13 things that tell you you’re living in The Land of the Enstupiated and the Home of the Sheeple:
1. Schools are pressured (by remote educrats) to “mainstream” kids who are mentally and/or physically incapable of learning to so much as tie their own shoes.
2. Those same schools are required to have 100% (ALL students) “at ‘proficient level'” in core subjects by X date.
3. Time and resources that might otherwise be used to actually, well, teach the core subjects to kids who are able to, well, actually learn the core subjects is spent instead teaching the uneducable how to use a pencil without causing severe bodily harm to themselves and others. RESULTING IN
4. Frustrating the trainable but uneducable children AND
5. Cheating the educable (though perhaps just barely, after a few years of “prisons for kids”) children of an education AND
6. Placing pressure on teachers (especially the growing number who are seriously subliterate and don’t even know it) who have been asked to do the impossible (bring ALL children to “proficient levels” in core subjects… that have been dumbed down already) THEREBY
7. Increasing school administrators’ call for more teachers, more funding (and thus, more power to screw up teaching and learning for teachers and, well, potential learners) AND
8. Increasing remote educrats’ turf/funding/ability to meddle and further bring schools to ruination BY MEANS OF
9. An outcry for “Somebody to do something” DIRECTED AT
10. The Feddle Gummint, which in its wisdom runs what is arguably the best model in the country for how to make stupid people by means of an “education system” (the Washington D.C. public schools) WHICH IN TURN
11. Commissions a study WHICH
12. Discovers—alas and alack!—that children aren’t even learning to read and comprehend simple English (producing adults who cannot understand a bus schedule, directions for taking prescription meds or a newspaper editorial, even though they are college graduates!) AND SO
13. Buries those facts in bureaucratese and proclaims that the Emperor’s New Clothes are just jim-dandy and everyone ought to be wearing them!
(Yeh, yeh, I know: not exactly a pretty picture for an inaugural T-13, but what do you expect from a curmudgeon before his third cuppa joe in the ayem, anyway?)
See a few experienced T-13ers’ entries at Thirsday Thirteen.
