Also, it fucks over all families without a stay-at-home parent.
Oklahoma encourages homeschooling more than maybe any other state. Those families without a stay-at-home parent are lucky to get FOUR days that the state takes over the parents' rightful job of educating their children. Maybe it'll be reduced to 3.
Hill and Heyward write that four-day weeks "proved contagious" simply because "adults like it: Teachers have more free time, and stay-at-home parents like the convenience" provided. They also say administrators describe the four-day workweek as a recruiting advantage.
What about working parents? And why is it more convenient for stay-at-home parents? One less day to drive their kids to school?
I think it means UMC families find it easier to take vacations/long weekends at the cabin.
That's why it's great as a recruiting advantage, so that you can deal with the fact that your kid is home on Fridays.
A number of our English Ed students (those who come from OK and have family there) have taken teaching jobs in Oklahoma. The dismal circumstances they're living in due to the low wages Oklahoma pays its teachers is really depressing.
For instance, I recently helped one of my ex-students buy tires for their car, so they could keep going to work. Others are on food stamps. It's a "joke" that the four-day work week is a blessing, because then they can take second jobs, and actually earn enough to live on.
Thanks, GOP.
How about a one-day work week - then teaching could BE their second job! Spend Tuesday through Saturday privately tutoring the kids who care enough about education to pay for it.
This is beyond horrifying . I had no idea, but of course eventually if you stop taxing things the state can't pay for things.
It really is decent evidence of conservatism as a literal brain disease. I can't imagine that almost anyone, truly wants local schools run at that level, so you'd think it's the kind of thing a democracy could prevent. But you combine anti-tax fanaticism as an ideology and a supermajority system and that's what you get.
Less education will make more people believe in conservatism. It's like how there's a virus that makes mice too stupid to not get eaten by cats so that it can spread.
Far too many Evangelical conservatives believe -- have been taught to believe -- that public schools don't educate children, that they only exist to brainwash children in liberal doctrine.
For the past 30/40 years, Evangelical churches have taught their members that mothers are better teachers than any school teacher -- that public school teachers are incompetent, brain-washed agents of Satan. (I'm not exaggerating, this is literally what our local Evangelical churches teach.)
So many, many conservatives here in the South are not only fine with destroying our public schools, they are actively working to destroy them.
Is there anything really stopping a state that is so-inclined from shutting down its public school system? Its not like there is a constitutional requirement to have one.
I'll add that we home-schooled our kid for four years (due to their anxiety issues), and during that time we got to know far too much about our fellow home-schooling parents.
The kid returned to the local public school in high school, and I was very impressed with the quality of almost all of their teachers. Much better than my high school, back in Louisiana. (But what wouldn't be!)
12 - most state constitutions, including at a 5-second glance Oklahoma's, require the state to provide free public education to school-aged children. Of course state constitutions are generallyeasier to amend than the federal constitution, so it depends what you mean by "really stopping" and "determined."
Right, but there's no obvious application of the equal protection clause or something that would bar it on a federal level?
Ohio had a good way around this -- online charter school with minimal attempt to audit.
But something went horribly wrong.
http://radio.wosu.org/post/ecot-close-after-sponsor-severs-ties-online-charter-school#stream/0
I'm kind of amazed their website is still up.
I guess Puerto Rico is going in that direction. Its a delicious mix of colonialism and disaster capitalism.
Do they still have football practice on the 5th day?
15 - the USSCT has explicitly held that there's no federal constitutional right to public education. With that said, depending on the way in which public education was taken away I can think of a few ways in which you could have a federal constitutional claim if a state just said "sorry no more money for public education whatsoever from now on."
There are also likely federal statutes that could come into play and work penalties on a state that abolished public education-- there's no explicit federal statutory guarantee of public education (I don't think), but there are likely a lot of federal funding programs that would be cut off if a state stopped all public ed.
Congress might be able to pass a law requiring the states to provide public education, but under current (bad) constitutional law I can think of some good (in the sense of conforming with precedent) why it would be unconstitutional for Congress to do so.
This concludes some half-assed constitutional law musings in this subject. Anyhow I doubt the states will ever abolish their explicit constitutional provisions requiring free public education, they'll just screw up the system a la Oklahoma.
