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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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 Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 9:30 pm Post subject: |
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| What's with the guys saying the term hoodlum is not just racist, but so unforgiveably racist that it warrants resignation? The guy holding up the "Reparations Now" sign is kind of funny though. Adds a nice, very telling, "Show me the money," feel to the whole protest. |
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geldedgoat
Joined: 05 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 11:41 pm Post subject: |
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From the first link:
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"Hoodlum, when you look it up in the dictionary, doesn't look so bad," Adams said. But when people in the black community hear it, "they associate it with words and meanings other than (those from) 1871 or whenever it was the word first appeared in print."
The professor said the case reminds him of the uproar from a 1999 incident when a Washington D.C., city official used the term "niggardly" to describe how he was managing budget cuts. It means "miserly," but another employee took it as a racial slur.
Said Adams: "What people hear always means something more than what a word may mean historically." |
So when we use words correctly, we have to always be watchful for the ignorant among us who failed vocabulary and are prone to knee-jerk reactions? Gotcha. |
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Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 12:20 am Post subject: |
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I'm wading gingerly into an increasingly hot thread...
Bill Maher can be very cruel to people he doesn't agree with, but I like one of his recent quotes: Not everything has to make a profit. I don't think that what governments spend money on is always relatable to what companies spend money on. Companies are interested in tangible, monetary rewards for their services. Governments can be wasteful, but sometimes they pursue broader, long-term, collective benefits. Public schools are not supposed to break even. They are supposed to educate a populace to return that productivity in eventual higher wages and taxes, and making these sorts of cost-benefit analyses of public schools is to me impossible and unhelpful.
I think as well that we early on were on our way to agreeing that the problem was with teachers and not the amount of money thrown at the system. This does not mean that the system is by definition flawed, but that priorities need to be changed.
I think the system requires broader and more long-term changes rather than just trusting the market to educate people. I know of no nation where its non-postsecondary school system historically came from the private sector. Who could afford school if it had no external support? What company would lose money on schooling someone for benefits that everyone in the country would share?
One rather abstract change we need to encourage is to value education as a whole. If people think that school is an activity we waste time in until we can take up our careers as hip-hop gangsters and supermodels, good people won't take up teaching and students won't value classes. Generally, to me Korean schools are bad systems with diligent students, and North American schools are good systems with apathetic students.
Teachers need to be well-paid. Teaching is a decent salary in Canada, but not great; there are probably union garbagemen making more. Those professors making six-figure sums are a tiny minority. The rest drop from there down to adjuncts making Taco Bell wages. I hate this ignorant slur that I've had to fight my entire career, the one that says teaching is easy because you work 9-3 and have the summer off, just like university professors only work 12 hours a week. There are probably enough Edna Kerbappels, but for many educators it does not begin to count preparation, grading, paperwork, consultations, and endless meetings.
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| When I was in school, I remember a number of student teachers, still in college, who came into our school. They observed lessons at first, and then transitioned to teaching under supervision, and then to teaching without supervision, as practice. Maybe that's just something they did in my state, but it seems like a much better idea to me than what seems to be described in this article. |
That's very true. I did teacher education in Alberta as well, and we had this same system. It worked well-- it flushed me out as a bad teacher (I do something else now, and it's 15 years later). Even then, I felt I was poorly prepared for the classroom. I did a BA and then spent one year in a BEd afterdegree taking union-prescribed flatulence about 19th century Saskatchewan schooling and the usual PC tripe about tolerance and understanding and soaring on the wings of eagles.
What I resented most about my practicum is that I had to pay full tuition at the U of A, and an extra fee, to work for free while my co-teacher sat in the staffroom eating donuts and bitching at me. It shouldn't be about money, but sometimes it is about money. Teachers need to be trained well and paid enough to want that training. |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:00 am Post subject: |
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[quote="Moldy Rutabaga"]I'm wading gingerly into an increasingly hot thread...
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| Bill Maher can be very cruel to people he doesn't agree with, but I like one of his recent quotes: Not everything has to make a profit. I don't think that what governments spend money on is always relatable to what companies spend money on. Companies are interested in tangible, monetary rewards for their services. Governments can be wasteful, but sometimes they pursue broader, long-term, collective benefits. Public schools are not supposed to break even. They are supposed to educate a populace to return that productivity in eventual higher wages and taxes, and making these sorts of cost-benefit analyses of public schools is to me impossible and unhelpful. |
How are they getting on with that? And how else are you supposed to measure their effectiveness? Exponential growth in spending, with no increase in grades or educational outcomes sounds like a bad mix to me.
