Public schools aren't bad

"I am surprised a bit by the fact that more private schools weren't getting better test scores for one specific reason: selective admission."

You've misread the study (probably because this particular article isn't particularly clear on it). Private school students *did* get higher test scores. It's just that once background was corrected for, the scores were the same.

A clearer statement:
"At first blush, private school students perform much better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But when adjustments are made for socioeconomic factors, public school fourth-graders did "significantly" better than their private school counterparts in math, while private school eighth-graders did "significantly" better on reading. Both groups scored comparably on grade 4 reading and grade 8 math."
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/15072518.htm

Even more telling, I didn't see controls for the (admittedly amorphous) variable of parental involvement. If I recall correctly, parental involvement in a child's education measures by various common yardsticks is more strongly correlated with academic success than even socioeconomic background. And the private school population is a naturally self-selected group of students whose parents made at least some efforts toward improving their education.

Colst: Thanks. That's an important piece of information.

If I recall correctly, parental involvement in a child's education measures by various common yardsticks is more strongly correlated with academic success than even socioeconomic background. And the private school population is a naturally self-selected group of students whose parents made at least some efforts toward improving their education.

Provided that your measure of "at least some effort toward improving their education" is covered by "writing a check".

I don't know that it necessarily follows that those with means to write such checks also have more time to devote to their children than those who don't.

Provided that your measure of "at least some effort toward improving their education" is covered by "writing a check".

I don't know what private schools are like in your area, but here in Los Angeles, many of them require parents to volunteer in the school's classrooms at least one or two days a month, in addition to mandatory parents' meetings, fundraisers, etc. If you do not participate, your child will be asked to leave the school.

That's a bit more involvement than merely writing a check.

Obviously the Yankee government was asking the wrong questions. They should be asking dogma questions instead of worrying about reading and maths.

Obviously the Yankee government was asking the wrong questions. They should be asking dogma questions instead of worrying about reading and maths.

I'd be interested to see statistics comparing public and private school students' performance with regard to the sciences. Of course, that would mean more standardized testing, so forget it.

I don't like public schools.

Mnemosyne,
As far as I know, the private schools around here have no such requirement. However, what I do know is that the local public schools certainly do have massive parent participation.

My point was not that parents of private school kids don't participate, but that it isn't a fair assumption that parents of public school kids don't. I see no evidence for that being the case.

PZ,
> I am surprised a bit by the fact that more private schools weren't getting better test scores for one specific reason: selective admission

I beleive the study did account for this. I recall that the private schools did fare better if one merely compares the scores. However, when paired groups were compared, the differences were negligible at best.

BTW, this study was also given the 'trash treatment' by DoEd when it was released. Notice 'release on Friday'? There was a big todo over this because Margret Spellings spoke a day or two early positively in favor of vouchers (to congress) and failed to mention this study. She later claimed she didn't know about (despite the fact her office was notified of it's immenent release 2 weeks prior to release). Bush Administration 'science and research' at work; triumph whatever you like and hide whatever you don't.

This is a subject I could rant on all day. Suffice it to say that I believe the term "public school" is a serious misnomer designed specifically to obscure some very basic and very unpleasant aspects of the system. A much more truthful and revealing term would be "government school," a typically poorly supervised special interest ridden black hole for extorted tax dollars where one's children can too often be brain-wash by unionized contract government workers aka "bureaucrats." I've seen it happen up close and very personal. Kids aren't stupid. In the belly of this "government school" beast it's small wonder so many kids are so alienated.

To be truthful myself, I perhaps wouldn't mind quite so much if I thought I was getting decent value for my tax money. But it's a guarantee that any serious attempt to properly reform and/or privatize the current system will be politicized and compromised to death.

William, that's entirely irrelevant. Yes, public schools are brainwashing hotspots. But so are private schools and homeschooling. Personally I could be as educated as I am if I just sat in the library and read, and today kids also have Wikipedia to teach them science, but most people aren't like me in this respect.

I don't know which public schools you folks have attended or taught in but they are very dissimiliar to those in which I either atended or worked.

this smells of BS to me:

typically poorly supervised special interest ridden black hole for extorted tax dollars where one's children can too often be brain-wash by unionized contract government workers aka "bureaucrats.

