Antonio Gramsci Now Running Montgomery County Schools

Folks who frequent HazZzmat with some regularity will recall that Wonker lives in the bright red state of Virginia. Just across the river lie the true blue District of Columbia and the equally blue state of Maryland. Baltimore, a decaying but occasionally charming city on the Chesapeake Bay is a hotbed for the leftists that infest the state.

But equally bad is Montgomery County, an impossibly wealthy jurisdiction that borders the District on its Northwest side and meanders up the Potomac River and north for a considerable distance. Towns you might have heard of are Bethesda, Silver Spring, Rockville (where F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda are buried), Germantown (where dwell the no longer so super-secret NSAers), and Gaithersburg. Another major federal facility in Montgomery County are the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Bethesda Naval Hospital, made famous by the many presidents who drop in there for annual exams and sometimes more.

You'd think with all this wealth and all this good stuff that Montgomery Countians would also expect the best from their kids' public schools, better to surpass rival Fairfax County, across the river in Virginia, Wonker's homeland. But nope, you'd be wrong. As Dr. Helen (aka, Instapundit's Instawife) notes in her periodic blog today, these wealthy folks, Democrat and far left to the hilt, are far more interested in political correctness than they are in giving their kids a quality education:

Thanks to Soccer Dad for pointing out this article in the Washington Post that discusses replacing the Gifted programs in schools in Montgomery County, Maryland with magnet classes for everyone:

But this fall, educators decided to try a different approach. Instead of selecting a few hundred students for traditional school magnets, officials opened magnet programs at three middle schools to everyone.

"We've changed from labeling children to labeling services," Horn said. "It's not whether you're gifted, it's what's appropriate for you."

Oh sure, this method will really fool the kids--think they don't understand the hypocrisy of leveling the playing field? Of course they do. In my daughter's school, when the mentally handicapped kids are called over the intercom for special classes, they announce, "Will all of the 'Smart' kids come to Room 101." The whole school, from kindergarteners to 5th graders look at each other in amusement that the school is calling the handicapped kids smart. How silly is that? And how silly is it to let teachers observe kids to determine if they are "gifted" instead of allowing for some set of standards to do the sorting for them?

Yep, the Gramscians are loose and wreaking havoc (or "wrecking havoc" as one of my former composition students once wrote) on the next generation, substituting political correctness for education. As Dr. Helen notes, even 5th graders wrinkle their noses at this asininity. If it's obvious to kids, how dumb can it be? Maybe they should drop back and use the old PC term "differently abled." (Wonker himself, who currently carries a few more pound than he should, regards himself as "horizontally challenged.")

But we're interrupting the good Doctor's train of thought here:

At two elementary schools, Georgian Forest in Silver Spring and Burning Tree in Bethesda, that means piloting an approach in which students are not formally labeled "gifted and talented" solely through traditional testing. Instead, teachers spend more time watching how individual students perform and place them based on those observations. The change doesn't necessarily mean that all students will be in the highest-level reading group, but it is a strategy for reaching out to kids who might have been overlooked in the past, said Georgian Forest Principal Donald D. Masline.

And their remedy for the lack of diversity just gets sillier:

Educators hope that the new approach will help them address why black and Hispanic students continue to lag behind white and Asian counterparts in achievement and why so few take advanced classes or are admitted into accelerated programs.

Don't they call this "racial profiling" when cops do it? Do we smell the old "equality of outcomes" game here? The only thing teachers will be "observing" here is what color each kid is. Then they can alter educational placement toward race-norming rather than relying on skill, ability, and merit to place kids in programs appropriate for their learning level.

One of Dr. Helen's readers comments:

In the movie THE INCREDIBLES, where the superhero mother is teaching her superchildren to hide their powers, there is a great line.

The mother says that everybody is special. The son says this: "If everybody is special, nobody is special."

This is echoed by the villain in the movie as well.

The public schools are yet another once useful institution infiltrated by the Gramscian left (via the teachers unions—weak to nonexistent in Virginia, by the way) which has for decades been turning them into training camps and brainwashing centers more focused on modifying behaviors to suit leftist dogma than in teaching kids how to think. Which of course would put the left out of business. But obviously, Dr. Helen's 5th graders have already hit the override button. How dumb do these educationaloids think people are?

Did you ever wonder why the educational establishment, aided and abetted by the useful legal idiots of the ACLU, fight educational vouchers tooth and nail. It has nothing to do with providing federal funds to religious schools. It has to do with the vouchers' collective ability to defund the huge re-educational gulag the left has set up, with taxpayer funds, to indoctrinate American children with deeply damaging ideas while depriving them of real educational tools. In other words, vouchers are another way of defunding the left. And the left won't stand for it.

We think it's time to put them out of business. Let the wealthy lefties in Montgomery County subject their wealthy kids to this kind of brainwashing. The rest of us think our kids deserve an education. Parochial schools and homeschooling, as Dr. Helen implies, have a great future.