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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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First, it's remarkable to hang your hat on "best interest of the students" in the immediate wake of the teacher's unions utterly fucking their students for their own benefit over covid.

As I explicitly said in my initial post, "Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do"

Second, if this problem of "teachers not being allowed to teach substantitive material" is a general structural problem, then that's a damning indictment of the entire public school system,

I don't know why you infer that it is a general structural problem. It was simply a single example of how principal-agent problems can sometimes crop up. And, btw, I guarantee you that it is not a problem unique to public schools. Private school administrators if anything have an even greater incentive to generate high test scores, since they need to sell their school to prospective parents.

It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs

IF that is true, then that just strengthens my point, because we were asked to spend several days on it.