Complete horror show of public schools. Truly frightening.

This afternoon I listen in total horror about the Milwaukee public school system.  The Rush of Milwaukee and Madison, Vicki McKenna (one of the best talk show hosts anywhere) had on a rep from MacIver Institute: The Free Market Voice for Wisconsin who talked about the state of public schools.

I knew it was bad.

I didn’t imagine it was this bad.

Sample…

In this video we learn that in two major high schools in Milwaukee had only one student proficient in math, none in English.

This is what we are up against.

A couple more years of this and the Biden voters… rather… Harris voters will be in control by means of raw violence.

That’s the plan.

Put that together with the Dem Party’s sacrament of abortion and Hell will be unleashed in ways hitherto unimagined.

We have to defund schools, not cops  We’d be better off without them.

Listen to Vicki McKenna in her first hour today when the podcast is available.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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15 Comments

  1. rhig090v says:

    I’ve always thought a free market approach to schools should win out. A state determines what per pupil spending it would like to spend and parents can choose the local public school, any non-public school, or opt to use the spending for a homeschool curriculum. We’ll see which institutions win out

  2. RosaryRose says:

    The only way I know how to fight this monster is prayer and penance. I’m cranking it up and getting others to, too.

    Our Lady warned us, and the instruction for us was “Penance!!”

    Go to confession so you are in a state of Grace and your prayers and offerings are efficacious.

  3. michele421 says:

    Something definitely needs to be done to help these students. But this report is awfully biased, and it sounds like there’s a lot more to this story. I’d like to hear the other side.

    [ZERO percent proficient in Math.. and English… ZERO… and you need to hear the other side.]

  4. The Masked Chicken says:

    I like a good bit of schadenfreude, but I have a dog in this fight and this is just misleading statistical reporting. I teach the product of public and private high schools as well as homeschools in my college courses and if this reporting were true, very few students would be able to achieve anything in STEM fields or in the arts (I know the undergrad curriculum in both) – if truly this few people were proficient in math or English.

    Did you notice that in this video there was not a single white student (there were a couple of white teachers). It is well-known that there is a huge disparity in test results in Wisconsin between racial and ethnic groups. In 2018 (the last year for which I have data), 15.7% of blacks were proficient in math vs. 58.8% of whites. Likewise, for English, it was 12% proficiency for blacks vs. 46.1% for whites. The racial divide drags the composite scores down quite a bit. In addition, how “proficiency” is determined shifted in 2018 to incorporate the much harder ACT Aspire pre-college exam in the assessment process (the ACT and SAT are being abandoned by colleges more and more for silly reasons, in my opinion, but that is a separate subject). This penalizes non-college students. It, also, makes the Wisconsin proficiency standards among the highest in the country.

    Yes, there are many things that could be done to improve public education (like getting rid of the NEA), but this story is a distortion of the facts. Clearly, these two schools are composed of racially uniform populations that tend to score low on proficiency tests. This is NOT an indictment of public schools, in general (yes, there are many other reasons that the current public school curricula are bad, but that is not the focus of this video). It is an indictment of whatever factors keep these students in these particular high schools from developing traditional academic learning. That is a separate issue from the state of public schools, in general, which has seen a divergence in student population in the last 30 years into the privileged few and the rest. I do not want to get into the issue too much, because it makes me angry.

    In any case, let’s set the record straight:

    https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2019/09/12/test-scores-wisconsin-students-see-declines-math-and-reading/2287056001/

    The Chicken

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  6. AlanLins says:

    While there certainly may be issues with public schools, I do not think defunding the public school system is the answer. Some people simply do not have another choice. An active, engaged electorate is the best way to encourage school boards and school administrators to make appropriate changes.

    I served for 11 years on a local public school board. Based on my observations, the students who were academically successful had parents who were actively engaged in their education. I wonder how many of the students in MPS have parents who are actively engaged? What is the home life like for the typical MPS student? Is it a stable two parent household? Is our society providing sufficient encouragement and support for marriage between one man and one woman?

