Since the year 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been evaluating students throughout the world to determine educational outcomes for each country. American students have ranked poorly in these studies despite the fact that the United States spends more per student that almost all other countries, has the highest paid teachers and the smallest class sizes. The data to support these statements are shown below.  As can be seen from the 2000, 2003 and 2006 data, the United States was ranked 15th, 24th and 21st respectively in reading, math, and science.   As can be seen from the 2009 results above, the United States ranked 31st in math, 23rd in science and 17th in reading. These are dismal results considering the resources the United States has committed to education. Canada doesn't even have a Department of Education and Canadian students outperformed American students in all areas. This should come as no surprise. The U.S. Department of Education is a political organization set up to indoctrinate students into extreme left-wing ideology and to benefit teachers at the expense of students.    The expression "Common Core" is a smokescreen for the teaching of the "new math" and "whole word" reading that began in the 1960s. This was during the Vietnam War, and left-wing teaching "professionals," believing in a half-assed brand of amateur psychology, thought that teaching by drills made people more willing to blindly follow orders and go to war as adults. The "new math" eliminated drills like learning addition and subtraction tables, multiplication and division tables. Young students actually learn best by repetition and it gives them an early feeling of early success in mathematics. The so-called "research" that "proves" the new math is better is a complete lie. Hippies caused more deaths by introducing their drug plague to the world than did the Nazis of Hitler's Germany. When the hippies entered education in the 1960s they crippled American students with their half-assed amateur psychology-driven idiocy, and the hippie- introduced marijuana used by American students kills their desire to learn and can permanently lower their IQ by as much as eight points. "Whole word" reading replaced phonics in the 1960s because teaching reading by phonics was also thought to make students more willing to go to war as adults. The anarchist/socialist and anti-Vietnam War activist, Noam Chomsky, was a champion of "whole word" reading because it stressed the "meaning" of words. In reality it crippled students from learning new words that they could sound out by using phonics. Chomsky instead said that teachers should read to their students, and the material he suggested would indoctrinate students to anti-capitalist and other extreme left-wing views. The United States was a leader in education until schools became this tool of left-wing political indoctrination. The worst examples are American universities which have become sewers of left-wing political indoctrination. Science, another failing of American schools, was also crippled by left-wing political propaganda. Concerns about environmental issues, animal rights, and global warming dominate science classes. The evil, Republican-owned chemical companies and corporations are said to be harming the environment and killing innocent animals. But the most ridiculous movement is the current global warming/climate change hysteria aimed at oil, gas and coal companies seen as provinces of evil, rich Republicans. The two charts below expose the lie of the global warming/climate change hysterics, that is, if Americans learned how to read graphs in their inferior American schools. The key to this disparity can be demonstrated by the way teachers are chosen in Finland, a country whose students perform near the top rankings in math, science and reading. Teachers in Finland are chosen from the top 10% of college graduates. In the United States teachers generally come from the bottom one-third of college graduates. In other words, American schools are populated with inferior teachers. But it is more than that. One-half of all new American teachers quit within the first five years of teaching. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a flood of hippies into the teaching profession in the United States. You can still recognize the people they mentored (programmed and conditioned into the hippie philosophy) by their beards and pony tails for male teachers and the "granny" glasses and long straight hair for the females. When highly-qualified college graduates encounter these hippie types, they often leave the teaching profession in disgust. These hippie type teachers are often drug users indoctrinating students with Marxist propaganda. In addition these hippie type teachers promote a variety of extreme left-wing ideas that interfere with the educational process; political movements such as "global warming," animal "rights," and extreme environmental positions. And finally, any teachers who are not members of the Democrat Party are usually forced out of teaching. American teachers and their unions are opposed to any performance assesments that could be used to judge teaching quality and might explain the poor academic achievement of American students. The article below discusses this opposition.  