Here's a chart from 2010 to 2021 (a bit down the page) which will suit this argument well. You can find others going back to the seventies if you like and it will not help your assertion a bit. I'm using the short table for ease. Surely we can all agree (for the current purposes) with the left that Trump, the Bad Orange Man(TM) is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER and thus his era would have the most draconian cuts those evil Republican scum ever implemented, right? Well LOOK AT THE TABLE. Gaze upon the massive reduction in education spending during his 1st term (2017-2020)!!!

Oh, goodness gracious, (or Golly!, or WTF?) pick your expression to align with your politics....

Yep. That's right. Education spending goes up and up and up every year no matter who is in the White House and no matter which party has the Presidency, or the Congress, or the state Governorship, etc. (well, technically, it dipped a bit during one presidency of the post 1970s... Barack Obama's, but it was not by much and probably did not matter at all) Education spending is the single most-popular normal government spending, other than social security and medicare, in the country and BOTH parties just keep increasing it. The constant chorus that Republicans "gut education spending" (like, presumably, some sort of fish...the imagery is probably useful) is just a huge political lie that works really well for the left when it energizes the teachers to get out there and support Democrat political candidates.

I'm not pointing this out because I think the Republicans are any better on education (I do not believe they are). I'm pointing it out because I believe that Objective reality matters and we CANNOT have honest debates and CANNOT get to any good solutions if we cannot all at least start from a common set of FACTS. I also think we've had enough extreme rhetoric lately, and we all ought to tap the breaks on it - it leads to incredibly dark places. No matter how much we each might like it, we DO NOT each get our own truths.

First, those teachers are, in may places paid quite well when you consider their annual pay and benefits compared to other people of the same educational level and then take into account that they work a LOT fewer days per year. industrial employees in this country, for example, do NOT take months off every year.

Second, and it's a BIGGIE, is that most teachers in the US are government employees, and their unions have negotiated INSANE payouts that most Americans are completely unaware of. The typical teacher in the US can retire after 20 or so years of working... at FULL PAY, and with inflation adjustments. So, if a person starts teaching at 25, retires at 46 or even 50, they often take NO PAY CUT and still keep excellent tax-payer-funded insurance. If they live to be over 70, as a great many do, they end up having taken so much money from the taxpayers that they were effectively paid well over TWICE the amount they were complaining about during their 20 years of teaching. Oh, and since the pay was effectively spread-out over twice the years, they are taxed a lot less on their total haul. I'm not aware of very many private sector employees with anything like that sort of pay and benefits scheme. I have a couple of former teacher relatives who retired the moment they realized they'd suffer NO loss of income by retiring and would no longer have to commute or face a room of kids.

There are 2 points you listed I will at least partially agree on: #4 is too true; the modern school is far too willing to back down in the face of an upset parent. I suspect it's partially due to fears of various ethnic/cultural matters arising (not ACTUALLY arising, just fears of them, and no specific ethnic group presumed) but it's also another problem: earlier generations of PARENTS would back-up the teacher when Johnny or Susie acted badly, and Johnny or Susie KNEW this and behaved in class (this was probably assisted by things like dress codes that used to be in effect). I also agree on #7 that there's entirely too much stuff that can be taught at home that the schools are instead wasting time pushing for political/ideological reasons; the educational system seems bent on creating "the new man" in a dream of creating a Star Trekkian future, but no such future is possible if the kiddies are going to be illiterates with no math skills, no historical knowledge, and no ability to reason.

Parents being satisfied that the schools are good babysitters while they're away at work is no indicator of the quality of the teaching or the curriculum. The fact that the parents have a brief encounter with the teacher, perhaps once, and the teacher seems friendly and the facilities look nice is also not a meaningful gage of anything.

This is why parents approve of THEIR schools while the test results show worse results. Of course, by THIS point, the current generation of parents were, themselves, dumbed-down by their educations in that system a few years earlier and are therefore even less capable of objectively measuring the quality.

It's NOT the same thing, but it is in some ways related to the stats that always show that most people hate congress, but like their own representative...

Anybody who has been in business, particularly in a technical field, for a number of years and has dealt with wave after wave of new employees over the years has probably seen the results of the education system up-close-and-personal.

It ain't pretty.

Over the past 20 years in particular, I have come to dread having to bring in a new young employee; it's like each year brings a new level of stupid. I've had junior people in the past several years hunkering down in their work areas, thinking they're not being seen and heard, calling former classmates and begging for help with tasks that the person in that same spot 10 years earlier would have easily accomplished. I've reached a point where I no longer want people educated in the public schools and instantly favor a home-schooled person. The home-schooled nearly always have better math and English skills, better work ethic, and are more creative and less cellphone addicted. I'll also favor the self-taught over the college-taught any day of the week. I think we've reached a critical point where many profs haven no real world working experience in the fields they're teaching, and are thus pumping-out grads with the wrong skills, used to using the wrong tools and the wrong methods. I'm not interested in wasting the time of senior employees teaching remedial classes to the unskilled with diplomas.

