teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.

They’re not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master’s degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don’t need a bachelor’s in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don’t need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don’t need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.

Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It’s the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.

the issue is the metricization of education

Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.

Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don’t look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson’s latest “Number go down / Number go up” announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.

By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.

not to mention the changing in parenting

You can blame “parenting” for a single kid’s mistakes.

Once you start blaming “parenting” in the aggregate, you’re inevitably full of shit.

The common denominator in these school districts isn’t “parents” and its absurd to pretend otherwise.

Brilliant Stressand Effect.

Talarico certainly knows how to work the angles. One reason I’m bullish for him in the general. If anyone has a chance at flipping Texas, its a guy who makes $1 in spending feel like $100.

Harris chose to lose the most winnable election in history

Dems already shat the bed in 2022, handing Republicans a narrow majority in the House because they refused to pursue Congressional criminal misconduct from the prior administration or do anything about state voter disenfranchisement or gerrymandering while they controlled the federal government. Nevermind the clown car of corporate toadies and unloveable hacks they larded up with corporate donations.

Little reason to believe they’d do better in 2024, given that Biden made “supporting a genocide” and “rolling back COVID benefits” his central platforms for the next two years.

How is an election “winnable” when your party is married to policies everyone hates? It’s like complaining about Mitt Romney losing in 2012, when Obama was underwater. The GOP trotted out an absolutely odious corporate turd - a man who literally penned the editorial “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” four years earlier - and married him to a nepo-baby who hates social security as VP. Of course they fucking lost.

You don’t get to talk about an election being “winnable” if you insist sandbagging the primaries to run loser candidates in the general.

2024 was Trump’s election to lose. He capitalized on people’s disgust with liberals. He leaned heavily on TPUSA, QAnon, and other effective social media campaigns to juice MAGA support. He promised to bail out TikTok, the only company that wasn’t run by an American oligarch, while Biden was threatening to run them out of business. He rallied his base voters while liberals embarked upon the worst internal voter suppression campaign since 1968. And he did it all as fascist tendencies in the US were cresting.

Harris wasn’t running a winnable campaign. She was struggling (badly) to bail out a floundering Biden debacle.

If we don’t abolish this system we’re all going to die.

Everyone dies eventually. But this government seems intent on accelerating things.

You’d be hard pressed to find the kind of modern rhetoric around guns you see today before the Civil Rights Act.

Idk about that. I remember a zealous enthusiasm for guns and “freedom” in the South circa 1860.

All those southerners willing to slaughter their neighbors during the Bleeding Kansas incident weren’t using billy clubs

No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple.

This is why I look sideways at the “Americans only read at a 6th grade level” statistics. Because technically speaking you should be able to derive this answer from the content of the story without having it explicitly laid out. Only, the standardized question adds so much incoherent fluff to the narrative as to make deriving the answer ambiguous at best.

As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event

This still feels like a trick answer, because “owls are wise” is a cultural trope not included in the story itself in any meaningful way.

You could argue the crow is the wisest for discerning the possibility of a trick. And then you could argue that wisdom is not synonymous with correctness to justify why the crow was savvy but still wrong.

You might argue that the moose is the wisest, because it was able to identify the moral of the story in advance.

You might argue the hare is the wisest, because it knew it could win a race against a pineapple.

But all of this would need to be laid out in an actual fully-written argument. It’s not the sort of answer you can pick out of a multiple choice exam. It’s the a debate you can have between peers where the analysis of the work is more valuable than the final selection.

Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol

The story is highlighted precisely because it is nebulous and confusing. I suspect the authors of the question intended it to create the illusion of a weed out question by guaranteeing a low success rate at selecting the answer.

But you could achieve the same results by asking “What side will a coin land on if I flip it?” a. Heads, b. Tails, c. The Edge, d. The Coin will not land

Since there’s no explicitly correct answer, you are - at best - going to get a roughly even distribution of answers between a. and b. Then you get to report up to your bosses that you’re filtering out a certain number of students as “failures” without interrogating why they failed or what you’re even testing them to do.