American schools have become extreme left-wing Marxist instruments of the Democrat Party. It is almost a reflex action on the part of these left-wing extremist teachers to blame American corporations for anything with which they disagree, as can been seen in the quote above. The reader should also note that the Marxist color red is prominent in the protest photograph above.    A great deal of time is wasted teaching courses in sociology and psychology in colleges preparing students to teach. There are also "method courses" which are of questionable value in preparing a person to teach in the public schools. Of course, colleges are dominated by left-wing, liberal teachers who worship the bogus psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and buy into social engineering of American society as the main concern for teachers.   Teachers, administrators and government officials in other countries have no problems with administering tests to measure student achievement. However, in the United States teachers seem to be reluctant for their performance or lack thereof to be judged. They just want to keep looting local communities for their excessive salaries, pensions and health car benefits.   The two articles above document the fact that teachers in Finland are chosen from the top 10% of college graduates whereas American teachers most often come from the bottom third of college graduates. Those on the liberal left in the United States have produced false data and false claims to say that American students aren't doing as badly as the data claim and that American teachers are "highly qualified." When such claims were made in the former Soviet Union is was called propaganda. The same is true today for liberal propaganda. Tell a lie often enough, and weak-minded individuals will eventually believe the lie. This should come as no surprise. After all, Americans are the products of an inferior educational system and are therefore willing to accept liberal propaganda as the truth. These liberal apologists and educational "experts" claim that the way to improve student achievement is to throw more money at the problem. The graph below shows what you get in the American educational system for more money.  Spending per-pupil has doubled in the United States since 1970 with no improvement in student performance, and the United States spends more on education than almost every other country in the world, as can be seen in the graph below. Finland, whose students outperform almost all other students worldwide, spends around $7,000 per student while the United States spends over $10,000 per student. Obviously the answer to improving student performance has nothing to do with the amount of money spent on education. However, you will hear liberals calling for more money to be distributed to schools through the U.S. Department of Education. If more money doesn't improve student outcomes, where does all this money go?  The graph above of teacher pay is a bit misleading. When payments into teacher health care plans and teacher pension plans are added - payments made by taxpayers - teacher salaries can approach $100,000 a year in some school districts. In many school districts teachers are paid 65 percent more than the average taxpayer. Teachers unions have made a corrupt bargain with the Democrat Party to support Democrat political candidates in exchange for getting excessive pay and benefits. In some school districts teachers can retire at age 55 with 80% of their salary as a pension for life and virtually free health care for life. These excessive benefits are bankrupting state and local governments. In addition teachers unions provide union thugs (Stormtroopers) to intimidate local governments to continue these excessive benefits. When teachers carry signs saying they are on strike for more money for students, they are lying. Most school costs are for teacher pay, pensions and health care benefits. Since 1960 student populations in the United States have increased by 90% but non-teaching staff numbers have increased by 900%. Twenty-one states now have more non-teaching staff than teachers! Some of these new staff people are psychologists and sociologists and assistants to the principals, however, school "resource personnel" account for much of this increase in non-teaching staff. The teaching lobby will tell you that a "resource teacher" is a "specialist" used to help disabled students. There are special education teachers for that purpose. These "resource personnel" are teachers awarded with plum positions that allow them to avoid the drudgery of classroom teaching. They are supposedly used to seek out better teaching methods, but in reality they are the people who obtain materials to indoctrinate students to a radical liberal agenda. They are often union bosses who are allowed more free time for union agitation. These are the people who obtain videos to be shown to students promoting environmental issues, animal "rights" issues and videos that are critical of America and the free enterprise economic system. They receive the same exorbitant pay, pensions and health care benefits being extorted by teachers from local governments. If you wonder where all the money is going that is spent on education, this is part of the answer.   The Democrat Party has so completely taken over the American public school system that no other political opinions are allowed. The story above of a student wearing a Romney T-shirt is a prime example of Democrat Party tyranny in America's public schools. One is reminded of how Jews were treated in Hitler's Nazi Germany. Democrats are becoming the new Nazis!  