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By middle school, many of our boys are already in gangs and the girls are already pregnant, albeit not by boys, but by predatory men.
I always want to ask people, At what point is a child supposed to realize that the parents way of life is a dead end and make the decision to reject their parents and their peer group? Age 8? 10? 12? 14? When?
I don't know...as for the kids in middle schools are you talking specifically about your town or in general?
Quote:
Originally Posted by sammbriggs
i disagree with this. in much the same way that prisoners often exit prison worse off than when they went in, school kids in low income areas leave school worse off than when they went in.
i posted a video in my previous post of prof. james tooley who has studied the emergence of low cost schooling in the 3rd world. he tested over 20000 kids and compared results from low cost private students with those educated in the vastly better funded state schools. the results were unanimous.
when i look at all the vacant real estate in florida, i think of the 1000's of low cost private schools which could be started. i then think of the huge bureaucracy of the dpt of ed who would put every possible obstacle in the way of anyone starting a for profit, low cost private school
I can't hear the video--what is he claiming is the difference between a low cost private school and a free public school?? Who is going to pay for these "low cost" schools??
Just one example--Minneapolis public schools--45% (give or take by the year) graduation rate overall yet some kids end up attending schools like Harvard, Yale--if THEY can do it, so can most of the other 55% that DON'T do it. The difference--CARING about what happens in your life. Certainly by high school kids in poor areas have been exposed to teachers and other professionals that HAVE made it and are examples of a better life....
Unfortunately, simply having exposure to successful adults who have made good choices/been presented with decent opportunities isn't always enough to combat other, stronger influences in day-to-day life. Exposure isn't really necessarily enough to combat some young people's day to day reality that, to them, is a direct contradiction of what they see from the odd "successful" person in their lives. Every kid has LOTS of people who are examples to him or her, both good and bad. With at-risk kids, it's hard for a proportionally few good to balance out a lot of bad...so much so that when it does, it's almost a fluke.
Not to be a naysayer, because I've walked the walk, working with high-risk families and children. And I've certainly seen that exposure to achievers can make a difference. But to expect that it it will all the time, or even a large percent of the time will break your heart more often than not. It's very, very, very difficult to combat numerous negative influences with comparatively few positive ones. That's why success stories get so much press...not because they're heartwarming (although they typically are that), but because they're rare.
I can't hear the video--what is he claiming is the difference between a low cost private school and a free public school?? Who is going to pay for these "low cost" schools??
I turned off the video when James Tooley suggested that pre-British colonial India was smarter than post-British colonial India. My guess is that the rest of the video shows how Tooley "proved" that private schools are better than public, to support his argument for shutting down all public schools in favor of an unregulated free market private school system. I don't agree. Caste systems aren't good. They weren't good when India practiced it for 1200 years before the Brits, they weren't good when the British exploited it from the 1500's to 1900's, and they're not good now. Not educating the masses is not good, no matter what type of economy and government a society adheres to. After 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention news reports about Somalia, Pakistan, and Mexico, any rational thinking American adult would know that failure to properly educate the masses and provide a peaceful means towards upward financial mobility leads to low-functioning masses who are easy to recruit into insurgent or terrorist groups or masses of people stuck in a stagnant, money-sucking depression. You don't even have to travel overseas to see that. Go to poor rural areas, reservations, inner city neighborhoods, or Appalachia. Depriving poor people of a decent education and some means of financial mobility isn't just stupid, it's dangerous and financially crippling for the rest of the society that IS functional.
I turned off the video when James Tooley suggested that pre-British colonial India was smarter than post-British colonial India. My guess is that the rest of the video shows how Tooley "proved" that private schools are better than public, to support his argument for shutting down all public schools in favor of an unregulated free market private school system. I don't agree. Caste systems aren't good. They weren't good when India practiced it for 1200 years before the Brits, they weren't good when the British exploited it from the 1500's to 1900's, and they're not good now. Not educating the masses is not good, no matter what type of economy and government a society adheres to. After 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention news reports about Somalia, Pakistan, and Mexico, any rational thinking American adult would know that failure to properly educate the masses and provide a peaceful means towards upward financial mobility leads to low-functioning masses who are easy to recruit into insurgent or terrorist groups or masses of people stuck in a stagnant, money-sucking depression. You don't even have to travel overseas to see that. Go to poor rural areas, reservations, inner city neighborhoods, or Appalachia. Depriving poor people of a decent education and some means of financial mobility isn't just stupid, it's dangerous and financially crippling for the rest of the society that IS functional.
