Voucher programs and charter schools once again do worse for the same sets of students than plain old public schools. When will rightwingers show they care by defunding programs that consistently fail our kids?
Ha ha, I made a funny.
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alphie
There’s profit to be had funding Christian madrassas.
Doubt they’ll ever be defunded.
Davis X. Machina
The whole discussion is predicated on the risible notion that vouchers’ rationale is to improve student performance, not:
* beat up on teachers’ unions,
* fund religious schools under the table,
* pay off eduprenurial campaign contributors, or
* shovel baksheesh to inner-city pastors and others to get their otherwise reliably Democratic flock to see the light at the ballot box.
cleek
what we really need is re-education camps.
Zifnab
You mean to say that taking money from an existing, established school system and throwing it into a brand new system run by rank amateurs in out to turn a profit would result in a decrease of quality at an increased price?
I am shocked! Shocked I say!
The joke of it all is that charter schools have some merit in so far as school choice is good and the ability to lean on a school with financial incentives seems to be the most expedient and efficient way to act at the federal and state levels. If I say “we’ll give you $10k to start a football team”, you see a lot more schools with football teams. If you say “get math scores up or we’re docking you $100/student” you’ll see math scores rise across the board. If you say “give my kid a quality education or I’m sending him somewhere else and he’s taking his $5k worth of your budget with him” you’ll see schools fight to retain kids and increase class sizes.
Unfortunately, the voucher system was always more about crippling or killing existing public education, much like SS privatization was about crippling or killing the social security program and military contracting is about crippling or killing the military’s ability to function without paying trillions to US companies to do half the work at a hundred times the price.
So yeah. Fuck the reformers, bring on the reformers.
ThymeZone
Absolutely right, and I have not seen a better summary.
superdestroyer
A few points of discussion.
1. Since the Milwaukee Public Schools are only 12% white, I doubt that many of the kids are leaving to attend religious schools. http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=674879
2. Most of the families using the vouchers are black. The study showed that the children on the voucher program were much less likely to be the victims of violence and enjoyed the school experience more than their public school. http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/SCDP/Milwaukee_Eval/Report_5.pdf
3. One of the teachers unions predictions on vouchers is that they would take the cream and leave the worst students. Obviously this has not happened. A prediction of the pro-voucher crowd is that the public schools would get better when faced with competition. This seems to have actually happened.
4. The study also mentions that there is no statistical difference at the 6th through 9th grade level. Also the parents of those sending their children to private schools were on average poorer than those that stayed in public schools.
demimondian
Oh, goody, the superdestroyer troll is back.
Let’s see how long it takes to make this an issue it can write a racist screed about.
Punchy
If by “math scores rise”, you mean teachers will be asked to doctor answers, re-re-re-readminister tests until everyone passes, and, if necessary, invent passing exams from whole cloth, you’re dead on.
As an aside, if you’re curious to what the genesis of grade-inflation is (as John can probably attest), look no further than “performance”-based salaries. Teachers with the best evals get the most money. Funny….students who get Cs tend not to be the kindest on those things, while the A students lavish praise. Hmmmm…..
SGEW
I’m not a total education policy wonk, but:
I think that it’s important to note that vouchers and charter schools can be implemented in many, many different ways.
Aye, ’tis true that the G.O.P.’s plans for education reform are, well, destructive and counter-educational. But this is not a good enough reason to totally discount the very idea of vouchers or charter schools.
One should not, in my mind, simply say: “Vouchers! Charter Schools! The Republicans support them, and they do not work, so therefore to hell with them!” There are other ways to use these tools: “vouchers” and “charters” are broad concepts, not necessarily specific policies.
demimondian
Actually, Punchy, that all turns out to not be true.
(a) in a double blind study of correlation between student performance and evaluation contents, there does turn out to be a statistically significant relationship — weaker students are typically *kinder* than their stronger counterparts.
(b) there have been studies of teacher assistance, and there are second order mechanisms for detecting such manipulation. Some teachers do cheat — but the fraction turns out to be small, and statistically insignificant.
I know it’s unpopular with my colleagues on the left…and in the profession…but testing and funding do work.
The Other Steve
Most of the problems with education are the result of Republicans attacking education, and Democrats trying to blindly defend it.
Explain this. How can a political party go from demanding the Dept of Education be disbanded in 1994, to jumping up and down shouting for NCLB in 2000? My cynical answer is that they realized that the only way to destroy the system was to corrupt it from within.
Education shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Sadly, because Republicans realized they could appeal to Catholics and Evangelicals by offering to pay for religious schools, it has become partisan.
Zifnab
Qua? Where are you reading these statistics from? I see stats on students compared from public to private that year but nothing indicating how students had performed over the course of multiple years.
True, there existed an argument that charter schools would “skim the cream” but I fail to see how this has “not happened”, as we are looking at averages and not high/low performers. The best argument you could offer would be that vouchers don’t appear to have impacted public school grades negatively. This, in the face of a $120 million price tag, hardly seems encouraging.
Because the statistics say so? Because they don’t build religious schools for darkies? Because tan skinned families don’t believe in Jesus? Where do you pull this shit from? Even your ass can’t be that far off in right field.
Well, to a degree, yes. If your goal is to raise test schools, this will in fact make the test scores rise. They could just as easily hire a bunch of math tutors with money they save by killing the school band program. Or they could… I don’t know… hire better math teachers / retrain existing math teachers / give all their kids calculators / push everyone down a grade level… Whether they do this ethically or unethically… I’m just saying what the destination will be, not what road they’ll take.
Cassidy
No more destructive than the liberal fascination with self-esteem. That mantra is just as destructive to the educations system.
libarbarian
How on earth does giving kids calculators help them with math instead of just making them lazy?
