on the side.)

Thanks, Diane, ’cause “laughter is the best medicine.”

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Máté Wierdl says:

November 7, 2018 at 7:35 am

“2015:
Damning report finds majority of charter schools falling behind other kinds of businesses in generating profits.”

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Bob Shepherd says:

November 7, 2018 at 11:41 am

One of my favorite facts from the history of education in the US: The first textbook published in the US, The New England Primer, contained an alphabet with sample sentences.

F
The idle Fool is whipt in school.

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