Oh, and I REFUSE to talk to the parents of any of these people. Previous generations went off and fought in SHOOTING WARS at ages 16-20 without mommy and daddy, but the current generation seems to think it's appropriate to get support from mommy and daddy after their college years. [eyeroll]

There was NO drop in education spending during the Reagan years... in fact the ONLY drop in K-12 spending in the US on a year-to-year basis was under Barack Obama. That drop is even more notable when you look at elementary & secondary education, but of course the secondary is not so much what this article is about. Year after year after year, education spending is the thing government has the easiest time raising taxes to fund; parents are often willing to vote for higher taxes even when they're already struggling financially. If you look at those charts and then look at student performance over those same years, you'll realize you're looking at a SHOCKING level of failure, and it only gets worse when you realize that the educational system has, for decades, been trying to hide this by periodically making the testing easier. If the tests had remained at the same difficulty level over the decades, it would be impossible for anybody not in a straight jacket in a padded cell to defend.

Just because some political jerks TALK big about education it does NOT mean they increase funding for it, and just because some others talk about reforming education or cutting the educational bureaucracy, it does NOT mean they're cutting total funding. We have a deeply-entrenched educational bureaucracy in this country that, along with their allies in the two massive teachers unions, squeals like a stuck pig and pretends students will be harmed any time anybody tries to reduce the administrator-to-student ratio. The fact that they're ranting and raving does not, however, mean ANYTHING is being done to reduce the dollars allocated per student as the actual data illustrates.

People need to learn to stop being such easy meat puppets for the political activists within government.

Incidentally, the fact that the standardized brick-and-mortar school house in America got standardized early in the industrial revolution in order to put every American kid into an educational machine and mold them into cookie-cutter diploma-certified high school grads that employers could stuff into any positions in industry like standardized gears in a machine does NOT mean that this is the best model for educating a human being. The one-size-fits-all model served BUSINESS interests well, and probably made military training easier in the era of the draft, but it cannot possibly have served the best interests of the individual human minds being trained in it and by now we probably should write it off as obsolete. The fact that this particular form of schooling serves a large number of ADULTS who work in the system may well be nice for them, but that also does not make it the ideal system that cannot be messed with. The kids should be first, no matter how many adult education workers get hurt feelings or even pink slips. After all, these are the very people who so often insist that THEY care more about the kids than everyone else.

Far too many people were told to go into debt and attend college and get that magic degree, only to find themselves in debt, and working jobs that either require no degree or do not line-up with the degree they got. Also, most people who went to college had the experience of being required to take a bunch of junk courses they had no interest in, and which were unrelated tho their majors, supposedly in the interest of becoming a "well-rounded" person - but are aware that many of these classes were more of a partisan indoctrination (politically or culturally) rather than being the traditional classical education stuff.

You can tell people all day long that they and their kids and grand kids all NEED those college degrees and all that debt, but as long as they see with their own eyes that this is not actually needed, large numbers of people will not buy-in.

Incidentally, before somebody replies critically, Yes I DID indeed serve my time in college, and I think it's highly important for people to do it IF THEY ARE TAKING THE RIGHT MAJOR FOR A GOOD CAREER. We NEED doctors and engineers and scientists etc with degrees, but we do NOT need carpenters, plumbers, store security people, baristas, etc with useless fluff degrees and so much debt they'll never be able to buy a house and live comfortably. If somebody is going to end-up in a blue collar career, they should not be wasting 4 years of their lives and going deeply into debt with college, and it's abusive to counsel them to the contrary. We sadly developed a system in which a lot of people have been told that blue collar jobs are awful and only stupid people do them, and this is wrong on both points.

They want the public to think it's OUR fault they keep shoveling out fake numbers with loud pronouncements, and then later try to slip-through huge corrections,and they don't want us to think this through. There's no need for them to get any data this way! Every single valid employer in the USA is required by law to file accurate job data with the IRS as they take part of every person's paycheck on a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly basis and send it in. Any increase or decrease in employment will be immediately reflected in tax payments tied to specific employee SSIDs the with the first filing of taxes to the IRS after an employee is hired/fired/layed-off. When the employees file their annual taxes, they are required to indicate what they do fr a living (plumber, doctor, engineer, teacher, etc). With the mountain of required-by-federal-law-to-be-accurate data constantly cascading into the government, the BLS does not need any phone surveys to get good data; in fact they probably should not EXIST as an agency (the IRS and the Social Security Administration ought to have very reliable labor data at all times).

