Posts tagged education
Posts tagged education
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This is what I’m saying…
But what about the [insert field here] mission of [same field here] departments? They’re not vocational schools! It shouldn’t be their job to train people to work in industry. That’s for community colleges and government retraining programs for displaced workers, they will tell you. They’re supposed to be giving students the fundamental tools to live their lives, not preparing them for their first weeks on the job. Right?
Universities ought not be concerned with giving students ‘real world skills’ or ‘job competence’…that’s someone else’s job. They ought to be concerned with identifying bright and capable students, and pushing them to expand their minds, become intellectually flexible, and (God help me for using this phrase…) think outside the box.
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School Choice: It’s not a conservative issue or a liberal issue, Republican or Democrat. Ensuring that our children have the best education possible is an American issue, and it’s one that the country should get behind.
(Source: foundry.org, via evilteabagger)
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After all, Race to the Top — a competition that has states vie for federal funds by promising to implement reforms championed by the Education Department — does, in fact, extend NCLB’s obsession with standardized testing. How? By requiring that teacher evaluation be in part measured by the scores students get on these exams. There is no concrete evidence that any of the Race to the Top reforms actually improve student achievement, but when has education policy paid attention to research?
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Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.
To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.
Citizens drastically underestimate current per-student spending and are misled by official figures. Taxpayers cannot make informed decisions about public school funding unless they know how much districts currently spend. And with state budgets stretched thin, it is more crucial than ever to carefully allocate every tax dollar.
Didn’t you know this already?
People often don’t believe me when I say that a localized, privatized school system would be both better and cheaper for even the poorest Americans. Now I have numbers to back it up.
How are the poorest Americans going to afford private school? Public education is free, private schools cost money. When it comes down to feeding your family or paying for your child’s education, feeding your family comes first. Education is not supposed to be limited by your ability to spend money. So my only real question is “how do we get the poorest Americans enough money to send all their children to private money costing schools?”
“Public education is free”? Are you kidding? You just reblogged a report that public schools cost twice as much as private.
And, historically, education was limited by your ability to pay for it. That meant that you may not be able to go to a regular school, but you could be an apprentice somewhere if you worked hard. Or a community would pool their money and hire a teacher for their children. It can work.
But since most communities have a tax base, and are apparently accustomed to spending around $20k per student, why not give vouchers, encourage people to form new private schools and expand existing ones, and take advantage of schools that are better and cheaper than the public system?
Yes public education is free. Since we pay taxes we get the benefit of public education along with free public roads to use and free public beaches to visit. I guess you payed? Your parents signed a check to you public elementary school when you enrolled and then had to pay them another check every year you went their? Just like when you pay a members fee at a country club you get to play golf for free. Taxes are the members fee to the country club that is America membership includes education, roads, hospitals, a fire department, a police force, beaches, a Military and many other great perks. Maybe that helps?
Sorry, something isn’t free just because you don’t have to pay at the time of service. By that logic home repairs are free because you pay for insurance.
We pay taxes, which means we paid for the roads, and the beaches, and the schools. We pay for the teachers, administrators, staff members and supplies. My parents wrote a check every year, whether I was in school or not, to the county for property taxes. So yes, they paid. They paid for public schools when I was going to a private preschool, and they paid for them when I was going to a private college. They still pay for them now, and so do I, even though my kids aren’t school age yet.
Your country club analogy is cute, but if my club’s golf course has weeds in the fairway and the tennis courts are falling apart, and I find a private golf course that’s cheaper and in much better shape, I can take my money there. No such luck with property taxes.
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Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.
To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.
Citizens drastically underestimate current per-student spending and are misled by official figures. Taxpayers cannot make informed decisions about public school funding unless they know how much districts currently spend. And with state budgets stretched thin, it is more crucial than ever to carefully allocate every tax dollar.
Didn’t you know this already?
People often don’t believe me when I say that a localized, privatized school system would be both better and cheaper for even the poorest Americans. Now I have numbers to back it up.
How are the poorest Americans going to afford private school? Public education is free, private schools cost money. When it comes down to feeding your family or paying for your child’s education, feeding your family comes first. Education is not supposed to be limited by your ability to spend money. So my only real question is “how do we get the poorest Americans enough money to send all their children to private money costing schools?”
“Public education is free”? Are you kidding? You just reblogged a report that public schools cost twice as much as private.
And, historically, education was limited by your ability to pay for it. That meant that you may not be able to go to a regular school, but you could be an apprentice somewhere if you worked hard. Or a community would pool their money and hire a teacher for their children. It can work.
But since most communities have a tax base, and are apparently accustomed to spending around $20k per student, why not give vouchers, encourage people to form new private schools and expand existing ones, and take advantage of schools that are better and cheaper than the public system?
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“I realized that I needed to be an example to my children,” she says. “I needed to be in a better position to make it on my own. That’s when I got really serious about school.”
She pushed herself through college through a combination of local classes and online course offerings, completing her bachelor’s degree in 2006. Two years later, Nolan finished an M.B.A., emerging with $84,000 in student loan debt, she says, but a powerful sense that she had armed herself for success.
Black Unemployment At Depression Level Highs In Some Cities
First lesson of economic advancement: stop borrowing money for college!
Among the many bad decisions I’ve made in my life, this is the only one that will still be with me after my kids move out.
