Blatantly Stupid

The Puerto Rico Department of (Mis)Education has the immense, atrocious, unbelievable gall to claim that the student dropout rate in the local school system is 1%.

One. Percent. The lowest in the nation, even.

Are you fucking kidding Me? The acknowledged cesspool of the the swampy U.S. of part of A. education system has the unmitigated chutzpah, the barefaced fuerza de cara to utter such an IDIOTIC claim, somehow expecting it to be accepted? Rafael "Bow-tie Boy" Aragunde, secretary of the misbegotten department, feebly commented that the number was "woefully" far from reality.

No spit, Shylock. You want fries with that? And as a follow-up question: How would you know, Bow-tie Blob?

For years--years, people--this same cesspool of a department has avoided reporting or even quantifying the dropout rate. In some schools, the dropout rate is close to 50% over a 3-year span (grades 10-12.) I know, for I used to live a mile from one such school. According to a municipal study, the Caguas school district has a dropout rate of over 40%, despite ranking as one of the top 5 of the 10 local school districts.

Look, Bow-tie Boob and percentage perverts: It doesn't take a Jenius to figure out that if 15,000 students start first grade and only 8,000 graduate from high school, then there is a major problem with dropouts. We've had it for decades and trying to cover it up with a stupid, stupid claim like "1%" is like putting makeup on a horse's ass and calling it art. That's a politician's job, not an educator's.

Here's a suggestion, Bow-tie Bobo: Determine the dropout rate. Anybody with basic math and research skills could easily do it in a week, so hire somebody to do it (obviously, nobody in your whole friggin' department is qualified.) Post that percentage: overall, by district, region and school. Then challenge everybody in your sorry-ass department to make those numbers come down. Not by erasing or fudging or lying or ignoring them, but by improving the retention rate of students.

Will it work? Who knows? But one thing's for sure: We can't do worse than We're doing now. At least when We have the truth, We can start moving forward. Lying by omission and by simply lying like a dog is not the way forward.

I thought you would have learned that by now, Bow-tie Blowhard.


The Jenius Has Spoken.