Boy Punished For Calling Teacher “Ma’am” And A Mother Was Investigated For Letting Her 8-Year-Old Walk The Dog

Is America going completely and utterly insane?  Every day we get even more evidence that this country is going downhill really fast.  I am about to share with you some stories that deeply upset me, but it isn’t because anyone died.  Rather, these stories demonstrate that the America that so many of us once loved is dying.  Liberty and freedom are being eroded with each passing day, and we are rapidly becoming a European-style socialist state in which control freaks micromanage even the smallest details of our lives.  Even our speech is being heavily micromanaged, and anyone that gets out of line is likely to be cracked down upon really hard.  At this point, things have already gotten so bad that it is getting really difficult to determine what is safe to say and what isn’t safe to say.  For example, a 10-year-old boy in North Carolina just made national news because he was punished for calling his teacher “ma’am”

A 10-year-old boy in North Carolina was punished last week for referring to his female teacher as “ma’am.” The incident left his parents both concerned and confused, they told WTVD-TV.

Teretha Wilson noticed her son, Tamarion, seemed upset after leaving the bus Aug. 21 from his school in the town of Tarboro, she told the station. “I asked him what happened. He said he got in trouble for saying ‘yes ma’am’,” Wilson told WTVD’s Michael Perchick.

Are you kidding me?

If you can get kids to use “sir” and “ma’am” in this day and age it is actually a great accomplishment.  But apparently “ma’am” was not this particular teacher’s “preferred title”, and she insisted that little Tamarion quit using it.

And to make her point, she forced Tamarion to write out the world “ma’am” dozens of times on a piece of paper

Tamarion showed her a piece of paper with the word “ma’am” written dozens of times by hand, four times on every line, Wilson said. The boy said his teacher made him write it because he continued to call her “ma’am” after she asked him not to, the mother told WTVD.

This is just another indication of how pathetic our public schools have become.  In recent years we have witnessed a homeschooling boom all over the nation as parents have pulled their kids out of the public school system in record numbers

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 1.69 million kids between the ages of 5 and 17 were homeschooled, based on spring 2016 numbers. And that data comes just from the 15 states that track homeschooling, as well as Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix).

As strange as that first story was, this next one is even stranger.

USA Today is reporting that a mother in Illinois was “investigated” for allowing her 8-year-old daughter to walk the dog around the block…

A mother faced a visit from police and an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigation after she allowed her 8-year-old daughter to walk the family’s dog around the block alone on Aug. 2.

Stop the presses and call Robert Mueller!

An 8-year-old girl was allowed to walk the family dog around the block?

What is next?  Are we going to allow kids to bicycle down the street and run outside unsupervised when the ice cream truck comes?

Of course I am being sarcastic.  The truth is that the authorities in Illinois should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.  Literally dozens of people are being shot in the city of Chicago each week, and yet somehow they have time and resources to spend on something like this?

And it probably won’t surprise anyone that this all started with a phone call from a nosy neighbor

The incident happened as Widen’s daughter walked the family dog, Marshmallow, around the block. A stranger saw the girl walking the dog alone and called police, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Widen told the publication that she can see most of the block from her home’s windows. Walking the Maltese dog is the only time her daughter is unsupervised, she said.

I’m not that old, but when I was 8 years old my mother allowed me and my younger brother to freely wander around pretty much anywhere we wanted.

And we even lived in a foreign country at the time.

Yes, I know that times have changed, and this is something that I wrote about yesterday.  But is it really going to be necessary for us to lock our kids up at home all day?

I really detest what is happening to this country, and it is even infecting many of our kids.

For example, just the other day a little girl accused a man of urinating on her and calling her a racial slur.  That man’s life would have been ruined, but fortunately the little girl ultimately admitted that she had made it all up

An outrageous set of accusations claimed a man committed a disgusting act against a child while uttering a racial slur.

But after two days, we find out that the children involved were making it all up.

It started Wednesday when a woman living on Grand Rapids’ Northwest side said that a 5-year-old girl soaked with urine came running to her house. The story that allegedly came from the girl and her friends was that a man urinated on her in an alley in the 1000 block of Leonard Street NW and then used a racial slur against her.

Why can’t people just behave normally?

Sadly, we don’t even know what “normal” is anymore.  We live in “Bizarro America” where up is down, right is wrong and everyone just pretty much does whatever is correct in their own eyes.

We like to think that we are a “light” and an “example” for the rest of the world, but we aren’t.

Instead, the rest of the world is laughing at us, and we desperately need to get our act together.

This article originally appeared on The Economic Collapse Blog.  About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

3 Examples That Show How Common Core Is Destroying Math Education In America

Whenever you let federal bureaucrats get their hands on anything they are probably going to ruin it.  During the Obama administration, the Department of Education spearheaded a transformation of American education that was absolutely breathtaking.  Over a period of about five years, Common Core standards were implemented in almost every state in the entire nation.  Unfortunately, this has resulted in a huge step backward for public education in this country.  Common Core has been called “state-sponsored child abuse”, and it is a big reason why U.S. students are scoring so poorly on standardized tests compared to much of the rest of the world.

According to Wikipedia, at one point 46 states had adopted Common Core, but now some states are having second thoughts…

46 states initially adopted the Common Core State Standards, although implementation has not been uniform. At least 12 states have introduced legislation to repeal the standards outright,[1] and Indiana has since withdrawn from the standards.

Sadly, many parents don’t even understand how dramatically our system of education has been tampered with.  In her book entitled The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids, Joy Pullmann exposes how the Gates Foundation has been one of the key players in the effort to get Common Core introduced into classrooms all over America…

Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach … not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature … but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.

