Signs of the Apocalypse I

Do you know what incompetent educators do when they utterly fail to teach children English in an English speaking country, children of parents who speak no other language? They decide that they’ll elevate the garbage those children do speak to language level and declare victory. Give it a catchy name like “ebonics” and give it no more thought. Problem solved.

Oh but we’d be myopic if we thought ebonics was the first time. The same process degraded Latin into Italian over a few hundred years and when someone with an IQ above room temperature wrote something decent in the new mongrel dialect, Italian’s place was secured as a language in history. Word. …err…Parola!

If you don’t like test results, you can either raise the level of performance or you can lower expectations. At every step our Teacher’s Union has fought for lowering expectations and getting rid of any kind of test, benchmark, or measure of performance that would make them accountable for doing their job. We can’t fire the bad ones and socialist policies of seniority, tenure, and command economy style salaries mean that we can’t keep the good ones by paying them what they deserve and what we could afford if we didn’t need to support mediocrity with the same budget.

Our schools are failing and it shows:

Now most of you lefties out there will squawk that teachers need more money and more perks. Barack Obama has said as much in several of his speeches, just like every Democratic candidate before him in history.

That might be true, but unlike your idea of bribing the NEA with anything it wants, if we are to pay more, we need to be paying different (and better) people. Most of our current teachers need to be kicked to the curb or given jobs flipping burgers. If we are to pay more, we need to be getting more in return and that means firing huge numbers of idiot teachers. And that’s saying nothing of the bloat, the untrimmed fat, the excess of “administrators.” These wack jobs severely outnumber the teachers and they do little and are accountable to no one.

Paying more money to TEACHERS instead of administrators is not what the NEA wants to hear. Paying more money to DIFFERENT teachers instead of the bottom of the employment barrel we have now is not what the NEA wants to hear. They don’t want more money for better teachers, they want more money for the crap we have now, just so long as a fixed percent of every salary comes back into their coffers. They don’t want standards, they want job security for teachers which translates into guaranteed cash flows for them.

Interestingly enough, Mr. Obama has more to say when he gets specific, and the NEA doesn’t like what it hears. As nicely as an NEA ass kissing candidate could possibly be without risking their wrath, Obama told the NEA last year that he supports merit pay. Merit pay is anathema to the NEA and most of its members for the simple reason that most of them lack any merit whatsoever. I’ll do without the promise of riches Obama used to soften the blow of merit pay, but even hearing those words out of a Democrat is refreshing.

In fact, despite disagreeing with almost everything Mr. Obama wants to do with this country, I have to admit that listening to him speak is refreshing. He’s really the only orator running for President and you’d really have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find the last orator of note. Bush senior was tinny and annoying, Clinton was a say-anything sleaze, and Bush junior is a mush mouth. If you had to quote the first two, you’d likely recall a vehement lie over anything inspirational (read my lips, no new taxes; I did not have sexual relations with that woman), and anything inspirational the last one has said is buried in all of the spoonerisms and gaffs he produces on a daily basis. All three will be forgotten to history, yet the great orators past are still relevant. No one name Bush or Clinton will ever join their ranks.

Now, would Mr. Obama be as inspirational if he were speaking in vernacular instead of pristine English? Would he be giving the Clinton machine a run for their money, winning over huge percentages of uppity well to do whites if he could be dismissed like the holy and tax free “Reverends” Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson and their pale imitations of King-speak? Or even worse if he spoke like your average urban or suburban high schooler? Not a chizzle in hizzle, my nizzle.

Language is the best proxy for intelligence we have. People who speak well are assumed to be intelligent and people who speak poorly are assumed to be idiots. A nice British accent will even add a few points to that perception, along with bonuses to credibility and authority. Why do you think a plethora of advertisers in America use accented announcers to push their products, especially when they are appealing to class, intelligence, and trustworthiness?

If you want to be taken seriously with your bumper sticker sized mottos, or tattoo length messages to the world, at least get the spelling right people. Grammar and Spelling are the things DREAMS are made of. American dreams. Presidential dreams.