you obviously turned it off because you couldn't bear hearing that james tooley recommends no such thing. whether you like it or not, the public school system produces compliant robots who cannot accept that there are ways, other than the outdated relic of the industrial revolution, to educate children. in tooley's research, without exception, low cost private schools serving poor, semi subsistance communities, the for-profit, low cost, private schools way outperformed their costly govt counterparts.
i don't advocate getting rid of public schools because we don't live in an ideal world. what i do say is that we sghould delegate education out to the states. in doing so, i'm not silly enough to believe that all states would radically change what i see as a deeply flawed system, but some states might. some states might even further devolve education to the individual counties. where this occured there might be a less red tape laden pathway for low cost private schools to develop. this would at least offer accountable tuition to parents who have for decades have had to put up with sub standard govt service.
I don't know...as for the kids in middle schools are you talking specifically about your town or in general?
I can't hear the video--what is he claiming is the difference between a low cost private school and a free public school?? Who is going to pay for these "low cost" schools??
Just one example--Minneapolis public schools--45% (give or take by the year) graduation rate overall yet some kids end up attending schools like Harvard, Yale--if THEY can do it, so can most of the other 55% that DON'T do it. The difference--CARING about what happens in your life. Certainly by high school kids in poor areas have been exposed to teachers and other professionals that HAVE made it and are examples of a better life....
the parents pay. so what's the big difference? first off, these are poor people who make sacrifices for their kids to avoid govt schools. that alone takes care of most of the discipline issues. secondly, the parents have much greater input in what and how their kids are taight. teachers are retained on merit alone
Sooo, in low income areas just exactly how does this work???
when you say this to people here, they look at you like you have 3 heads. in reality, low cost private is working in places where what people receive here in welfare would be considered rich! places like nigeria, zimbabwe, china, india, pakistan etc. many of the poor have looked at the product of the public school system and opted for something else.
when you say this to people here, they look at you like you have 3 heads. in reality, low cost private is working in places where what people receive here in welfare would be considered rich! places like nigeria, zimbabwe, china, india, pakistan etc. many of the poor have looked at the product of the public school system and opted for something else.
You don't know how I've been waiting to respond to one of these posts about how great education is in China and India!
2. It was Shanghai — not all of China — that received top honors on the PISA test. And Shanghai is where the smartest kids in the country go to school. So drawing the breathless conclusions as the media has about China and the PISA data is not unlike taking all the college kids in Cambridge, Mass., home to Harvard and MIT, and declaring them to be a representative sample of higher education across the U.S. When we start testing rural China, we'll get a more accurate picture of what we're really up against.
My allowable three sentences. You'll have to read the rest.
Despite growing investment in education, 25% of its population is still illiterate; only 15% of Indian students reach high school, and just 7% graduate.[4
Yes, let's use these countries as role models for improving education in the US.
2. It was Shanghai — not all of China — that received top honors on the PISA test. And Shanghai is where the smartest kids in the country go to school. So drawing the breathless conclusions as the media has about China and the PISA data is not unlike taking all the college kids in Cambridge, Mass., home to Harvard and MIT, and declaring them to be a representative sample of higher education across the U.S. When we start testing rural China, we'll get a more accurate picture of what we're really up against.
My allowable three sentences. You'll have to read the rest.
Despite growing investment in education, 25% of its population is still illiterate; only 15% of Indian students reach high school, and just 7% graduate.[4
Yes, let's use these countries as role models for improving education in the US.
help me out katiana, where exactly did i say that education in china or india was great? what i was stating was that in the poorest parts of those countries, low cost private education there is achieving better results than the state schools. i did not make a comparison between our education system and theirs.
with all due respect i'd appreciate it if you actually read my post before responding.
help me out katiana, where exactly did i say that education in china or india was great? what i was stating was that in the poorest parts of those countries, low cost private education there is achieving better results than the state schools. i did not make a comparison between our education system and theirs.
with all due respect i'd appreciate it if you actually read my post before responding.
"with all due respect" I did read your post. I'm a little weary of people who want to think that the US educational system sucks. If private education is doing so well in India, why are 25% of the people still illiterate? They're obviously not reaching a lot of people. It's even worse for girls:
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