Recently, it came out that 80% of all New York City high school graduates require remedial education courses in order to enter the state-run community college. The head of the NYC department of education has claimed that NYC schools have a 40% increased rate of graduation, in his own defense. In other words, he’s dumbed the courses in order to meet arbitrary and vague goals. He’s failed to understand that there is a different between a diploma and the knowledge that said diploma is supposed to represent. He should probably be fired.
But he won’t be, largely because it is nearly impossible to get fired in you are in the education department in NYC. Hell, you could molest, then murder dozens of school children and draw a paycheck while sitting on death row. Seriously, in NYC child molesters are still employed by the school system, they just sit in the teacher’s lounge waiting to be processed out, all the while drawing a paycheck. Wally, Dilbert’s co-worker, would be envious of such a job.
Why is it important to mention how hard it is to fire know sex offenders from NYC public schools? For the simple reason that if they can’t even fire the child molesters, what fear do teachers have of doing their jobs right? I’m talking about motivation being the key factor and the greatest motivator in a better job at your place of employment is the ominous threat of being fired or “let go” or laid off or whatever term they use these days.
So with no motivation to do a good job, NYC teachers (and I imagine so many other school districts all over the country) end up fudging it and allowing idiots to graduate. Instead of being proud of weeding the stupid people, the people who refuse to learn and are better off with a job that has a nametag, we are instead graduating children with subpar skills and sending them off to college. They then take more than four years to get a Bachelor's Degree and end up with a ton of student loan debt and a severely limited job market as every other asshole with a below average GPA also took the same major.
The problem with modern education is that it is simply outdated. We are operating on a Prussian model from the 1800s which was mostly designed to encourage obedience to the government rather than actually educate the little tikes. Looks like after a century and a half, they have finally succeeded in making people subservient to the State.
Most people are better off simply homeschooling at this stage. With such high rates of failure among the State-run schools, it is really a no-brainer. At this point, the whole system is too broken to fix, so it should probably be scrapped and replaced with something better, like a free market educational system.
Of course, no one ever considers the free market option. Their diplomas made sure of that.