The BLS has a LONG track record of reporting bad numbers, and the seemingly-partisan way they're always wrong and then later correct (seemingly always with numbers and updates (in magnitude, direction, and timing of release) that favor one political party) lead many people to be VERY suspicious. Random errors would be in random directions, not directions that conveniently line-up with partisan interests. This most-recent hugely positive data before the presidential election end then huge downward revision post-election is one of their largest ever and seems to have gotten the attention of this administration which was hurt both by the initial reporting (making their opponent look better during the campaign) and by the update (making them look bad now that they're in office). People who think humans become non-partisan saints when they land government jobs may see nothing wrong here, but they should at least understand why others "smell a rat".

The vast majority of "pollsters" calling are working for companies or politicians who are NOT trying to accurately obtain public opinions in order to change THEIR behavior and better serve the public, but instead are trying to generate data to help them figure out how to better mislead and manipulate the public. There's a HUGE difference between these things. We would all like a politician to poll us and find out what we want and then do his/her best to achieve what we want... but the politicians want their people to poll us in order to find out how to better "tailor their messaging" (i.e. lie to us in ways more likely to convince us to send money or vote) while they go ahead and do what their party leaders or biggest donors insist they do no matter what WE want.

Why on Earth should anybody help jerks figure out how to better lie to them?

YOU are not "coding" at all. You are asking a hacked-together-and-modified human language processing experiment to cut and paste random chunks of code from the internet into a blob that might well compile and even run, but which YOU neither understand nor can claim credit for "writing". You're not gonna know the code, not going to be able to fix it or maintain it, and you certainly are not a "coder" or a "programmer" or a "developer"... you started as a specifier, and then turned into a coach/critic for a dumb machine in a big sloppy feedback loop of "that was closer to what I want, let me be more specific".

I'd fire anybody I caught using AI on any of my projects.

These shortcuts/buzzwords/"new methods" that so-called developers keep wanting to use to supposedly go faster better and cheaper are just getting junkier and junkier...

Cats & dogs, living together! Oh, no! People are going to be DYING en masse, like never seen before!... well... ok... like not seen since 1970 [eyeroll]

Are we REALLY at a point where a president proposes an accounting change to a policy 90% of us will never notice that will return to a system that worked for many decades just 55 years ago deserves all sorts of bloviating about corruption and ulterior motives and conspiracies just because some people are just full of hate?

The change from bi-annual to quarterly was not noticed by most Americans. It created lots more busy work, and quite frankly it DID contribute (though it did not CREATE) to the shortening of the planning horizons for lots of bad executives. Instead of trying to make each semester of business look good, execs got fixated on the even shorter-term and needed good quarterlies. Switching from quarters back to semesters is not likely to be noticed by most, and [sadly] I doubt it'll do what some in this administration probably hope and get corporate America to stop being so short-sighted. Whatever the effect, most of us will not notice nor care, and people need to stop trying to turn every single damned policy proposal into a hyper-political argument and evidence that people we disagree with on other issues are incompetent, or evil. I think we've had enough of that recently.

the bleed air systems of airliners DO NOT use air that has gone [as implied] all the way through the engine.

Essentially, what's happening is that the cabin needs to be pressurized for the safety and comfort of the people on board, and the jet already has one or more air compressors on board (each engine effectively IS one) so to save weight and complexity the compressor PORTION of the engine is doing double-duty. A jet engine essentially sucks cold clean low pressure air in the front, runs it through a bunch of fan blades to compress it, (with a side-effect that it gets quite warm) then runs it into a cumbustor section where fuel and fire are introduced to drive the temp way up, thus driving the pressure way up, and then into the tailpipe where it exits the engine for thrust. The bleed air system taps into the warm compressed air BEFORE the combustor stage and routes some of that air to anti-icing systems and such, but also cools and routes some of that air into the cabin. Since outside air at high altitudes is generally quite clean, these systems are often unfiltered. The problems generally are tied to things like lubrication fluids contaminating, or engine/plane specific failure modes.

The AOPA has a nice page on it here for those interested.

The Nixon "Southern Strategy" is the excuse that liberal teachers and professors have sold to people as a supposed evidence that the Democrats and Republicans flipped sides in the South in the 1968-1976 window. It's provably false by simply looking at election results.

Yes, Nixon tried a "Southern Strategy"... but it failed. The South continued to elect Democrats all the way until Reagan in the 1980s, and even though the South supported the Reagan PRESIDENCY it kept sending Democrats to the House and Senate. In fact, Clinton/Gore got the Southern vote in 1992 and 1996.