Personally I could be as educated as I am if I just sat in the library and read, and today kids also have Wikipedia to teach them science, but most people aren't like me in this respect.
******
But do we ever give it a shot? Is there anything truly innovative in any of the continuous public school reforms?

It's all very well to be in favor of public education for all but if I wouldn't send my child to a school, how dare I ask another Mother and her children to put up with it?

Nance

"But do we ever give it a shot? Is there anything truly innovative in any of the continuous public school reforms?"

I know it was a rhetorical question, but no. If anything, it gets worse and worse.

For the benefit of readers outside the U.S.: Most pushes toward private schools in the contemporary U.S. are a threadbare mask for putting public tax dollars into Christian indoctrination mills. Few people are willing to state it this bluntly, but most recognize that this is what the debate is *really* about.

It's bad enough that parents are *allowed* to deny a real education to their children by sending them to such sham schools, but actually *funding* the dogma-pushers would be an insult to real education. And blatantly unconstitutional, if you're one of the people who still cares about that.

In my experience, people like William who rant about the state of public schools usually have some crackpot and completely unworkable ideas about how children should be educated.

I take great offence to the implication that I am a unionized contract government worker who is out to brainwash students. There are far to many teachers out there for you to be able to seriously claim that all of us fall lockstep into a particular political ideology. There are states out there (Texas for one) in which union membership cannot be made mandatory.

There are some really, really stupid comments made against public education on this thread. At least two of the above commenters I now consider to be nothing but dumbass trolls, whom I will scoll past as quickly as possible.
j and William, you are damned arrogant, demented fuckwits, and I will not be allowing your twisted, bullshit opinions to sully my enjoyment of this site further. May you enjoy the real fruits your empty posterings will bear, in time.

As a caution, this report's methodology has been questioned by a couple of researchers who believe the statistical controls leave something to be desired (see http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/pr/pepg0602PR.htm ) . Specifically, the NCES report uses Title I status (and other indicators) as a poverty measure, though that designation is much more commonly used among public schools, meaning that private school poverty levels may be higher than the study assumes. When looking at the same data with different controls, the researchers found that the private schools maintained a statistically-significant advantage in 11 out of 12 areas.

MrWill:

Here's how "mandatory" union membership works, in states where workers are somewhat more free to form their own union arrangements with their employers without legislative obstruction:

Mandatory union membership is negotiated as part of an overall contract, which is then ratified by the members (i.e., democracy), or union shop is voted on as a stand-alone issue by members of the bargaining unit. For every bargaining unit where membership is mandatory, workers have the option of de-authorizing this requirement through a democratic vote. The notion that union staff can somehow impose mandatory membership on dissenting rank-and-file members (particularly in today's pro-corporate union-busting political climate) is an example magical thinking on the order of ID and other counterfactual conceits that are kept in check on these pages.

So-called "right-to-work states" like Texas limit the right of workers to enter into such contracts.

If you're going to trash unionization, then better start trashing weekends, universal public education, child labor laws, and other hallmarks of civilized society that were achieved in the U.S. by labor unions.

This study doesn't show that public schools aren't bad. It shows that private schools aren't any better than the public ones.

The American education system still sucks.

Re: parental involvement

I once had a high school teacher tell the class that the only parents she ever saw in parent-teacher conferences were of the students that got As and Bs.

"j and William, you are damned arrogant, demented fuckwits, and I will not be allowing your twisted, bullshit opinions to sully my enjoyment of this site further."

I apologize for sullying your enjoyment of this site. I completely understand how my responses might have been construed as arrogance; I should have elaborated further in my opinion. So here goes, with the hope that you will scroll slowly enough to read this comment. My apologies once again.

Public schooling is an intrepid and admirable effort. It is absolutely essential that all children receive basic education, and for the government to provide this schooling is the best method I can currently imagine.

Nevertheless, to pretend that there are no problems with American public schools is, well, arrogant. My main objection to public school is the inflexibility demonstrated by so many teachers and administrators and perhaps caused by the structure of the public school system itself. Parents who wish for their children to skip grades or take advanced courses often face seemingly insurmountable hurdles. Students are grouped by age instead of ability, and the need to learn social interaction with one's peers is given more emphasis than the need to receive a challenging, individualized education.