Me, a Millennial: “Kids today will never understand technology like I understand technology…”

My best student, Reconecting…: “Gotta get this old turd off my ass so I can finish porting Gentoo to Codeberg.”

Keep posting this headline. I’ll keep upvoting it.

I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That’s when kids weren’t coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.

I gave my high school teachers fits because I’d sit in the back of the class and read my dad’s old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They’d be annoyed to see I wasn’t grinding my way through “Crime and Punishment” or “Great Expectations”, but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.

Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they’re getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been

• Larger class sizes
• Teachers with less education / professional experience
• Shorter school days / school years and bigger gaps in continuous education caused by the need to start work sooner

Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there’s one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.

It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn’t seem to match out with empirical evidence.

To Wit

Exploring the relationship between children’s knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes

If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.

People make money coming and they make money going. I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”, as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn’t really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.

If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You’ll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming “the kids today and their computers” is as good a vector for attack as anything.

Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.

It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing.

The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?

1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?
a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to

2. Who was the wisest?
a. the hare
b. moose
c. crow
d. owl

It’s just that they got every single other detail, including who the child abusers are, insanely wrong.

“Hillary Clinton is connected to a pedophile ring”

Yes! We’re finally pealing back the curtain. We’re on the case. Finally, this unholy cartel of human trafficking is going to be exposed.

“and only Donald Trump can bring it to light”

Fuuuuuuuuuuu-

The man was drowning in allegations and accusations ten years ago. He regularly used Epstein to source “models” for Victoria Secret ads and events. Talking about Wexner like he’s under investigation for human trafficking is like suggesting Jeffrey Dahmer might have bitten someone.

Thankfully I have other choices, so I choose neither.

At least post-COVID, there’s been a mini-revival of locally owned and operated restaurants owing to the space cleared by the office park real estate bust.

Lots of new little shops opening up. We’ll see how long they last.

The Goof Who Sat by the Door

Nancy Guthrie, 84-year-old mother of NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reportedly abducted from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026,

A prison volunteer also gave him a copy of a document titled “Warrior Society” that included a code of ethics that required Native Americans to serve the people, be honorable, kind, and not steal or be stingy. A prison guard searched his cell one day in 2005, and confiscated the AIM notes, along with the “Warrior Society” document. Both were classified as “written contraband.” Greybuffalo was written a disciplinary case and sentenced to 180 days in solitary confinement. The disciplinary charge was upheld in part by a federal district court in 2010.

Always worth reminding people that “solitary confinement” is recognized as a form of torture under international human rights law.

Not that the US has ever been opposed to torturing suspects or inmates as a form of punishment. But it bares repeating.

As Oliver detailed on “Ear Hustle,” the award-winning podcast created and produced from San Quentin State Prison, he came back to officers swarming his cell, which they had yellow-taped off like a real crime scene. Oliver was handcuffed and held in solitary confinement for the next eight years in California. His only offense was “possessing illegal contraband,” which also made him ineligible for new sentence under a 2012 California law easing life sentences on nonviolent “three strikes” convictions. (Oliver was finally freed in 2019 after serving 23 years.)

Vin Turbine

The bill was introduced by Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-MD) last December and would allow for a minimum of 20 House members and five senators to call for congressional review of a pardon, which would lead to a 60-day deadline for Congress to nullify that pardon with a two-thirds majority vote – similar to a veto override.

Listen, I think it’s great that we’re breaking the taboo of pardons being somehow sacrosanct.

But there’s exactly one person I can think of that would get 2/3rd of the Congress off their assess to block clemency against.

6 ‘Necessities’ Millennials Are Spending Money on That Hurt Their Finances

11 Things Gen Z Overspends On That Boomers Would Not Waste Their Money On

Young People Are ‘Doom Spending’ on Luxury Goods. Here’s Why.

Social media traps teens in cycles of unnecessary spending Consumerism is taking over the lives of young people, especially those on social media. It must be stopped.