Failing public schools?

“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” Falsely attributed to Joseph Goebbels.

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.” - Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

For more on both of these quotes, see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels.

“Failing public schools” is a sweeping statement that implies no public school is doing its job.

But nobody ever turns it around and says much about failing parents or bad peer pressure.  If a family constantly has the TV on, how well can a student do homework?  If peers constantly bad-mouth school, how much grit does it take to ask questions in class?  If a home has lots of lead contamination, how much can schools do to increase a student’s cognitive ability?

I think the “failing schools” mantra is pushed by those who don’t want to pay taxes to educate all the children and those who want to make a profit by taking away students from the public schools.

Well, my parents were products of public schools.  My wife and I are products of public schools.  Our two children are products of public schools.  Our grandchildren are products of public schools.  Two of these are products of Japanese public schools, but they are welcome as visitors to U.S. public schools.

If public schools have failed, it is not teaching enough civics. We have to look no farther than “president” Donald Trump to learn how badly private schools have taught civics.

See also “Charter School Achievement: Hype vs. Evidence”.

Bureaucracy can exist in any economic model

Many people complain about government bureaucracy as if it went away everything would be so much better. Unfortunately, bureaucracies occur in organizations of all types and sizes. They occur in government, in non-profits, and in profits.

We should also note that some employees have flexibility in almost any type of organization. I had a water inspector accept on my word that our usage dropped because I replaced a washer, not that something had happened to our meter.

The incident that triggered this blog entry was an automated call from a non-profit medical center reminding me of an appointment in two days. Some hours earlier that department had called me to move the appointment to next week. Left hand, please meet the right hand!

A couple of weeks ago I had sent an online problem report to a well-known computer manufacturer. I received a boiler plate response about checking that I had the latest version of the operating system and the latest version of the software with the problem. That information was automatically included in my report.

Today I discovered there was a work around to my problem, but it was not obvious. There were several non-intuitive steps involved. I sent a report to the agent who had initially responded to my problem report, including the suggestion that what I wanted should be a menu item. She thanked me for the report and suggested that I send the manufacturer a feedback suggestion. Duh! Couldn't she and shouldn't she do that herself? Shouldn't somebody in the call center be looking at the reports and extracting trends?

See also my "The Federal Government has no corner on bureaucracy", Reader Weekly, 2008-01-03.

Capitalism is a good thing except when it's a bad thing

Bill Maher wrote an interesting article about how capitalism has run amok in this country.

"New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit"