09 January 2014 (15:17 UTC-07 Tango)/07 Rabi ‘al-Awwal 1435/19 Dey 1392/09 Gui-Chou (12th month) 4711
Several newly released studies and books show what many in the main streamer news media have discounted for decades: The rich just keep getting richer, and the poor stay poor.
The City University of New York’s Graduate Center says their research shows people who live in New York City are fools, at least the ones who aren’t rich are fools.
The bottom 20% of people working in the Big Rotten Apple saw a pathetic $1,028 USD increase in the average incomes from 1990 to 2010. In the same 20 years time period the top 1% saw an increase of $264,210!!!
The study also showed the Middle Class continues to lose ground to the elites.
Steve Murdock, a former state of Texas demographer and former director of the U.S. Census Bureau and current director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University, has published a book called Changing Texas: Implications of Addressing or Ignoring the Texas Challenge.
Murdock warns of a growing income gap between those who got a good education and those who did not. He predicts by 2050 the poverty rate in Texas will be at 17.7%. As of 2010 it was 14.4%.
Once again the academic and socio-politcal elites harp on lack of education. That’s bullcrap after decades of ever increasing spending at the expense of taxpayers, resulting in a decrepit educational system!
It’s been proven that since the 1980s most tax money has gone to the administrative side of public education, and then to bogus school security programs. But I know (after helping my three kids to navigate the joke of an education system) that the actual quality of education went down since I graduated in 1982! And I thought it was bad when I was in grade school, having to actually correct some of my High School teachers and realizing at least half of them knew nothing about the subjects they were supposed to be teaching!
By the way, I attended both public tax funded schools, and private parent funded Christian schools, and I found the quality of education lacking in both! Most of my grade school education was done at the local library in Hesperia, California, and every now and then at the library in Victorville when my mom took us there.
My parents actually had two sets of encyclopedias (remember, this before the invention of personal computers and the internet), Britannica and World Book. They probably don’t know it but I actually read those books, and when I wasn’t satisfied with those expensive investments my parents made, I rode my bike the few miles to the library. Self taught I was! That’s how I knew, by the time I hit High School, that most of the teachers were BS artists! And that’s how I knew that my most of my children’s teachers were BS artists! And now I’m even college edumacated with a BA in International Studies from Idaho State University.
Here’s another story: In the late 1990s I knew a Junior High school coach and math teacher who taught at a now closed down Junior High school in Pocatello, Idaho. He admitted to me that he knew nothing about Algebra. He said he was forced to become a math teacher or lose his coaching job when the Administration decided all teachers had to teacher two different subjects. The only position open at that particular Junior High was Algebra. He admitted he winged it for years before actually learning Algebra from the students. He did it like this; he would pose questions to the class to find out which student seemed to know the subject. Then he would have that student demonstrate solving Algebra problems (meaning the smart student actually taught the class).
Unfortunately for me I never had a smart student in my grade school math classes, let alone a smart teacher. I remember having many problems with the math books because the answers in the back of the book didn’t jive with the formulations in the main part of the book, and when I asked my teachers about it they always responded “read the book” (that’s clue number one that your teacher is a dipschtick). I latter found out from a competent math teacher at ISU that most math books are wrong, and he was right as I discovered while helping one of my daughters with her math class at Highland High school. I used his tips to see if the book was wrong and it was. It left important steps out of the Algebraic formulas. When I pointed it out to her math teacher he was stupefied. Her mother and I immediately transferred her to Pocatello High school where, at the time, they had a very competent math teacher. By the way, that math teacher at ISU was the best math teacher I ever had, and he got fired that same semester! The dean of the math department said his teaching style went against her philosophy regarding math. Her philosophy is “If you don’t understand math, it’s because you don’t love it!”
Until the quality of education is addressed, which means getting rid of massive tax sucking administrative bodies, getting rid of tax sucking Orwellian police state school security systems, and make the teachers prove they know what they are teaching and can teach it, it’s only going to get worse!
But those changes aren’t going to happen because the administrative bodies have become too powerful, the incompetent teachers protect themselves with corrupt and powerful unions, they also find political support in the politicians who spout the need for education improvement, and as long as the general public is kept in a paranoid schizophrenic state the police state school prisons are here to stay.
It’s almost like a conspiracy to dumb down the average worker of the United States so the 1% elites can get richer by creating a slave wage labor state?
“Our ideals and principles, as well as our national security……..That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”-Barack Obama, 10 September 2013
PS: When I was a student at ISU, in one of the many history classes I took there was gaggle of education students. One of them was going on about how she failed her Teacher Certification test, for the third time! She said ‘no worries because I’ll just get my husband to pay for another one. I’ll eventually pass’. Yeah, there’s no hope for our education system when education students have that attitude!