Bubblegum Tate
Excellent point, and I also fully agree with Zifnab’s post above. The whole “school choice” argument pushed by the right wing is basically a Trojan horse to accomplish Davis X. Machina’s bullet points, and that’s a pretty sad thing. They’d much rather harm the school system in the name of chucking dollars at religious schools than actually, you know, help schools and students do better.
superdestroyer
Zifnab,
Several of the posters implied that the families taking advantage of the vouchers were socially conservatives, religiously motivated white families. Considering that most of the families using the voucher program were probably Senator Obama voters See http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=720195, I doubt that religious training and wanting to avoid “secular humanism” was the biggest motivating factor.
Milwaukee also was charter schools, magnet schools, and a program where students can apply to attend suburban schools. The study did not make it clear if the charter, magnet, and suburban school students were excluded from the programs. A more interesting study would be to compare the suburban public school program to the voucher and to the neighborhood school.
I also found the $120 million figure considering those students were not costing the MPS system any money and the school district is shrinking anyway.
dAVE
Hey, superdestroyer
Since Charter/Voucher schools are not required to test by NCLB is this report based on voluntary reporting?
And yes charters are skimming the cream at least to the extent that unlike the public schools they are not required to take any student. So how many attention deficit, developmentally/physically challenged, special needs children do you suppose are in charter schools?
Punchy
Link please?
SGEW
Ah, but the whole “self-esteem,” “every child is special” catch phrases are just that: catch phrases (like “No Child Left Behind” or “Hang In There”).
Even if I did not disagree with your central premise (that the “self-esteem” mantra is a) a “fascination,” b) “liberal,” and c) destructive), I would argue that a mantra alone cannot be as overtly destructive as actual funding choices, district determination, and mandated testing.
Also:
I’m not too concerned about this, from a political perspective. I hold to the view that funding religious schools is frankly unconstitutional, and this issue will be settled in the courts (eventually, I hope!).
demimondian
Tell me, can you compute the cosine of pi over 5 in your head? What are you…lazy?
Calculators are no more crutches than slide rules were two generations ago. They are tools which children will use throughout their lives. Sure, I’d love to have them master the division algorithm, too — but, given the choice, I’d rather they knew how to balance their checkbooks, and have a clear intuition for when numbers sound wrong. That latter only comes with practice.
Cassidy
In the grand scheme, I’ll take the self-esteem BS over the NCLB BS anyday. Both mindsets deprive children of quality education. Pick your poison.
It’s more than a fascination; it’s indoctrination. It’s destructive in that children are actively lied to on a daily basis and not prepared for real life. It isn’t the job of the school system to make Suzy believe she can be POTUS, but to instead give her a qualuity education, that if she absorbs and studies hard, might give her the tools to become POTUS.
superdestroyer
Dave,
First, do you have a reference for charter schools being excluded from NCLB? I can understand private schools being excluded but not charter schools. I know that in Virginia and Maryland, the magnet schools are not excluded from any testing requirement even thought they skim to the extreme.
Second, are you implying that having special needs children harm the education of the rest of the children. Wouldn’t it be better for overall education to not have special needs children in the same classroom with children wanting to learn.
Why would blue collar and poor children have any more special needs children in their classroom than Malia Ann or Natasha Obama have in their classroom?
The study, if you had bother to read it, states that all of the students in the study took the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE) exam which sounds like an NCLB compliance exam.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Good comments, Zifnab.
My mother and my sister are both public schoolteachers. According to them, the problem with schools is not the b.s. the wingnuts claim goes on in there. According to them, the problem is fraying infrastructure vs. rising demands. My mother (who teaches at what is, statistically speaking, one of the best public schools in her state) says she’s using textbooks from before the year 2000. None of the money allotted to schools trickles down to the classroom level; what does trickle down are testing requirements that make teachers throw out their entire curriculum in favor of an endless series of test preparations and testings.
I haven’t met any teachers who are fans of No Child Left Behind. They’re probably out there, but every teacher I’ve met says that law made their jobs harder while delivering no additional funds to their classrooms. I don’t have much of an opinion on the matter myself, other than an innate distrust of the Gooper response to just about anything. I’m pretty much ignorant of the matter, personally. But from what others tell me, I suspect this is the academic funding equivalent of National Guardsmen scrounging vehicle parts from scrap heaps while increased funding for our military expeditions goes to mercenary groups incapable of carrying out the tasks allotted to them. Somehow, every Bush Administration idea seems to boil down to the same thing. But as I say again, I’m pretty uninformed other than anecdotes heard from those in the “front lines” of public education. Anyone is welcome to prove me wrong. I’m not asserting a very strong opinion in the first place.
SGEW
Um. I believe that’s just called “school.” It has always been thus (although the indoctrination of the day changes from generation to generation, naturally).
I find that the “self-esteem” thing (whatever one wants to call it) is, at worst, disingenuous and, well, cheesy. But destructive? Does it really “deprive” children of quality education? Many people believe that it’s psychologically/emotionally helpful for developing minds and, at least, does little harm.
Besides. Kids won’t need to be taught that they can become POTUS once the MUP guides us all into the future and gives every child a magical Hope Bunny.
ThymeZone
I’d rather eat a worm than agree with you, as you know, but this is absolutely right. Slide rules and calculators make people more powerful, not lazy. A lot of the calcuation work of math is just drudgery, and the tools can save the drudgery without taking away the power of the result.
Can you pass me the Franks Red Hot sauce for this worm?