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| I think as well that we early on were on our way to agreeing that the problem was with teachers and not the amount of money thrown at the system. This does not mean that the system is by definition flawed, but that priorities need to be changed. |
It's not he teachers that are the problem, it's the incentives to try and gain economic rents that are the problem.
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| I think the system requires broader and more long-term changes rather than just trusting the market to educate people. I know of no nation where its non-postsecondary school system historically came from the private sector. Who could afford school if it had no external support? What company would lose money on schooling someone for benefits that everyone in the country would share? |
There was a time when all schools were private. I'm not saying schools were better back then, but there's no reason to believe the govt is better at administering schools than the market.
As for who pays? Huge numbers of kids in the slums of Africa and India go to private schools. The public systems in those countries are so bad that people won't use them even if they're free. Who says a company would have to lose money on schools? I'm sure Samsung, Hyundai, Microsoft or whoever could cut costs a lot lower than $11,000 per child and give a better product. Then you could give that tax money($11,000) back to citizens and they could pocket the difference.
| Quote: |
| One rather abstract change we need to encourage is to value education as a whole. If people think that school is an activity we waste time in until we can take up our careers as hip-hop gangsters and supermodels, good people won't take up teaching and students won't value classes. Generally, to me Korean schools are bad systems with diligent students, and North American schools are good systems with apathetic students. |
This isn't really an area we can change in my opinion. We might as well take it as a given(though I don't have such a jaded view of people in general, as this), and change what we can.
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| Teachers need to be well-paid. Teaching is a decent salary in Canada, but not great; there are probably union garbagemen making more. Those professors making six-figure sums are a tiny minority. The rest drop from there down to adjuncts making Taco Bell wages. I hate this ignorant slur that I've had to fight my entire career, the one that says teaching is easy because you work 9-3 and have the summer off, just like university professors only work 12 hours a week. There are probably enough Edna Kerbappels, but for many educators it does not begin to count preparation, grading, paperwork, consultations, and endless meetings. |
How much is a fair wage for a teacher. No one in the world knows. Literally not one single person. Only a market of individuals free to choose who they want to teach them, know the answer. There needs to be a system that punishes bad teachers and rewards the good ones. Politicians are very poor at doing this. The market is the single greatest judge in the history of man. |
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caniff
Joined: 03 Feb 2004
Location: All over the map
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:08 am Post subject: |
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Interesting post, Moldy. I've never taught in the US (thank god?), but as a former HS teacher/instructor/whatever I was at least somewhat impressed with the general diligence of Korean students.
I grew up in an upper-middle class community (I've since slipped several rungs), and even there the 'pyoopulls' were a bunch of clowns. I think we only had one dork who would sit in the corner and complete a Rubic's Cube in about a second while the rest of us would act like we needed a slap. |
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Reggie
Joined: 21 Sep 2009
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TheUrbanMyth
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Location: Retired
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Moldy Rutabaga wrote: |
I
Teachers need to be well-paid. Teaching is a decent salary in Canada, but not great; there are probably union garbagemen making more. Those professors making six-figure sums are a tiny minority.. |
It depends on your time spent and location.
http://resource.educationcanada.com/salaries.html/
For example the minimum in PEI with 4 years of education is around 30 grand. With six years it goes to 38.
In Yukon it starts at 56 grand for 4 years and after six years of education maxes out at just over 90,000.
And then there's fringe benefits such as medical, dental, accumulated sick leave.... |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:56 pm Post subject: |
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My friend teaches at the school profiled in Oakland. It even outperforms the local rich school. The school has also expanded to high school since this episode aired.
Besides the strict discipline, the students also have the same teacher for all their classes. At least for middle school, don't know about high school. The teachers are also from the Ivy Leagues or comparable universities. |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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Reggie
Joined: 21 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Senior wrote: |
| How are they getting on with that? And how else are you supposed to measure their effectiveness? Exponential growth in spending, with no increase in grades or educational outcomes sounds like a bad mix to me. |
That's my main problem with teacher pay right now, especially with private sector incomes and tax revenues going down. What are we really getting for our investment? While I agree to a certain extent with people here who point the finger at parents, I'm not paying the parents. I am paying the teachers and they're delivering piss poor results for what I'm paying them.
| Senior wrote: |
| How much is a fair wage for a teacher. No one in the world knows. Literally not one single person. Only a market of individuals free to choose who they want to teach them, know the answer. There needs to be a system that punishes bad teachers and rewards the good ones. Politicians are very poor at doing this. The market is the single greatest judge in the history of man. |
True. The public really needs to do what it has got to do regarding education and ignore the teachers unions. Most of these teachers are so replaceable and expendable, especially in the current economy with high unemployment figures.
