This is a very brave girl, I would rather be Margaret Thatcher than a coward.
Where is all the support? At least 80% of America agrees with her. Where are the men and women to support her and this insanity?
Wait until they defund some of the women’s sports under Title IX. The men’s team from the same school gets defunded also by the same amount of money, by law.
Don’t wait for that. Why don’t the boys in all these schools talk to the trans guys?
I know we would have taken care of this in my school. Where are the real men and women, and the parents?
This could be eliminated if we show the support for no men in women’s sports and locker rooms.
This is injustice, and they need everyone’s support from all of us. I can’t believe this is still allowed. All I see are individual girls doing this — what about her teammates? Do they like playing for second or third place?
If a large group of women’s teams boycotted this injustice, Title IX will start defunding the school’s support — both men and women — because they must be funded the same, by law. Watch the boys scream then.
Just organize for a few months — it will be a short challenge — and get this to go away.
I have no problem with real or fake trans, except being a loser playing in women’s sports. Let them start their own league?

Let’s stop talking and do something.

We needed to get rid of the Federally Corrupt Department of Education (thanks, Mr. President), which was an ATM machine for the corrupt politicians and unions. The 30% of the valid programs will be moved to other, more responsible departments. Now we need to finish off the unions and school boards, which they control. We have 10,000,000+ people employed in the K-12 education system in the US; only 4,200,000 are teachers. Even as taxpayers, we pay some union workers directly? We don’t have a money problem; we have a management problem.

Eliminate the unions and the very ineffective middle and upper management, and pay teachers 50% more, with incentives included. The poor teachers also pay the unions for nothing but grief.

30%+ of teachers have quit the unions, and the tipping point will be 40%. That’s when the unions can’t penalize or, better yet, terrorize the teachers who quit. We totally believe in organized labor, but the teachers need to run their organizations themselves by state.

The leaders should not be paid; they should do it for two-year terms for the prestige of doing the right thing for their fellow teachers but will need some paid support staff. At $25.00 a year in dues per teacher, that’s $125,000,000, which is plenty of capital to run their support system, negotiate higher pay, equal rights, and better working conditions. Then, stay out of politics as a group—let the teachers handle their own politics individually.

A voucher system is a must to protect the underserved and less fortunate, allowing them to have a voice and expose the bad teachers. There aren’t that many bad teachers, but enough to make the good ones mad and look bad.

I think teachers are the most important profession we have. Let’s let them do their job with the parents, who need to step up.

I believe we need to make all the changes to our Education System that have been stalled by our Politicians and School Boards, thanks to the Unions’ bribery of both.

We need to do it all at once because there is no downside, as we are the worst in the world—ranked 40th out of 40—and the most expensive in the world. We have nothing to lose, as I think we can only go up. Who thought we could be here, though?

We need a national Voucher system. The School Boards are the biggest problem here—NIMBYs—and our teachers are better educated in WOKE ideology by design. This is done at the expense of the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science, and history.

Trump is a very good beginning at lowering the Wokers’ influence, but in Education, we all need to do a lot more as parents and grandparents. The Unions and the Education Boards are to Education as Iran is to Democracy. I believe in organized labor totally, but the teachers need to rule themselves with the parents—using unpaid leaders who serve short terms, supported by paid support systems and organizations.

If they paid $25.00 a year each, that’s an estimated $120M a year, with no contribution to any political party. Get rid of all the unnecessary mid-level management and Union workers—there are more of them than teachers.

We need to go to the Private sector as much as possible, like Charter schools, especially for the less fortunate. That’s where we can improve our education the most. The A & B students won’t give us nearly the improvement in numbers as improving the C, D, and F students.

Using support like the Khan Academy, which has tens of thousands of free courses that can support students and teachers, is key. They are developing an incredible AI homework support platform, which is free or nearly free.

My Pop Quiz is: How long do we have to fix all our kids’ deserving education?

This article was written by one of our readers, Loretta Pierfelice about technology and education. I think it speaks for itself and has a lot of good ideas as well as a little bit of history of how we got here.

We hope that more of you will submit workable solutions to keep the discussions alive.  Thank you Loretta Pierfelice for your submission.

Everyone Deserves an Education

By Loretta Pierfelice

Do you know when the United States jumped to the front of the world’s countries and became a major power?