A degree doesn’t guarantee you an income, and anyone who suggests it does is either lying or foolish.
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The Republican legislature in Michigan is trying to push through a truly frightening bill. Basically, House Bill 4465 would punish striking teachers by revoking their license for two years.
Honestly, there is no domestic issue that disgusts me more than this anti-union propaganda in 2011. I guess the rich will be happy when 99% of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. (We’re accelerating in that direction)
I’ll leave you with a few words from Republican Dwight Eisenhower:
“Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society”
You’re right. If we allow the government to restrict the power of public-sector unions, all wealth in the country will be immediately and irrevocably absorbed by greedy rich folk. I’m glad you’ve pointed that out.
Workers have the right to organize and bargain with their employers. You seem to have forgotten, though (like many others) that in bargaining, both sides have rights. So employers have the right to refuse the contract terms offered by the union. They can propose their own nonnegotiables. In this case, the employer is setting up a consequence for choosing to go on strike: you can’t work here for two years.
The employers can do this because (a) the employees choose whether or not to go on strike with full knowledge of the likely consequence, and (b) they clearly have the upper hand in the situation, because there are more teachers than there are jobs.
If that situation changes, or the teachers are able to hold their members in check so they don’t cross picket lines when the state starts offering the jobs of the striking teachers, they would then have the power to return to the table and have the state eliminate that provision from the contract (or from the state books, in this case). Either way, they have to weigh the costs and benefits of striking and choose for themselves.
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But there’s something about teaching English that keeps pulling at my intellectual heartstrings. That something is the readings I’ve done over the past few years from E.D. Hirsch, Neil Postman, Alfred North Whitehead (a math teacher, incidentally), and Stanley Fish. Language is the foundation for all of our thought and learning. The more we command our language, the more we command our thought; as we become clearer thinkers, we become better communicators; and as we become better communicators, we – and everyone around us – become better learners.
That’s a powerful idea, one that far outstrips the (admittedly high) ideal of exposing students to the best thinking and writing of the Western Tradition. It’s more compelling than the image of quality speaking and writing as a necessity to economic or social advancement. And it has more potential to raise achievement at all levels and in any subject where verbal communication is necessary (that would be all of them).
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Has anyone seen any stories chronicling the pain and lost wages of Wisconsin parents who had to miss work this week because schools were closed?
No, probably because the vast majority of parents here support their teachers. hth
So you’re suggesting that…
This is more than just a “grievance”. If you’re in the “ed sector” you know that teachers work mandatory overtime and get no compensation. They’re salaried workers that come to school before class starts, stay late after class, spend their own time grading and creating lesson plans and spend their own money on supplies for their students. And surely you know that Wisconsin teachers start at $25k a year. But this isn’t about their wages or their health insurance or their pensions, this is about their rights as workers.
Why scare-quote “ed sector”? Do you not believe me? It was more convenient than explaining I’m a non-certified full-time employee of a private, postsecondary institution. Can we unquote it now?
I checked out the data (here: WASB). While you’re right that the state minimum for a starting teacher is $25K, only 10 districts out of 186 started below $30K (all above $28K), and the average was $33,600.
My first full-time job was as a youth minister. Overtime, weekends, mornings, evenings, late nights, traveling, and working every weekend all year; I did that for less than the lowest paid teacher in Wisconsin. And let me remind you, I worked 12 months a year.
And overtime without compensation is why salary jobs exist. Taking a salary is a risk - you might work more than 40 hours some weeks…deal with it. Your employer’s taking a risk, too. I’ve got a friend whose firm has no work to be done for the rest of the month, but he still gets paid, because he’s on salary. There are ups and downs. The downs of having to come in early and stay late (please tell me you mean something more extreme than 7-4:30), are matched by the ups of not working from June until August.
But, you said it’s not about that. So what “rights” are they at risk of losing?
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The graduation rate in New York (state) is 64%, and it seems a lot of people are concerned and deeply upset that only 36% of those graduates are “college ready”, and they’re very anxious about solving this dire problem.
Should they increase graduation standards? Probably. Should they make promotion more challenging starting in earlier grades? Absolutely. Should they give students more choice in their high school coursework, as well as the opportunity to earn dual-credit with local colleges? Yes and Yes. Are any of these likely to satisfy the problem? Not really.
As long as there have been public high schools, there have been plenty of students who were just not capable of doing college-level work, even though they were qualified to graduate. College is supposed to be harder than high school, and, as a result, not everybody who could do high school level work is able to keep up.
In my opinion, if every high school graduate in a large sample (like New York) is capable of college work, college is too easy.
The only realistic way to make sure every graduate is college-ready is to make high school so difficult that only the college-ready will graduate. Of course, that will only make it needlessly hard to graduate, and depress grad rates. Not exactly a win-win. You could make college easier, but that’s just a waste of everyone’s time and money, and won’t provide the end result: work-ready college grads.
The real solution is something we heard a lot about after Pres. Obama’s election: manage expectations. Not every kid needs to go to college, and not every graduate should be able to get in to one. We should respect higher education enough to restrict admission to students who’ve proven they’re academic ability.
A statistic quoted in the article is that 75% of NYC grads need remedial college coursework. The most likely problem is that 50% of NYC grads should never have been admitted to college. When we deal with that reality, these numbers won’t seem so bad.
