That actually seems like a very challenging assignment. Perhaps not practical, but to come up with a decent response in exactly 20 words would take some serious creativity.
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Not a chance. Public schools already spend vast amounts of money as they continue to fail. For example, the abysmally bad D.C. school system spends nearly $30,000 per student per year. The problem is not monetary, it is systemic - regardless of how you think it should be solved.
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To be fair, the writer is a product of the US education system. However, if you would like to see how the word is used in the cited source, you can find it here http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1176843?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103609657837
Iād rather opt my son out of public school entirely if heās going to have to go to school with murderers.
/kneejerk, but stillā¦
I live in the Bible Belt and have three kids in public school. The loudest opponents of CC originates with public school teachers and the undercurrent of resistance that I hear from my kids teachers is remarkable. Some of the very best teachers here have resigned out of disgust and disappointment with the over-emphasis on testing. My kidsā school year includes 36 days of standardized testing of various flavors, this in addition to the normal tests and semester exam weeks.
This week, the school is undergoing one of these flavors of tests, but the testing is computerized and so incompetently created and handled, that entire day of testing was lost due to the network failing to handle the city-wide load of students. Furthermore, these tests so poorly match what teacher have been teaching, that teachers are providing answers on the board for uncovered topics for students to copy. This, in spite of teachers providing input for the creation of the tests in the first place.
Contrasting with the teachers, the administrative types have embraced CC, or at least dare not speak openly negatively about it. Something has incentivized the administrators in a way that escapes the teachers.
Finally, the few people that I know that home school and that I talked to about CC have little opinion about CC simply because it doesnāt affect them.
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The very concept that a school is like a dog you can beat into better performance by withholding funding is idiotic, hell that doesnāt even work well with dogs.
Itās the worst kind of lazy management. Very in line with our current politics, however.
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Yea, āFor exampleā, lets use the highest spending, aparrantly by 50% or more district in a screwed up jurisdiction which is directly administered by congress.
Intentionally picking outliers will not prove your point.
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Exactly. In my opinion, this is THE fundamental problem with education. The idea that all kids must learn the same things at the same times, regardless of their individual needs and/or desires, is as demonstrably ineffective as things like the wars on drugs and terror.
Ironically, my son went to private school his whole life but still made bad grades. Your point on lowest common denominator is still valid regardless of the public vs. private debate.
What we found was that paying out a bunch of money made no real difference in the quality of the education. My wife was dead set against public schools mostly because of all the myths floating around about them. I always argued that it made no difference but that was a battle that I did not win.
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I recall feeling differently about it in high school, but I definitely remember LOVING the Iowa Test of Basic Skills when I was in grade school. Partly it was the novelty (something different than regular class for a whole week!), partly it was the fact that I was a good test taker and, thus, test week usually meant extra time for me to sit around reading, and partly (perversely) I remember thinking of some of the stuff on the test as actually being a lot of fun. Primarily the word and puzzle problems and the reading comprehension stuff. All of this probably goes a long way towards explaining why I didnāt have many friends in junior high.
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There is that, of course. Itās unlikely that underfunding a school is going to improve the performance of the students. Though, giving the school more funds isnāt likely to help if it all goes to administrators, either. Education is broken in an awful lot of ways these days.
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I canāt recommend this essay highly enough.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/duh.htm
The field of education bubbles over with controversies. Itās not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are certain precepts that arenāt debatable, that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true.
While many such statements are banal, some are worth noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. Itās both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it werenāt?
Here are 10 examples.
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Itās a very limited idea of education to think that it is simply about learning facts and figures. While there is no way to āmeasureā personal growth, confidence, a desire to learn, ambition, or thoughtfulness, arenāt these the true measures of whether a teacher has succeeded?
Now it has become all about getting a job, getting a grade.
Where have the ideals gone of having a public that is educated simply because education makes us better, more interesting, and more fulfilled people?
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Those arenāt the sort of standardized test indicated.
TCAPS & itās ilk are about competitive funding models not about educating or measuring the education of students. That is why ākids who didnāt test would be marked absentā (from the article) Yes, great idea Principle Skinner, admit in an email to parents you intend to defraud a system.
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Also, Iāve been finding the Common Core debates (what I see of them as a person without a child currently in school) really fascinating from a sociological perspective. I know some people who are convinced that Common Core is brainwashing children into Obama worship and communism, some people who are bothered about the testing mandates, some people frustrated with not-exactly-intuitive methods for teaching math ā¦ and theyāll all overlap with each otherās concerns at various points.
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Hey hey we all know that one plucky, optimistic, naive, young, probably white educator that volunteers to teach in the scary inner city, mostly brown underfunded school can in short order have that place smelling like roses & shitting out Rhodes Scholars.
But you canāt get that result without scary, underfunded schools rife with gangs.
Let the system work, man.
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I believe the liberalism comes from who implemented it. Liberal President = Everything they implement is Liberal.
Itās one of the bases for the sad state of US politics.
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When Bill Nye, the winner, recently seemed to oppose home-schooling by famously refusing to help an individual create a specific science curriculum for homeschoolers it was the nutjobs you mention in your second paragraph that he had in mind. Political & Religious homeschoolers.
In Canuckistan, at least in the cities, most of the home schooling going on isnāt about that, itās about being able to provide a better education than the factory & avoiding all the mishap of dealing with the factory. They also band together kids & resources to the point that most kids in standard schools donāt even want to hear about what the homeschoolers do all day lest they become angry & raging with jealousy.
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