A Comment About Our Educational System

[cb1000rider]

You could have the best school in the world and if your kids were not willing to put out the effort it would all be for naught. Their success speaks to theirs and your character. Like everything else in life, if you are lucky, you get what you give out in effort.

A lot of that comes back to parenting. I know I needed a swift kick in the rear a few times.

[android]

Have y'all been to a public school in the last ten years? Some of them are great. Most are mediocre. A few are horrendous. Now where are the horrendous schools? Right where you think they would be. The projects, the inner city. Now where are the amazing schools, right where you think they would be upper middle class neighborhoods. They get similar levels of funding. I know that the teaching staff is similar in nature. So what is the difference. The people attending the school. Sad to say it but some of the lower end schools will never catch up because the children are chemically damaged from birth. It is just a sad fact of life that those who love their children and value them will invest more in them from the very start.

I think you are attributing too much emphasis to whether the school is good or horrible based on student performance rather than teacher performance. Ratings are incorrectly based on an average of student performance.

Suppose you put a bunch of kids in a room and teach them about something they know nothing about.
Now give them a fair and meaningful test on the subject.

20% pass with 100%
80% fail with < 50%

Is this a horrid teacher? Is this a horrid school?

I say no because if the teacher had not presented and taught the material, there would be no way anybody would have passed.
The rating of schools should be based on grades of the top 20%, not the average of everyone there.

Of course nobody wants to do it this way because they don't want to admit their kids are lazy or stupid, it must be the school district's or teacher's fault.

[mojo84]

The reason for me posting this has absolutely nothing to do with race, so don't go there. It does indicate much of what is the problem. I'll let you make your own opinion.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?318025-3/h ... nority-men" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[VMI77]

Part of why the US has had economic success (relative to other countries) is we have a high degree of educated people here. I don't attribute that education to a public school system, but it's part of an educational chain. And that chain needs to adapt and get better. We're already losing in Math and Science compared to other countries and long term, it will disadvantage us.

Sorry, you're just wrong. Apparently you don't work in a technical field with either scientists or engineers. I know and work with lots of Phd engineers and exactly one is American born. All the rest are from India, Pakistan, China, or the Middle East. We have a lot of people with easy to obtain and meaningless college degrees but that translates into ego enhancement, not educated people. We have to import Phds in the technical fields. And all the evidence shows a steady decline in educational quality across the board over the last 50 years. I've dealt with engineers from Mexico, educated in Mexico, that were far far better educated across the board, and even spoke better English, than most American college graduates I've me. I've met many people with college degrees, but very few of them are educated in any meaningful sense of the word.....particularly if they were liberal arts majors. When my son was attending UT he had story after story of how stupid his fellow students were, and UT should have the top 10% from Texas high schools.

Our economic success, which is soon about to end, is almost entirely the product of the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. If it wasn't, we would already have had a major economic collapse.

We don't have an educated populace, we have a populace cheated out of an education, and deluded into believing that indoctrination constitutes education. Yes, the best and brightest always find a way, and they may well be better educated than ever, but that's irrelevant to this conversation. That has been and always will be the case in any system.

[VMI77]

Well, if your argument really is the one above, then you wouldn't pass those either, because concepts like literacy and mathmatics would be anathema to that standard. DO you really want a generation of unschooled kids? How exactly is that going to help the US compete globally?

You're grasping at straws. My youngest son never set foot in a classroom until he went to college. He's got a full scholarship with stipend at on the the best law schools in the country having made a perfect score on the LSAT and graduating UT Austin in four years with two degrees and a 4.0 GPA. We already have at least two generations of what you call "schooled" kids that are still uneducated. Schooling and education are not the same things.

BTW, the US isn't competing globally --unless you call fast food franchises in other countries competing globally. We don't make anything to sell to anybody else. The only reason our economy hasn't totally collapsed is because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the rest of the world is in the process of ending that advantage. We're living beyond our means, and if the dollar wasn't the reserve currency, the party would already have ended.

[VMI77]

So you're ok with public school, you just don't want to pay for it? Mmm...ok.

You're being robbed and think you're getting a gift. Geez.

[VMI77]

Have y'all been to a public school in the last ten years?

Yep. Ours regularly stomps hard in sports, band, and academic achievements. Top 10% typically go to UT, A&M, and Ivey League schools. They're doing math and science at levels that put my old school to shame.

Another strawman......we're not talking about the top 10%. We test applicants all the time fresh out of HS and even Jr. high, and most of them can't do basic math, and can't even add numbers together without a calculator. The math curriculum's are horrible in this country. We test way near the bottom, even below countries like Malaysia. Your experience with your kids is not representative. The math curriculum is so widely recognized as bad that school districts in the state, like the one here, are dumping what they have now for the Malaysian system.

Sports and band don't help you get a job, unless you're a professional athlete or musician, and they don't make you an educated person....besides which, again, only a relatively few students participate in either.

[VMI77]

He's suggesting that we should just have to pay if we have kids and only pay when those kids attend school. If those parents are the only ones paying for education during the years where the kids are in school, expect the cost of that education to be very very expensive...

What planet are you on? My property taxes are $6,000 a year. I didn't spend that much homeschooling both my kids for their entire 16 years. The cost of education is not only already very very expensive, it's a rip off on top of it. Everyone could be better educated at 10% of the currents costs. The system is designed to fleece you.

