Posted on 04/21/2004 3:02:46 PM PDT by BurkesLaw
"All men by nature desire to know," said Aristotle. Either Aristotle was wrong, or public education is failing to awaken the academic desires of American students.
According to a new Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, only 32 percent of recent high school graduates were qualified to attend a four-year college. In addition, the report showed that the high school graduation rate remains depressingly low at only 70 percent.
For years, American education experts have been alarmed at the growing inability of public school students and graduates to compete academically with peers in other industrialized democratic countries. As Charles Sykes wrote in his revolutionary 1990s book, Dumbing Down our Kids: Why America's Children Feel Good about Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add , "When the very best American students -- the top one percent -- are measured against the best students of other countries, America's best and brightest finished at the bottom."
While Sykes may have exaggerated the problem, it is true that America's students are average at best.
According to the most recent academic comparison study by the Program for International Student Assessment, of students in 32 developed countries, 14 countries score higher than the U.S. in reading, 13 have better results in science, and 17 score above America in mathematics.
It isn't as though American students aren't scoring first places any more. A survey by the Princeton Testing Service shows that American students rank highest amongst industrialized democracies for amount of time spent watching videos in class. And William Moloney, chairman of the Washington, D.C. based Education Leaders Council -- a coalition of reform minded political and educational leaders -- writes that American students feel better about their math skills that any other country in the free world, while Korean students (who feel worst about their math skills) outscore everyone else in math.
The characteristics of self-esteem-obsessed, video-watching schools are manifested in the frustrations of America's higher education system. According to the Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia, more than 40 percent of recent Washington State high school graduates attending community college enrolled in remedial courses to prepare them for college-level work. But a public-school system that transfers responsibility for learning basic knowledge to higher education isn't giving taxpayers and parents a return for their money. More damaging, the failure of elementary schools to prepare students for their future hurts America economically, socially, and intellectually.
Over the past century, public education has devolved from the classical approach of character plus basics (reading, writing, arithmetic, respect, and responsibility), to skills, to psychological-social engineering....
(Excerpt) Read more at iconoclast.ca ...
Wow. I'm impressed. If our kids take the college credit classes at the high school, they have to pay about $150 a class (for 3 college credit hours.) If they take the college credit on the college campus (while still enrolled in high school), they pay about 30% less than the going in-state college rate (i.e. they pay about $200 a credit hour, or about $600 for a 3 hour college class.)
Some of the private colleges in the area have offered college credit on their campus for $50 a credit hour to homeschooled students.
You've got a sweet deal though; smart to take advantage of it.
I've heard of that too. Fortunately it hasn't been our public school experience. I have heard that a lot of parents are complaining vehemently and in some districts the homework load is falling off.
I agree. I don't know how NC funds higher education, but in my state, it's funded out of state tax revenues as well as tuition. IMO it's just one of those things that people in a state pay taxes for, as part of the common good, and it makes the state a better place for everyone if it has a good public university system.
One of the modern gurus is Dr. William Glasser. To Glasser and his cohorts absolutes and facts are bad. Glasser believes that learning core knowledge promotes individuality, which is bad. He prefers collaborative and cooperative project learning, team playing, whereas a better idea is to promote the collective man, which is a good thing.
This is Dewey's "New Education" philosophy, unfiltered. Dewey's teaching dates back to the Columbia Teachers College of the 1920s. Interestingly, Dewey promoted "whole word" reading instruction in order to prevent individuals from learning to read on their own. Dewey wanted students to learn to work collectively in guessing the meaning of words on the page.
Bingo, but this has been the goal from the beginning, when Prussian schooling was imposed in Massachusetts by Horace Mann.
Think it through. What would the consequences be if there were no compulsory attendance laws? (By the way, compulsory attendance does *not* rule out homeschooling or private education. *Nowhere* are children forced to go to public school.)
On the other hand, a voucher system respects parents' fundamental right to be the primary educators of their children.
Yes, at *additional* taxpayers' expense, above and beyond what we pay now (which is enough, thank you.) Those who think vouchers are ever going to be available to the middle classes are living in a fantasy world. They are at present a *welfare benefit* given to the poor, and they don't come anywhere near to the cost of paying for a non-Catholic private school education.
Our system of compulsory schooling is appropriate for a totalitarian regime, not a free society.
Really? People in totalitarian societies get to homeschool their kids & teach them anything they wish re: curriculum and political views? They get to send their kids to any religious schools they want (even pernicious ones that teach jihad and black out Israel on their maps?) People in totalitarian societies get to move freely from one community to another, so they can exercise their own *free choice* to spend more for a house in a better school district? (I thought that was "the American way" - exercising one's economic freedom - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, etc.)
What's *socialistic* is telling middle class people they have to support yet another transfer of income above and beyond the common-school taxes to poor people who have children out of wedlock, use drugs, and do not pull themselves up to move to better neighborhoods with better schools. The proof is in the pudding - in every "failing inner city school" across the country there are immigrants (mostly from Asia, but some Euros like Bosnians) whose children *do* succeed in those schools, and who aren't in them very long, because they economically better themselves and *move out.*
See the US prior to around 1865.
*Nowhere* are children forced to go to public school.
Wuhaaat? If you can't afford private school or homeschooling, people with guns will come to your door and take your children away from you.
On the other hand, a voucher system respects parents' fundamental right to be the primary educators of their children.
Yes, at *additional* taxpayers' expense, above and beyond what we pay now (which is enough, thank you.)
