And I was just having a little fun, I do that from time to time.
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Beautiful post. The subtlety is sweet. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuttyd
I can't help but believe our kids don't suffer more or as much during an economic down turn than the parents do. TJ said something that stuck with me about parents at her school were responsible for getting their kids to school and picking them up, and without that basic function of transportation, many would be excluded from that opportunity. Maybe this is less a problem in rural areas than urban ones, but the benefit of having a car is one less obstacle to overcome.
Many older schools are being closed in large urban centers which to me translates to a lot of disruptions for the kids, and adjustments for parents. Economics often adds to the obstacles especially with those that don't have much flexibility in their work schedules, or budgets.
Many of those buildings would not quailify as animal shelters . Despite the fortune collected in revenues from taxes ,the public school system cannot provide safe and secure facilities ;and hire teachers qualifed to teach the subject matter .Yet most school administrators get a complete pass . Perhaps the reason is that they know how to get the job done ,but are handcuffed by regulations and union work rules. It's a good public works system if you just overlook the fact that they utterly fail where their primary role is measured .Quote:
Many older schools are being closed in large urban centers which to me translates to a lot of disruptions for the kids, and adjustments for parents.
Chicago closed 49 schools and set up routes labeled with yellow "Safe Passage" signs so students will know where to walk to get to a new school that's farther away from home. Interestingly, a man was shot and killed the other day on one of these routes. So much for "safe."
For what?Quote:
Get a room.
http://media.giphy.com/media/A8nLow7DRwluU/original.gif
Perhaps he means a schools can be set up in a room ah la two hundred years ago perhaps you could have one in every house
Time for another education update. Our illustrious Attorney General has sued Louisiana to block their school voucher program.
So why does Holder hate black people?Quote:
Give Eric Holder credit for cognitive racial dissonance. On nearly the same day the Attorney General spoke in Washington to honor the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, his Justice Department sued to block the educational dreams of minority children in Louisiana.
Late last week, Justice asked a federal court to stop 34 school districts in the Pelican State from handing out private-school vouchers so kids can escape failing public schools. Mr. Holder's lawyers claim the voucher program appears "to impede the desegregation progress" required under federal law. Justice provides little evidence to support this claim, but there couldn't be a clearer expression of how the civil-rights establishment is locked in a 1950s time warp.
Passed in 2012, Louisiana's state-wide program guarantees a voucher to students from families with incomes below 250% of poverty and who attend schools graded C or below. The point is to let kids escape the segregation of failed schools, and about 90% of the beneficiaries are black.
But Justice is more worried about the complexion of the schools' student body than their manifest failure to educate. During the 2012-13 school year, about 10% of voucher recipients came from 22 districts that remain under desegregation orders from 50 or so years ago
http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/2...o-Details-come
Justice Department tries to block Louisiana's school voucher program | Fox News
Even the folks in Louisiana have doubt about Jindal's voucher plan. Just curious have you done any analysis of the plan and its performance?Quote:
The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in May that the state could not use the allotted voucher money, resulting in Jindal finding about $40 million in other public funds to help the roughly 8,000 students already enrolled in the program this school year.
I have often questioned the wisdom of privatizing education because like private prisons have become just a for profit warehousing that may not be a better system for our kid in the long run. I can see where its attractive to cash strapped states to have private companies build new buildings for our kids, that makes fiscal sense, but I am not convinced the oversight is there for certification of teachers or even the standards required are being met.
As the data comes in for real results, private school are not out performing traditional school as a whole but all over the country, like public school some are better than other, some are great, and some are really as bad as the public schools.
Politics aside, we have a ways to go. Private, or public.
I would imagine if their kids get a good education that translates in further educational gains and a great job future they would be happy. I was/am. I guess the jury is out until that happen.
You act as if there are no standards for private schools. Give parents a choice.
That's not what I said, as a parent I would want access to whatever they are doing and access to those teachers. Just my own experience, and opinion, the PTA and how regularly they meet, and how involved parents are is a good indication of how successful the children will be. It an important interaction between parents, teachers, and school administration.
