Why are students so dumb today?

All one has to do is watch Jesse Waters on Fox Network and you will see how really dumb students are today. It makes no difference if he interviews students at Yale, Harvard, or Podunk Community College they are dumb.

Do they even teach history, geography and government in public schools.  It appears they do not require college students to take basic courses the first two years in college any longer.  They do not even know the basics of politics, government, geography, economy or the social system. They have no reality of how we got to where we are today.

I watched as he ask who the Vice President of the United States is. I believe only one out of about twenty knew. One even said Al Gore! They ask about Bernie Sanders and one said he is the guy who owns all the buildings. If they are our future our future looks bleak.  How are they not going to make the same mistakes we did if they do not have any knowledge of history?

I am beginning to think our students are functionally illiterate. Whose fault is it? I am beginning to think it is our fault and not their fault. We allowed the politicians, teachers unions and educators to destroy our schools. We listen as they told us in the 80’s it was more important for the students to feel good about themselves than to actually learn the correct information. If Johnny thinks 2+2=5, it’s okay because he will eventually learn it’s 4. We not only listen we believed their crap and allowed them to adopt it in our schools.

Mark J. Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan claims the grade “A” is now the most common grade given to students. D’s and F’s are typically less than 10% of all letter grades. What is even more shocking is private universities give more A’s and B’s than public universities.

Students and their parents are being ripped off. Anthropology professor Karen-Sue Taussig at the University of Minnesota said, “They’re paying for it,  and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade.” Not only do the students think they deserve the good grade the professors are giving them the good grades.

I suggest  If a university cannot educate its students well enough so they can gain proper employment, allowing them to pay off their loans, the schools should not get paid. The student loan program is run by the government I bet if politicians began to withhold student loans to universities that are doing a poor job in educating our children universities would improve rapidly.

High school students are completely unprepared for college, the reality is most of them have not even been equipped with the necessary skills that they need to function at a very basic level in the real world.  Today, a surprising number of high school students are simply unable to fill out a job application, write a readable essay or balance a checkbook. Our government schools have failed them and we have failed them because we did not force our government to do a better job. It is a national disgrace.

According to a survey conducted a while back by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could find the nation of Iraq on a map of the world. Our men and women have been getting killed their for over a decade so our children can go to school and our students do not even know where it is. Even worse, according to that same National Geographic survey only 50 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could find the state of New York on a map.

Our young adults cannot even have an informed conversation about what is going on in the world and yet they are VOTING. They do not know the difference between communism, socialism, fascism and capitalism. Some do not even know who their hometown mayor is.

So what in the world are they learning in the classrooms of our government schools and our universities?

I though it was a joke when high school graduates were asked: What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress and only 27 percent knew; What are the two major political parties in the United States and only 43 percent  knew; Who was the first President of the United States and only 23 percent knew and Who is in charge of the executive branch and only 29 percent. I fell out of my chair when black students were ask who fought in the U.S. Civil War and two said the French and U.S. and one said the Germans and U.S. Some of the black students did not even know why the civil war was fought. I do not want you to think the white students knew because 90% did not.

Is there any doubt that public education in the United States has completely and totally failed? We are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in education. At this point, U.S. 15-year-old's do not even rank in the top half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math and science literacy. So how do we expect to compete with the rest of the world in the future?

I am thankful the University of Saint Thomas taught us how to think, not what to think; to question whatever we read, and never to accept any claim blindly; to suspend judgment until we heard all sides of a question, and interrogate whatever claims to be true, since the truth can withstand any scrutiny. They taught us how to learn!

Critical thinking is one of life’s survival skill. 

The new education bill ESSA may prove to be another disaster!

 I have written blogs before and made the statement I no longer know what the Republican Party stand for. It seems to me we now have a one party system in the United States – The D and R Party. I put the “D” first because when the Democrats stand up the Republicans bow.

We just saw another example of the one party system last Wednesday; the Senate followed the House in passing the conference report reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. The new bill, called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), claims it will return education control to the states. It is supposed to allow the states to do away with the Common Core national standards, and prohibit the Secretary of Education from dictating standards and assessments.

Don’t be fooled the legislation passed by Washington lawmakers does not give states more control over their schools because the bill does not give states adequate authority and there are no enforcement provisions protecting states against overreach by the federal authorities. We must also remember that it is Washington politicians that control the purse strings.