The NCLB has worsened matters. Standardized testing, while inevitable in a public school system, has been taken to an extreme; the almighty AYP is used as the single yardstick (both measurement tool and punishment device) for schools. Students are reduced to statistics: age, sex, race, family income. Teachers and administrators feel more pressure than ever to raise the floor but not the ceiling. Everyone is squished. Teachers are underpaid and overworked. Bureaucracy and politics abound in the schools.

goddogit, I cannot tell you how happy I am that your educational experience was a positive one; I simply cannot say the same for mine. I know the public school system must remain, but many changes are in order, the first being the immediate repeal of NCLB and its impossible standards.

I recommend two books, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students and Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds. For more information, visit nationdeceived.org and geniusdenied.com.

I would say it is the unions causing the problems in the public schools. For about ten years, Ontario teachers went on strike, including three times in my district. Just recently, the federation union wants to bring down the number of report cards from three to two so the teachers can spend more time teaching. I do not understand how this will provide more time for teaching.

I support public education. I support the good teachers that work in public education. And I think public education is disasterous for many.

J notes, "Students are grouped by age instead of ability." That this incredibly stupid and easily fixed state of affairs has not been addressed is beyond the pale. Where is there any data that says all kids progress, or should progress, at the same rate in every subject? Like many aspects of religion it is simply accepted on faith.

I would say it is the unions causing the problems in the public schools. For about ten years, Ontario teachers went on strike, including three times in my district. Just recently, the federation union wants to bring down the number of report cards from three to two so the teachers can spend more time teaching. I do not understand how this will provide more time for teaching.

Think about it. You're not confusing testing with teaching, are you?

And you do realize that what you said doesn't match up too well with the post that started this discussion, right?

And I think public education is disasterous for many.

Apologies, but the temptation to apply snark is just too great in this instance...

Corey you don't know what your talking about. i mean not even a little. DO you not think the teachers had a reason to strike?

Any evidence to back up your claim?

Nevertheless, to pretend that there are no problems with American public schools is, well, arrogant.

Has anybody in this thread actually said there are no problems with American education?

Well excellent! I'm back from the show (Amy Rigby - she's excellent!). It seems that a bit of "trolling," if that's what one wishes to call it, has gotten the pot boiling somewhat on a subject that I feel should be central to the concerns of all who lurk and comment on this blog. Indeed, it should be very near and dear to the one who writes this blog.

To wit: Government schools are a gut wrenching disaster. One needn't take my relatively unqualified word for it. EVERYONE who has any concern at all about what's happening to U. S. schools and inevitably our future ought to peruse the short and eminently readable book by New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto entitled "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling." Here's the Amazon link; read some of the comments there: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865714487/sr=1-1/qid=1156046539/ref=p… . Read the book, think about it, and you'll likely understand why it is so easy to lead so many to nonsense, be it George W. Bush, ID, superstitious religion in general, or a host of other sorry things. (I suspect that Nance might find Gatto's outlook especially congenial.)

To expand and clarify a few points: My experience has been with Pennsylvania and primarily New York State government schools, which in many instances are bleeding the economies of at least the rural areas in these states white. (It's a long sad story.) In these states the unions have a stranglehold on the schools, and while there are fine teachers to be sure (my father, for one, taught in government schools for nearly 50 years), the unions have fostered and protected many truly terrible pedagogical disasters. I know of several personally. As far as I'm concerned, it really doesn't matter these days; in the case of either union or management power corrupts. Worse still when both are in cahoots. (e. g. School boards packed with spouses of teachers, retired teachers, and union members, with the public blithely unaware.) Moreover, unionization destroys professionalism. Government teachers are unionized, but no other profession to any large degree. Professionals typically exist in private (there's that word again), often group, practice. So it ought to be with education. But the government monopoly that runs, or should I say strangles with regulation, schooling (as opposed to education) in this country has pretty much destroyed any real possibility for diverse options to be made available to students and parents. Consequently, in most cases the only private schooling options currently available are motivated by religious zealotry. Also a disaster. As far as I'm concerned, something similar to our college and university system should extend to the beginning of education, and must be broadly supported in every sense by parents, government and business. Communities should have at least as many, and as diverse, educational options available to them as they have food stores (also a basic necessity), and the government and unions should exist in the same relationship to them as they do to food stores.