A shiny new building with clean hallways is great but teaching is done in a room with an adult, and without parental participation and interaction how do we address a students needs, and make sure we are making a difference. Now if the process of implementing a curriculum, and certifying teachers is open to parents/community/ and state oversight, okay we can go forward in the right direction, but if its purely in the hands of business men and their accountants, I have a problem.
I would hope every parent would take a deeper look into who, what, and how our children are educated. Just to make sure our children are not turned into some commodity to be profited from.
Here is Slate's idea of a "deeper look" into education.
Well, I guess all those libs better get their kids out of private schools and lead by example. More from this genius...Quote:
If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.
Someone tell me this is satire, right? I want to believe it is but it's too much like the arguments I see here - even though Obamacare sucks we gotta go for it anyway, I mean sure it might suck for years, generations even, but eventually it's all going to pan out - that sort of thing.Quote:
I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)
You can't make this stuff up.
I think it was written to look at the question of when all the private schools are full what of the kids that aren't in private schools. They need good teachers and computers too don't they?
Do you believe in means testing for income, or do you believe rich well to do kids should get a subsidy for their kids going to private school?
Your thoughts because obviously every child won't be in private schools.
Tal, you're a bad person if you don't send you kids to public schools? Even if your kid gets a crappy education send them anyway? Is that really what the left espouses, mediocrity in hopes of something better through osmosis?
"Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there?"
Uh, not if I can help it.
"I understand. You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it."
That's not for you to say.
"If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school."
Take chances with your own kid. Here's the crux of her message:
Right, they got to have that 'village' thing going, it's much more important than an actual education. Who cares if they learn anything useful as long as they get to party on and get all multicultural and all that.Quote:
Also remember that there’s more to education than what’s taught. As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music, and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.
I wonder how this is playing in Chicago?
Why can't anyone answer my questions?
When all the private schools are full what of the kids that aren't in private schools? They need good teachers and computers too don't they?
Do you believe in means testing for income, or do you believe rich well to do families should get a subsidy for their kids going to private school?
I don't want to argue about the opinion of one pundit. Can we get facts? Or at least show me the data that's says all the private schools are superior to the ones we have let fail for whatever reason.
Can we get back to the kids and not just the ones whose parents can get them into a private school?
Yes, maybe you can find a way to utilize the gazillions in tax dollars they get and also fire bad teachers.
Since when are you a fan of means testing? Should those who actually pay taxes not benefit from them? Just asking.Quote:
Do you believe in means testing for income, or do you believe rich well to do families should get a subsidy for their kids going to private school?
No, you just want to change the subject whenever some lib let's the truth slip out.Quote:
I don't want to argue about the opinion of one pundit. Can we get facts? Or at least show me the data that's says all the private schools are superior to the ones we have let fail for whatever reason.
I have been talking about the kids, while your side is doing everything in its power to keep them in trapped in the system, even though "Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”Quote:
Can we get back to the kids and not just the ones whose parents can get them into a private school?
And I started this thread, and this is what we're discussing, the new public school 'manifesto.'
"What women really think about news, politics, and culture"
I'm telling you, it isn't satire. Though I don't take her seriously this is what she thinks.
She is one woman, with one opinion, and a flair for over simplifying. To assign her opinion to anyone other than herself is crazy.
From what you wrote your whole frame of reference is to destroy the education system for many and turn it into a revenue stream for some companies. You hate the government and I get that but messing things up for those that don't share your own hatred is narrow and biased.
That's why you cannot address the simple questions asked of you because you just cannot be honest and say you hate it and want to destroy it, and nothing and nobody else matters.
I can appreciate the passion, but disagree fully with your premise, direction, and implementation. No I don't expect you to be a fan, or agree with my position either.
In a nutshell, I think you are so wrong!
I just said "this is what SHE thinks."
Tal my friend, that couldn't be further from the truth. You assign that whole evil corporations/profit motive/conservatives hate poor people BS to virtually every situation.Quote:
From what you wrote your whole frame of reference is to destroy the education system for many and turn it into a revenue stream for some companies. You hate the government and I get that but messing things up for those that don't share your own hatred is narrow and biased.
