a Trump vs Clinton United States Presidential Election in 2016
- Thread starter Charlie Don't Surf
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Zappit
Staff member
I think it would be better to improve the schools that are lagging behind. Provide additional professional development and training, lay out clear standards of acceptible behavior and enforce it consistently, and for fuck's sake, have the administrators back up their teachers. It has worked before. Some of the worst schools in my area have seen dramatic improvements because they actually addressed the problems in the lowest performing schools, rather than shuffling people around and ignoring those problems.
School choice is the state giving up. School choice is them telling you that if you want to leave, whatever, they don't care. Not like they're going to try to fix the problem.
School choice is the state giving up. School choice is them telling you that if you want to leave, whatever, they don't care. Not like they're going to try to fix the problem.
Because he can always say it better than I can...
I live in Ohio. My own state government was caught manipulating performance statistics and misleading grant application reviewers for charter schools. I went to one (ECOT) for a year and managed to pass in classes I did no work in and took no tests in because the teacher was falsifying grades. To put it bluntly, I -know- that charter schools don't work. It's just another scheme, by the rich, to drain tax money out of the state and vouchers are simply the mechanism by how it works.
It's a plot to destroy the public school system, plain and simple.
I live in Ohio. My own state government was caught manipulating performance statistics and misleading grant application reviewers for charter schools. I went to one (ECOT) for a year and managed to pass in classes I did no work in and took no tests in because the teacher was falsifying grades. To put it bluntly, I -know- that charter schools don't work. It's just another scheme, by the rich, to drain tax money out of the state and vouchers are simply the mechanism by how it works.
It's a plot to destroy the public school system, plain and simple.
There's a difference between "IS a plot to destroy the school system" and "CAN BE ABUSED AS a way to destroy the school system".
Almost any system is open to abuse in some way, on some level. A badly-run, hardly-checked system like charter schools are in a lot of states even more so. I'm too sick and tired at the moment to make a nice big list, but, you know, I think we can all agree on that. Extrapolating from one instance to "the system is Evil" is a bit of a reach.
Which doesn't mean I'm in favor of vouchers/charter schools, certainly not in general.
GasBandit
Staff member
The public school system was a plot to reduce the American public to docile servitude, providing only the minimal programming required to be good labor without thinking thoughts dangerous to those in power.
Who are you ascribing intent to here?
THEM. Read between the lines sheeple.
Well, I happened to work for one in China. It was expensive as sin (30,000 USD/semester) for attendance, but it offered alternatives to state education. We had duel Chinese/British principals, and a mixed staff of foreign (UK/American/Canadian) teachers and used British-based curriculum. We went from Pre-K all the way through to 12th, and, as an added bonus, we did IB-preparation and got certified to teach IB-courses the 2nd year it was opened in Wuxi (the other 5 branches in Shanghai already had IB certifications). This also meant students that worked their ass off and were successful didn't have to take the national entrance exam known as the Gaokao. And you know what? It was fucking awesome. We did shit that most other schools didn't. This isn't to say the Chinese public schools were shit, because we were in competition with a pretty damned prestigious one in the area, but we had a focus on Ivy league universities and didn't have to follow state curriculum. Hell, I took my students on a 5-day science camping trip to the New Territories of Hong Kong. Parents paid a crap ton, and we delivered. Our dorms were better, our school lunches were better, and students had a wider range of activities. We used the British pastoral system to discipline students. There are going to be shit private schools out there, but I do believe students/parents should be given the choice. I don't know what its like in everyone else's area, but the shit schools in my area (like Gulf High, thank God I went to Mitchell High), have stayed shit for the last 20 years no matter how much money was thrown at them. If public schools crumble at the thought of some competition, then they need to get good. Better materials, better training, better teacher-parent interactions.
<Insert far side comic that I only vaguely remember about "they">
GasBandit
Staff member
The shapers of the modern public education system, in particular the General Education Board, founded by John D. Rockefeller.
"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm." - General Education Board, Occasional Papers, No. 1 (General Education Board, New York, 1913) p. 6.
None of that even implies this:
Like, at all. Are you sure you got the right quote?
GasBandit
Staff member
You might be giving it a more wishful, charitable tone in your head. It becomes different when you consider these other JDR quotes:
"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."
"Individualism is gone, never to return."
The NEA (National Education Association) was very alarmed by what the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations were doing, in 1914, they said:
“We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and universities.”