Thx.
superdestroyer
ThymeZone
If you would hang around engineers you would realize that most of them can quickly do arithmetic in their head. If you go through the drudgery, you get a feel for the math. Kids who depend on the calculators will put down answers that are ridiculously wrong because they have no feeling for the math.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Interestingly enough, they DO pull down the test scores for the rest of their (public) schools, costing them funds. (My mother complains about this incessantly. At times, it’s almost a mantra for her. She teaches her students well, her class gets top-notch scores, then the ESL kids and the special needs kids lower the scores for the entire school.)
You’d think someone would’ve figured out a way to factor special needs test scores in differently, but apparently nobody bothered.
ThymeZone
Oh what fun, a life of hanging around with engineers!
Thankfully, the purpose of teaching math is not to turn kids into engineers. I tend to think of the humanitarian aspects of this, but there are practical aspects, too. Imagine a world in which everything worked like Windows, or pharmaceutical research. You get my drift, I’m sure.
No, calculators were invented to empower people to work faster and easier. Do you suppose that I’d be a better writer if I knew how the keyboard driver on my computer worked?
Uh, I imagine that you probably do, actually.
Never mind.
demimondian
I don’t think that superdestroyer is likely to catch the snark there, TZ. I’m not sure it’s got the social skills.
ThymeZone
Thus adding to my glee at tossing it over his head!
superdestroyer
ThymeZone,
If they actually had a feel for the math, they would understand what a one in a million cancer risk meant when discussing EPA regulations. They would understand what no statistical difference meant when discussiong educational testing. They would not waste money on lottery tickets. They would understand compound interest and the future value of money. they would actually look at the price per pound sticker at the supermarket.
ThymeZone
I do sort of know how the keyboard driver works, though, and this saddens me immensely.
ThymeZone
Uh huh. You’re right, math is the key to just about everything.
“All men are created equal,” for example. How in the world to understand something like that, without math?
Thanks for standing up for math. You are doing a great service.
(No, I didn’t steal that line from Governor Patric, either, so back off).
ThymeZone
But would they know how to spot second-rate spoof?
Hah! Gotcha.
tBone
So special needs kids don’t want to learn?
I haven’t met any teachers who don’t actively hate NCLB. There’s precious little time for anything that doesn’t directly contribute to higher test scores. In my son’s school, recess is now treated like a luxury that kids earn if they meet their educational mandate for the day – even for lower elementary grades. That’s insane.
Martin
But the accusation ignores the fact that the schools are compensating for this. They spend quite a bit of time now practicing estimation and order-of-magnitude work, and even some dimensional analysis. Rather than get a feel for it as a byproduct of doing that long division 1,000 times, they are just teaching it directly, where before they didn’t.
So, I just call it another ‘back in my day’ conservative gripe.
ThymeZone
We had NCLB when I was a kid. Whenever we went camping, my stepdad made sure he brought back all the kids. Except that sometimes he wished he could leave behind my one cousin who was a real little pain in the ass.
SGEW
Um. Have you read through the p.123 “Tagged” thread? Engineers abound here, apparently.
4tehlulz
Right. Engineers, accountants, and other math-heavy workers never buy lottery tickets, fuck up their finances with interest, fuck up budgets, or use considerations other than raw numbers when discussing policy.
0/10
tBone
I bet you used a calculator to come up with that fraction, didn’t you? Stupid liberals.
Ryan S.
Reminds me of the time I was trying to convince a paper sales rep that .2 was the same as 1/5th it took like 5mins and she still didn’t believe me completely when I hung up. Her excuse was, Well, they didn’t give me a calculator.
ThymeZone
Yes, it was profoundly depressing.
That’s why, looking at my desk, with a Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Internals, and Voyage of the Beagle, equidistant, I chose the Darwin to excerpt. Who wants to read another spirit-killing technical blurb, for crissakes?
Zifnab
So now we’re testing family political affiliation? My god man, how can I take a word you say seriously when you’ve already typecast the entire Milwake school district with a wave of your hand. The 88% non-white student population consists of poor, secular, Obama voters. We know this because… … … … … My family shopped around for schools when I was a kid and we moved around a bit. My father was a red-blooded fiscal conservative, my mother a religious Catholic conservative. I remember them grading schools by a number of criteria. “Secular humanism” never broke the top 50 reasons they disliked a school.
Put down the kool-aid, dude.
I’m a math major, so I call authoritative dibs.
Calculators are useful, and I would never deprive a student of his little magic box when taking a test. Likewise, any teacher who makes you calculate pi out past the fifth digit, then use it with any regularity, is just being a punk ass bitch.
That said, my schools all stressed mental math first and calculators later. Even up through Calculus, we had a number of “no-calculator” and split “calc/no calc” tests. The ability to crunch big numbers in your head isn’t just a trivial exercise. It helps your memory, your focus of mind, and your learning speed later on.
All that said, not giving kids calculators because the school just doesn’t have the budget is completely different from handing out four-function calcs when you’re still learning basic arithmetic. Past Algebra II, a TI-83 is almost mandatory. Once you get to Calc and Diff Eq, you might as well graft that TI-89 to your right arm.
But if it makes you feel better, you can replace “calculator” with “science lab equipment” or “new english textbooks” or “projectors” or whatever you want.
tBone
Paging lukasiak . . .
Martin
I routinely out-math all of the engineering PhDs here. They all suck at it too. they see numbers and want to do arithmetic when a lot of the time algebra, etc. is faster and easier. We learn based on context, nothing new there. Give people more context and they learn in broader ways.
Zifnab
Raises hand, tentatively. I’m kinda geeky like that.
Drew
I was a school voucher supporter (and still may be):
Two points:
(1) How did this affect total test scores from year to year. Did public school test scores go up? If they did, then maybe the program worked and more study is needed.