It isn't us playing games with the lives of our children. We aren't the ones using every means possible, including the courts, to force those who would otherwise be stuck in a failed school to stay in that school. It isn't us making it next to impossible to fire bad teachers.
I did address your questions.Quote:
That's why you cannot address the simple questions asked of you because you just cannot be honest and say you hate it and want to destroy it, and nothing and nobody else matters.
It's easy to find reason to disagree with someone when you're the one assigning their positions to them. And no, I don't expect you to see the irony in your post.Quote:
I can appreciate the passion, but disagree fully with your premise, direction, and implementation. No I don't expect you to be a fan, or agree with my position either.
In a nutshell, I think you are so wrong![
Schools in Illinois apparently don't have anything more pressing, like an actual education... It seems they want to be the parent, too.
‘What is Government?’ Elementary Students Taught It’s Your ‘Family’ | TheBlaze.com
Yeah, it's just like that. And, I knew this was coming...
CPS Mandates Sexual, Health Education For Kindergarten « CBS Chicago
Yeah, yeah, what's wrong with teaching 5-year-olds about inappropriate touching? Nothing, I'm OK with that, but they don't stop there...
I already know your arguments here, too. Of course they could always teach them instead that it takes a mom and a dad to make a family...Quote:
“Whether that means there’s two moms at home, everyone’s home life is different, and we introduce the fact that we all have a diverse background, “ said Whyte
So if its two mom's or two dad's it's not a legitimate family? Is that what you teach at your house? That it's not legit to have a gay family?
Is a single mom, or dad a legitimate family? That's what it's about, people are legitimate despite the differences. I get what YOU believe, and that's cool for you. But reality is that it's not always that way in the lives of real people.
So are you saying that gays cannot make a family, divorced or single people cannot make a family?
That was exactly as expected. You believe all that's legitimate, some don't. Why should those who don't have the public school undermine their values? I thought maybe you'd get that by my example, do you want them to teach that the only legitimate family is the traditional family, or should government funded public schools remain neutral and leave such subjects to the home?
We are long past Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best in this country. Like Tal said, there is every kind of family grouping possible -- parents turn out to be the grandparents, a single mom or dad, a divorced mom or dad, a gay or lesbian couple or individual, an older sister, you name it -- and students might be living in houses, condos, apartment buildings, homeless shelters, cars, on the street. It would be an insult to teach that there is only one right way to be a family.
So you don't believe parents have the right to their values without public school interference? That is the issue, not what is a family.
I can only hope you teach your kids not to look down on others because they are different. No matter what their home is like.
Agreed, so why should the schools be involved in teaching their values?
.Quote:
If the parents' values intefer with the child's education, then what?
What is it to you if I teach my kids my values? I don't interfere in your home, why would you interfere in mine?
Thousands of American higher-education administrators will spend part of Labor Day weekend trying to plumb the meaning of the ideas President Obama dropped on them last week to "reform" the American college and university system. Given the political genome of college administrators nowadays, they'll try to make the Obama plan work. But for the handful who want to preserve and protect their hallowed institutions, here's a recommendation: Drop by the nearest medical school for a chat with the doctors about how it's going with the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.
Insofar as all these higher-ed reforms will be tied to federal rules for getting the money, it is beyond dispute that this will be ObamaCare for education, just as Dodd-Frank was ObamaCare for banking and finance.
A clue to where this is headed may be seen by clicking on the White House backgrounder's link to the "Financial Aid Shopping Sheet" jointly developed by the U.S. Department of Education and Dodd-Frank's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The sheet has a striking name atop it: "University of the United States (UUS)"—with a logo, no less.
http://collegecost.ed.gov/shopping_sheet.pdf
The education proposal reflects the Obama modus operandi. First, identify an American industry that long ago made a Faustian bargain for federal support, such as hospitals and housing. Then describe the subsidy-dependent industry's inevitable bloat and inefficiency in images so stark no reasonable person could disagree. "Burdened with tens of thousands of dollars" in student debt, Mr. Obama said at Binghamton University in New York, "they have to put off buying a home, or starting a business, or starting a family." [Footnote: That was federal student debt.] Then after getting buy-in from the mortified industry, he imposes the solution—on his terms.