Oh pardon me, I seem to have gotten in between you two. If you just give me a moment, I'll get out of the way. Sorry.[DOUBLEPOST=1479935139,1479935067][/DOUBLEPOST]I attended a couple high schools in and just north of Toronto where several foreign students were enrolled. Most of them were from Hong Kong and South Korea. Their parents sent them here to get a Canadian public school education. Our system must be working if people are doing that, right?
Tuition for a year at a Toronto public high school for a foreign student is 14 grand right now.
Well, that covers part of it: they wanted workers. It doesn't suggest they were threatened by people being free thinkers, beyond it interfering with the time and effort that goes into creating good workers (which, by the way, is not inherently bad. I think people also want to BE good workers!) As a college professor, I aim to give people critical thinking skills (sob!), which is notoriously hard to budge, but I ALSO try to give my students useful skills that will translate to the workplace. They are not wholly incompatible (from a 21st century perspective, which is vastly different than it was 85 years ago). But even today, there is a bit of tension in planning curricula. What are we preparing the students for beyond graduation? Are they going to be philosophers or work in human resources? Those may very well be at odds, because if you prepare them for the former, they may be unprepared to do the latter. A nation of philosophers might grind the economy to a halt!
Ideally, we should give students enough foundation to find their passions and enough training to translate to common real-world situations, and opportunity to launch into something greater than the most basic offerings available. And I'd argue that, on average, students are granted those things. But averages only show us the central-ness of what is going on in education. The spread is pretty extreme in terms of how well individual schools accomplish foundation, training, and opportunity. I don't see how vouchers does anything but increase that variability in outcomes. For some people it will mean even worse schooling and for others, much better. If the for-profit university abuses of their students' financial and educational futures is any indication, opening education to stronger market forces will probably create a gold-rush to grab as many dollars for as little in trade as possible, with a little bit of good intention thrown in here or there.
All that was to try and paint a picture that I don't think you can conflate fear with the intention to give students useful skills. You might have another handful of quotes in there but I think you are reading it in a bit of a biased fashion yourself.
GasBandit
Staff member
I wouldn't say that the goal of those who are educators are to create drones, just that the system itself was designed to foster that end result. The current public education system is notoriously in shambles, especially in the poorer neighborhoods of urban centers. The system we are in right now excludes market forces entirely, unless the parents are wealthy enough to pay for private schooling in addition to paying the taxes that go to funding public education. I myself attended both public and private schools, and I credit the private school with getting me up to 8th grade math by the time I was in 5th grade, and public school for reducing me to having to take calculus 3 times before I was able to eke out a passing grade. There are good schools and bad schools, both public and private - and allowing the money to follow the students to good schools and allowing the bad schools to fail and be replaced might be something worth trying. Yes, it has the potential for abuse and failure, but in a system of actual current abuse and failure, I don't think we're risking much.
Part of the context of that quote is the fact that automation and industrial machinery were becoming universal, and was more complex than in prior generations. Employers need workers with a more complete education to be able to operate them. One could argue that critical thinking skills - as in being able to diagnose problems and consider ramifications before engaging large, expensive, dangerous machinery - were part of that. So yes, education was designed to produce better workers. But that doesn't mean they were looking for drones.
My sister was a teacher at a Catholic charter school for years. The 6th graders she was teaching English could barely read or write but the school kept pushing them onward because if they held them back, the parents would pull them from the school and cost them revenue.
My sister was a teacher at a Catholic charter school for years. The 6th graders she was teaching English could barely read or write but the school kept pushing them onward because if they held them back, the parents would pull them from the school and cost them revenue.
I'm sure a private institution seeking tuition dollars would face a similar dilemma...and produce a similar conclusion. So how do you incentivize in a way that rewards schools for teaching right instead of pushing through?
Make all schools private!
So each state would have it's own Common Core?
I found this interesting-
"Schools who receive funds from the state of Texas are required to enforce these tests among students who attend the schools. Any private school, charter school, or homeschooling that does not receive monetary support from Texas is not required to take the STAAR test, and as of May 2012 can only take the TAKS test via ordering from Pearson."
Huh.
I found this interesting-
"Schools who receive funds from the state of Texas are required to enforce these tests among students who attend the schools. Any private school, charter school, or homeschooling that does not receive monetary support from Texas is not required to take the STAAR test, and as of May 2012 can only take the TAKS test via ordering from Pearson."
Huh.
That's an assessment, which is obviously a critical step in the process, but it isn't an incentive. And if it was tied to an incentive structure, it might result in "pushing through" just to acquire the incentives. How do you incentivize holding someone back a grade without a school holding too many people back unnecessarily? Or incentivizing special education, which is not very cost-effective but usually necessary for students that struggle? Basically, how do you incentivize addressing failure properly? The business world could stand to figure this out too, I'd wager.
