Ignorant Matt - Damon’s silly teacher rant
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Topic: Ignorant Matt - Damon’s silly teacher rant
Posted By: TudorBrown
Subject: Ignorant Matt - Damon’s silly teacher rant
Date Posted: Aug 05 2011 at 1:26pm
Ignorant Matt
Damon’s silly teacher rant
By Michelle Malkin
Actor Matt Damon is a walking public-service reminder to immunize your children early and often against La-La Land disease.
In
Damon’s world, all public-school teachers are selfless angels.
Government workers and Hollywood entertainers are impervious to economic
incentives. Anyone who disagrees is a know-nothing, “corporate
reformer” ingrate who hates education.
Last week, the liberal
box-office star addressed a “Save Our Schools” march in Washington at
the behest of his mother, a professor of early-childhood education. He
attacked standardized tests. He praised all the public-school teachers
who “empowered” him and unlocked his creative potential by rejecting
“silly drill- and-kill nonsense.” Damon decried the demoralization of
teachers by ruthless, results-oriented free marketeers whom he mocked as
“simple-minded.”
What Damon’s superficial tirade lacked,
however, was any real-world understanding of the deterioration of
core-curricular learning in America. Students can’t master simple
division or fractions because today’s teachers -- churned out through
lowest-common-denominator grad schools and shielded from competition --
have barely mastered those skills themselves. Un-educators have
abandoned “drill-and-kill” computation for multicultural claptrap and
fuzzy math, traded in grammar fundamentals for “creative spelling” and
dropped standard civics for save-the-earth propaganda.
Consequence:
bottom-basement US student scores on global assessments over the last
two decades. Blaming the tests is blaming the messenger. The liberal
education establishment’s response to its abject academic failures? Run
away. This is why the Save Our Schools agenda championed by Damon calls
for less curricular emphasis on math and reading -- and more focus on
social justice, funding and “equity” issues.
Out: Reading is fundamental.
In: Feeling is fundamental.
After
his drippy pep talk absolving teachers of any responsibility for
America's educational morass, Damon lashed out at a young reporter who
had the audacity to ask him about the negative impact of lifetime
teacher tenure. “In acting, there isn’t job security, right,”
Reason.tv's Michelle Fields asked Damon. “There is an incentive to work
hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job. So why isn't
it like that for teachers?”
It's elementary that people will work
longer and harder if they know they will be rewarded. There's nothing
anti-teacher about the question. (And before teacher-unions goons go on
the attack, I am the child of a public-school teacher and the mother of
two children in an excellent public charter school by choice.) But
Damon's hinges came undone when confronted with the mild question.
“You
think job insecurity makes me work hard?” he retorted. “That's like
saying a teacher is going to get lazy when she has tenure.” Damon
unleashed crude profanities on Fields. “A teacher wants to teach,” Damon
fumed with his mother next to him. “Why else would you take a sh- -ty”
salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really loved to
do it?"
Never mind that most out-of-work Americans would find nothing
“sh- -ty” about earning an average $53,000 annual salary plus health
and retirement benefits for a 180-day work year.
Damon went on to
deride standard, mainstream behavioral economic principles as
“intrinsically paternalistic” and “MBA-style thinking.” And when the
young reporter's cameraman pointed out that there are bad apples in the
teaching profession as in any profession, Damon called him “sh- -ty,”
too.
Tinseltown stars can afford to put emotion over logic,
progressive fantasy over practical reality. The rest of us are stuck
with the bill. And those whom bleeding-heart celebrities purport to care
most about -- the children -- suffer the consequences of bad ideas.
Interminable
teacher tenure in America's largest school districts, from New York to
Chicago to Los Angeles, has produced a rotten corps of incompetent (at
best) and dangerous (at worst) educators coddled by Big Labor. As the
DC-based Center for Union reports, “In many major cities, only one out
of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons. . . . In 10
years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated
from New Jersey's schools.”
By contrast, as the educational
documentary “Waiting for Superman” pointed out, one out of every 57
doctors loses his or her license to practice medicine, and one out of
every 97 lawyers loses their license to practice law.
In Los Angeles,
it’s not just meanie Tea Partiers making the case for abolishing
teacher tenure. When the Los Angeles Times exposed how the city's tenure
evaluation system rubber-stamped approvals and ignored actual
performance, the district superintendent admitted: “Too many ineffective
teachers are falling into tenured positions -- the equivalent of jobs
for life.” USC education professor Julie Slayton acknowledged: “It's
ridiculous and should be changed.”
Pop quiz: Would multimillionaire
Matt Damon apply the same warped employment practices and dumbed-down
curricular standards to his own accountants that he champions for
America's public-school teachers? Film at 11.
mailto:malkinblog@gmail.com - malkinblog@gmail.com
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Replies:
Posted By: John Beagle
Date Posted: Aug 05 2011 at 2:06pm
Education is Waiting for Superman
Bias in Education is alive and well in the ‘drop out factories’ of America. In a new movie Guggenheim the director of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, yes the Al Gore film, does a much better job of telling the truth about our failing education system. Schools in America are indeed failing. It might take all the superhero moms and dads in the world to save our schools.
In the superman movies, the hero rushes in to save the day. Where is superman to save Anthony from a family legacy of drug abuse or Daisy a fifth grader in a failing school system. Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim shocks us back to reality when he tells the stories of real life American school children. They have a face and a name, Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. WAITING FOR SUPERMAN follows a these promising kids in a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth.
The film is essentially a review of public education, surveying “drop-out factories” and “academic sinkholes,” methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems. Guggenheim also questions teachers’ unions, which sometimes act against the best interests of students.
Full Post: http://www.biasededucation.com/2010/10/06/education-is-waiting-for-superman/ - http://www.biasededucation.com/2010/10/06/education-is-waiting-for-superman/
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http://www.johnbeagle.com/" rel="nofollow - John Beagle
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