[VMI77]

It's cumulative. Sure, you'll pay more than someone else if you live longer, but your neighbors helped pay for your education and your kids education. You're largely returning the favor. If you didn't have to pay, the system would break down. The alternative is paying *a lot* more - quite a bit more for "your kids". Think college level costs and simply put, that won't work with compulsory education and high "kids only" education costs.

How do you figure you'd pay more for your kids' education than you'll pay in property taxes over the course of your lifetime? That math doesn't add up.

He's suggesting that we should just have to pay if we have kids and only pay when those kids attend school. If those parents are the only ones paying for education during the years where the kids are in school, expect the cost of that education to be very very expensive...

Yes, that's the way it should be, those who choose to have kids should have to pay for their own education just like they pay for their food and clothing. What kind of morality do you subscribe to when you believe some stranger should be able to impose a financial burden on me for their own personal choices? That is totally whack. You decide to have kids so I have to pay for them to be educated? That used to be called freeloading.

[cb1000rider]

Sorry, you're just wrong. Apparently you don't work in a technical field with either scientists or engineers.

VM, I work in a very technical field full of engineers. I went through that whole period of technical "outsourcing" that everyone thought would put an end to gainful domestic employment in technology as we were all being replaced by lower cost and equally "educated" engineers. That experiment largely failed for most companies and we found that it works only a very narrow set of circumstances. I ran both types of teams - domestic and outsourced.

Note, most of the people that I work with aren't educated to the PhD level. Almost all have higher Ed degrees under that level, so it could be that we're talking apples and oranges.

I think you and I agree - there has been steady erosion and decline of our competitiveness in terms of technological superiority.. I think we're still advantaged based on our head start that preceded that decline. And certainly we're advantaged by our currency and economy. And another thing you and I agree on - a high degree of technical education that doesn't allow for creativity, problem solving, and free thinking has limited use - that's part of why outsourcing failed.

I agree with you on the value, especially economic, of a liberal arts education.. I also know that's a personal bias.


If you've got a solution other than giving up mandated education and depending on churches for our educational system, I'm all ears... Otherwise, I'll continue to work to improve my local school system and make it as good as possible for my kids.

[cb1000rider]

Yes, that's the way it should be, those who choose to have kids should have to pay for their own education just like they pay for their food and clothing. What kind of morality do you subscribe to when you believe some stranger should be able to impose a financial burden on me for their own personal choices? That is totally whack. You decide to have kids so I have to pay for them to be educated? That used to be called freeloading.

You mean you're not going to call it Socialism?

I'm not pointing out that I'd design a system were you get to pay for my personal choices. I'm simply pointing out that this is the system in which we live and that I'll support it within current bounds until I'm aware of an alternative that might work. I'm also pointing out the inherent non-sense of those crying foul on this system, yet they received that "hand-out" themselves. That is, it's not like we're the first generation where they're asked to pay for the education of the masses, we were part of the masses that were paid for by the prior generation. Some of that generation didn't have kids.

I understand why you think that it's not very "free society". I admit, it's not very free. You don't get a choice. Suggest an alternative that I can get behind so I can think about it. I can't get behind the alternative of non-mandatory education... That doesn't work elsewhere in the world and we've got too many parents who make bad enough decisions in their own lives. You can say that smart kids will find a way and maybe that's true in some cases... but smart kids with good parents have a much larger advantage. Those advantages translate into an advantaged country and economy for all of us.

[Oldgringo]

So you're ok with public school, you just don't want to pay for it? Mmm...ok.

Yes, I'm okay with public schools, whether ISD or Charter. I don't like to still be paying for public schools 50+ years after I graduated from HS and 30 years after my son graduated from his HS, both in far distant states.

[android]

So you're ok with public school, you just don't want to pay for it? Mmm...ok.

Yes, I'm okay with public schools, whether ISD or Charter. I don't like to still be paying for public schools 50+ years after I graduated from HS and 30 years after my son graduated from his HS, both in far distant states.

There's a park in my neighborhood with a pool that I never swim in. I never drive on 5th street. I've never had the fire department come to my house.

But these and public schools are all common services paid for with tax dollars just like public schools and I don't get to pick and choose which I want to fund. Should I get a refund from the fire dept when I move if I never called them the entire time I lived here? That seems kind of ridiculous.

If I vote no on a school bond, and it passes then I'm going to accept that because that's how things work here.

There's nothing in the US or state constitutions that says we can't spend tax dollars on quality of life services. Schools are not working right because of the federal interference, Robin Hood and other issues but there is nothing fundamentally really wrong with local public schools and state colleges and universities.

[WildBill]

So you're ok with public school, you just don't want to pay for it? Mmm...ok.

Yes, I'm okay with public schools, whether ISD or Charter. I don't like to still be paying for public schools 50+ years after I graduated from HS and 30 years after my son graduated from his HS, both in far distant states.

Oldgringo, you are just a mean old man.

[FML]

[ Image ]

That's what happens when we lower the standards so everybody is promoted to the next grade level based on time served, whether or not they learn what they were supposed to learn in their current grade level. I suppose it does prepare them for jobs where seniority is more important than competence. Like teaching in public schools.

No child left behind. Until their jobs are outsourced to Pakistan.