GasBandit
Staff member
STAAR (or TAAS, which is what it was back when I was in school), only tested your answer, not how you got there. Most of the objections I heard to Common Core were based on the emphasis being on the opposite.[DOUBLEPOST=1479942292,1479942228][/DOUBLEPOST]
Because passing the assessment would be a prerequisite to receiving that student's voucher funds. If you don't deliver the results, you don't get paid.
Hey, it's only been 14 years. Maybe it's time to give it another chance.
I have zero issues with Common Core math, as I've said before. I feel like the people most opposed to it are people who don't really get what it's trying to do. I can think of several kids who struggled in math to start, but are now very good at it now that they have all the right foundations.
Colorado opted out of NCLB, and replaced it with a system that tracks yearly growth instead of grade level standards, so kids are required to go up a grade level, whether they are behind OR ahead in grade level standards. We also have open enrollment, which means a kid can apply to any public school they want, but they don't get public transportation unless they go to the school in their district. Sadly our school funding is also shit, and our special ed funding is worse, but I've complained about that before.
Colorado opted out of NCLB, and replaced it with a system that tracks yearly growth instead of grade level standards, so kids are required to go up a grade level, whether they are behind OR ahead in grade level standards. We also have open enrollment, which means a kid can apply to any public school they want, but they don't get public transportation unless they go to the school in their district. Sadly our school funding is also shit, and our special ed funding is worse, but I've complained about that before.
You might hear this objection sometimes as "teaching to the test", which I think is not very specific. The real problem is do you have an adequate assessment? Does it really measure academic ability in an unbiased fashion? As an extreme example, when the Binet-Simon version of the original IQ test was translated from French into English, American kids tested almost uniformly as mentally retarded. (Subsequently, this was blamed on immigrants bringing down the national IQ, leading to a rash of deportations and refusal of immigrants into the country. Not to mention the forced sterilizations of actually mentally retarded individuals.) In this case, the test was culturally biased against American kids. The problems with standardized testing (especially when tied to an economic incentive) do not end there. In some Asian countries, students spend countless hours memorizing the answers to questions that are highly likely to end up on the test. And it is a strategy that works, but probably dilutes the validity of the test as a result (it isn't measuring what you think it is). So if you are going to have an assessment that is the end all be all of what determines where the education dollars go, it better be damn great. And there really isn't any assessment like that. They are almost all insensitive to some very important variables and may actually be measuring immovable variables, like innate biologically-bound intelligence. If your imperfect measurement cannot identify why a student is struggling in the first place, then how does reassigning the education dollars to a competitor even help?[DOUBLEPOST=1479943336,1479943217][/DOUBLEPOST]
The teachers I know like Common Core. Interestingly, it seems as if it is the private sector making crappy learning materials is the root of a lot of complaints. Maybe the market has yet to speak on the matter.
I feel like this needed it's own post.
GasBandit
Staff member
So don't give the schools the test ahead of time to teach from. I mean, sure, you'll probably have to disclose things like "the peloponnesian war will be on the test" but leave the exact questions, and their format, a mystery. Some of the questions might be multiple choice, some essay, some true or false, but make it so that the test is a test, not a lesson plan.
Naturally, the nature of the assessment is one that will need to be addressed and refined, as will probably the administering and grading of the test. I have some ideas for that which may be better suited to its own thread and a day when I'm not ass deep in last minute black friday advertising.
As for the final sentence, competition almost always benefits the consumer and puts pressure to improve on those competing. It's the difference between monolithic Ma Bell and a half-dozen cellular providers constantly trying to outdo each other. Is it perfect? No, but it's the best engine for improvement we've got so far, and it usually works, so long as corruption and collusion can be rooted out and punished harshly.
I want to respond at length but Family is imminent. Competition can inspire consumer friendly as well as consumer unfriendly practices. Arguably it is not the root of innovation, but rather information exchange is what is truly critical. I want to dive in more, but no time. In short, competition isn't magic and it will do nothing in a vacuum.
Oh, also, your assessments are not privatized, so are not subject to competition. if the are privatized, they are not standardized. A dilemma...
Oh, also, your assessments are not privatized, so are not subject to competition. if the are privatized, they are not standardized. A dilemma...
It sounds like all us Americans are too busy with Thanksgiving and its surrounding elements to continue discussing anything. Let's let the forumites from other countries decide our fate in the meantime.
Honestly, could it be worse than where we are headed?