The article above shows that teachers and school administrators are unaware of what is going on in their schools. They ignore students being bullied and in the case above, they were unaware that school lunches were being thrown into the garbage when students' food cards didn't have enough credit to buy a lunch. And giving a student only a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk is discriminatory and demeaning. Teachers and school administrators claim to be amateur psychlogy "experts." Making students look deprived in front of other students will affect a student's self esteem and learning ability. Why are such idiot teachers and school administrators populating America's schools? There are plenty of government school lunch programs to avoid such stupidity. Better yet, take some of the undeserved salaries, pensions and health care benefits from teachers and school administrators to feed hungry students. In order to keep their jobs and undeserved compensation, many teachers and administrators have taken to cheating when it comes to evaluating student performance, and indirectly teacher performance. The example below is from the Atlanta, Georgia school system, but indications are that the practice could be happening nationwide.     One must also keep in mind that teachers only work for 9 to 10 months a year to loot local governments of excessive pay and benefits. There are breaks for the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays, a spring break and a summer break. Teachers also claim to work long hours when compared to teachers in other countries. What they fail to mention is that many of these hours are taken up by field trips, showing movies that denigrate corporations, the rich and the free enterprise economic system, assemblies and "pep rallies." This is the legacy of the hippie/Marxists that flooded into teaching in the 1960s and 1970s and the liberal Democrat Party. An example of one of these "pep rallies" is shown below.   Any intelligent person would be aware of the dangers of these tug-of-war games, but teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates. There is even a tug-of-war association that tells what kind of rope will not break and is safe to use. These "know-it-all" teachers didn't even give proper instructions to the students on how to safely grip the rope. Teachers in the United States waste valuable teaching time on non-academic activities because American teachers get heavy doses of psychology courses as part of their training that make them believe that their job is to turn students into clones of themselves - the perfect hippie, liberal/Marxist citizen. This heavy emphasis on teachers studying psychology can explain why American schools are inferior to the schools of other industrialized nations. The following quote is from page 270 of The Psychological Society: The impact - and the failure - of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the psychological revolution by Martin Gross. "The schoolteacher-as-psychologist is a popular contemporary model which begins in early training, when the would-be pedagogue is introduced to the highly psychologized curriculum called 'professional education.' Critics such as Dr. James B. Conant, former president of Harvard University and author of The Education of American Teachers, and James D. Koerner, author of The Miseducation of American Teachers, have shown that the training of American teachers is often as much a psychological as a knowledge experience. Through 'educational psychology' and other 'method' courses, more emphasis is often placed on the whys of learning and the personality of the child than the actual curriculum. Several critics, including Koerner, are convinced that this psychological emphasis has been greatly responsible for the lowering of academic school performance...Faculty gossip, particularly among younger teachers, often centers on Johnny's 'psychological problems' rather than on his grades. If his psychic woes are solved, many teachers believe Johnny's academic problems will miraculously clear up. In this psychological environment, learning deficiency is not the result of student ineptitude or poor instruction but of a psychological problem." There is no more important duty for teachers and school administrators than to provide for the physical safety of the students entrusted to their care. In this American teachers and school administrators fail miserably, as illustrated in the example below.  The statement above that "We take bullying seriously" is complete nonsense. Teachers and school administrators try to avoid the subject at all costs, including the death of students in their care, in order to not make waves that might jeopardize their tenure, their excessive and undeserved salaries, pensions and health benefits. Dozens of students commit suicide every year in the United States after a period of bullying that is usually ignored by teachers and school administrators, and hundreds of thousands are afraid to go to school every day because they are being bullied at their school. Students who are threatened and fearful at their schools will not perform well, lowering the overall academic performance of American students.   