"No Child Left Behind...

... REALLY means "No Child GETS AHEAD!"

Fred Reed has a good rant this week on our "Department of Education" - which is a euphemism just about as stupid as the "Department of Justice." (H-T Brock at Free North Carolina!)

Go. Read.

I'll wait...

All done?

OK... Well, Reading Fred's bit prompted me to share this TRUE story...

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I knew a kid who was reading (the newspaper, aloud) BEFORE his 4th birthday. Forced into Kindergarten with kids who weren't POTTY-TRAINED, he nearly lost his mind until they decided to give him a Library pass & let him go.

On to a different place/town/school for first grade, they endeavored to teach him to read - using some idiotic crap called the "Initial Teaching Alphabet" (aka "ITA").

He refused to write in "ITA" when he knew how to write in ENGLISH - and his inner-city-Sistah-Teacher vowed to "put 'dat lil' smart-ass cracka in his PLACE!" -- so he nearly flunked out of first grade until his parents intervened with the school-board.

On to ANOTHER place for 2nd Grade, luckily into the care of a man who understood...

In 7th Grade he was selected for a Johns-Hopkins study, and took the SAT along with all the College-bound HS seniors. He had no prep - walked in cold - and scored higher than 68% of the College-bound Seniors who took the test.

That would be closer to the 90th Percentile today - now that EVERYONE takes the SAT...

They told his parents to let him get a GED and go to college - at age 13. They refused, but put him in a new, private, "Accelerated Christian Education" school - he wiped out their entire curriculum (equivalent to a 2-year "Liberal Arts" Degree) by the end of 9th Grade.

His parents split that summer, and Mom was given custody. She took him to the local public school system who told her flat-out "We have NOTHING for him - you should let him get a GED and go to college!"

Mom needed him SUPERVISED so she could work, and couldn't be driving him to classes - so she refused.

The geniuses at the "Board of Ed" put him in the 10th grade, with all the other 10th-graders...

...Doing work he'd actually done in Elementary-school.

Sure - That's GUARANTEED to work - right?

Bored and angry, he rebelled - started smoking weed (and worse) and getting in trouble. He slept through class or read a book (about something that interested HIM), never did a single homework-assignment, aced every single test they ever gave and passed every class with a D-minus.

The room-temp-IQ teachers HATED him - and his senior year ONE of them vowed to "put 'dat lil' smart-ass cracka in his PLACE!" She found a loophole in the rulebook and kicked him out of her class 3 days before graduation, keeping him from taking the final exam and thus causing him to fail the class.

Despite his being the *ONLY* kid in the 335 "graduating class" to earn a passing score on the state's new trial-test of graduate knowledge. He'd actually scored a perfect 100% - but they still refused to give him his diploma.

I won't repeat what he told them...

So he took off, getting high, playing music, and raising hell. Doing mostly manual labor, he signed up for library-cards at local Universities, sat in on classes that interested him when he could and generally educated himself.

When his first kid was born, he decided he needed to better himself - so he went to the local "community-college" - where he was forced to take a "diagnostic entrance exam" to ensure he was educated enough to take CC classes.

He scored the only perfect score in the history of the CC - a record which AFAIK stands to this day.

He had his hands full - working 2 jobs and studying computer programming in Night-school, he had a mentally-ill wife and was raising 3 kids, only one of them "his."

When it came time to graduate from CC, they wouldn't let him graduate because he didn't have the HS diploma. He went to take the GED test, where he ran into another sub-moronic "work-fare" case who insisted he take their "pre-test" before taking the GED.

He scored another 100% - PERFECT - score on the pre-test, which pissed off Sistah-Johnson to no end!  She vowed to "put 'dat lil' smart-ass cracka in his PLACE!" and told him that he'd need to take at least 20 hours of "prep classes" before she'd schedule him for the actual GED class.

I won't repeat what he told HER, either...

He eventually became one of the top IT/Enterprise Consultants in the country, handling some of the largest and most complex IT projects ever conceived.

To this day, he STILL doesn't have a HS diploma, nor *ANY* respect for "educators" who would deliberately punish a child for being more intelligent than they were.

He made damn sure that *HIS* kids didn't suffer the same sort of BS...  The schools THEY attended hired "enrichment" teachers for the "gifted" kids which included his... More importantly, he was able to do what HIS parents weren't: relate to their "gifted" kids and help them deal with an "education system" where most of the "instructors" weren't fit to shine their shoes.

He also taught them to "play the game" at school then invest their time self-educating on the things that interested THEM!

Both are now classic overachievers, well on their way to finishing their University degrees...

The younger will be Valedictorian in a few weeks because she learned the "game" lessons just a little bit better than her elder sister, but elder is head-RA in the "Honors" dorm at her University, and an incredibly impressive young woman in her own right...