(2) This type of post is the problem. One advantage of federalism (something I actually still believe in) is you can try new things without destroying the entire country. What you have in Milwaukee is the implementation of a creative idea on a immsense scale. Maybe it didn’t work. But if it didn’t, and the worse side effect is the kids are in the same position they were in before it was tried-is that really all that bad? I’m just so sick of one side or the other shouting “I knew, just knew, your stupid idea wouldn’t work. GOD, you’re so stupid!!!!”
mark
What ThymeZone said. I have long defended the concept of vouchers to my to my more, er, traditionally-minded liberal friends (competition, choice, and accountability seem like good ideas), and Zifnab nails the problem. The wingnuts have done the same thing to patriotism and damn near everything else they touch.
Dork
Damn right.
I teach SAT prep, and I can tell you this is dead on. They’ll put down whatever the calculator says. They never realize they’ve hit the wrong button, b/c most have no idea even a ballpark esty of what the number should be about, b/c they have little to no feel for basic math manipulations.
Reverend Spooner
I remember reading something about privatized schools in Philadelphia forcing children to do janitorial duties after school, in order to save costs. Here’s a link.
The fuckers sold off textbooks, too. Fuck it if the kids are illiterate, as long as this corporate school district’s in the black!
ThymeZone
I’m sorry, man. Honestly.
But anyway, I am in favor of the full range of Liberal Arts education. Math and science are cool (I was going to be a chemistry major, ended with something else which I cannot reveal due to anoymity concerns) but the languages and the literature and history were interesting too.
I work around a lot of computer science types. You can therefore understand how badly I wish that I could drink.
Tim F.
Absolutely.
Demi, your example using pi is intentionally disingenuous. Kids aren’t supposed to learn third roots on their own; they should learn how to do the root fundamentals in their head and then pick up a calculator at the point when the simple rules don’t work anymore. Having a generation who cannot do simple multiplication without mechanical help is a national disgrace.
superdestroyer
Zifnab,
The average user of the Milwaukee voucher program (based upon averages and demographic data), is a black family, votes Democratic, voted for Senator Obama, attends church more than virtually anyone who posts here. It does not fill the stereotype of the ignorant redneck, religious wacko who wants to avoid the government. But the people posting here are not about to let the demographics of Milwaukee get in the way of their own prejudices.
tBone
Why do you hate capitalism, you liberal fascist pig?
Punchy
It’s called “No Child Left Behind”, and not “No Child Expect The Retarded Ones Left Behind, and They Get to Eat Paste” for a reason.
So do I, albeit for a private company, so most of the students are somewhat edumacated already. But most of that is true (as Demi shakes his head violently)…I’ve had students who couldn’t even set up a long division sans calculator, let alone solve it.
Martin
Add me to the list agreeing with this as well. Pushing the acceptability of home-schooling is part of the same effort. Individually, there’s nothing wrong with these efforts, but they are being forwarded because conservatives lost their ability to indoctrinate and control what kids think. This whole movement started in the 60s when they lost the right to segregate kids, to force them to pray and to control how broadly they think. They’ve come to equate freedom of thought with radicalism based on what happened at universities in the 60s. Why do you think they are pushing so hard against science, climate change, evolution? Science is a cancer to indoctrination and party thinking. The more open and democratic education becomes, the more of a threat conservatives see it.
Remember these are *conservatives*. As a default position, they oppose change in society. A free-thinking populace is the enemy of conservative ideology.
Jake
Pass the worms.
Agreed. The last 7+ years have been a painful illustration of what happens when an otherwise unqualified know nothing believes he can be PotUS.
crw
Part of the problem with vouchers, even when they aren’t being dishonestly argued, is they aren’t by any means a panacea. They are a fucking tool to facilitate parental involvement in the educational process and give them more leverage over the school (by giving parents more choice in finding a school that matches their child). But the key is still parental involvement, and vouchers are not going to solve the myriad external factors that sap a parent’s ability to take an active role in their child’s development.
All that leverage and competition is useless if parents are incapable (either through ignorance or sheer lack of time/resources) of accurately judging the quality of their child’s education. Lack of parental involvement is probably the biggest hurdle for school. For instance, local school levy elections are historically some of the lowest turnout elections in this country, even though they’re still the primary funding source for school improvements. And that makes it easy for childless antitax nuts to shoot down the needed funding.
Reverend Spooner
I think he was saying there should be a way to factor the fact that the kids are special ed. into the scores for the schools. You know, so a public school chock-full of special needs kids could compete fairly with a private school accepting none. You know, so the public school could have the same level of funding, and not have a bunch of kids left behind with no textbooks, eating paste for 15 years.
You know, kinda like the whole point of the original post.
demimondian
Um, Zif? I’ve got a Ph.D. in Math (set theory) and have published multiple papers in both pure and applied mathematics.
Want to know how to make a table full of mathematicians turn white with dread? Ask them to split the bill without a calculator. They, because of their extra training, don’t feel a need to pretend that they don’t need the help.
OTOH, ask one of them to estimate and give a rough error bound for 127 * 33.6M, and he’ll pause for a second and say “roughly 4.2 billion, a little bigger”, because he’ll say internally multiplying by 127 is mutiplying by 1000 and dividing by 8, and 32 is — oh, wait, 33.6 is 32 + 1.6, so that’s going to be” (out loud) slightly more than…ooops dividing…less than 4.2 billion.
How do I know? It’s how I did it…and I picked the numbers randomly.
ThymeZone
And thus, another lukasiak post on how the numbers prove that Hillary really won is born ……….
What a country.
