Tag Archives: education

Look How Far We Have Come??

The route to independence for pre-teen boys in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s was paved with paper.

Newspapers.

Before there was a digital, instant-access-age, twice daily local newspapers were hand delivered to America’s door-steps by an army of young boys, over a million strong at its zenith.  Nearly half of all of the nation’s newspapers were handled by these young entrepreneurs and I was one of them.  Sadly, today that number has dropped to near zero.

Commitment, being on time, managing your time, honesty, accuracy, math skills,-adding-subtracting, managing money, counting change, managing credit, marketing, customer-relations, communication, handling complaints, paper-work, banking, coping with weather, delays, illness, fitness all of this and more was the responsibility of the newly minted pre-teen business owner.  As my customers came to know me, I mowed their lawns in the summer and shoveled snow from their sidewalks and driveways in the winter.

How would that reality affect today’s pre-teens and teens?

I attended one of the highest ranked business schools in the country and I learned far more about the realities of enterprise and life managing my paper route as a 12-year-old than I did at the university.  I’m still an entrepreneur and I continue to use those old, familiar lessons every day; street-reality forged by experience.  I was up-sell-marketing before I knew it was a business term.

The real tragedy here is that right now, today, we have done nothing to replace that kind of invaluable experience for our young people.  There is a price to be paid for ignoring this void and if you can pry the cell phones and ear-buds off today’s teens and pre-teens, that blind spot we are ignoring becomes abundantly obvious by their blank stares and struggle to effectively communicate.

My “graduation” from the paper-route was to the local gas station, a natural transition in those days because customers did not pump their own gas, attendants did.  Just shy of 16 and anxious to get my license, I was saving to trade my bicycle for a motorcycle and eventually a car.  A service station seemed like the place to learn more about all things mechanical.  Pumping gas for customers led to learning how to check the oil, filling or changing a tire, even changing the oil, or spark plugs.  Over time, even more methods of mechanical know-how became a puzzle I solved that granted me access to remedies and possibilities I previously knew nothing about and could not otherwise afford.  Knowledge becomes power when you can solve your own mechanical problems and at the same time save money and gain independence.  It was liberating, empowering and it gave me confidence.  It was a way to advance one more rung on life’s ladder and gain my independence.  I could transform a junk car into something useable and do it on a small budget and when it broke, I could fix it.

Self-service gas pumping, grocery scanning and a host of other jobs previously manned by an army of school-aged kids are now extinct in the age of automation.  Again, we leave behind a void and no intention of filling it, yet can we really expect to suffer no effect?  What I describe was my life growing up.  Thank God for it and Thank God I was able to introduce these kinds of working values to my own children, a genuine work-ethic.

Kids peddling newspapers and pumping gas are jobs and experiences never coming back however, the life skills those jobs and many others like them instilled in those kids provided a tremendous benefit we fail to provide today.  Like everything in life, there is a price for this failing and we can see it all around us as the mobs of phone-obsessed kids trudge through life oblivious to their surroundings, mind-numbed by a screen and sadly lacking of any of the kinds of “street-smarts” I managed to learn.

Today’s parental insistence on the physical “safety” of their kids justifies their hyper-insulation from the realities of life.  Paradoxically, kids will learn the longest-lasting lessons about safety when parents allow them, (within reason and with calculation) to experiment with their own judgment and at times be even a bit unsafe.  You can’t know where the margins are if you never push them.  Close-calls forge real lessons and develop better habits much more authentically than a hovering-smothering-over-protective and lecturing parent.  The mistakes and mis-steps we prevent our kids from taking will correspondingly fail to teach them anything.  Failure is a wonderful teacher when consequences have real sting.

The illusion of safety is represented by a parent believing that the act of knowing their kids’ whereabouts is sufficient.  The actual threat comes silently from screens and ear-buds and knows no safe boundaries.  While parents may sit in the same room with their kids, digital forces from unknown sources are competing for dominance and control of their thoughts.

The reality of my childhood that involved, literally, playing on the railroad tracks, hopping trains and jumping off cliffs into the deep waters of abandoned gravel pits was a better and more effective character developing experience that I would argue was in the long run not only safer, but better than being mentally and emotionally poisoned digitally, ironically under the silent illusion of a safety we failed to provide.

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Spectrum News Bias

Spectrum news anchor JoDee Kenney made a comment this weekend about the issuance of Commercial Drivers Licenses, (CDL) in New York, referencing national news about states lax oversight, professed by National Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy when he was addressing recent instances of truck drivers that can’t speak English and can’t read or understand road signs.