Those terms, as described by the White House, are that future financial aid will be tied to "college performance," based on a federal rating system of all colleges designed by the Department of Education with metrics defining affordability (average tuition, scholarships, loan debt), admission rates for disadvantaged students, remedial support for disadvantaged students, student outcomes (graduation and transfer rates, postgraduate earnings), and bonuses based on the number of Pell students graduated. And a lot more. The White House calls this a "datapalooza."
Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education commented on the proposals in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "If you want to condition the receipt of student aid on this information, you have an obligation to have perfect data." Wrong. Like ObamaCare, you'll make this work with far-from-perfect data.
One attribute that sets the U.S. higher education system apart from any in the world is the diversity of its 4,495 degree-granting institutions—big, small, private, public, religious. Under this plan, that historic diversity would melt beneath conformance. The Obama plan says it will increase the number of college graduates and contain tuition costs by "rewarding states that are willing to systematically change their higher education policies and practices."
Random thought: Will professors at participating ObamaEd universities become subject in time to the same cost-containment rules that, say, Medicare imposes on doctors? Think it can't happen? Better read the president's speeches last week.
To better comprehend the origins of all this, one need only visit the White House website and read the proposal's first sentence. Actually it's the first half of the first sentence, which makes it clear that something other than student debt loads and repayment schedules is in play here: "Earning a postsecondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few." A talented few?
When, since the end of World War II, has U.S. higher education been for the "talented few"? Like everything else the past four years, the economics of higher education is about to be refracted through the same lens of social antagonism Mr. Obama uses to think about pretty much everything.
Here are two higher-ed reforms that weren't in the president's speeches last week, and likely never will be.
The first is reform of the U.S.'s No. 1 national disgrace: the failed inner-city public-school system. Their doors opened again this week, and in nine months they will sweep tens of thousands of uneducated "graduating" seniors out the doors, with no chance of qualifying for any college.
The Obama administration's contribution to the new school year? A lawsuit just filed by Eric Holder's Justice Department against Louisiana's school-voucher program, whose black participation rate is 90%. Why isn't Education Secretary Arne Duncan finally resigning in protest?
The second reform would be returning the U.S. to its historic 3.3% economic growth rate, rather than the below 2% rate of nearly the entire Obama presidency. In his speeches Mr. Obama said a college education ensures higher lifetime earnings. But not if you've graduated into four years of unemployment or underemployment.
Imposing ObamaCare on health, education, finance, energy and anything else in reach is the reason why 2% growth and 7.5% unemployment looks chronic. We may have the best higher-education system in the world, but we're underachieving. So is the president.
Daniel Henninger: ObamaCare for Everything - WSJ.com
Interesting article.
There will be problems when funding is tied to university performance in the way outlined in the article. Universities will obviously try and make themselves more attractive and the most successful. One could see a situation arising where by some degrees will be incorrectly shorted. For example, a three year degree could become a two year degree.
What the author thinks is a reasonable definition is what I call a conjunction error
" Then describe the subsidy-dependent industries' inevitable bloat and inefficiency in images in images so stark that no reasonable person could disagree"
I don't believe that bloating and inefficiency necessarily go together. It is possible to have a bloated budget, but still be efficient.
Note. Incorrect placement of the apostrophe in the original article has been corrected in my citing.
Your higher education system does produce some of the best universities in the world while at the same time producing some that are not up to international standards..
Like I care about international standards.. the real question is ,do international universities measure up to our standards ? It is not the government's business to grade universities. But Henniger does make a valid point. These universities accept government handouts and then are surprised when there are strings attached. But a private university can rightly tell his to shove his rating where the sun don't shine.
I doubt if they will though, they like money and that why they do what they do.
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