Reverend Spooner
Probably because I’m a product of the public school system. We’d spend whole days burning American flags and effigies of President Reagan. For homework, we’d recite passages from the “Communist Manifesto.” That’s the only education I’ve had, really.
Martin
Not to mention a lot of public school districts have individual schools specialize due to space. Creating a classroom for 6 special ed. kids, one for 8 gifted, and so on gets expensive. Plus hiring a teacher for each school, handling busing needs, etc. Instead, they have one school take all of the gifted kids and one take all of the special ed. Guess which one tests better?
tBone
Maybe if the brats would quit easting paste, they wouldn’t be special needs.
Face it: giving special treatment to children with terrible physical and/or mental ailments will just turn them into shiftless losers sucking at the teat of government for their entire lives. These kids need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if they don’t have the physical capacity to do so.
demimondian
Since I’m the parent of a special ed kid who’s also gifted…which one do you think gets him?
ThymeZone
If God had intended for engineers to be the goal for humans, he’d have given Herbert Hoover four terms instead of Roosevelt.
I’ll bet he was a math whiz.
This is how we remember him.
superdestroyer
demimondian,
I always how people how to calculate and average of a data set the same way that the card coutners in Vegas do it. Pick the middle number and just to small plus and minus calclulations until you do all of the data points. I also love showing people how to calcuate the Standard deviation of a final exam by taking the difference between highest and lowest and dividing by four.
On NCLB, one of the reasons that many teachers hate it is because it has exposed the gimmickery that has been going on in schools. Even in the top rated public schools, black and hispanic students perform much lower than the white and Asian Students (see Montgomery County Maryland). The NCLB has also exposed that schools are promoting students who should not be promoted. How else do you explain students in high school who read below the fourth grade level.
tBone
Did you pledge allegiance to a large Che poster like we did? That was always my favorite part of the school day, aside from the daily lessons on abortion and deviant sexual practices.
tBone
No, they hate it because they’re now in the business of preparing children to take tests instead of educating them.
Martin
Oh, and I take issue with the ‘self-esteem’ accusations. I live in a very conservative area and there are FAR more ‘self-esteem’ parents here than any place I’ve ever been. Tons more than in liberal NYC. The reason is that it’s not some touchy-feely crap. It’s a pragmatic response to a social reality down the line.
As a nation, we value a degree more than we value actually knowing how to do math. If you want to be a carpenter, you fuck well better know how to do your arithmetic and fractions, but if you want to be a generic white collar worker a bachelors degree of any kind will do, math skills or not. Parents know this. They know that the safest path to financial independence is pedigree rather than hard work. Get the requisite balance of grades and extracurriculars, get into an ivy, take your easy As, and go take a >50K job that will practically be handed to you even if you are functionally retarded. Commander flightsuit is pretty much the last piece of evidence you should need to see that. This guy couldn’t help but fail at almost everything he ever did, but he was a Yalie and he was connected.
We have sold out hard work and skill in this country. Bring the value of trades back up to the level of meaningless bachelors degrees (eg, close the income gap in this country) and you might see an effort to prioritize knowledge again.
Cassidy
This was the original program…started in Texas under Gov. Bush…
Our schools have become an indoctrination battleground period, whether it be about telling children that homosexual lifestyle’s are okay, or banning prayer, or murdering science, killing gender roles, etc.
Our public school system, generally, has taken upon itself the role of usurping the role of the parent. If dimwit #1 wants to teach his kid that the “fags and niggers are bad”, as abbhorrent as that is, he’s the parent. When his kid gets his ass kicked for saying it out loud, he’s learned a valuable life lesson. If I want to teach my 6 y/o birth control, then I have the right to do so. Our schools need to stick to education, period.
Cassidy
Two different groups, though. Inside the education system it is a liberal ideal. It has grown into a “retarded parent” ideal, unfortunately.
Martin
Fair enough. The schools here that do that actually do a quite good job of accommodating students based on the input of the teachers and parents. (My son is in one of those programs as well and we had quite a bit of input on where he would be placed.) But my point is that a school should not be punished for taking on the challenge of educating special needs kids, nor should a school district be punished for making the best budgetary decisions for their students and parents.
Reverend Spooner
Of course! It was right before the lessons on homosexuality every morning. Those were awesome!
Life is a test. That means those kids are better-prepared than ever.
Why do teachers hate America?
I think parents have forced that role upon it, as they’ve done less actual parenting themselves and demanded more that others do it for them.
The Other Steve
I could have sworn when I was a student that parents could hold their kids out of sex education if they wanted.
I don’t understand why conservatives feel the need to just make shit up to formulate an argument. Can you explain that to us Cassidy?
Cassidy
Honest question:
I realize that this perpetuates the stigma of “special”, but wouldn’t one particular school specially designed for special needs kids, assuming it has the highly trained staff, funding, etc., be ideal?
Martin
The only people that didn’t recognize that was true before are the ones now using it to defend NCLB.
And by not providing any funding or effort to actually address the problem, it only serves to drive wedge #3 into the public school system.
The Other Steve
Paste is actually quite good for you. It’s northing more than flour and water. Very nutritious.
tBone
The rest of this little rant is boilerplate wingnut rhetoric, but “murdering science?” I can’t figure that one out.
Cassidy
Fair response. Something worth thinking about.
I was using two extreme positions for the argument. Interchange as you please. I personally support sex education in school that teaches the scientific facts of birth control and abstinence.
tBone
For some types of special needs, yeah. It’s the bolded portion that’s problematic.
Jake
Actually don’t, MoCo is not where you want to look when trolling about race and education. Thank you and good night.
