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You can't throw forever throw money at the nation's problems that are very clearly not based in lack of funding. The funding trick has been tried over and over again, and it has always failed.
You can't forever blame "management" for patterns that are clearly not based in management, as they always have and always will readily transcend legitimate poor-management boundaries. Though, we can also observe how schools can magically transition from being well-managed to "poorly-managed", often when the same managers are employed, when the students start performing poorly as a result of change.
You can't assign guilt to communities that do not share the same problems. There is no collective "our", as minorities clearly do not see it that way when it is their turn to benefit from being considered separately. That game is long up, in case you haven't been paying attention to the political climate. You can only run the same game for so long, using any excuse in spite of its logic as you are here, to gain benefits and other "rent".
When Americans hear "education reform" they should automatically think "dumbing down" and respond appropriately. This has been true for 50+ years now.
Yes, and the dumbing down was intentional. The theory at the time was that creating equal (albeit, dumbed down) outcomes would foster more social cooperation. Instead, it just yielded a dumbed down populace that is more socially divided than ever :
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"
...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 [ability/skill-level grouping, aka tracking]."
If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.
THE INCUBUS OF THE SIXTIES
In every conceivable fashion the reigning ethos of those times was hostile to excellence in education. Individual achievement fell under intense suspicion, as did attempts to maintain standards. Discriminating among students on the basis of ability or performance was branded "elitist." Educational gurus of the day called for essentially nonacademic schools, whose main purpose would be to build habits of social cooperation and equality rather than to train the mind."
The religious aspect and outright nutcases becomes sticky subject. As I mentioned in my previous post you would set some minimum testing standards for all schools accepting vouchers. Math, History, etc. are fairly easy to set standards but when you get to Science it becomes problematic.
On the other hand there was small Catholic school near me that was exceptional, something like a 99% graduation rate and 92% graduation rate for higher education. That school had to close because of lack of students and that is just a shame. It's not the only reason but clearly cost was part of the reason they didn't have enough students. Just so it's clear I'm not Catholic or even religious.
At the end of the day it's not going to make much difference what school kids go to who have parents that are teaching them things out of the norm at home. In my opinion allowing them to go to the wayside is unimportant if you are providing opportunities to the rest of the students.
There was similar arguments being made about the plan being proposed here in PA under Corbett. The students in these very poor districts that had parents taking an interest in their education would have been the ones to take advantage of the voucher. It was legitimate argument that the public schools would have been left with less money and the worse students. My argument is those kids are not going anywhere anyway and extracting the ones that have enormous potential from that environment is the better option.
Well I missed stillwatertownie's post, probably for good reason, the last thing we need is to bring the church and state together. Pretty sure that's what created America in the first place, since most future Americans moved here to escape religious prosecution for not being part of the Church of England.
Religion has definitely held education back, historically and today. Proof of that relies on the creationism, the earth being flat (many Muslims fall here), the year Earth was created, anti-vax, the denial of climate change, denial of evolution, etc. Religion constantly interferes with many advancements in all subjects due to "controversial" topics interfering with religious doctrine, luckily most of this is historically with Christianity but not so with other religions. It includes fiction books, history (yes, how history was written to a T), science mostly, and math.
Well I missed stillwatertownie's post, probably for good reason, the last thing we need is to bring the church and state together.
Too late for that... Religious-affiliated private schools already get taxpayer funding in the form of Pell Grants, scholarships, government-sponsored student loans, research grants, etc... Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, Emory University (which a few years ago successfully treated the two US citizen Ebola victims, AND works VERY closely and frequently in tandem with the CDC), etc., etc.
"Your future is managed, and your freedom's a joke, they don't know the difference, as they put on the yoke" (excerpt from "Sparks of the Tempest"/ Kerry Livgren 1978)
America spends more money per student than any other country. Clearly dumping loads of money isn't a fix. The system needs to be reworked from the ground up.
Spending the education money foolishly on high stakes standardized testing is the base issue here. Not unions. Not teachers. Not local school boards.
It's poor decision making mostly at the state level and federal level. That's where the publishing companies apply their political pressure and campaign funding. They benefit from $billions annually sent their way for these tests and those are $billions that used to be spent on schools.
Spending the education money foolishly on high stakes standardized testing is the base issue here. Not unions. Not teachers. Not local school boards.
I strenuously disagree, and here's why...
People tend to vastly overestimate the quality of their own neighborhood's and their kids' schools.
A lot of people think that their public schools are excellent, and a lot of school districts LOVE to foster and encourage that perception, even when it's not true.
I spent the better part of a year in the not too distant past educating my local community and our school district on the fact that one cannot make that assumption.
I lived in a town in which the percentage of college graduates is quite high. Consequently, the income levels and housing prices are also quite high. Our town's public high school brags that 94% of their graduates continue on to college. Sounds good so far, right?
Well... a newspaper publisher local to a different suburban area than the one in which I live threw a monkey wrench into that idyllic blissfully unaware mindset when they got ahold of ACT's College Readiness Benchmarks and compared suburban Chicago public school district students' ACT scores with ACT's own College/Work Readiness Benchmarks.
(In Illinois, all 11th grade students take the ACT as part of the required NCLB testing, which is a GOOD thing as that way the state CANNOT misrepresent the quality of our public high schools by making the state test easier or instituting lower passing scores as explained here: Lake Wobegon, U.S.A. -- where all the children are above average)
What that data showed was that while our local public high school loved to brag that 94% of their graduates continued on to college, only 29% of them were adequately prepared to take first year college-level courses according to the ACT Benchmarks. Furthermore, that 29% figure was significantly below that of comparable area communities and even that of communities in which housing prices were significantly lower.
I brought the data to our community's attention by publicly speaking out at school committee and board meetings which are covered by local suburban press.
The stunner: NO ONE in the community had EVER looked at that data even though it is easily accessible from ACT. Not school admin. Not the school board. Not students' parents. No one.
Naturally all the usual stages followed... shock, anger, resistance, and finally... grudging acceptance. The school admin and school board would have done nothing about it. Parents and community members shocked and angered at learning the truth have put pressure on the school to make improvements. School admin and the school board have subsequently been analyzing the situation and are making extremely slow progress in improving academic outcomes. Our high school's ACT College/Work Readiness percentage is better but not anywhere near where it should be given the aspirations of our graduating students.
For those interested in exactly what the ACT College/Work Readiness Benchmark scores are (they're SURPRISINGLY low, hovering close to the national average scores ):
http://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/benchmarks.pdf
Now, compare those low benchmark score minimums to the percentage of Chicago suburban school districts (some quite wealthy) that have prepared their students well enough to meet all 4 benchmark minimums (last column in chart): https://prev.dailyherald.com/packages/2007/schoollfinance/chapter10.htm
Without that nationally-normed ACT standardized testing benchmark, there would be NO way to convince parents and the community that their local school district was a joke and needed to make SIGNIFICANT changes in both curriculum and pedagogy.
Lesson learned... DON'T automatically assume a school district's "excellent" reputation is deserved, or that higher-priced homes equals better public schools.
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