So the US public schools can take on that Lake Woebegone characteristic…
“USA, where all the schools are above average.”
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I reeeally hope that is either a misquote or a foot-in-mouth quote.
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Wow, she really said that.
…and so begins the eternal cycle of closing over half the schools in the country every year…
…because math.
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Mean, median or mode?
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Sounds like it could be a way to get rid of standardized curricula. I’d prefer to have schools which didn’t strive to impress a population of uniform children all with the same information. It has never been very practical for anyone but bureaucrats.
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This is why I can’t swallow Hillary as forward-thinking candidate. Forget the math thing for a second: It’s the same tired idea that we’ve been applying to our school systems that hasn’t been working. This is the old corporatist success strategy where you wait to a part of the business to stop growing (it can hold steady, or just dip slightly) and then immediately start depriving it of funds as a punishment to make that department work harder, until finally demoralized and disillusioned it staggers toward an inevitable shutdown. This is a recipe for better schools the same way being an MRA is a recipe for dating success.
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No, I believe she said it. The mainstream parties really don’t give a fuck about the working class any more. They really don’t.
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Well, America appears to be working on producing spherical children of a uniform density, so…
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Don’t forget the perfect vacuum… In their heads 
(nah, kids these days are fine, just annoying)
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Yeah, that’s a whole other set of problems, isn’t it?
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It’s a complete misquote. It’s one half of a sentence.
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She continued: “This school district and these schools throughout Iowa are doing a better than average job. Now I wouldn’t keep any school open that wasn’t doing a better than average job. If a school is not doing a good job then, you know, that may not be good for the kids, but when you have a district that is doing a good job it seems kind of counterproductive to impose financial burdens on it.”
You mean one sentence in a paragraph, right? It was a full sentence.
AWe know she’s not THAT stupid and she wouldn’t actually be trying to close half the schools, but that’s definitely what she said and it’s fun to make fun of the misstatement!
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You’re right about the sentence. Also, it kind of smacks of Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. Still, she’s not out to kill ur school.
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I think it’s fair game to misrepresent the stance of a person who misrepresents her own views.
And from the perspective of education (let alone almost anything else), Sanders’ agenda offers relative paradise.
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Fair enough. I still don’t think she cares, though. I think the republicans and democrats care about staying in power and that’s about it. The democrats might lean a bit further down to make sure we know they “care”, but I just think the people who’ve clawed their way to the top care about the rest of us very much. Maybe that says something about me and the way I’m viewing the world lately, but there it is.
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Okay, in full fairness, she never did say she intended to close half the schools in the country.
But a completely logical inference from what she did say is:
That’s still pretty tone deaf, because (the special interest of the venue at which she was speaking notwithstanding) the correlation between financial distress and academic underperformance is well above the level of coincidence.
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Apparently. rural schools are expensive to keep open. If rural schools provided a below average education at an above average price, closing those schools might make sense-- you could argue that despite longer bus rides, the kids would be getting a better education at …consolidated… schools But if these schools are good schools-- above average schools-- then they are worth keeping open despite the cost.
The federalist.com is one of those rags. There’s an intelligent question about education policy that’s simply buried beneath willful misinterpretation. Does the question matter outside Iowa? Probably not. Does the question not matter at all? Of course not.
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I agree, and I suspect she worded an impromptu comment very badly. It would be interesting to find out what she really means - but that doesn’t sell newspapers.
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