Recently some half-assed amateur psychology "expert" said that bullying does not cause teens to commit suicide; that there are "usually underlying causes" that make the teen prone to commit suicide. Obviously this moron has never been bullied or is an apologist for the failures of American teachers to prevent bullying. The best that I can wish for her is that she is driven to commit suicide. In the example above the student who struck Baily O'Neil was rewarded with a two-day vacation from school. This example proves that American teachers and school administrators are incapable of controlling bullying in America's schools. Bullying is assault and should be handled as a police matter. If a student is seriously injured or commits suicide because of bullying, the teachers and school administrators responsible should be arrested and charged as accessories to assault or negligent homicide. Nothing else will work to stop bullying. American teachers and school administrators are gutless cowards who should not be placed in charge of anything more important than a hot dog stand!  The senseless beating of Pereston Hodge above while under the control of teachers and school adminsitrators is unacceptable. It is time for teachers and school administrators to be charged, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for negligent child abuse.       School administrators and teachers are more interested in protecting their cushy and undeserved jobs than they are in providing for the safety of children left in their care. The article above is a typical example of what is happening in America's public schools. School administrators and teachers are incompetent idiots and morons when it comes to protecting students. All the administrators and teachers implicated in the neglect exhibited above should lose their jobs and face criminal charges. The glorification of public school teachers is misplaced. They are simply workers like any other workers. Teachers fail to protect students in their care and often attack students physically and verbally as the two articles below demonstrate. Note that the article reporting the 6 year-old boy being slammed into a wall by his teacher was reported on a Fox News TV station. Teachers are protected by liberal news outlets and the Democrat party because they vote for Democrat political candidates.      In the previous two articles female teachers were exposed ridiculing and physically abusing young boys. This is no accident. Most extreme feminists are man-haters, and they are found tearing down males in America's public schools. And it is not just the teachers. In one high school a group of female high school students was found to be torturing and abusing a male student who was autistic. A panel discussing the abuse called the female sudents evil psychopaths. This was a rare judgment against any females these days who are seen as being incapable of any wrongdoing. The following article is yet another example of abuse of male students by female teachers. How can these twisted females be trusted to prevent the bullying of male students?     The number of students being injured or committing suicide while under the care of teachers and school administrators pales when compared with the death of millions of people in Africa and Asia. American teachers led the campaign to get the insecticide DDT banned because it was "harmful" to some birds in the United States. DDT was the most effective vector to control the malaria-bearing mosquito in Africa and Asia. As a result of the DDT ban, at least 37 million and possibly as many as 90 million people have died from malaria in Africa and Asia. American teachers are still promoting the sick idea that animal life is equal to human life. As it turns out, proper scientific research has proven that DDT does not harm animals, the environment or people. But the banning of DDT was the "signature accomplishment" of the environmental movement, so these people still make the false claim that DDT is harmful. Millions are still dying from malaria in Africa and Asia because of the DDT ban, and Europe, which was once free of malaria, is seeing malaria coming back on to the continent as seen in the article below.   The following quote is from the dust jacket of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death: "This book should have been written years ago. It reveals a dark secret of the ideological environmental movement. The movement imposes the views of mostly wealthy, comfortable Americans and Europeans on mostly poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. It violates these people's most basic human rights, denying them economic opportunities, the chance for better lives and the right to rid their countries of diseases that were vanquished long ago in Europe and the United States. "Worst of all, in league with the European Union, the United Nations and other bureaucracies, the movement stifles vigorous, responsible debate over energy, pesticides and biotechnology. It prevents needy nations from using the very technologies that developed countries used to become rich, comfortable and free of disease. And it sends millions of infants, children, men and women to early graves every year. "The ideological environmental movement is a powerful $4 billion-a-year U.S. Industry, and an $8 billion-a-year international gorilla. Many of its members are intensely eco-centric, and place a higher value on wildlife and ecological values than on human progress or even