Do they still have football practice on the 5th day?
This is the kind of question you get when evangelicals try to sound like Jews.
(pwned by Halford, but what the heck)
12, 15: See Griiffn v. School Board of Prince Edward County Virginia, 337 U.S. 217 (1964). In the 1950's the State of Virginia abolished the right to a public education. In 1959 Prince Edward County closed its public schools, while providing grants to allow parents to send their children to any private school within the county, although none had existed. It also gifted textbooks and such to a newly founded private school. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally that school limited admission to Caucasians.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the excluded children (ending their FIVE YEAR vacation), but only on the basis of racial discrimination. It rejected the idea that denial of public education by itself is a violation of equal protection.
The current Supreme Court would certainly consider this last point to be binding precedent, possibly not the major holding.
Anyhow I doubt the states will ever abolish their explicit constitutional provisions requiring free public education, they'll just screw up the system a la Oklahoma.
It seems like a progression to me. If they screw it up for 20 years, making it continually shittier, pushing the boundaries on the type of shittieness that it allowed, that sets them up to eventually pull the plug on something that has become so shitty that its no longer worth saving. That kind of reflects the broader Republican strategy toward government.
22 -- could be. Who knows what happens as a result of the brain disease.
No more Saturday football practices?
Oklahoma's experiment with right-wing orthodoxy hasn't gotten as much attention as Kansas's for some reason, but it's been at least as bad. (Note that the districts moving to four-day weeks are clustered along the borders with Texas and Arkansas, which have been poaching teachers due to the mess in OK, but not Kansas.) This is why Democrats have been winning so many special elections for Oklahoma state legislature recently.
Wow, your crazy party has really gone all-in on a delicious banquet of seedcorn. It's depressing that a major aspect of intelligence is the ability to think about future consequences, and there is a major strain in anglosphere politics that boils down to "what if we view this complex issue from the perspective of a dog, or maybe a particularly stupid horse?"
10: There might be a virus too, but I've heard this most often in reference to the Toxoplasma gondii parasite.
22 really does seem to be the game plan among the Right-wing Evangelicals and Reactionaries here in the South.
29: I don't think a dog has ever become a senator.
Only because they have a sense of dignity.
22: They literally said they wanted government small enough you could drown it in a bathtub.
They literally said it but I think they meant it figuratively.
At least they didn't want to use the toilet, like the government was an emotional-support hamster.
I'm beginning to agree that dogs might be smarter than horses.
||
Civil-defense coordinators in Nevada and in Riverside County, California, warned their citizens to arm themselves to repel H-bomb refugees from nearby Los Angeles. The Reverend L. C. McHugh, a columnist for the Catholic magazine America, assured readers that it was ethically permissible to shoot your neighbors if they tried to break into your fallout shelter.|>
...
Schlesinger continued, the program was generating "a false sense of security--a belief that . . . a nuclear war will be no worse than a bad cold," an illusion that will "encourage these people to become reckless in their foreign policy demands and to condemn negotiation and accommodation as appeasement."
39.2 "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed..."
||
Bundy wrote a memo to Kennedy: "I must say I am horrified by the thought of digging deeper as the megatonnage gets bigger, which is the notion of civil defense that Dr. Teller spelled out to me after your meeting with him the other evening. He thinks it can be done quite easily for $50 billion spent over a period of years. This is a position from which you will wish to be disassociated|>
BTW, sorry to hear about you and Chani.
Primates are much more advanced, the monkeys who ride on deer achieve orgasm.
But the deer don't, because primates are selfish.
Always looking out for number one.
Thanks everyone, here and in the other thread.
I am now a free man. Laydeez.
For two years there I really enjoyed the rhythm of my life with her, each of us having our own lives living in different countries as we do, the monthly or so weekend trips to Dubai, spontaneous excursions to the desert oasis town of Al Ain, the highest mountain in the Emirates Jabal Jais, etc, and all the art galleries, museums, biennales, the film festivals, and the trips abroad, Berlin, where we first met face-to-face, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, and all the ones we planned for the future. It was magical.