    How about good paying jobs in the Milwaukee area? Are they available within the boundaries of MPS? Or are better paying jobs in the Milwaukee suburbs? What impact does that have upon a students life?

    And I wonder how much historical systemic racism plays a role in the lives of these students? Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The following video may be useful in providing an additional understanding on what is going on. It is called Segregated by Design.

    https://www.segregatedbydesign.com/

    And lest anyone think that racism is a thing of the past, think again. In my community, local Hispanics are pulled over far more frequently by local LEOs than whites on the suspicion of not having a drivers license. It is a known fact, yet very little seems to be able to be done.

    And I could go on…but I hope most people get the idea….

  7. michele421 says:

    I expressed myself badly. What I meant is close to what AlanLins expressed. The video is biased against social protest, when that isn’t the problem. And defunding public schools won’t help.

  8. tho says:

    It is so sad that this indoctrination is allowed to go on. Plus I think that the teachers should try to express themselves more like Henry Higgins than JayZ.
    This madness took root in the late 60s, using a mantra of re-naming schools, and streets, and hiring affirmative action teachers, all a superficial scam to hide what is obvious. Very few of us have a hidden Einstein that needs to be brought out, but all of us need discipline, either self or imposed. I know that it would incur the death penalty, but it should be brought out that there are places in heaven for the very smart, and for the not so smart. Our life styles are critical to achieving the goodness that is before our eyes.

  9. Suburbanbanshee says:

    Chicken… Chicken, my friend… I agree that some people stink on proficiency tests, but actually know what they are doing.

    However, my friend who taught in our local city public schools — and it’s not a big city, or all that poor — was teaching second graders one day, and there was a story which included “Mr. and Mrs. Bear.” She wasn’t surprised that she had to explain the abbreviations and how they were pronounced. She was surprised that she had to explain to the kids why these bears had the same last name, and that they were married. And what being married meant. Some of the kids had seen bride dolls, and that was what they understood about it. None of them had parents who were married, or had both parents even living in the same house permanently.

    Years ago, when I was tutoring kids, I helped a kid who was constantly being moved from parent to parent and school to school, and had thus missed lots of math classes. I was supposed to be helping her read, but I ended up teaching her more math in about ten minutes than anybody else had done in a couple of years.

    A few years later, I ended up teaching an adult woman about how interest worked on a credit card. She honestly had no idea why her bills kept getting bigger.

    People are not stupid, but they just don’t know. Maybe nobody told them. Maybe they didn’t listen. But they just don’t know.

  10. MitisVis says:

    Did no one notice the dates of those posters in the video? (00:36)
    The George Floyd incident happened on May 25th about 4 months later

  11. The Masked Chicken says:

    Dear Suburbanbanshee,

    It is true that sometimes one just has no contact with things in order to learn about them. Despite being able to do advanced partial differential equations, I had no really clear idea how credit cards worked when I got my first (and only) one. Boy, did I learn. I read the fine print (after I got the card!) and realized that this was what is known as a far from equilibrium system, such that you could, in theory, wind up paying $1000 on a $100 credit purchase, if you did it exactly wrong when paying it back. After that, I cut up the card and returned it to the card company.

    That is not the same thing as not knowing about marriage, however. That is the fault of the Sexual Revolution (with its underlying feminist distortions) coupled with no-fault divorce. I am convinced that these have created gaping wounds in the young that are the root cause of much of the educational woes in this country. It is hard to monitor a child doing his homework when you have to go to work because you are the only parent in the family. It is not, however, primarily, just the lack of adult supervision among these latchkey kids – there were latchkey kids going back at least to WW II, when women made up a large portion of the workforce. It is the lack of seriousness about life that distinguishes the latchkey kids of the post-Roe vs. Wade era up to the present, from the kids of WW II. To many of the “parents,” there are no consequences to their actions. Got pregnant, get an abortion. The guy you married isn’t fulfilling your “needs,” get a divorce. You are committing mortal sin (what is that?), get a psychologist to “absolve” you. Penance? What is that except demanding that I put “my needs” on hold.

