Do your job - then maybe we'll talk

Public education, once a legitimate source of pride and achievement in our country, has descended into an abyss of low expectations and misdirection. Let's talk about the locus of low expectations.

One of the reasons that I'm not crazy about the involvement of government into what ought to be the affairs of individual citizens, is that even if I agree with the cause, I don't generally see the government as the best answer. I simply don't see a lot of evidence that the government has achieved particularly high levels of universal success with the relatively few things that they are actually supposed to be doing.

The reason that I'm not in favor of government run healthcare, for instance, is that the VA, Medicare and Obamacare are templates for what happens when you let the government run healthcare for you. Anyone embracing any of the above has abysmally low standards.

Now even the erstwhile party of small government, the Republicans, want to go where angels fear to tread. Former Republican Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recently penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed with his own wish list of government healthcare mandates. My favorite part of the piece was Jindal's promotion of telehealth as an answer to what ails us.

Said no one, ever, who's spent much time on the phone with customer service.

Perhaps the most disturbing government intrusion into the lives of citizens is the current overreach into the affairs of families of school-aged children via public education. This issue, by itself, is very likely to spell doom for the Democratic Party during the upcoming mid-terms, as parents from all walks of life, and with a variety of social and political affiliations, respond to gross intrusions into their ability to raise their own children in the manner they best deem fit.

Public education is a basic responsibility of government - and has been for more than a century. For most of that time we did a commendable job of promoting upward mobility, along with career and personal satisfaction, through a robust and effective system of public education.

One of the principal reasons that families from impoverished nations around the world were willing to give up what little they had in order to come to this country was to give their kids an opportunity for a better life through our system of free public education.

Education was one of the things that we did the best, and was justifiably a source of national pride. Unfortunately, those days are gone. The very things that made our public education attractive to so many: accessibility, rigor, a focus on fundamentals (with demonstrable outcomes), a wide variety of career paths, have been substantially replaced by cultural inculcation, social and emotional learning and a near singular academic focus on college preparation.

It's generally teachers who take the hit for all of this. I'm almost positive that's missing the target. Like most every profession, the majority of teachers are reasonably good at what they do. The problem lies in the locus of overlap in the Venn diagram of a few teachers, teachers unions, teacher education programs, many school administrators, most all social justice/equity advocates and the government. For the sake of convenience, let's refer to this visual real estate as the locus of low expectations, or LOLE.

To the LOLE crowd, the very idea of academic achievement is an anathema because it results in uneven outcomes. This, of course, is not only ridiculous, but un-American. This country is about equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. But that hasn't slowed down the LOLE outfit. Not even a little.