Kenney made the comment that these CDL audits were mainly occurring in “Blue States” and inferred, directly, that this was a form of retaliation coming from the administration.

Kenney is supposed to be a news anchor, not an opinion host.  Her obvious bias disqualifies her from serious credibility as an anchor and she should either step down or be removed.

These are the FACTS:

The Department is now moving to withhold $73 million in federal funding if New York fails to follow the law, revoke every illegally issued license

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy today announced that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) nationwide audit of non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) uncovered that the New York Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has been routinely issuing CDLs to foreign drivers illegally. The federal audit exposed a shocking 53 percent failure rate in the records sampled, indicating a total collapse in the administration of New York’s CDL program.   
 
FMCSA’s audit of New York’s non-domiciled CDL issuance practices found numerous failures by the state of New York including:  

  • Out of 200 sampled records, 107 were issued in violation of federal law—a failure rate of over 53%. 
  • The DMV’s systems defaulted to issuing 8-year licenses to foreign drivers for non-REAL ID licenses, regardless of when their legal status expired.
  • New York issued commercial licenses to foreign drivers without providing any evidence that it had verified their current lawful presence in the United States.

“When more than half of the licenses reviewed were issued illegally, it isn’t just a mistake—it is a dereliction of duty by state leadership. Gov. Hochul must immediately revoke these illegally issued licenses. If they refuse to follow the law, we will withhold federal highway funding,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy. “This administration will never stop fighting to keep you and your family safe on our roads.” 
 
In a stunning admission, New York DMV officials confirmed that their licensing system is programmed to default to an automatic 8-year expiration for non-REAL ID CDLs—intentionally disregarding the expiration of a foreign driver’s lawful presence in the U.S. This systemic failure allows the state to blindly grant long-term commercial driving privileges to foreigners that expire long after the expiration of their lawful presence in the country. 

Spectrum is and always has been strongly Left-Leaning and this particular story involving Kenney should be corrected and taken down as opinion not news.  Spectrum needs to apologize to their viewers for mixing opinion with news and Kenney needs to be fired.

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Disconnected

NYS Governor Hochul (of all the unlikely people) demonstrated long over-due leadership by banning student cell phone use in public schools.  This begs the question of why local leaders controlling the 731 school districts throughout NYS failed to do so on their own?  Who in God’s name thought it wise to provide kids with another distraction or way to cheat?  Maybe with test scores being so abysmal, school officials hoped that the cell phone induced cheating would improve their numbers?

Did any of the geniuses that manage our schools really believe cell phones would have no negative effect?  As it stands, kids are completely intoxicated by their phones.  For many, their social skills suck, they can’t carry on a reasonable conversation and their attitudes, well they suck as well.

History is a fine teacher and I’m old enough to have a historical perspective based on my own experience and I can tell you this, with certainty.  The overwhelming majority of school leaders from 50+ years ago would have banned cell phones from day one.  This is because back then, leaders actually led.  They didn’t  wait for legislation, regulation or questionnaires to know what was smart and what was stupid and allowing cell phones in schools is on its face stupid.  What passes for leadership in schools today is little more than cowardly custodianship.

Waiting to be told what anyone with a pulse knew was a problem and then applauding the effort demonstrates how leaderless our schools actually are.  You see, the youngest members of the educational establishment just coming aboard are also from the cell phone dynasty and have the same social issues and screen addictions as their students.

And to cap off what is already a colossal joke, the governor allots $13.5 for phone storage bags.

Seriously?

Again, common sense goes something like this.  Kids, you have 3 choices when it comes to your phones.  1.  Leave them home, (best choice.)  2.  If you drive, leave it in your car.  3.  Leave it in your locker with the ringer off.  There you go, common sense solution and $13 million saved.

What the hell is wrong with these people?  This is the best we’ve got?  Talk about phoning it in….  

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The Bigots at Binghamton University

During the fall semester of 2024, my friend Andy and I hosted a once-weekly public
affairs radio show on the campus station, WHRW. We were fired for being outspoken
white, older, conservative men.


It began when I announced that we had secured a live, on-air interview with University of
Pennsylvania named chair law professor Amy Wax. Professor Wax had just been
stripped of her chaired position and been suspended for one-year at half pay and publicly
reprimanded. Her story was international-level news in academia and the fact that we
had landed her as a guest was phenomenal, or so we thought.


