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And yet … actual test scores, budgets and other data that SCHOOL DISTRICTS across the country report have no meaning for you. (Oh, I see what you did there -- dismiss these facts by calling them "one set of test scores reported by a news agency." Clever. I suppose you imagine the news writes itself, and the data just leaps in there all alone.)
Fascinating, what you RWNJs will do to pretend your little boondoggle is actually about education.
Exactly, which is why longitudinal studies are so much more valuable. That's why I posted the link to the Harvard study. It follows cohorts of students over time to observe the long-term effects of school voucher use.
No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core...none of these will help kids succeed in school. All these government initiatives do is provide more incentives not just for students to cheat, but entire school systems. After all, nobody wants to lose funding because they're a failing school. Lowering standards so that any moron with a pencil can pass doesn't do anybody any favors. It creates more corruption from the top on down.You cannot legislate culture. This story about the Atlanta cheating scandal proves it.
Wrong Answer In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice.
The school provided computer classes to parents, who had been so removed from their children's academic lives that it was a struggle to get them to sign progress reports. "We had to trick the parents and give away this, that, and the third in order to get them into the building," Lewis said. "Some of them looked like they were on drugs—not fun drugs but ruin-your-life drugs."
The only thing dumbing down American schools is American kids. The vast majority ridicule learning and feel it sould be handed to them on a silver platter. If you want to learn something the best way is to do it your self. Read a book , get a pad of paper and pen or pencil and do all the suggested problems. Learn how to do arithmetic in your head, learn how to write with a pen. The same with sketching pictures with a pencil. Once you get this far there is no stopping you you could be doing calculus before you are a teenager. The same with history once you get to academic serious histories things will start making sense. You don't have to be crippled by high school textbooks dumbed down to pass muster by State of Texas School Boards!
The only thing dumbing down American schools is American kids. The vast majority ridicule learning and feel it sould be handed to them on a silver platter. If you want to learn something the best way is to do it your self. Read a book , get a pad of paper and pen or pencil and do all the suggested problems. Learn how to do arithmetic in your head, learn how to write with a pen. The same with sketching pictures with a pencil. Once you get this far there is no stopping you you could be doing calculus before you are a teenager. The same with history once you get to academic serious histories things will start making sense. You don't have to be crippled by high school textbooks dumbed down to pass muster by State of Texas School Boards!
Yeah its the system and methods of education, we need to mix education with entertainment..
Get the priavte sector and the free market into education, prices will plummet and quality will sky rocket.
No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core...none of these will help kids succeed in school. All these government initiatives do is provide more incentives not just for students to cheat, but entire school systems. After all, nobody wants to lose funding because they're a failing school. Lowering standards so that any moron with a pencil can pass doesn't do anybody any favors. It creates more corruption from the top on down.You cannot legislate culture. This story about the Atlanta cheating scandal proves it.
Wrong Answer In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice.
The school provided computer classes to parents, who had been so removed from their children's academic lives that it was a struggle to get them to sign progress reports. "We had to trick the parents and give away this, that, and the third in order to get them into the building," Lewis said. "Some of them looked like they were on drugs—not fun drugs but ruin-your-life drugs."
For some reason liberals and Jeb Bush type conservatives think that schools are social agencies that can fix all problems. Schools are merely supposed to be places of instruction. It is assumed that the kids are being raised appropriately enough at home that they show up ready to learn.
I think education worked when educators did less thinking about educating and more actual educating.
There was more emphasis placed on student and parental responsibility in education.
My kids' junior high took away honors classes and mixed all the kids up. The effect was the opposite they were hoping for. The lower performing kids took the entire classroom down to their level.
I think education worked when educators did less thinking about educating and more actual educating.
There was more emphasis placed on student and parental responsibility in education.
My kids' junior high took away honors classes and mixed all the kids up. The effect was the opposite they were hoping for. The lower performing kids took the entire classroom down to their level.
I was not a happy parent during those years.
I'm not sure why they didn't know that would happen. There are decades-worth of longitudinal data that show that mixed-ability classes cause academic achievement declines in all but the struggling students.
Quote:
"While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement," he continues, "but less loss and some modest gains at the lower levels."
...The contrast was stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have maintained good SAT scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping."
Liberals aren't the ones trying to teach fairy tales and creationism in schools.
The topic is interesting however. I would also like to bring up the disparity between wealthy, suburban school districts and inner-city districts. My nephew goes to Edina High School (Edina, MN) and the quality of education is way out of the ballpark compared to say, South St. Paul or Minneapolis Southwest. The income disparity shows up in sports too. Edina's athletics are the best in the state; my nephew just won a state championship in hockey, which pretty much makes him a god at school, haha. But the poorer inner-city schools get blown out, or have to co-op to cover equipment and rental costs.
Get the priavte sector and the free market into education, prices will plummet and quality will sky rocket.
How so? How will the private sector cut costs in educating students with special needs or those whose first language is not English? How will the private sector motivate hundreds of thousands of kids from broken families to achieve en masse?
A big part of the reason why education in this country costs so much is because in recent decades school have become tasked with fixing society's problems that go beyond simply educating youth. I fail to see how simply transmitting billions of dollars and responsibility to the private sector is going to significantly improve outcomes (no matter how they're measured).
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