Martin
Not entirely. Special needs kids are ostracized from society enough as it is. The more they can be mainstreamed, the better. The approach here is to put them in their own classroom when they can’t be placed in with the regular group (some can, some can’t depending on need), but to integrate them in with the overall student body whenever possible. I think ideally you’d want to have this happening at every school, but economics simply don’t make it possible.
Not only is it good for the special needs kids it’s good for the general population to not see special needs kids as being fundamentally any different than them. They’re all just kids after all.
Cassidy
You’re assuming I agree with those stated positions. Regardless of what I personally think, our cultural battles are being fought in the classroom, and our educators are criminally complicit, depriving our children of a solid education. That’s my point.
The Other Steve
You mean like the Iowa Braille School founded in 1852? The place Mary Ingalls went to, as written by Laura Ingalls Wilder?
They’re struggling to keep the school open.
Generally I suspect it is more efficient economically, and is also better for the students.
What’s interesting, is that the GOP push to defund schools at the government level, and push “choice” into the hands of parents, actually results in parents demanding nearby schools handle this load. The end result of the GOP push has been for schools to become more expensive.
Now there is argument of whether or not that is bad. Certainly parents like expanded capabilities and what not, it’s closer to their home. But I always find it funny to see Republicans complaining about cost.
tBone
Really? A science teacher trying to teach the theory of evolution is “criminally complicit” when some asshat Bible-banger demands equal time for creationism?
The Other Steve
Ah ha! you’re suffering from 1970s thinking.
The latest thinking is that maybe mainstreaming wasn’t such a great idea. Kids with special needs placed in the general population tend to get teased much more. Also when in a group with their peers they learn more from one another, as they share similar challenges.
Punchy
I could not possibly disagree more vociferously with the application of this concept. Parents need to be actively involved on the home front, not the actual classroom ciriculum. Parents are terrible judges of “education quality” b/c they are the antithesis of objectiveness; the “best education” is whatever helps their kid, the others be dammed.
My mom, sister, and bro-in-law all teach at diff levels and say the education process has become kneecapped b/c of all the parents each demanding something diff–specifically, whatever aids their child. It’s a whoresbath of conflicting demands and requirements.
The Other Steve
Did you know birth control causes breast cancer?
tBone
Martin, I have to respectfully disagree. I’m thinking specifically of schools for the deaf, where students can share a common language and culture in a way that they couldn’t in a mainstreaming situation. For some types of special needs, I think a dedicated facility is better.
peach flavored shampoo
Odd. I thought part of an education is teaching kids to get along, not bully, not discriminate against those that are different.
Why teach kids that all skin colors and sexes are equal but not throw in gays? It’s a logical step.
The Other Steve
My kid needs to get into Harvard, so please make sure he gets all A’s.
Thank you.
Martin
Your first statement doesn’t hold. One of the big arguments going on right now is the fight over evolution. Is the public school system usurping the role of the parent to say whether we evolved or were created? Can’t that argument be applied to every single thing in education?
And ‘fags and niggers are bad’ is every bit as factually wrong as ‘the earth is 6000 years old’ and ‘2+2=5’. Further, we have quite a long history to show us that the ‘fags and niggers are bad’ set is more likely to do the ass kicking than the other way around. What you are espousing isn’t parental rights, but the systematic marginalization of minority power groups in this country. Parents love that shit until they find themselves as the minority.
And if you want your kid to learn birth control you are always welcome to do so. But that’s the wrong question. The right question is whether your kid has the right to know how NOT to get pregnant or get a disease. They absolutely have that right. Sex ed in school is always argued as a parent right, but it is yet another area that conservatives try and indoctrinate kids (and accuse the left of doing that instead). The kids aren’t being taught to have sex, but how to prevent a disease or get pregnant. You don’t want them to have sex, by all means spend an hour each day talking to them about it.
So your last statement is essentially a packed lie. All of these things are education. The problem is that it is education that contradicts your biases, prejudices, and worldview. That doesn’t cause it to stop being education, it just causes it to be education *that you don’t like*.
So sorry, an informed nation can’t be educated according to some individual menu, picking and choosing what students don’t deserve to know based on the weaknesses and failings of their parents. For all the energy conservatives put into demonstrating that a zygote is actually a person, they work equally hard denying that children will become adults and deserve to at least be aware of the mental shackles their parents and those around them have placed on them.
Jake
Be fair, Cassidy makes an ass of himself enough as it is without help. There’s no way you can get that out of his statement.
4tehlulz
Or, as in the case of my special needs child, they regress because they pick up affects from other more severely affected children.
Once we put him in a mainstream class, his language skills improved dramatically, and it hasn’t held the class back either. He’s at grade level in many categories (including behavior in class) and gets along fine with most of his peers.
It’s a case-by-case thing, which – BTW – private schools don’t have to deal with because they don’t have to comply with federal laws regarding special education.
Reverend Spooner
Hey! Indoctrinate your kids into the homosexual lifestyle on your own time. Me, I’m trying to make sure that mine get equal time for Ptolemy.
tBone
Uh, read his statement again:
Do you disagree that evolution vs. creationism is a cultural battle? Do you think that science teachers are “criminally complicit” in bringing that battle to schools?
Cassidy
I would say it’s the other way around, but you have the concept.
I agree and disagree. I believe kids should learn to get along, as that is an obvious skill needed to live in our society. OTOH, our current system undermines the children’s ability to 1) stick up for themselves and 2) develop the confidence and self-esteem through their own actions that they are strong enough to take care of themselves.
I would appreciate it if you all stopped assuming that I’m personally behind these positions. I personally support teaching evolution, sex education, respecting homosexuality and other races, etc. I just don’t like having my kids classroom turned into a cultural battleground. And while most of the transgressions are from the conservatives, the liberals have done it as well. The attempt to nullify gender, and the unconditional uber-tolerance is equally as damaging. My child’s school currently involves a lot of little things that while innocent, are derived from urban/ gang culture, which I do not feel is a positive influence at all.