Think it through further; it was Republican votes that pushed the civil rights bills over the finish line in the 1950s and 1960s (southern Dems voted "no" and the GOP voted in higher percentages for those bills than the Dems) and it was the Republican president Lincoln who freed the slaves. It was Democrat president Woodrow Wilson who segregated the federal government along racial lines. It was Republican President Eisenhower who, only a decade before this imaginary political flip, sent federal troops into the South to push back on racist Southern Democrat governors. With all that context, you truly believe that the warm-and-fuzzy bubbly [yeah, sarcasm] Nixon convinced southern racists to protest Democrats slipping toward moderation on racism, by moving en-masse to the Republican party (who most Southerners in the 1960s still hated for Sherman's march through the South)??? Really? In the 1960s in the South you still routinely heard Southerners refer to the Civil War as "the War of Northern Aggression" and express hatred for Lincoln and his supposed war crimes against the South [eyeroll].

Ignore the fairy tales by biased educators and look at the raw data. You're on Slashdot, so I presume you know how to look at data and give it some weight. Use some common sense too.

The Elephant party has TONS of flaws, but history really is not on the side of the Jackass party in this area. Sorry.

You THINK those Pharma ads are (like normal ads) intended to get consumers to buy a thing... how innocent.

The ads cannot be for that purpose when the "consumer" is not allowed to buy the product. Like everybody else, I then assumed the fall-back position that these ads (which USED TO BE ILLEGAL) were designed to get little elderly people to pester their doctors into prescribing pills they did not need... BUT those sorts of pills are NOT where Pharma gets its money, AND while some doctors probably could get worn down and cave-in to such pestering, I suspect most would stand firm and not make such prescriptions.

Those ads for prescription drugs on TV are, I now believe, for an entirely different purpose: Blackmail. Old-school mafia style (not spoken openly, just implied).

A company spends MOUNTAINS of money running ads for a product consumers cannot buy on every TV channel that has news outlets. Then we have a health crisis in which the company will make BILLIONS by convincing government to buy very expensive experimental medications and pressure everybody to take them (hundreds of millions of doses to be made and sold in bulk quantities to governments, CHA-CHING!). In this scenario, what SHOULD happen - but does not? serious critical Investigative reporting. Why not? Why does not ONE broadcast news channel do ANY critical investigations of the company or its experimental product? Could it be because management of every TV station involved fears losing a vast amount future of ad revenue if it makes the advertiser mad by investigating that advertiser? I could well be wrong, but nothing else makes better sense to me...

As a general rule, I hate conspiracy theories. Stories like this one, therefore, make life rather difficult at times.

How do you tell the nuts to take off their foil hats and drop the rants about secret cabals of rich& powerful people trying to live forever by harvesting organs from young&healthy ordinary people, when the world's four nastiest dictators get together and age caught on a hot mike discussing living forever by taking transplanted organs from other people, AND when one of the snakes in the conversation has actually been harvesting organs from people?

The fact that they then get the video taken down is just the frosting on the cake.

I think I have lost the ability to argue against this one [sigh]

On a certain level, I'd have been tempted to agree with you on it being OK to "teach to the test", but I have three problems with it, one of which you caught and ack'd:

1. (the one you hit) if the tests get dumbed-down (the current strategy of the entire American educational establishment over the past 30 or so years) then the teaching auto-aligns to the dumber setting. Definitely more of a bug than a feature in my book...

2. Depending on how it's done, it does not get deeply into the "how" and "why" of math (not the "how do I do it?" but rather the "how does this WORK?") which I suspect leaves many kids with an insecure grip on math - not a good foundation for higher learning. As an example, let me highlight the idea of teaching kids "math shortcuts" (where the kid learns a method or scheme to get a fast answer but has no clue as to how and why the scheme works and may not know when to apply it (or NOT to apply it))

3. Some kids become VERY good at learning how to pass tests, but are nearly paralyzed when they need to apply the material that the test purports to show that they know. I have seen this up-close. Many years ago I had peers who took classes to learn to ace the SAT and some of them tested very highly (particularly on the math section) but, to my knowledge, nearly all of them switched away from science and engineering majors in college, and usually because of the math.

We seem to lack a good way to distinguish between the kids who really learn a subject well, and kids who learn to TEST well in that same subject, and while we'd all really love to presume that a kid's teacher will "just know" which kids are "getting it", the truth is that many teachers lack that skill, and while many others might be ABLE to, our current brick-and-mortar industrial age model of schools often puts too many kids in the class and there's simply not the one-on-one time needed.