-—Race to the Top is an Ayers adventure via Obama and Duncan.
I agree that Ayers is an evil marxist bastard and my impression of ‘Race to the Top’ is negative, an Obama legerdemain that he gives a (** about real education. My expectations were so low I haven’t bothered to learn about it. It was just an excuse to get rid of Bush’s No Child Left Behind and satisfy Obama’s union backers.
-—Obama hasn’t killed DC charters. He strongly supports them and the percentage of students in the charters has remained steady since Henderson took over
This is your profession, you should understand what’s going on better than you do.
EDUCATION SECRETARY Arne Duncan has decided not to admit any new students to the D.C. voucher program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041003073.html
Despite a track record of sterling success in moving children in low-income families from failing public schools and giving them a chance at academic success — and a brighter future — Democrats cut funding to the DCOSP and consigned the children of the District of Columbia to the public-school monopoly.
While Obama always talks up the value of non-ideological solutions to bad public schools, he was quick to sign a bill last month that cancels a federally-funded D.C. school-voucher program after the 2009-2010 school year, unless Congress and the District government act to reauthorize it.
The practical effect of this bill and the fact that Congress has delayed re-authorizing the program is that private school vouchers will cease to be an option for more than 1,300 students. But we learn today that the impact of President Obama’s decision to limit access to new entrants is even greater than we thought.
The president is expected to announce his proposal Thursday. The plan would fund the program for $12 million in the upcoming school year and keep the vouchers running until the 1,700 children currently in the pilot program complete their studies. The program would not be extended beyond that, according to the White House.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/05/07/obama-extend-dc-voucher-program/#ixzz20TQXu38m
——Buddy, they found out that the charters have more girls and white kids.
I can see how you would miss the nuances in this study. It is rather complex because it combines an observational component (where your sex and race differences WOULD confound the results) AND a Lottery study (where they would not).
They state the LOTTERY STUDY “controls for all differences in students’ background, including unobserved differences” They reviewed the results of the lottery (because the state could conceivably screw up/bias a lottery in some way (favors, bribery?), but I read the indications that the lottery results (randomization) did not show significant bias (page 24).
Their stated results are that “””The estimated impacts of middle schools and high school Charters are similar in both the “observational” and “lottery-based” results.””
So your sex and race factors DID NOT APPLY to the statistically significant lottery results (which paralleled the observational results).
Happy to discuss race and sex in an objective manner using statistics and science. That’s how we will improve education for our kids.
-— Much of stat and modeling is merely an exercise in mathematically intimidation.
Quite a revelation of your ideology. This mind set is probably a major part of the massive fail of your ‘profession’. Sadly, it also probably reflects self-selection of many future teachers into education who cannot really cope with math and science but end up teaching it to our kids.
I’ll bet Ayers would agree with you that statistics and metrics are tools of the 1 percent ruling class.
-— What are charters? Let’s see, they are tightly regulated industries where the private sector owns the means of production but the government dictates how they are run That is called fascism.
Yes. And as one who is as afraid of socialism as fascism, the government turns everything it touches into shit. Government feels the need to control this system but doesn’t feel the obligation to make it succeed (jobs program). We need to avoid the -isms and privatize the massive fail.
—Eugenics is already common in the U.S. Half of down syndrome kids are executed before birth. At least they won’t pull test scores down that way.
I am pro-life. I am not sure I would casually use selective abortions as a talking point.
—Apparently they are good enough for you dyslexic son. Why didn’t he go to the private ... ....Why don’t we take accountability a bit farther? Aren’t you accountable for your kids both socially and genetically?
And now we reach the level at which a liberal is most comfortable arguing, at the personal level.
==Why would I keep any of my kids in public school? Because just like the black innercity folks there have been times when I felt I had no economic choice. We pay taxes and the government says they are providing an education, why shouldn’t we be able to expect that it does? When we strong armed the District into classifying him as both gifted and learning disabled, he was the first kid ever classified that way. Some of the staff remarked that they had learned more about this phenomenon from us. Presumably it was easier for the next parents in that situation.
When the school system began to also fail my 3d child (who was doing 6th grade math in the second grade), we commenced home-schooling. That child just graduated cum laude with an honors BA.
==Accountable for your kids both socially and genetically? Well since my son’s dyslexia was ideopathic, but he had convulsions leading to hospitalization after a household head bump mishap, I’m not really going to blame myself for it genetically. And since we overcame the school system to make him a successful college student and corporate IT guy then I guess we took our accountability at an appropriate level. That meant we had to stop listening to the experts who said he was lazy and unmotivated and kick the school system’s bureaucratic ass for six straight years.
-—I still have no clue what you are saying about embezzling funds.
Yes, I can see that the world view in which you exchange value with an employer escapes you. I consult on an hourly basis and I feel a very strong obligation to provide economic value commensurate with the dollars I receive. I think that’s more commonly true in private industry contrasting with my experience in government work.
I have always heard that teachers regard education as a big jobs program. Since you can’t conceive of the fair exchange of teaching value for taxpayer educational spending, I can see how that jobs program orientation plays out. It means its ok to waste kid’s time in those 180 days that they are in school. If the class time is economically worthless then why not take the kids out to politically demonstrate, show them movies all day, politically support one party (the one that keeps the jobs program going)?
According to a new study out today from the Center for American Progress, which picked over three years of data collected by the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, 37 percent of fourth-graders say their math work is “often” or “always” too easy, 57 percent of eighth-graders says the same about their history work, and 39 percent of seniors say they rarely have to write papers on what they read about in class.
The kids are just props. You see no obligation in return for your salary, the building you teach in, the resources the taxpayers provide, the trust of the parents and the time and future of the kids to spend your in-school working hours actually, measurably teaching the kids.
Privatize the massive fail.