Martin
Holy fuck! That’s real!
Do I dare search for the ‘Gravity is an atheist theory, God’s hand pushed down on all of us equally’ website?
Reverend Spooner
I think the Onion had once had an article up about teaching “Intelligent Falling” in schools.
tBone
What’s the “other way around”? Not following you here.
Reverend Spooner
When the teacher tries to show kids how God invented them 6000 years ago, some asshat Darwin-thumper demands equal time for evolutionism?
Cassidy
Wow…
Cassidy
Okay…regardless of the topic it’s the idiot teaching the wrong thing (creationism) that is criminally complacent. replace creationism with the “everyone is special and you can be anything you want” mantra and I think you’ll see where I’m coming from.
Reverend Spooner
Yeah, that’s a fun site.
Cassidy
Not my kind of party…more of an Xbox Live kind of guy.
Reverend Spooner
They probably think you’re going straight to Hell for that one.
SGEW
Come on, that’s a false equivalence if I’ve ever seen one. On one hand you have a demonstrably false (and, therefore, unscientific), religiously motivated (and, therefore, unconstitutional) “theory” being taught in science class, and on the other hand you have (at worst) a vague, feel-good, ineffective, and cheesy slogan standing in for concrete policy decisions.
You can criticize the “everyone’s special” “mantra” all you want (it is, after all, a debatable issue, to say the least), but equating it to creationism is a little absurd.
Punchy
Blame the parents. They’re now called “helicopter moms”, cuz they hover over their child’s school ciriculum, demanding teachers do this or don’t do that. You’d think it’d abate some when they get you college. You’d be wrong.
You couldn’t pay me enough to teach in a public school system.
tBone
Got it. Would you agree that often (not always) schools are embroiled in these cultural battles through no fault of their own? It was just the “our educators are criminally complicit” bit that pissed me off.
And FWIW, I think the public education system is often too quick to jump on the latest fad, and sometimes they are to blame for the cultural dust-ups. I think the reverse is more often true, though.
tBone
Especially if he played that Mass Effect sex-simulator game.
sidereal
You realize those are the same thing, right? If you tell Suzy that if she absorbs her education and studies hard she might be POTUS, then you are making her believe she can be POTUS.
And your fascination with “liberal” self-esteem based education is nothing short of quirky. It’s one of those conservative talking points that stopped being relevant around 1973. When’s the last time you were in a public school? After 5th grade or so, they are engines of self-esteem destruction. There is nothing esteem-affirming in any of it.
Jake
And kicking the class bully in the junk creates an hugnormous fuss. Or so I’ve heard.
“Everyone should get along,” is an excellent theory, but in practice it becomes “Everyone should get along provided the student and parents aren’t too rich, scary or some combination of the two.”
I guess you could say that’s an important lesson.
someguy
So students who take advantage of school choices programs perform the same or slighter better than peers who remain behind in public schools.
We need to wait on the second half of this study but so far it seems that impact of competition results in better performance by public schools.
The parents and students who take part in the programs are happier.
And it looks like, the cost per student, 6501, is less than the per student spending of MPSD in 1998!
http://www.wisconsinsfuture.org/publications/education/MPSFunding.htm
So costs less. The same or better results for students who take part. Improves performance of public schools. Parents and students are happier.
And you conclude that these programs need to be cancelled?
Why?
From the study
“Despite the limited number of voucher programs, numerous researchers have contributed a considerable body of evidence to the debate over vouchers. The type of research falls into two broad areas: 1) the differences in achievement and other outcomes between students in voucher schools and various comparison groups; and 2) the systemic, competitive effects of voucher programs on the remaining public schools. The LEGS deals only with the former question. Future reports from the School Choice demonstration Project will address the latter area.
The evidence on achievement from prior studies has yet to produce a strong academic consensus, with reported voucher impacts ranging from 0 to statistically significant gains of 3-4 percentile points per year. Prior research on Milwaukee from 1990 to 1994 found mixed results on student achievement, with all researchers agreeing that there were not significant differences between private (voucher) students and a random sample of similarly eligible MPS students on reading scores even after as long as three years in the program. There was considerable disagreement on possible math differences, with the three studies
differing over the size of the advantage of private schools (Witte, 2000, chapter 6; Rouse, 1998; Greene et al, 1999). In terms of who participated in the prior Milwaukee voucher program, there was agreement that the private schools did not “cream skim” the best students, although choice parents, while very poor and often heading single-parent households, were more educated, had higher levels of prior parental involvement, and placed somewhat more importance on education than otherwise comparable MPS parents (Witte 2000, chapter 4). Finally, researchers agreed that choice parents were less satisfied with their prior public schools and more satisfied with their subsequent (private) schools than MPS parents. Studies of other voucher programs have found similar results on parental satisfaction but have mixed, and contested results on student achievement. In Cleveland there appeared to be no overall differences on achievement test scores between voucher recipients and public school students (Metcalf et al, 2003). The same was true in Washington, DC based on the first year outcome report of an experimental evaluation (Wolf et al, 2007). In Florida there are a series of different programs including a vouchers-for-failingschools program (recently ruled in violation of the Florida constitution); a program for students with disabilities; and a program awarding scholarships to poor students to attend private schools financed by corporate contributions in lieu of some state taxes. Research on these programs has thus far focused primarily on the effects of voucher competition on student achievement in public schools.
