Let's take a little walk down memory lane!

Hello All.

Things are going fine and dandy here in Japan. It's a rather funny place, but I like it. Job's good. School's good. Apartment's good. Neighborhood's good. Neighbors . . . could be worse. I'm pretty much finished grading, and now the only thing left on the calendar is this silly little 3-day "summer session." After that, two months of probable nothingness, with a nice 10-day Indonesian vacation in the middle. Although I'm bracing for dull tedium, I'm sure some interesting and blogworthy events will occur, and I'll keep you posted on those. Also, if there are any questions about life in Japan or anything else, feel free to use the comment feature to air them. (As I typed that last sentence, I felt a dire premonition settle upon me . . . no telling what kind of retarded questions I might be forced to field from Errol, but I'll do my best to answer even his.)

That said, in anticipation of the tremendous downtime, I feel a need to add something to this blog. In addition to the orgasm-inspiring artwork, I'm going to start republishing my old Collegian "Cageliner" columns here. I do this mostly out of vanity, somewhat out of nostalgia (you win, Zach, you magnificent, sentimental bastard!), but also slightly because I feel the need to archive my rantings electronically--preservation through the nebulous vagaries of the internet as opposed to the shaky confines of my aging and rattling hard drive. I'll put them in a different font--the elegant "Lucida Grande"--to differentiate them from the rest of the post. That way you can tell when current info ends and old news begins.

We'll begin with my first column, dated August 28th, 2000. Wow--Almost six years ago. In this inaugural piece, I savage teachers. This topic choice was a nod to my first "Soapbox" editorial, which was printed by The Coloradoan some six years before (1994!) and also savaged teachers. That little escapade nearly got me kicked out of school and it still represents what will likely be my life's greatest achievement--the pinnacle of my existence. Sigh. . . it's been entirely downhill since the 9th grade. When the Collegian decided to hire me, I chose to target teachers in my first column in the hope that it would get my newspaper career started on the right note.

This piece also features research--how naive I was to think I needed solid facts to write opinion columns! How ignorant I was to assume that the editors of the Collegian might expect that from a columnist! My boss at the CSU bookstore receiving department thought I'd made a possibly racist comment in comparing Washington D.C. schoolchildren to primates at a zoo; he pointed out that most D.C. schoolchildren are of African descent, and in certain racist circles, simian comparisons are a pejorative mainstay. I say millions of schoolchildren of all races and creeds are as stupid as monkeys, most of them grow up without even slightly augmenting their intelligence, and many are often hired for tenured careers in academia (e.g. CU's dearly departed plagiarizer, fabricator, and non-Indian Ward Churchill). Also, notice in paragraph two my contempt for extremists from both right and left sides of the American political landscape. I disliked extremists back in those days (still kinda do) and tried to blast both sides in a lot of my columns.

Anyhoo, I babble. I forget the headline this was printed under, but that's OK because I didn't write the headlines. Enjoy!

Every time a new report is released illustrating the bumbling idiocy of our nation’s public school students in comparison to kids from other countries, the inane debate over why our education system is failing reignites, demonstrating that our nation’s educational pundits seem to place well below the average intellectual caliber of the graduates of our schools.

Inflammatory reports, like “95% of American fifth graders believe Uranus is the capital of Algebra” or “when asked who the father of our country was, 62% of 10th grade students responded ‘true’,” are usually harbingers of an impending inundation of moronic explanations from “experts”. Absurd rationalizations range from “God is transforming us into wretched imbeciles because prayer has been removed from public schools” to “our standards of testing are race biased, gender biased, or biased against homosexual elementary students.”

Despite the fact that virtually no group affiliated with public education ever seems to take any responsibility for the mess, a loud-mouthed contingent of our noble and selfless “educators” often tend to be a major source of some particularly empty-headed solutions. While their conclusions have been deemed valid in the court of public opinion, the sad fact of the matter is statistics indicate their proposals are actually woefully ignorant of the way education in America works.

For example, one “solution” constantly parroted by the education establishment goes something like, “if we educators were paid more, then the quality of our teaching would undoubtedly increase.” Essentially, the higher their salary, the better the education.

However, according to a February report entitled “Report Card on American Education” published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, there is no noticeable correlation between teacher salary and student achievement. Minnesota and Iowa, for instance, ranked respectively first and second in the nation in student performance based upon ACT, SAT, and NAEP standardized test scores. Keeping in mind the education establishment’s “higher salary = better education” equation, Minnesota and Iowa teachers earn substantially more than the national average for these results, right?

Wrong. The average instructional staff salary in Minnesota is $40,320 a year, 21st in the nation, and Iowa’s average teacher salary is a paltry $35,277, ranking them 35th. Teachers in New Jersey have the 3rd highest average salary, but their students rank only 29th in terms of achievement. Over the past twenty years, New Hampshire has raised its average teacher salary 44%, more than any other state, but their average total SAT score has only risen by .2%. On the other hand, Illinois’ average SAT score has shot up 8.3% over the same time period, but they’ve only increased their teachers’ salary by 7.31%.

Another myth propagated by the education establishment is the notion that if schools had more money to spend on students (for essentials like jump ropes and glue sticks) then the kids would perform better. However, New Jersey, ranked 29th in student achievement, spends more money on each pupil ($10,900) than any other state, and Washington DC comes in second at $10,300 in expenditures per student. How are students in our nation’s capital faring scholastically? Well, let’s just say they’re doing slightly better than the state of Mississippi and the primate exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.

When taken into account all of the information indicating little to no connection exists between public school funding increases and student achievement, one is forced to question the motives and thought process of the mainstream education establishment and their extremely vocal tools. I don’t mind the National Education Administration and their eternal quest for more funding, but I would be far likely to support public education funding increases if the educators themselves could manage to swallow their pride and admit a shred of responsibility for the sorry state of education in America.

The efforts of the good teachers in the public school system -- the quality few who do an outstanding job despite the lack of money or recognition -- are often overshadowed by the constant, asinine call for more money to be indiscriminately thrown about.