Students run the radio station. Two young girls, the general manager and the public
affairs manager, began demanding of us transcripts of what we would say in our
interview, even though station guidelines clearly tout an open format and minimal
interference. Following demand after demand, which we fulfilled, the girls ultimately
shut down the interview 10-minutes before air, citing “harm to the listeners.”
We filed an official FCC complaint for discrimination and the suppression of speech,
which is currently pending.


On our following show, we had arranged for former University of Pennsylvania trustee
and law school overseer Paul Levy to call in. Because we were ambushed over the Wax
interview, we kept this scheduled call-in to ourselves. Levy resigned from his leadership
position at Penn over the treatment Wax had received and we had a far-ranging very
interesting interview about what had happened. It was the kind of original and interesting
reporting a public affairs show was supposed to produce.


Immediately after that show, the remainder of our shows were abruptly cancelled.
Fast forward to the winter 2025 and spring 2025 semesters. We made no effort to renew
our shows. We aren’t students, we had no other business on campus and we had no
intention of returning to WHRW.


In spite of that reality, the girls began pushing us to avail ourselves to a disciplinary
hearing. When we reminded them that we were gone, didn’t want to return, and have no
relationship with the station or the university, they nevertheless persisted.


Understanding that this “hearing” was going to go on, with or without us, we decided to
present a statement in lieu of appearance, outlined just how unfair and wrong-headed this
whole fiasco was. Quite predictably, we were found guilty of all charges and only
because there is no death-penalty provision in the WHRW Star-Chamber Manual, we live
to fight on.

In the text of the damning documents, we were reminded of our appeal process and
provided a link if we so chose to make that appeal, which we did, surmising that we
might find justice when finally outside of the incestuous radio station hive.


Quite promptly after making the appeal, the Chief Justice of the Judicial Board rejected
our efforts, noting that because we were not students, we had no official standing within
their fiefdom, however, if we could secure the assistance of a student to act on our behalf,
our appeal would live on!


God-Bless the college Republican organization that agreed to push our claim forward.
But just as promptly as the first denial, the second one followed, this time suggesting that
the board had no jurisdiction because this was a management issue. In other words, kick
the can down the road and make sure all feathers stay unruffled, a judicial board
unwilling and maybe unknowing on how to adjudicate, afraid to act.


This is the kind of product our public campuses are producing; autocratic, authoritarian
bullies, not seeking truth and understanding through discussion and debate, but
demanding compliance, enforcing group-think, and rejecting opposing views as they
close their minds to any outside interference. These kids aren’t learning how to think,
they’re validating what to think, without challenge and devoid of a thorough debate that
tends to clarify the issues and expose both the truth and the lie. But for these kids, there
is no point in having the discussion when your mind is already made up and you can
move forward with the knowledge that in their short 20-some years on the planet, they’ve
managed to figure it out, they broke the code, there are no more debates, just their truths
that need to be injected into everyone else, for their own good of course.


Best of luck with that strategy.

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Doubling down on Stupid

A recent federal lawsuit is challenging a Chicago public school initiative they believe is discriminatory.  Parents Defending Education, a not-for-profit organization, filed the action with the Civil Rights division of the US Education Department. 

At issue is the recent launch of a program called the Black Student Success Plan.  The plan would:

  • Double the number of black male teachers.
  • Reduce disciplinary actions against black students.
  • Teach more about black history and culture.

This is what the current federal Education administration says about the issue:

“Treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice or equity is illegal.”

Said another way and to make it simple, Treating students differently based on race is illegal.  That means that any program that is race-specific in its very title, like; “Black Student Success Plan” is not permissible.

Think about the inferences made here when examining the goals of the plan.

Doubling the number of black male teachers seems like a not so thinly veiled effort to infuse “father-figures” into the equation where statistically, black households are overwhelmingly headed by females.  The role of public education is instruction and education, not family reconstruction.  Specifying the dominance of male teachers also suggests that the problems, specifically, are mainly with the black male students.

Reducing disciplinary actions against black students is asinine on its face.  Simply looking the other way and failing to address the nature of the problem is burying one head in the sand and solves nothing.

If the district cannot control their students, what good is teaching more about black history?  Again, an asinine response to the problem.

As usual, the liberal mindset is to solve all problems for all people all the time.  The problem, in large measure, is the lack of traditional families and their values, taught at home with caring and involved parents.  This is an issue overwhelmingly absent in the black community.

Families need to prepare their children for school.  When they do not do that, it brings about discussions regarding what to do.  The answer is not for the school system to become surrogate parents.  Values, ethics, morals, self-value and religious grounding all emanate from the family.  Therein lies the problem and accordingly, therein also lies the place to start in finding solutions.

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