Good teachers who deserve high pay would get high pay in a free market. For example, when I was in high school, many of the kids in the band were getting huge music scholarships at Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech, Tennessee, and various smaller colleges. It's easy for a teacher like that to justify his salary or even a pay increase. The math scores of students taking the ACT at my high school were always horrific. The math teacher should've been paid minimum wage since she was very expendable and very, very replaceable. One of the substitute teachers was actually better.
I'm not against high pay when it's deserved. However, I am against taxpayers paying many of these teachers high dollar when many of them, for whatever reasons, either can't or won't deliver on what they're being paid to do. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:05 pm Post subject: |
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Here's an interesting piece of research on Charter schools. I'll include the introduction here, but there's a lot more at the link itself.
| Introduction wrote: |
As charter schools play an increasingly central role in education reform agendas across the United States, it becomes more important to have current and comprehensible analysis about how well they do educating their students. Thanks to progress in student data systems and regular student achievement testing, it is possible to examine student learning in charter schools and compare it to the experience the students would have had in the traditional public schools (TPS) they would otherwise have attended. This report presents a longitudinal student‐level analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States. The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter school impacts. Charter schools are permitted to select their focus, environment and operations and wide diversity exists across the sector. This study provides an overview that aggregates charter schools in different ways to examine different facets of their impact on student academic growth.
The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools. These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy challenge is how to deal constructively with varying levels of performance today and into the future. |
These results were found both via comparison to "virtual twins" created with statistical modelling (the factors included were demographics, english language competency, extra-curricular participation, participation in special education programs, and participation in subsidized lunch programs), and by comparison with real local alternatives.
Charter schools are an example of choice-based models of education. Region also impacts the statistics; Arkansas, Colorado (Denver specifically), Illinois (Chicago specifically), Louisiana, and Missouri's charter schools tended to be the ones who outperformed traditional schools. Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas' charter schools tended to underperform compared to traditional schools. California, DC, Georgia, and North Carolina's charter schools were roughly comparable.
States who capped the number of charter schools also produced worse results than states who did not, which implies that at least some of the problem is bad charter schools continuing to "take up a school slot," and thus prevent the creation of better schools which could outcompete them. |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:14 pm Post subject: |
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| So more than 50% of the schools delivered a better or equal product? Charter schools are usually cheaper per student than public schools, so this seems pretty successful, for an initiative with zero political backing. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Senior wrote: |
| So more than 50% of the schools delivered a better or equal product? |
Or you could say it in the reverse fashion: over 50% of the schools delivered a worse or equal product. Given more schools under-performed than over-performed, this would be the more rational way to put it. 17% of schools over-performed. 37% (over twice as many) under-performed. This means that on average charter schools perform worse than public schools.
The report makes it clear that some things can be done to improve this situation, but it would take a lot of improvement to even bring charter schools in general statistically in line with public schools, and a lot more to make them start performing better on average. |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| Senior wrote: |
| So more than 50% of the schools delivered a better or equal product? |
Or you could say it in the reverse fashion: over 50% of the schools delivered a worse or equal product. Given more schools under-performed than over-performed, this would be the more rational way to put it. 17% of schools over-performed. 37% (over twice as many) under-performed. This means that on average charter schools perform worse than public schools.
The report makes it clear that some things can be done to improve this situation, but it would take a lot of improvement to even bring charter schools in general statistically in line with public schools, and a lot more to make them start performing better on average. |
You haven't addressed the cost issue. Simply put, there is an optimal amount of education, currently we are consuming too much. We know this as there are cheaper schools, even if they have lower outcomes, that people still happily attend.
Charter schools are relatively new. They are performing at about the same level as PSs with a fraction of the funding. PSs have stagnated over the last 30 years, there is no reason to assume that charter schools wouldn't improve if the market for education weren't made freer. |
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