The breakup is amicable, and I believe we will continue to be friends and I will see her when I visit Dubai, though not in a romantic way. Although now the pull of Dubai is suddenly much weaker, OTOH anything beats the isolation of Arrakis. I also can't begin to imagine the hellscape that would be dating here. I've broken out the good bourbon for this one.
That sucks, Barry. I second Halford's recommendation about the dune buggy.
But perhaps not in combination with the good bourbon.
For drunk driving, cheap bourbon is more traditional.
Really sorry to hear that, Barry. Hugs.
Yes, Barry, sincere commiserations. Next time you're in London remember we're all here to help you drink to forget.
||
Ok, so I've been reluctant to share this project here - even though it all started on this very blog - due to the pseud-busting nature of the thing.
But it took on a life of its own at the other place, eventually turning into a whole series of dumb stories which I then complied into a very slim book.
I've put the first three of the dumb stories on this website, and if you want the whole thing, its available on Kindle. So there you go.
|>
Thanks! Volume two is in the works.
Time was, you could tell something was fiction because it was too fucked up to be real. Now, you have to know that it's fiction because otherwise even if it was real, nobody could have taken those notes.
52 is great. I'd buy the kindle addition if my kindle's screen wasn't broken.
For you, Barry, there is a pdf.
Are there wizards? I seem to be reading lots of stuff involving wizards lately.
56 addition s/b edition.
57 Thanks Mike!
I'm saving the wizards for when I start running out of ideas.
||
Still, there was one awkward and imposing reality: nobody knew how to follow the rules while playing an actual game--nobody really knew how to fight a protracted or limited or coercive nuclear war. This conclusion had been reached before, over and over through the years; and there had since been no new data, studies or grand technological leap to warrant any other. Yet the difference in the Reagan Administration--the difference that frightened so many otherwise apathetic citizens that a popular, broad-based anti-nuclear movement suddenly grew up apparently out of nowhere--was that no one in power seemed to have truly grasped this conclusion.|>
What's that a quote from? ... Ah, nm and thanks, Google: Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (1983).
I remember studying (and living through) some of that stuff. I was in grad school and one of my professors used to stop his lectures at the sort of points Mossy has been posting about and say "thousands and thousands of PhDs, thousands and thousands of PhDs," and then shake his head.
When just 50 or 100 PhDs is more than enough to deter any possible adversary. Madness.
Thanks J!
If anyone would be so kind as to leave a review of it at the Kindle store, I'd be obliged.
65. Just one or two, if their eyebrows are bushy enough.
True, Teller did escalate things to a whole other level.
66. I'll put a review on co.uk when I've read it, but it may be a day or two, because other shit happening.
Belated sorry to hear about the relationship, Barry. I hope that you can remain friends, but also that you can give yourself permission to not stay friends if you need a break to heal and move on.
Also, I echo the recommendation for dune racing. Also isn't there dune skiing?
70 Thanks Buttercup.
They call it "dune bashing" here.
I can't believe John Lott can still manage to get an editorial in the NYTimes.
Sigh. I can't even manage a proper WTF anymore.
72 I thought it was an excellent editorial. Genius level even.
Once you are in the club, you are in. Steven Levitt is basically a joke within economics now, but he seems as high-profile as ever.
OT: Garsh, McMegan is now a WaPo op-ed columnist. (Sorry, I just saw this - perhaps mentioned here already.)
I probably could have gone a whole 'nother week without noticing that if you hadn't have done that.
Jesus fuck do I now have to cut my subscription to the WP too. God damn it. Looks like the LA Times only for me.
There are many worse people than McMegan, and even some stupider, but few more annoying. It's like having some mendacious prick from an undergrad seminar follow you around your whole life and never stop talking.
If she replaced that Hewitt (sp?) guy, I'll have to find something nice to say about her. I guess "you're not Hewitt" counts.
Anyway, their editorial page has always been shitty except in comparison with other editorial pages.
True enough. I can't actually remember I've read an opinion piece from them unless you count Alexandra Petrie or the guys at the Monkey Cage, which I don't.
But still -- McMegan, so unbelievably fucking annoying.
77.2 Worse and stupider? I'm sorry but I'm going to insist on names.
Caitlin Flanagan landed a perfect McMegan with that line about the #MeToo movement being white women forming a lynch mob to get colored men.
say what you like, she's no ernst jaensch.