human life. They have a deep fear and loathing of big business, technology, chemicals, plastics, fossil fuels and biotechnology - and they insist that the rest of the world should acknowledge and live according to their fears and ideologies. They are masters at using junk science, scare tactics, intimidation, and bogus economic and health claims to gain even greater power. "As this book forcefully points out, these radical activists have now wrapped their ideologies up in several elastic principles that focus on perceived environmental threats and largely ignore human needs: corporate responsibility, sustainable development, the precautionary principle and socially responsible investing. What makes Eco-Imperialism unique, though, is not just its insightful analysis of corporate and environmental "ethics," but its reliance on personal, sometimes angry observations by people from less developed countries, who bear the brunt of these misguided environmantal policies. "The ideological environmentalists are helped every step of the way by people who ought to know better, and ought to be the first to challenge their assumptions, claims and demands: corporate executives, U.S. civil rights leaders, politicians, journalists and even clergy. They should be paying intense attention to the issues raised in this book. Instead they typically ignore them, preferring to focus on Republican misdeeds, perceived slights and other contrived problems. By their silence, they accept and encourage the human rights violations, and the brutalizing of entire nations and continents. "During the recent World Trade Organization meetings in Cancun, Mexico, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) confronted a number of extremist environmental groups with these facts. We discovered that they were very uncomfortable with having to defend the indefensible - as well they should be. "CORE concluded that the time has come to hold these radicals to civilized standards of behavior, end the tolerance for their lethal policies and demand that they be held accountable for the excesses, and the poverty, disease and death they have perpetrated on the poor and powerless. Eco- Imperialism is an excellent start. "Driessen does a masterful job of stripping away the radicals' mantle of virtue, dissecting their bogus claims and holding them to the moral and ethical standards they have long demanded for everyone except themselves, and he does it with humor, outrage and passion - and always without pulling any punches. "Every concerned citizen and policy maker should read this book. The environmentalists will hate it. The world's destitute masses will love it. And everyone will be challenged by it to reexamine their beliefs and the environmental establishment's claims." - Niger Innis, Congress of Racial Equality, New york City. The previous pasage was included here because public schools in America and their teachers provide an almost brainwashing influence on young minds; indoctrinating them into the cult-like environmental movement, and having them participate in some of the most horrendous crimes against humanity since Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The teaching of American History has almost been abandonded in America's public schools except to point out the negative aspects of our own history and that of Western civilization. The left-wing anchor on MSNBC, Chris Matthews, recently said that American history is the tale of a continuing civil war between those who want to restrict freedoms (read that Republicans) and those that seek to extend freedoms (read that Democrats) to women, minorities, etc. Michael Regan recently wrote an article that illustrates how the teaching of American history has been abandonded in the United States in favor of "women's studies," "African-American studies," "Latino studies," etc. The American educational system fails to teach that none of our freedoms would exist if they had not been defended and faught for by the brave men and women who came before us. Instead America's public schools, through their hippie teachers, tell students that the military is evil and that all wars are bad.    It should come as no surprise that women favor animals over human beings. American public school teachers, who are overwhemlingly female, have been promoting the sick notion that animals are soooo wonderful and that humans are "evil." This has been a brainwashing process that has been going on since the 1960s when hippie Marxist liberal freaks took over America's public schools. will continue to receive undeserved compensation for a failing educational system. President Barack Obama and his wife even gave commencement speeches at American colleges and universities encouraging students to "reject the corporate model and enter community service." The hippies who entered the teaching profession in the 1960s and 1970s considered science, corporations and technology to be evil. These people and their clones are still teaching in America's schools. It should come as no surprise that the academic performance of American students in math and science falls far short of the achievements of students in just about all other countries where people do not live in grass huts. In American schools the sports hero (jock) is admired and the academic achiever is scorned, often called a "geek" or a "nerd." The emphasis of American schools on sports probably does