Get government and politics out of running schools! I know, that's utopian. Entrenched government and union interests, together with historical and societal inertia based on the fact that most people fear change and can not imagine any other system, will guarantee that real change will not occur, at least not in out lifetimes. Vouchers and "charter schools" have been pretty much politically compromised to uselessness.

As for having a particular "educational philosophy," I don't. All of the various approaches to education seem only to verify that kids, if motivated and ready, can and will learn under some pretty adverse circumstances.

And as for being a "fuckwit," well, perhaps. But ad hominem argument really isn't very logical or persuasive. Instead, it makes me suspect that someone may have a strongly vested interest in the status quo.

I think it's pretty simple to get to the root of what's going on with our schools, both public and private.

We are a nation that does not value education. In fact, it's worse than that: we place a *negative* utility on education.

It's not just that at the high school level, it's the football players and not the chemistry club members who are idolized, it's that at the adult level, it's the football players and not the chemists who are idolized. Most Americans haven't been in a bookstore in the last five years. Most never go to the library. Most haven't been to a museum since their public school days. Most haven't read a book this month. Significant numbers of them can't tell you who is Vice President or find their state on a map. If the adults are this way, why would you expect their children to be any different? How many of your coworkers would rather watch Jeopardy or one of the many "learning channels" that have sprung up on cable than a football game or an Adam Sandler movie (nothing personal against Sandler - just using him as a representative figure for pop culture in general. And if you work at a university, it's worth remembering that your coworkers are self-selected in such a way that they are not representative of the larger population.)?

Americans have terms of derision for the intelligent or educated....egghead, nerd, latte drinking liberal (with the implication being that such a person is "educated" but lacks sense). Think about how those who work in intellectual fields are portrayed in pop culture: we don't really make a lot of films in which scientists are the heroes anymore.

Unfortunately, anti-inetllectualism seems to be an ingrained part of our culture. It's something we've been known for since practically our beginnings. It's like we took our entire intellectual energy budget and blew the whole thing in 1776 and 1787 - we've had nothing since then.

Like I said at the beginning, I do think it's pretty simple to figure out *why* our schools do the sort of job they do....it's just less simple to figure out what to do about it.

Corey: Blaming teacher unions for the problems in public schools is unrealistic. Granted, I'm not a Canadian, and things might be radically different there, but unions can only be expected in a profession whose members are ridiculously underpaid and underappreciated. And teachers can't even legally go on strike where I live.

Alon Levy: No, nobody has said that public schools are perfect. I wasn't directing that sentence at anyone in particular. goddogit was (understandably) angry with me for my previous comments critical of public schools, and I was simply recycling one of the adjectives he used in insulting William and me.

William: I have read some of John Taylor Gatto's books, and believe me, it strongly affected me. I am not yet to the point that I can accept private schooling; as you mentioned in your previous post, such a system would necessarily be ridden with politics and religious zealotry. Our school district has given up its summer school program to a private, for-profit educational company, and in my humble opinion, it has been a disaster. And I don't think getting government out of schools will get politics out of schools.

Jillian: I completely agree. To fix the problems in public schools will require changing our entire society's attitudes towards education. And that is why I am so pessimistic.

I would like to know how strongly socioeconomic factors influence educational success in the US. Is there data available?

Shodane, a Google search turned up this:

http://www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/ed…

First off, to those of you who'd rather skip certain commentors, I'm going to shill for my killfile script once again, which will let you mark certain users as never seen, assuming you're using firefox, have greasmonkey installed, and click the little "kill" link next to their names. (I just corrected the bug that was letting commentors with one-character names escape the killfile; current killfile users can upgrade by clicking the above link)

Secondly, I'll note that although I went to one of the best public schools around, there were certainly many spots that could use improvement. I'm going to first mention something that I think public schools do very, very well: teach the average kids the average amount of stuff.

Unfortunately, almost no child is average at everything, and when it comes to dealing with students who are significantly ahead of or behind the rest of the class, public schools respond very poorly. I was fortunate to be in a school district that would let me opt out of 12th grade physics and hand me three periods a week and a desk and book in what was otherwise a large walk-in storage area; I learned way more than I would have in that joke of a class. As the area where I was was also occasionally used by students who had to take make-up tests so that they might pass with a D- instead of fail, I also got to see how kids on the other end of the curve were treated. Being bored is bad, but these kids were screwed worse - there was no additional help (that I saw) for them to be able to learn the material in between obviously not knowing it on the main test and getting tested again on the make-up test.