The president of the 3 million National Education Association members (teachers union) praised what lawmakers have done on Capitol Hill regarding ESSA. Have we not been told repeatedly by Republican politician’s that the teachers union is the cause of school failures. The Public School Teachers Unions like ESSA because it was designed to hurt charter, online and private schools. The only good part of ESSA, if there is a good part is that it continues to exempt homeschool families from any kind of federal mandates.

The Republican politicians could have taken the lead and written an education bill that would accomplish what the Republican Party leaders claim they stand for and conservative voter want. But, instead they fell in line with Obama and the Democrats on a bill that will seriously affect adversely millions of conservative Americans until the year 2020. It was a repeat performance of the passing of Obamacare.

The ESSA text is 1061-pages long and was only released on Monday. We now have a piece of legislation like Obamacare that was passed without many reading it.  Republicans and some Democrats when all the flaws in the bill start to appear will claim they were not given adequate time to study the bill before they had to vote on it just as they did with Obamacare. The new Republican House Speaker, promised transparency, an open process and a more responsive House, so much for that promise.

Opposition was growing among Republican member to ESSA so Ryan jammed the vote through faster than anticipated. Then they pretend they do not know why the Republican base is so frustrated with them that they would support outsiders like Donald Trump.

Speaker Ryan and his fellow Republican Representatives and Republican Senators once again raised the white flag of surrender to Obama and the Democrats. They gave liberal groups and teachers unions a huge victory. Republican leadership surrendered control of our children’s education for years to come to liberals without any kind of repercussions.

Were we not told by Republican politicians the Department of Education should be abolished because it is inefficient and we should return control of our schools to local districts and parents? Did they once again lie to us or did they just not have the guts to fight Obama, Democrats and liberals or are they really Democrats in disguise.

It appears that our elected officials in Washington both Democrat and Republican still do not understand that when they pass a bill, it gets implemented, and when it gets implemented, people feel it. There will be consequences to this bill that will affect millions of Americans for years to come. Our elected politicians have an obligation/responsibility to study every line of any new legislation before voting for it. They passed No Child Left Behind over a decade ago and today few want their name associated with the bill. Every Republican who supported this bill should be looked at closely in upcoming elections.

ESSA according to Jane Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, allows the Federal government to continue to lay out particular requirements for state standards and uses code language throughout that gives the federal government the tools to pressure the states to stick with Common Core rather than risking their federal money by adopting something better. It maintains the federally dictated testing regimen and requires states to implement assessments that are expensive, that have been proven in the past to be ineffective and unworkable, and that operate not by assessing students' academic knowledge, but rather by measuring their attitudes and dispositions.

ESSA's new preschool program and President Obama's pet project, "21st-century
community learning centers" are all bad ideas. Obama has pushed the “21^st-century community learning center” idea for some time. It basically allows public schools to be expanded to replace family and church as the center of every child's life, "services" including mental-health programs. Parents should be alarmed that the government will assess the mental health of their children and worse the government will have the right to fix any problem the government claims to have found. I ask all fellow conservative Republicans if this is this is what you send Republican politicians to Washington to do?

ESSA is so progressive it was supported by every single Democrat in Congress. It was supported by Barack Obama. It was supported by the owners of the Common Core national standards testing group. Of course it was they make a fortune off their testing. It was supported by every pro-Common Core and pro-progressive education interest group in the country. It was strongly opposed by over 200 conservative anti-Common Core grassroots organizations.

Rand Paul voted against ESSA. Ted Cruz voted against cloture, but missed the final vote where it counts. He claims he opposed ESSA, but if he truly opposed the bill he should have been present for the vote and cast a vote against it. He certainly has attack Jeb Bush for supporting Common Core and ESSA is Common Core with a face lift. Marco Rubio claims he opposes ESSA, but he not only missed the cloture vote he missed the final vote. Lindsey Graham again demonstrated his love for the establishment and voted in favor of passage. I guess in some weird way I admire Lindsay Graham for having the guts not to dodge the vote. Jeb Bush, ‘Mr. Common Core’, in an interview on Fox News could not praise ESSA and Common Core enough. I never supported Jeb Bush, but after watching his spill on Fox I would not trust him with my dog, much less my child.

I guess Donald Trump will have to speak out and educate the voters and the Republican Party on ESSA as he has on immigration, terrorist and refugees.

ESSA is nothing more than a new name for a previously failed program known as Common Core.