What is best for education?

Um, saying that because a complete ideal isn't possible, that they should just give up on it isn't a very good position.

Not Three Laws compliant.

It's worse if those few going comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn't, though.

edited 7th May '13 7:18:06 PM by Wulf

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

Exactly.

They don't, though. Again, voucher programs typically cost less than public schools, so they're actually a net gain for the system as a whole.

Assuming this is correct, since Ace seemed to disagree with you on this point, I'm still not sure it actually matters. If you remove students and the tax money they would bring from the "bad" public schools and funnel them into private schools, you're disproportionately hurting the bad school. They now have even less money to work with, even if they are teaching fewer students.

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

Ok, first of all, let's clarify that charter schools and voucher schools are two completely separate issues. Charter schools are a lottery, voucher schools aren't.

I'm more interested in saving kids than schools. If a school is beyond help, the best thing to do is shut it down and send the kids to better schools. It's not the responsibility of a kid to try to save a failing school. I also don't agree with the idea that funding is the only problem any school has, some of them suffer from more fundamental problems than that.

Now, if we're talking about charter schools, you may have a point, since they limit their enrollment. However, this has nothing to do with voucher schools.

You may also be right that some schools might be in a position where having fewer students would harm them through economies of scale, but others would be in a position where having fewer students helps them due to dis-economies of scale.

edited 7th May '13 7:41:42 PM by Topazan

Its pretty simple why.

Suppose I give everyone a voucher to go to their school of choice, public or private. Okay.

Now every student that doesnt go to those public schools means less government funding goes to those schools. Which means quality suffers, and more people choose to try and go elsewhere. And so a death spiral of funding begins.

It also means their expenses are reduced.

You mentioned, and I acknowledged, that there are some economies of scale. However, there are also dis-economies of scale. Maybe it would help if you could give me some examples of schools that are suffering from this, and explain why they're having so much trouble scaling down.

So basically you are apparently completely okay with the fact that this system throws kids under the metaphorical bus, ensuring that they remain in the cycle of poverty that is plaguing this country?

Instead of working on the problem the way the rest of us are suggesting, but giving support to the schools and communities that need it, building them up, and increasing the chances of ALL CHILDREN, as much as we possibly can. This is what it comes down to.

Wow. I have lost a lot of respect here, dude. I seriously don't think you understand how this would effect society in the long run. And no, I don't think, nor did I ever imply that it would be mere months for improvement. I have a mother who's a teacher. I know it's going to be a struggle on the scale of years. And I think it's worth it because this is a situation where we can save everyone, rather than chucking someone under the bus with "oh well, we helped these kids over here."

Um, no. That's why I want a DIFFERENT system. EDIT: Ok, you did say you wanted to change that part.

What are you talking about?

Yes, you did say it could be months. I quoted the part where you said it.

edited 7th May '13 8:35:43 PM by Topazan

I said it could be months or years. In response to you demanding a deadline none of us can calculate. I'm not locking myself into a set time when I can't predict the future that way. You're just conveniently ignoring the part where I said "Most likely years, considering political gridlock."

It feels like you're deliberately misinterpreting me or nitpicking on things not relevant.

This is the part where you're willing to throw kids away. You've essentially declared improving the public school system to be a waste of time, and therefor are unwilling to help the people that need it. This is pretty classist bullshit here. Exactly how else am I supposed to take that as anything other than you not caring about the kids that simply aren't lucky? "It'd be nice but oh well, not everyone gets something everyone should have."

Well, to start with, there's the "It'd be nice..." part.

You were complaining that charter schools were a lottery (even though no one was talking about charter schools). What I meant was that it's unfortunate that only a lucky few have the option to go to nicer schools, but the solution is to give that option to everyone, not take it away from those who have it.

What are you all basically arguing? Summarize it for me if you don't mind.

Topazan supports vouchers and the rest of us are saying the idea is a fool's plan that will drain away even more funding from the poorer areas than is already being drained.

He's saying that the standard public education system is apparently too broken to fix and that we shouldn't be wasting our time. In general the rest of us support giving more resources to public education and letting teachers have more control over how they do their jobs.

And Silas gave us an interesting perspective on Summerhill School in England at one point, which he's actually attended.

edited 7th May '13 8:56:27 PM by AceofSpades

It's been said here before, but I believe the bigger issue to address is not monetary, but structural and efficiency-based. We need to address our current methods of pedagogy because they're outdated and ill-suited for creativity and productivity among our children. In other threads, people have proposed reasonable ways to go about doing this such as not excessively focusing on point-based grading systems, giving children constructive responsibilities more freely, and encouraging non-standard methods of problem solving.

Many educators, psychologists, economists and other experts have argued that education standards in K-12 and higher education are not where they should be largely because we are not fostering an atmosphere of creativity and innovation. In turn, our economic woes can be partly explained by lack of creativity in the workplace. You can see what kind of impact this is having on entrepreneurial endeavors, finding cures for diseases, cultural exchange, designing energy-efficient, environmentally friendly machines, etc.

edited 7th May '13 9:05:17 PM by Aprilla

It's a bit of a stretch to say we aren't creative enough to have a good economy. I mean it might even be true, but it's impossible to tell when our lack of jobs at all and sitting on patents is largely because of corporate fuckery. That, and while we're underperforming compared to the rest of the first world, we're more educated than we've ever been compared to our own past and times of prosperity.