I think we might actually be looking at something structural - to do education properly, I think you need (at least at the high school level) something like apprenticeships where the teacher is someone whose primary job is something other than teaching and where the student:teacher ratio is in the low single digits. Clearly, that's not going to happen at any public school or any private school that wishes to emulate public school structure with slightly different material. (you might be able to approach this model at some "vo-tech" schools, since those seem more able to experiment with methods other than the standard huge-classroom-all-academic model)

For the lower grades, I'm not sure what's needed. Maybe nothing - it may be that the current school structure works at that level and is only small tweaks away from the ideal. (Some things are obviously wrong - like the bulk of US textbooks - but the basic teacher-to-bunch-of-kids-at-desks concept may be appropriate)

Here's a statistic that helps put the seriousness of our failures in education in perspective....at least, it did the first time I heard it.

Some states are using the third grade literacy scores from standarized tests as a factor to help them set future construction goals for prison cells.

We obviously know as a nation just how important a decent education is - we just seem to be unwilling to do anything of substance about it.

Yes. The undeniable fact is that the system is broken and too dependent on "grade levels", than on skill sets. To use myself as an example, in roughly 5-6th grade I was having "problems" in math. The reality was that I was simply bored out of my skull, and unlike other students, recognized that I was being fed the same identical study sheets over and over, but also willing to call them on it. They sent me to the shool pyschologist.. lol The downshot of the whole thing was that they actually submarined my math education, distracted me from other things and left me on the bottom rung. The next year later they finally stuck me in a special class that was being run at the school, which helped me stomach the make work BS history class that one teacher was making so irrelevant and boring I barely stayed awake in it, while also trying to get me caught up on other work.

The first thing they did is run me through sets of tests. Result - I was at least a year behind in math, but they had to send to a university to find a test sufficiently advanced in reading comprehension to figure out what my score even was... In two years I went from being "behind" in basic English classes and math to being legitimately recognized as past most other students in the former, and barely caught up in the later. The result is that once I got into highschool I was taking optional courses on reading, optional ones like physics, etc., but where I "should have" been one of those taken Calculus as a senior in highschool, but I didn't qualify, since the stuff I should have had in 6th-8th grade, I missed when I should have been learning them.

The system failed me when while I was being run through the "traditional" grade system, and nearly dragged me completely out of the mud when I was dropped into a class that didn't cater to any "single" grade, but had people from all grades and ages, and allowed them to progress at their own rate, which I, at least in reading, I blazed through it so fast they had to tell me to slow down slightly, since they didn't have enough materials to keep up with me.

The normal system does not work. It forces the poor students, by nature or fault of how they are dealt with, to become either stay or become more poor and view themselves negatively, it makes certain that the medocre will remain so, and it all too often tries to make the exceptional conform to the mediocre, instead of recognizing that a) those exceptional people can't do well in those case, or worse b) many of the mediocre and poor students **are not**, but are just stuck or have been reduced to mediocraty by the inability to actually do better in the system. Unfortunately, one class that hand picks the best and worst, for maybe 40-50 students, then caters to their unique issues, while the other 2,000 students are shoved through the normal system, doesn't either promote any real improvement to the system, or do anything to promote a real change to that system, by which such a class might benefit everyone. And, most attempts to create a more cohesive system fail, for no better reason that because the idiots determining funding and test results want everyone pigeon holed into the same grade levels that create the fundimentally stupid mess in the first place. What matters isn't if 100% of students are **at** X when they graduate, but that all of them **make it** to X at all. But the system isn't designed to even allow them to go past that to Y or Z, so it instead tends to result in a significant number finishing at V, W or even, in the worst cases, some place around P (if even that), because it can't deal effectively with those that fail to read G at a certain age, or hit V three years earlier than normal in some subject. Assuming you are following my meaning.