Do you know why? Most historians agree that it occurred because we made education free and mandatory. Ours was one of the first comprehensively educated work forces in the entire world and our technology, natural resources and innovation moved us from backward colonials to a world leader. If we want to solve the problems of the future, we need to think about the basics.

What is the minimum we want of new adults in the United States?

• A portable skill that brings in a living wage.
• A buy-in to the social contract that the best way to get what you want is to work.
• Social skills that create a decent society.
• Be able to tell the difference between logic and rhetoric.
• Be able to read, write and speak the dominant language of our country.
• Understand the philosophy behind our structure of governance.
• Understand basic math.
• Understand the scientific method.
• Of course, there are many many things beyond these that we also want for our own young adults, but most of us would be pretty darn grateful if every adult without a disability could do the above. And very few adults in our world seem to possess all these qualities.

Here is how I think we might get there, and why it could work.

First, create a national dialogue that parenting and education are work that benefits society and should be recompensed. Anyone who chooses to be recompensed for these through government programs also consents to participate in metrics such as standardized testing (we do this already, but there’s very little remedial help for failure, and there’s no immediate reward for success).

Next, have incentivized learning programs written by game designers so that most of the teaching and testing is done by computers-at school, with X minutes on a video game as a reward for passing a level of proficiency. This leaves the teachers to actually be available, monitoring their pupils progress on a dashboard, and helping anyone lagging behind or stuck.

Create minimum Federal Standards that apply to all schools at the beginning of Kindergarten, first grade and every two years thereafter.

These are true minimums, not an entire education plan. For instance, kindergarten standards might be to have the self-discipline to sit still and work on something for 15 minutes without talking, count to 10, name the primary colors and play well with others for 15 minutes. A successful child gets a treat, their parent/s get a bonus in their child allotment, and an unsuccessful child and parent/s get parenting classes, or they can opt to drop out of the child allotment and education payment. Students and parents who don’t meet minimum attendance metrics are fined on a daily basis.

This type of minimum metrics will ensure that very few are left behind unless they have a disability, and disabilities will be identified as early as feasible.

From 15 to 18 every student will do an entry level job for 10 hours a week, in addition to school: waiting tables, line cook, fast food, cleaning houses, child care, construction labor, or apprenticed to a trade, etc..

This would be a graduation requirement. Also, a minimum of 10 hours of community service a year during middle and high school.

The Constitution, logic and the scientific method are required courses in high school.

Reading and writing at an 8th grade level is required to graduate.

Facilitating teaching via group projects, discussions, and directed and supervised recess offer opportunities to learn better social skills. There will be more time for this with the majority of the rote work being done via computer.

For every tiny piece of this, both the parents and the children are appropriately rewarded for success, and offered remedial help for failure.

What if remedial help doesn’t help? Hard as it is for academics to imagine, there are just as many people with IQs and EQs under the mean as there are above the mean. That’s science. This structure of identifying disabilities (physical, mental and emotional) early means that more children will have a chance to be identified and helped at an earlier age, and that fewer children will slide from poor preparation for school, to poor reading and performance, to rejecting what they can’t use, to virtual unemployability, and finally to jail or prison (Prison spending in 2015).

We currently pay about $33,000/ year to incarcerate 2.2 Million adults, at a yearly cost of $72.6 Billion dollars.

And that’s just state spending, not Federal. (NCES)

We pay $706 Billion a year to educate 56.6 Million students, or about $12,500 per student.  If my proposed changes saved even 3% of those 2.2 Million people from going to prison each year, either through better work preparation or increased support for families, the program pays for itself.

I think this kind of behavior going unchecked is going to haunt us all forever.

What are the teachers going to do with this type of behavior at this high of level? Two of my friends were kicked out of a Jesuit high school for one plagiarism mistake. Between woke teachers and administrators, plus AI we will cease to know a person’s character, unless we are friends.

Talk about graduating students that can’t read or read well? This is going to get real interesting when we hire the best available graduates, and they can’t do their job.

We need to give all new hires a higher level SAT + tests to hire what we are paying for? Or hire High school grads as interns and put them through a school, you must be involved in the process. Maybe online, or brick and mortar or a hybrid of the two types of colleges to get the best, for your company, because they’re not going to come from Harvard.