I am still a mediocre writer after a life time of practise, can't spell and still can't diagram a sentence.
If you find writing thesis and major papers for graduate school easy, then assuming you writing hasn't declined since graduate school you have above average ability in at least that area of writing. Maybe they don't care so much about diagramming a sentence, and maybe your other abilities to get professors and advisers what they want and/or having someone else edit your paper, makes up for whatever deficiencies you might have in spelling. It might be a narrow talent focused on getting by with academic writing, that doesn't help you much in other areas; but its still something that many people of average intelligence will have problems with, let alone someone at the 16th percentile of intelligence.
As for teachers unions, strong unions do not automatically make for bad schools. Assigning all the blame to the teachers unions is at best an oversimplification, and at worst a distortion. But they do have a negative impact. They restrict competition and increase costs. In areas where everything else is going well you can deal with that and still have good schools even if you have to overspend to get them. In areas where other things are problematic, and the unions are strong, you tend to have more severe problems than just too high of cost (which is itself a large problem).
Jeb Bush also got rid of affirmative action the minute he got in office.
If he did it would have been a really good thing, but in a sense he just hid it rather than got rid of it. He did get rid of the race based preferences in education (although perhaps not in some other areas), but he replaced them with a policy designed specifically to have a racially disparate impact without explicitly mentioning race. A policy guaranteeing admission to students in the top 10 percent of their high school class, no matter how poorly their high school has performed, and without regard to any other qualifications they might have or not have. |