The problem with the comments pushing for privitizing school is that we lose our ability to guard, and make sure is taught, what is true. Imagine a system when it were easy for Mel Gibson to send his kids to a school where they were taught by holocaust deniers. We'd be essentially allowing child abuse, as well as dragging ourselves backwards - relativity would run amuck even more than it already does. We have a collective interest in what is taught to our kids. This is why private schools are largely religious and pushed for by the religious. Public schooling is a way to fight that sort of ridiculousness.

Daniel, the link to the killfile script above is broken. But if you take "scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/" out (i.e., everything in front of "snowplow.org"), then it works fine.

All people here who think deunionizing schools will solve all of the USA's educational problems should consider the fact that teachers' unions in European countries, including many that should serve as models for the US when it comes to education, are even stronger. The single greatest difference between the US and the rest of the first world is the way school funding works; unsurprisingly, the Western countries the US does worse than are generally those that underfund all of their schools equally.

East Asian countries get decent results while having relatively low expenditures, but that's because a) their cultures are far more pro-education and venerate teachers more, so there's a better talent pool of teachers to begin with, and b) their educational systems are almost rigged to do well on international tests but not teach critical thinking.

Mandatory union membership is negotiated as part of an overall contract, which is then ratified by the members (i.e., democracy), or union shop is voted on as a stand-alone issue by members of the bargaining unit. For every bargaining unit where membership is mandatory, workers have the option of de-authorizing this requirement through a democratic vote.

I'm sorry, but not every instance of majority enforcing its will on the minority is laudable. It may be democracy, but it ain't liberty.

In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools did significantly better than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools fared worse.

Could that be because in fundiemath, 7 + 2 == 7000 loaves + 2000 fish?

William:

Even more telling, I didn't see controls for the (admittedly amorphous) variable of parental involvement. If I recall correctly, parental involvement in a child's education measures by various common yardsticks is more strongly correlated with academic success than even socioeconomic background.

The book Freakonomics goes on about this at length, citing some surprising (if true) statistics, e.g., that Head Start doesn't help nearly as much as having parents who bother to enroll their children in Head Start.

Assuming that parental involvement is a big help to academic success, would it make sense to encourage it through, say, a tax credit for each PTA meeting attended, or for volunteer work? Or a deduction for books and supplies donated to schools?

(I also have some crackpot theories on how to improve education in general, but I'll keep them to myself for now.)

"Anyway, the key thing is that these data show that there is no gain to be had from privatizing education, or worse, moving to 'faith-based' education. We can be aware of problems in the public schools, but we have to realize that switching to vouchers or otherwise ripping more money from the schools to support private efforts won't fix them."

Can you please explain how the report shows that there is no gain to be had from privatizing education (such as using vouchers)?

It may or may not be true that current crop of private schools may be as good or as worst as public schools. But competition is open-ended. Competition can cause incentives for teachers and educators to change and thus improving the quality of education.

By the way, those who believe that vouchers are a way to take the money away from public schools and putting it into Christian schools, wouldn't closing down those private schools and forcing all parents to send their kids to public schools will cause public schools themselves to be "christianized"?

Vouchers reveal a specific problem: If you take the dollar amount that is your child's "share" and use it to pay for tuition and fees for a private day school, it might be enough to pay for a small, fundamentalist-affiliated suburban school. However, it won't even come close to paying for the high-quality, innovative independent schools (religious or otherwise) that are found nationwide. Add to that the problem that many independent schools also charge for bus transportation to and from school, books, materials etc. Vouchers become "financial aid for the wealthy". Most families cannot come up with the thousands of additional dollars to cover the difference. Yes, there are exceptions, like parochial schools found in urban areas, but most rural and suburban public schools spend 1/2 per student or less than the better private schools. Makes you think-these good schools often offer smaller classes, better pay and benefits, FAR better working conditions, more selective students, more parental support, better facilties. If you have taught at a good private academy, moving to the public school system is a nightmarish slap in the face. God only knows how public school teachers manage-forced to teach to exit exams, deal with special education students who have been mainstreamed, teach large classes that are difficult to evaluate in meaningful ways, watch the best pay, parent interest and resources go to athletics. I'd work in retail or fast food instead.

And as for being a "fuckwit," well, perhaps. But ad hominem argument really isn't very logical or persuasive. Instead, it makes me suspect that someone may have a strongly vested interest in the status quo.

Or he's simply calling a spade, a spade, or fuckwit as the case may be.