If the voucher is valued at half of the current per-pupil government school expenditure, how does this increase taxes? Please explain.
Those who think vouchers are ever going to be available to the middle classes are living in a fantasy world.
Is this a fact? An argument?
They are at present a *welfare benefit* given to the poor, and they don't come anywhere near to the cost of paying for a non-Catholic private school education.
If Catholics can do it, anyone can do it. Do the math yourself, $3500 x 20 students is $70,000 per year per classroom. You couldn't run such a school profitably?
If not, add another five kids per class and make it $87,500 annually.
Our system of compulsory schooling is appropriate for a totalitarian regime, not a free society.
Really?
Yes.
People in totalitarian societies get to homeschool their kids & teach them anything they wish re: curriculum and political views? They get to send their kids to any religious schools they want (even pernicious ones that teach jihad and black out Israel on their maps?)
10% of the population is effectively free, although they are forced to finance the system that denies the other 90% of the families the right to educate their children as they see fit.
People in totalitarian societies get to move freely from one community to another, so they can exercise their own *free choice* to spend more for a house in a better school district? (I thought that was "the American way" - exercising one's economic freedom - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, etc.)
Right. Just move from the city to a wealthy suburb (where children still aren't allowed to learn about God, the Summum Bonum of human life).
What's *socialistic* is telling middle class people they have to support yet another transfer of income above and beyond the common-school taxes to poor people who have children out of wedlock, use drugs, and do not pull themselves up to move to better neighborhoods with better schools.
Again, if the voucher is valued at half of the current per-pupil government school expenditure, how does this add to the tax burden?
The proof is in the pudding - in every "failing inner city school" across the country there are immigrants (mostly from Asia, but some Euros like Bosnians) whose children *do* succeed in those schools, and who aren't in them very long, because they economically better themselves and *move out.*
Because some children survive horrible schooling, the system should be perpetuated?
Thanks for the link! This is how controversial programs are implemented from the top down, from the federal government and the state through local school boards, against the wishes of the community.
I've pulled pistols out of backpacks, been threatened with lawsuits by parents for breaking up fist fights in school, and things I never imagined could ever occur. NCLB will never fix the problems and is a failed program; just politics. Accountability is what is needed in alot of areas of our society.
Most vouchers are about $2000, but for the sake of argument use $3500 as you say. Let's also assume full enrollment, which is a *very* generous assumption, especially in the first 5 years or so of a new school's life.
Yes, you bring in $70,000 per classroom.
What then? In a K-8 school, that would mean nine classrooms if you have 20 kids per classroom. Assuming full enrollment, that will mean 180 kids and at minimum ten staff members (nine teachers and a principal.)
It also means a commercial building in a suitable location for a school. Nine classrooms is a bit too big for some church's basement, so that means renting commercial property somewhere. This means utilities, including larger air conditioners, furnaces, and electrical wiring than people have in their homes. It means a property with sufficient parking to accommodate all the staff (usually this is a zoning requirement), and at minimum some kind of play area for the children as well as a common area for lunch, etc. (You can't expect kids to sit at their desks all day long.)
The school will have to have insurance. This is not a trivial cost.
Finally, there's the pay issue. How much are these suffering servants going to expect in pay? Remember that salary isn't just the base salary; it's base salary X times 1.5 to include Social Security, workman's comp, Medicare, etc. as well as any employee benefits. Also, principals are generally paid more than teachers. Finally, who's going to clean the school, do repairs, remove snow and ice from the grounds? They're going to expect to be paid too, even if they're not union.
We haven't even gotten into the other issues of running a school in an inner city, where the students are *not* academically prepared and generally have far more behavioral problems. So without having any real-life small private school budgets in front of me, I don't think $3500 a year is reasonable - I think $6000 a year is more like it, maybe more.
That's why I think we need to compromise - at least end compulsory attendance at 14, and make high schools all "specialized" - so that those with good test scores *can* go to a rigorous college-prep high school. But the US now isn't the same as it was in 1865, and some of those old solutions don't apply.
If the voucher is valued at half of the current per-pupil government school expenditure, how does this increase taxes? Please explain.
Because the vast majority of students will still be educated in public schools, especially those with learning disabilities and/or behavioral problems. People *politically* still control school issues. People are *not* going to want their schools consolidated and closed; they want their kids to go to a neighborhood school, even if it has 100 students instead of the 300 it was built to hold. We'll still have to pay to keep those schools open, and even if some of them close, we'll still have to pay to have students bussed to more distant schools. It's not strictly a 1:1 transfer, because there are minimum costs to keeping a school going that don't go away to zero.
my eighty-year old daddy went up to the fifth grade... his fifth-grade education (led by nun--even though it wasn't a private school--in a school house that eventually became a gas station--that's how small it was) was far richer than today's twelfth-grade education... he is a man who can read, write and do arithmatic--multiplication, division, fractions, etc... he has successfully run his own business employing others for the last forty years (and still working at eighty)... back then, school wasn't filled with a bunch of social brain-washing...
How sad, that this guy/gal is teaching. When I taught math, I spent many late nights grading my classes homework. I had full classes but I believe if you assign it you should read it. In math it does not matter that you tried, there is no substitute for understanding what is going on and why the answer is right or wrong. (And I did allow equivalent answers, unless the student was instructed to provide the answer in one form or another, .01 = 1/100 = 10/1000) Consider getting you son a tutor, he will not learn anything in this class, and this is a critical age for understanding math. Of course you can't do anything about the teacher, thanks to the union.
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