“How can we eliminate corruption?” seems to me to be a political question.
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“The only parents I know who send their kids to charter schools are liberal Democrats,” - I call BS.
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I absolutely agree.
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Well, the fact is I’m not very close friends with any conservatives or libertarians, so call it what you will, it’s a fact. When people have kids, ideological concerns tend to become less important than finding the best ways to create what they believe is the best situation for those kids.
It’s a problem, but it’s not the main problem. If we agree that poor students provide unique challenges in education, then we need a system that is flexible. I think the main problem is that our education system is not flexible. We don’t just treat poor kids as if they had the resources of rich kids (and then tell those poor kids they’re not trying hard enough), we treat most kids as if they’re one kid.
We also have an almost entirely arbitrary way of deciding what a “well-performing” school or student is accomplishing. Until we develop a rational method to define what a good and bad “performance” is in education, there will always be unacceptably large numbers of schools and students who perform poorly.
You can see that in all the cases of Labour MPs in the UK who send their kids to private school.
Their party policy might be to defend the comprehensive system and make it as good as possible, but as they can afford to, many still take their kids out of it if there’s an option that gives their children a higher change of success. Isn’t that just normal parental instincts?
I can accept that part of the problem with public schools is that a lot of the more privileged kids are kept out, but if I can give my kid a headstart in life by sending him to a private school of course the idea is going to appeal. Call it selfish, but it seems natural to me.
ETA:
That said, if:
then it suggests that
is because you don’t know many parents who aren’t liberal Democrats. I’d imagine it happens across the board, and I’d really doubt that it was something liberal Democrats particularly did.
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Actually, I think the problem is rational measures of performance – using “rational” not in the sense of “reasonable”, but in the sense of “quantifiable”. Not everything can be quantified, and by restricting assessment to what can be clearly quantified, you omit many considerations that may be of great importance – and the harder such assessments are pushed, the more likely that considerations that don’t lend themselves to quantified assessment will be neglected or eliminated. That’s one of the problems with mandatory testing, for instance.
I was just reading this article about the efforts to shut down City College of San Francisco, which discusses how the accreditation board privileges rates of transfer to four year colleges over all other considerations, quantifiable and non-quantifiable.
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sadly, I am in California, in Silicon Valley, which? you would THINK? as a center of innovation, would have some of the BEST schools, however? that applies to Cupertino ONLY.
South San Jose? yeah, pretty bad.
http://school-ratings.com/ratingsDetails.php?cds=43696666048490
That’s shameful for Philadelphia. I know teachers in state schools in deprived provinces in Brazil who have to buy crayons from their own salary to keep their classes running … America should have a stationery budget closer to $160/child/year, not $160/school/year
The situation in California is further complicated by Prop 13, which essentially freezes property taxes.
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How is that possible? There is something called Freedom of Association. USians are very vocal when freedom of speech or gunsis concerned but restricting every other essential right is seemingly no problem (also see Right to Life (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and death penalty).
I’m not surprised that the US school system is going down the drain when important politicians can publicly claim Evolution is a hoax and even a recent President denied Global Warming.
Compare the demographics of San Francisco to the demographics of the SFUSD student population, and notice the enormous discrepancies.
HA! In my district in Florida, principals start at almost double the maximum teacher pay (after 25 years of service) and the superintendent makes over 25 times the maximum teacher pay!
Most administrators here hold teachers in contempt. I am SO glad I no longer teach. I mean, I loved the teaching part, but the rest of it was just soul suckingly bad.
The article is not about “shutting down” City College, but rather whether not ACCJC want to accredit them. Fine by me, as I think degree programs hurt schools more than help them.
No accreditation means no state or federal funding for the institution and no financial assistance for students who attend it. It means that the community college couldn’t offer degree programs, transfer credits, or vocational training. CCSF would have no budget and no students.
That would completely shut down CCSF.
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mastery charter high school in philadelphia spent $41,000 per student in the same school year (2012-13). pittsburgh school district spent $22,000 per student while reading school district spent just under $12,000 per student. how much of that spending represent salaries for staff? how much of that spending represents pensions, health insurance, and other benefits for staff? what were the educational outcomes for each of those districts? during the 2011-12 school year the philadelphia school district spent just over $13,000 per student. what happened in the following year to raise the spending per student by $7,000?
throwing out numbers bereft of context isn’t necessarily helpful.
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This is probably for the best, since none of those are directly related to learning.
This is up to CCSF and their (so-called?) community. Why can’t the community run it as a co-op, deciding what expenses need to be and how much tuition should cost? Once they decide they need to prostitute themselves to exist, they become subject to the economic whims of others.
in the article it seemed very much as though those things were directly related to the superior outcomes the city college provided for its students. it was a somewhat lengthy article, did you read past the first page?
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What I got from CCSF was some training in practical skills, and some certification that I had those skills, so I could get a decent job. That’s why thousands of people go to CCSF. And that’s what the accreditation board is trying to shut down. (The members of the accreditation board have strong conflicts of interest with for-profit schools.)
Yes, we’d get better education in a liberal arts system that wasn’t tied to certification and the like. But in any conceivable world, we’ll need practical skills training.
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[quote=“navarro, post:59, topic:48180”]
in the article it seemed very much as though those things were directly related to the superior outcomes the city college provided for its students.[/quote]
That’s debatable, skewing the measurement of “success” to equal “job placement” tends to always frame it this way.
I would have read it, if I knew how. But, unfortunately, I don’t have any papers certifying that I know how to read.
