200 Words

If you recall some time ago we took note of the fact that despite the relentless increase in America's yearly "investment" in education, results as measured by standardized test scores remain in decline.

You don't really have to recall, here's the stuff.

You may remember that at the time, we offered the following thought,

"As an aside, we think that issues having to do with K-12 education have far more to do with failing families than they do with failing schools."

Then, in our last post we took note of a profound increase in women entering the labor force.

After which, we offered the following opinion, "We view this in and of itself as neither a good thing nor a bad thing."  although the remarkable visual similarity between declining test scores above and the Husbands Only working line below is ... well ..... remarkable.

So .....

We do view it as is a thing.

More important, we see this thing on a daily basis as this just is how things are nowadays.

This much bigger thing ..... IOHO ..... we also see on a daily basis, as this is also how things are.

As .....

And ...

And while we're on the subject, single parent families account for over half the total of America's welfare recipients, while two parent families accounted for around 5% in 2010.

And family income is the single most powerful predictor for success on standardized academic achievment tests.

Apologies for the fuzzy image, it is however worth the eye strain as there is some good stuff in there.

Our conclusion here is that you should now be in a position to draw your own set of conclusions.

But ......... What to do?  What to do?

Later for all of that, we're still bitching.

I have Terry and a couple of the minions all over me to get it back up to speed.

And I will.

Mostly lately I've just been reading in an effort to separate fact from fiction.

The news of the world by the way is mostly fiction, as you can no longer trust any source.

I don't view this as tragedy since it began to occur to me that in all likelihood, you could never trust any source.

We just mistakenly choose to trust those sources with which we mostly agree.

After all, I'm a reputable guy and if these guys agree with me they must be reputable guys as well.

Right?

Mmmmm ..... maybe not.

So what to do?

For the forseeable future, you just gotta test everything.

Anyway, here's some pretty good stuff from CBC, The National, it's about 24 minutes and moves along pretty good.

The Monarchs of Money.

That's 178 words TD ..... not counting these.

It's 185 if you count those, but not these.

199 counting those and these.