Three different research teams have all reported that the Florida voucher programs have resulted in public (i.e. nonvoucher) students achieving at higher levels, but disagree regarding how much of the public school gains are due to voucher competition and how much are simply due to the desire to avoid the stigma of failure (Figlio and Rouse 2006; West and Peterson 2005; Greene and Winters 2003).”
superdestroyer
Jake,
You may want to do some reading about Montgomery County Schools. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15448-2005Mar7.html
les
Yeah, because conservative evangelitards harass, threaten and browbeat teachers, admins, and boards of ed every time their precious, fragile godbots see a book or hear a theory or learn a word that contradicts their infallible holy book. They won’t be happy till nobody can see, hear or learn anything that contradicts the combined wisdom of a bunch of 4,000 year old goatherds. The schools are battlegrounds because people think the job of schools is to assist them in their never ending battle against reality.
Jake
Did this dumbshit just link to a three year old article that disproves his point?
Glory be, he did!
That’s all right. I’ve seen Mo Co schools up close and personal so this is about as funny as Darrell’s “You can buy a house in Baltimore for $10,000!”
If ignorance is bliss then stupordestroyer is one blissed out motherfucker.
J. Michael Neal
Which is a damned shame. Europeans remember him for successfully running massive food-aid programs during and after both World Wars. He managed to get food into Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. He did the same in providing relief when the Mississippi flooded in 1927.
As President, Hoover was not the overall disaster he’s usually portrayed as. He actively made the tax code more progressive. He set up the anti-trust division at DOJ.
Even his economic policies weren’t as bad as usually assumed. He greatly expanded the scope of the federal government to provide stimulus; his budgets were much greater than any that had come before, though smaller than Roosevelt’s. He opposed Smoot-Hawley’s passage, though he signed the bill.
Hoover doesn’t deserve the reputation that’s been hung on him.
superdestroyer
Jake,
If you are going to nitpick other people’s references it would be nice if you could produce a reference that demonstrated your point insult of resorting to profanity.
From the Washington Post.
In Montgomery, the scores of black students remained relatively steady at 917, the same as the two previous years. Hispanic students scored 942 this year, down two points from 2004 and three points from 2003. But white students gained 11 points over the previous year, raising their average score to 1174, and Asian students improved three points over the previous year to 1163, the highest scores ever for both groups
I think that an SAT differences of over 200 points between blacks and whites in Montgomery County demonstrates that the county does not educate whites and blacks equally. Maybe there is something to improve the test scores of minorities besides having them attend the same school. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090701237.html
Or maybe
But none of the 47 regular high schools in Montgomery and Fairfax counties, the largest school systems in Maryland and Virginia, yielded a black student SAT average this year that met or beat the average for all students in those counties. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/09/AR2007090902032.html?hpid=topnews
jake
stoop, racist fucks who troll the internons don’t deserve nice, they don’t get nice. If they’re lucky they get: Go fuck yourself blind you gibbering pile of shit smeared sheets.
If you want to keep up this stunt without being told to fuck yourself blind try changing your handle so people don’t think “I’d wish that gibbering pile of shit smeared sheets would go fuck himself blind” the minute they see your name in a thread.
demimondian
No, Hoover doesn’t deserve the reputation he got…completely. However, his response to the depression was anemic, and was clearly aimed at protecting the profits of business, not at trying to get people back to work, stopping the runs on the banks, or the like. He reverted to fiscal conservatism and listened to the wrong advisers for far too long.
I’ve always felt very bad for him — like another failed president who was not as bad as he was thought to be — his work after the presidency made the world a better place. I sometimes wonder if Carter looked back to Hoover’s example for redemption.
demimondian
Punchy, I regret that I can’t find a link to the first study. It’s been some years, and I only remember it because the result was consistent with my own experience with my students — it was the good ones who correctly identified me as an incompetent lecturer, not the weak ones — and so completely opposed to the conventional wisdom.
demimondian
The second claim I made (about teacher cheating) is discussed at length in Freakonomics, if you’re interested.
rachel
Too late.
AnneLaurie
We have sold out hard work and skill in this country. Bring the value of trades back up to the level of meaningless bachelors degrees (eg, close the income gap in this country) and you might see an effort to prioritize knowledge again. Probably pointless, now, but I quote from memory because it’s one of my favorites:
Beej
I’ve been a teacher for 30+ years-Junior high (middle school), high school, and college. The so-called “self-esteem” movement is damaging to both the quality of education children are receiving and their future prospects. It has produced a generation of confident narcissicists who believe that whatever they want to do should be cheered and have no idea what real achievement is. After all, they’ve been praised all their lives for insignificant nonsense. These children have been cheated and lied to and allowed to graduate from high school lacking basic skills.
Oh, and TZ, I agree that calculators should be standard equipment in high school, maybe even in 7th and 8th grade, but not at the expense of learning basic arithmetic. Once a student has mastered addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, then give them the calculators, not before.
Tom in Texas
If you want kids to understand numbers take away their cell phones. No one can memorize a 10 digit number anymore, much less a multiplication table.
superdestroyer
Jake,
I take it that you are incapable of finding a study where a large, Democratic leaning suburban school district produces the same level of education performance for its black and Hispanics students that it does for its white students. Of course, it had ever attended a high school science fair, a high school debate tournament, an all-state band concert, you would see prima facia evidence that blacks and hispanics do not obtain the same level of academic achievement as whites and Asians.
Why else to you think that the University of Michigan was admitting blacks with SAT scores 200 points lower than their white or Asian students.
You should also look at the schools where the Democratic leadership send their children (Sidwell Friends, ST Albans, Andover, University of Chicago Laboratory School) you will find few blacks or Hispanics. Does that make Al Gore and John Kerry Racists?