That said, structural and funding problems aren't unrelated. I brought up earlier that conservatives tend to oppose new funding when they think current funds are misallocated. Looking at how much money constantly gets dumped into our community college to replace still-shiny equipment nobody uses while half our elementary schools get shut down...well, I can't say they're wrong.

edited 7th May '13 9:10:37 PM by Pykrete

Ace, are you speaking with the royal "we"?

I'd definitely agree with that, although the American system is hardly the worst at that. One of the more surprising things I encountered in my time in China is that it was apparently the norm there to tell preschoolers what colors to color their coloring books.

Anyways, everyone seems to have millions of ideas of how to fix the system. That's exactly why I think we need a voucher program, so that we can start establishing schools that put these ideas into practice.

That's true, too. I remember reading at some point that we actually spend more per student than many countries, including the famous Finland.

edited 7th May '13 9:13:10 PM by Topazan

To be fair, thats because k-12 has had an image of being basically glorified babysiutting and college preparation slapped on it by people seeking to take funding away from it, while colleges are expected to perform at high levels and look modern and intellectual and practially required by law to constantly update to do so.

My graphic design school is practically required to update macs on a biyearly basis to attract students and keep our accreditation with top graphic design firms, not to mention to bring in students via tours of how modern and great our computer labs and design equipment is.

meanwhile our art education majors are taught such amazing skills as writing a yearlong lesson plan and how to use colored construction paper to make faces,

which completely ignores what it'll do to anyone who doesnt get into one ofc these pioneering schools.

edited 7th May '13 9:15:47 PM by Midgetsnowman

Hell, I've been arguing for that too, but Topazan went straight for vouchers as the amazing "market based" solution.

Yeah, cutting funding off at the knees is really going to give teachers and students the push they need to improve.

But, and this might sound cynical, money is a large part of the solution. There's an article I linked to a few pages back (I'll go get it for you if you like) that addressed the matter of teacher pay: they start at the shit pay of.. I forget what actually, but the point of that bit was that a lot more people would consider going into teaching if the job paid better and there was a chance they could support a family on that paycheck. (One teacher was stated to have to go straight to another full time job just to earn enough to support his two children.) And people don't go into teaching because they don't feel the pay is enough for the skills they've learned. Pay the teachers more, and we're going to get more qualified applicants simply because more people will be applying.

And then all that structural stuff? Is going to be a lot less difficult to approach.

Damn, I got triple ninjaed.

edited 7th May '13 9:13:38 PM by AceofSpades

@Pyrete: Agreed, although I wasn't insinuating that funding and structural modifications are mutually exclusive. I mean, we're not going down the drain in terms of service-based innovation, either. The US is still leading in many fields, but keep in mind that this is the same country where a non-trivial number of Americans are enthusiastic about the idea of going to war with countries they can't identify on a map. Climate change, dieting, exercise, international relations, and other pressing issues aren't fully understood partly (and I say that very loosely) because of what we have and haven't learned in schools. Sex education has also taken a beating in the same states that attempt to block abortion, not understanding how closely related sex education is to reducing unwanted pregnancies and thus protecting the economy.

We are seeing improvement in the current K-12 system. Kids are learning about healthy eating, cultures different from their own, and they are even gaining stronger world language retention. I was roughly introduced to German in the 3rd grade, but I didn't retain any of it. Some of the 8 and 9-year-olds I spoke with recently are learning Chinese and Spanish, and when I spoke to them in those languages, they demonstrated a high level of competency for their ages.

But, yeah. Pretty much in agreement.

edited 7th May '13 9:25:12 PM by Aprilla

@ Bad Schools: How about shutting them down, building a new school somewhere else, and putting in new staff? Starting from Scratch?

Of course, it doesn't help when the pupils can't even see beyond their part of town...

Keep Rolling On

What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Buildings don't go up in a day. Hell, the school my mom teaches at has had construction for an expansion going for a few months. Also, I reiterate my point about the pay not exactly being attractive to large numbers of people, so attracting a staff isn't going to be that easy. Even if you're just replacing the building, you can't just knock down the old one before the new one is built. (And it's not like all buildings need replacing, in a lot of cases they need new equipment more than a building.)

Now there's some areas where it's fairly easy to attract new teachers, but those tend to be places where expansion in general is going on and people are moving in. Not to the old places.

Put it under direct Federal Control? Get new Staff in, somehow, by paying them more? Put in increased funding. In other words, Special Measures?

Does the US have any form of School Inspections by the Department of Education?

Keep Rolling On

Build the new school first, then.

edited 7th May '13 10:44:52 PM by Topazan

I wikied it, and we have no federal standard set of inspections for education. And that is fucking stupid. It's left up to states and municipalities to determine that sort of thing. Bang up job they're doing! Hell, even when they want to do their jobs they can't.

See part of the problem is this extreme decentralization. There's little oversight making sure money doesn't get siphoned off into other things. (The infamous instance where Governor Perry gave state money earmarked for the state education fund to OIL SUBSIDIES and yes I'm still everloving pissed about that.)

The Department of Education appears to have no direct control over anything really. So I'm wondering what it is they do.

In other words, nobody knows (objectively) what makes a "Good School" good and a "Bad School" bad, and how each school matches to the standards and expectations of the DoE. Let alone how ideas from the Good Schools can be passed on to the bad ones and be made to happen.

Doing some more reading, it does seem interesting that attainment varies by race — is it something in the culture of Blacks and Hispanics that makes attainment so low?

edited 7th May '13 11:24:55 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On