    Most of these issues, sadly, have occurred because the newfangled ideas on child rearing among the newly minted crop of societal engineers, I mean psychologists, in the 1950’s (let’s not spank our kids) gave a warrant to societal experimentation in sex and selfishness. It was the age of positive thinking, of re-imagining God as a God of “luv”. It was the age when liberals grabbed the reins of society (including the Church) and brought their brand of frivolousness to any group it could touch.

    Marriage is a serious thing. In the Eastern Orthodox rite of marriage, I think they say something like: “Marriage is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” That’s the missing element in society as a whole, today: sobriety.

    Can this be changed? No. Not without a radical transformation of society back to taking things (including God) seriously. People are brandishing guns at-large, these days, in part, because many of them do not take life seriously. The difference between the military (and police) and some ya-ho who shows up to a rally with a gun (and I don’t mean for protection) is that the military/police take life only when necessary (usually – there are sick people in any field) and their use of force is proscribed except under very serious, specified rules of engagement. To many in society, a gun is not serious. It is an ego extension. I don’t mean to pick on guns, in particular, I am using it to show that life has become a game to many. Obtaining permanent knowledge is taken no more seriously than a computer game.

    I am ranting, so I will stop, but what we are seeing in education is a very fast divergence, just like in economics, between the “privileged” and the “servile” classes, between kids taking college courses in high school and those struggling to learn to read. Some of this is tied to economics, but most of it is tied to moral issues, which, I am afraid, society will not correct any time soon.

    The Chicken

  12. Kathleen10 says:

    Everybody’s always trying hard to find a reason why the black kids score lower than the white kids.
    Nobody comes up with an answer that everybody enjoys. The easiest route is now “systemic racism”, which may have applied in the 30’s but is ridiculous today. It isn’t that. Not at all.
    As someone who knows the public school system and has spent a lot of time in it, no matter what ability kids have, the kids who have it the worst are those who don’t have much ability to begin with, and their families are a mess. Families are often a mess today, and it is truly shocking what kids are living in even nice communities. Tough realities. I’ve got kids whose Mom’s just walk away, and after school I see the lonely child, back at the schoolyard, looking for someone to notice them. Mom’s into drugs now. People of color don’t have a lock on tough times and misery, it’s equal opportunity, but nobody cares much today about the white kids problems, just the black kids. And if you’re a white boy, you’re all but invisible. Girls get much more attention and that’s why our boys are falling behind, entering college in lower numbers than they did.
    Money does not ensure stability, but it helps. But many parents are in bad shape even if they had the money, their life choices are horrible or they just don’t have the life skills. During Covid, it has been found that many, many parents are unable to help their child with work because the parents can’t do it! They don’t have the ability. Some of this can probably be blamed on the confusing Common Core, which in my opinion is a disaster.
    There are hard conversations that would need to happen before things could ever improve, but they won’t happen, because people don’t want to take responsibility when it’s so much easier blaming someone else, and because some of the realities are unpalatable.
    For what is happening in this video, it should be criminal, and I would defund that Marxist Indoctrination Camp in a second if I could. The kids are turned into angry, uneducated militants. I think we’ve seen where that leads.

  13. KateD says:

    A wise woman I knew once said: “You’d be better off keeping your kids home all day and playing poker with them than ever sending them to public school. At least then they’ll learn a little Math.”

    Truer words…..

    I’d lump most parochial schools in there, too.

  14. KateD says:

    And though I cant speak for anyon else, from where I sit, racism IS indeed a thing of the past. However, groups like BLM and Antifa sure are making a valiant effort to revive it, dragging it’s corpse around like something from Weekend at Bernie’s in hopes of getting a little more Marxist utility out of it before it really starts smelling putrid. Patchouli can only do so much…..

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