But this isn’t just an issue about control.  The truth is that the approach to teaching basic fundamentals such as how to add and how to subtract is fundamentally different under Common Core.

Let me share just three examples that show how much Common Core is changing the way that U.S. students learn math.  All of these examples have been floating around Facebook, and if you have never seen these before they are likely to make you quite angry.

If I asked you to subtract 12 from 32, how would you do it?  Well, the “new way” is much, much more complicated than how we were all taught to do it…

If that first one seemed bizarre to you, than you really aren’t going to like this one…

And this last one was so confusing that a parent with a degree in engineering decided to include his own commentary on his child’s homework…

How are kids supposed to function in the real world if this is how they are learning to do basic math?

Personally, I am going to teach my daughter that 9 + 6 equals 15.  But that isn’t how it is supposed to be done under Common Core.  You can watch a video of a teacher explaining the very convoluted Common Core way to solve that math equation right here.

And of course it isn’t just math that is the problem.  Common Core is systematically “dumbing down” our young people, and that may help to explain why the average U.S. college freshman now reads at a seventh grade level.

So what is the answer?

The first step in fixing our education system is to repeal Common Core.  But even in red states such as Idaho there is a lot of resistance

Since their inception, the Idaho Core Standards have been enmeshed in controversy.

Some legislators and citizens have pushed for a repeal of the Idaho Core Standards, the state’s version of Common Core standards in math and English language arts. Those repeal efforts have gone nowhere in the Legislature.

I don’t know what is wrong with our legislators.  The Republicans have full control in this state, and so there is absolutely no excuse for not getting something done.

As I end this article, I want to give you an idea of just how far the quality of education in America has fallen over the past 100 years.  In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 made a lot of headlines when it was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum.  As you can see, it is doubtful whether many of our college students would be able to pass such an exam today…

14 Facts That Prove That America’s Absolutely Pathetic System Of Public Education Deserves An ‘F’ Grade

One thing that almost everyone can agree upon is that our system of public education is broken.  We spend far more money on public education than anyone else in the world, and yet the results are depressing to say the least.  Considering how much we are putting into education, we should be producing the best students on the entire planet, but it just isn’t happening.  Personally, I attended public schools from kindergarten all the way up through law school, and the quality of education that I received was extremely poor.  Even on the collegiate level, most of the courses were so “dumbed down” that even the family dog could have passed them.  And of course millions of other people all over the country would say the same sorts of things about their own educations.  Many refer to what is happening to our society as “the dumbing down of America”, and if we don’t get things fixed the United States is on course to become a second class nation.

If you believe that I am exaggerating, I would like you to consider the following numbers.  The following are 14 facts that prove that America’s absolutely pathetic system of education deserves an “F” grade…

#1 Somewhere around 50 million students attend public schools in America today.

#2 Education is the most expensive item in 41 different state budgets.

#3 The latest PISA tests show that U.S. students are below average compared to the rest of the industrialized world…

One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

#4 A report from the Educational Testing Service found that American Millennials are way behind Millennials in most other industrialized nations…

Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.

#5 According to one very disturbing study, fewer than half of all high school graduates “are able to proficiently read or complete math problems”.

#6 According to U.S. News & World Report, “inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent.”

#7 In 2015, the percentage of students in our public schools coming from low income homes crossed the 50 percent mark.  That was the first time that had happened in at least 50 years.

#8 One study found that a whopping 76 percent of all high school graduates “were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.”

#9 The following are five numbers which show how far the quality of college education has fallen in the United States…

-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”

-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.”

-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”

-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages.”

-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

#10 Just 36 percent of all full-time college students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years, and just 77 percent of all full-time college students have earned a bachelor’s degree by the end of six years.

#11 One survey found that nearly 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…

#12 Another survey found that 29 percent of all U.S. adults cannot name the Vice-President.

#13 And yet another survey found that only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between the years of 1850 and 1900.

#14 Perhaps worst of all, 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East.

This is what happens when we put federal bureaucrats in charge of education.

All over the country there are calls to abolish the Department of Education.  For example, the following was published on CNBC

The DOE currently employs 5,000 government workers and has an annual budget of $73 billion, yet according to the CATO Institute, it has not affected student outcomes in any demonstrable way over its 40-year history . It has successfully created a system that requires educators to teach reams of “politically-correct” content and focus on scoring well on standardized tests. It has created an atmosphere of testing in our schools, putting intense pressure on teachers and students to “ace the test” rather than mastering the material. This promotes a culture of teaching to the test and score tampering.

Unfortunately, abolishing the Department of Education is not going to be easy, because there is a tremendous amount of money at stake.  And whenever there is a tremendous amount of money at stake, there are going to be very powerful interests that are determined to keep things just the way that they are…

The major stakeholders in K-12 public education are at an impasse. Teachers’ Unions are primarily concerned with self-preservation, maintaining extravagant perks for union administrators and exerting disproportionate political influence. A handful of publishing houses sell us $8 billion worth of warmed- over text books every year. Testing companies collectively spent tens of millions lobbying in states and on Capitol Hill from 2009 to 2014. These politically powerful, entrenched special interests are heavily invested in maintaining the failing status quo.

But even though there is going to be a lot of resistance, I am going to try to abolish the Department of Education anyway.  I believe that full control over education should be returned to the state and local levels, but that is just the beginning.

Ultimately, we need to rebuild our system of education from the ground up.  Instead of politically-correct indoctrination centers that endlessly pump progressive propaganda into impressionable young minds, we need to transform our public schools into institutions that focus on the essentials.  We need a renewed emphasis on reading, writing, math and the skills that will enable our young people to function successfully once they get out into the real world.

At one time America’s system of education was the best in the world, and we can get there again.  But of course the left is going to fight against the changes that need to be made every step of the way.