account for part of the reason American schools are failing to educate. Finland, the country with the highest academic achievement, does not have any sports programs in its high achools. The money used to finance sports programs in American schools and to pay teachers salaries, and especially the excessive health care and pension benefits for those teachers, does very little to raise academic achievement. Much of what has just been said on this webpage was recently confirmed by an article on the Daily Beast website shown below. The overarching theme of the story is that Americans do not value intellectual achievement. Any student doing well in school is called a "nerd" or a "geek." For African American students, doing well in school is often termed "acting white." All these labels are meant to be derogatory in nature and they all have roots in the inferior American culture. The most important thing that an American student strives for is popularity. Status is determined by whether you are a sports hero, dress and act cool, support various liberal causes and avoid talking about serious matters. School is supposed to be fun and not really essential to success in life. The recent "Occupy" movement stressed that people who are poor and uneducated are the "real people." Of course this was a bit of hippie inspired nonsense that has been so destructive to American culture. American television programs present the most crude and dumbed down characteristics of humanity. Thus we have Swamp People, Breaking Bad, Mountain Men, Honey Boo Boo, Duck Dynasty, American Hoggers, Weed, and The Walking Dead. Yes, warn people to be on the lookout for zombies. And heaven forbid that any student should watch news programs. That would be sudden death to a student's image. Look over the following article and the two comments left on the Daily Beast website. Who is at fault for America's dismal educational system?           Above we see another example of evil Republicans withholding money that could be used to educate poor minority students. How can it be expected to educate students for a mere $12,400 per student and still provide the school principal with a $128,207 salary and enough money for the school principal to buy fur coats and a BMW? Let's hear it for all those underpaid and overworked educators.   In the hippie-freak, Marxist-liberal culture of American education, what is important to these educators are things like art and music. An interest in science is allowed if this interest is in something like oceanography to "save the whales" or some biology specialty to "save the animals." Any student wanting to study geology for oil exploration would be looking upon as an "evil" person. Teaching "critical thinking" in America's schools today means carrying out a program of left-wing political indoctrination. The critical thinking in this case would mean being critical of Republican and conservative ideas. Rote memorization was eliminated from American schools by hippie teachers during the 1960s because their half-assed amateur psychology belief was that rote memorization made people more likely to blindly support things like the Vietnam War. The result was the "new math" which has crippled the teaching of mathematices in American schools. All teaching in American schools today is political in nature. If it does not glorify Marxist- liberal ideas and membership in the Democrat Party, it simply is not taught. Bibliography 1. Gross, Martin L., The Psychological Society: The impact- and the failure - of psychiatry psychoanalysis, and the psychological revolution, New York, Random House, 1978. 2. Koerner, Dr. James D., The Miseducation of American Teachers, Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1963. 3. Conant, James B., The Education of American Teachers, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1970. 4. Gross, Martin L., The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools, New York, Harper-Collins, 2000. 5. Driessen, Paul, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, Bellevue, WA, Merril Press, Free Enterprise Press, 2005. 6. Zubrin, Robert, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo- Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, Washington, D.C., Encounter Books, New Atlantis, 2012. 7. Susman, Brian, Eco-Tyranny: How the Left's Green Agenda Will Dismantle America, New York, NY, WND Books, 2012. 8. Inhofe, James (U.S. Senator), The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, New York, WND Books, 2012. 9. Nickson, Elizabeth, Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, New York, NY, Harper-collins, Broadside Books, 2012. 10. Spencer, Roy, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists, Washington, D.C., Encounter Books, 2010. 11. Singer, Fred S. and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. 12. Shapiro, Ben, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, New York, NY, Simon & Schuster, Threshold Editions, 2013. 13. Goldberg, Jonah, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat In the War of Ideas, New York, NY, The Penguin Group, Sentinel HC, 2012. 14. Ripley, Amada, Why the World Is Smarter Than Us: And How They Got That Way, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013. 15. Sommers, Christian Hoff, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000. Copyright © 2013 by Paul Roebling |
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