False Economy in the Schools | Eastern North Carolina Now

False Economy in the Schools

BY: HOOD RICHARDSON

The outrageous incompetence of claiming 1.4 million dollars of teachers’ salaries paid by the State of North Carolina is a savings to Beaufort County by closing the Snowden school prompted me to consider some other irregularities in school expenditures. The State of North Carolina pays teacher salaries, not the county. For the Beaufort County Schools to claim this is a savings probably goes as much to fraud as it does to incompetence.

I am concerned about the amount of computer or online course work that takes place in all of education. This mode of false teaching is used more and more from kindergarten through public schools, to colleges and those PhD degrees that are handed out after one has paid enough money to that university without a campus. Most of these computerized courses involve pushing the correct key and not stringing the subject work together to come to a conclusion based on logic. Hands on the computer keyboard are not the same thing as hands on the pencil and textbook.

The Beaufort County School System pays between $100,000 and $400,000 for various computerized curriculum programs. There are usually no textbooks. Sometimes work sheets can be printed. The content on most of these programs is heavily laced with the teachings of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), CRT (Critical Race Theory) and socialist and communist indoctrination. These teachings are contrary to the beliefs of the founding fathers and the Constitution of the United States.

Most public-school textbooks cost about 75 dollars. For purposes of teaching the basics in public schools these books should be good for at least ten years or until worn out. That means we could buy 1,300 textbooks for each of the $100,000 spent on computerized curriculums. There are about 6,000 students in the Beaufort County Schools. Would there be 1,300 students taking the same course each year. Very unlikely.

A computer program called i-Ready used to evaluate student progress came up for renewal at the July School Board meeting. The cost of the program went from about $100,000 per year to about $140,000 this year. From my perspective, sitting in the audience, this was not a good deal. Important questions were being asked by Charles Hickman and Stacey Davis. How many students use it? What is it for? It sounded like we are using only a small part of the $140,000 program. Who benefits and how is it used to improve student proficiency? The item was to be voted on at the next meeting. Suddenly RINO (Republican In Name Only) Carolyn Walker made the motion to fast track the expenditure with an immediate vote. All of the “uninformed” board members climbed on board and voted for another useless and expensive computer program.

Most of these computerized curriculums are in the cloud and can be used for about three years. Then they are cut off. We pay another $100,000 for another three years. It is easy to see that we pay $330,000 over ten years for a low-quality product. We should be paying $100,000 for ten years’ use of a good product which is textbooks.

There are advantages to the school staff for not purchasing textbooks. Books have to be inventoried and stored. Records have to be kept on who has them and who returned them. Parents have to be contacted whose children did not return books. The school board has to have a textbook return policy. Teachers have to follow the textbook and be familiar with it. Teachers have to prepare tests and lectures based on the textbook. Teachers have to interact with students. None of this has to be done with a computer program.

Parents and the public need to wake up and become aware of the inferior education their children and future generations are getting. One problem is that we are entering the third generation of poor education, and many people do not know the difference between good and bad.

Defenders of electronic teaching tell us that the above statements are not true. All we have is their word.  With computerized teaching, parents and the public never see what is being taught unless they sit in the classroom. Whereas, with textbooks and classical teaching methods, parents can have access to the textbook and the test papers. Canned electronic curriculums offer the perfect way to indoctrinate young minds without parents or the public having a clue as to what is going on.

Almost all teaching requires visual aids, especially if the instructor is competent in the subject. Visual aids are one way teachers interact with students. These canned courses fail to provide adequate opportunity for interaction. This is an important part of the learning process.

Computerized course work is how the modern education system erroneously arrived at not teaching cursive writing. Why do we need to write or sign anything if it can be done on the computer, they ask?

There are huge reductions in work for teachers using computerized curriculums. Reduced lecture time, not having to prepare lessons, and reduced time grading papers are some of the advantages. The tradeoffs are students who never become intimate with the course material, and are not focused in the logic of the subject. They passed the course because they punched the right computer key.

Computers allowed the recent debacle on pronouns to run to ridiculous levels. It was easy to sew confusion and indoctrinate young minds who were using the computer programs, whereas a textbook would have been absolute. My North Carolina eighth grade English textbook said “The masculine denotes both the feminine and the neuter”. Students who had the textbook were much better educated than those who had the computer.