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Those preparing those tests need to be tested; if they don't understand the concepts of a sport, they have no justification for writing about them in a test.

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Atkins:-

Your post 1354795 of May 23 satisfies me that there is no point continuing debating with you.How you get from my previous post to that baffles me and though we may use words from similar dictionaries we obviously speak different languages.

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spendius wrote:

Atkins:-

Your post 1354795 of May 23 satisfies me that there is no point continuing debating with you.How you get from my previous post to that baffles me and though we may use words from similar dictionaries we obviously speak different languages.

You do remind me of someone created by Charles Dickens.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Some of the interesting things on the site is the steadily increasing support for vouchers.

That's an opinion poll. Unfortunately, the only thing that proves is that the pro-voucher propaganda is working. Parents are frustrated--rightfully so--and they want to run from the public education system they perceive as failing them, but they haven't taken a good, hard, critical look at what they want to run to.

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If private school teachers are less well educated and less well paid than are public school teachers, how do you account for the fact that private school children do as well as they do?

The question should be rephrased as "how do they do as well as public school children" (remember: when socio-economic background is considered, it turns out that private school children aren't doing better in general). In the case of parochial schools, I suspect divine intervention.....that's a joke. But with regard to parochial schools, they are sometimes able to attract certified teachers from amongst the 'faithful'--trained teachers who will work for substantially lower wages because of their religious devotion. These seem to usually be folks who can afford to be paid less because of a spouse's income or lack of financial obligations (no family, no student loans to pay off, etc.). The problem, however, is that there simply aren't enough trained teachers who fall into this category to accommodate the additional students vouchers would create, so either they would have to be extra selective. Parochial schools seem to be the majority of private schools. My educated guess would be that part of the reason private school students keep pace with public school children (when controlling for socio-economics) is due in part to having trained educators mixed in among their teachers. Then we can add the fact of smaller average class sizes, which by itself means fewer distractions, more one-on-one time between teacher and student, and fewer disciplinary problems. Add to that a more effective disciplinary system (I imagine parents would tend to take a call home much seriously when their paying the tuition directly). But more than anything else, private school students keep pace with public school students because their parents are much, much more involved in their kids' educations.

On the other hand, the wealthy elite of private schools (a small minority) certainly have the best educators money can buy (yet wealthy kids in private schools don't seem to be doing any better than wealthy kids in public schools).

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I sympathise deeply with your assessment of the problems in public school, most particularly the lack of parental cooperation. Wouldn't it be nice if you could require parental participation and cooperation? The private schools can and do. With a little public outrage and a few well placed demands, the public schools can too. They used to. And I would put my small town dirt water one horse town public school education up against anybodys. But that was decades ago when parents and schools worked together to educate the kids.

It definitely would be great to somehow compel parents to be more involved in their children's educations. I, too, would put my small town public school education up against anybody else's. However, while private schools can, to some degree, compel their parents to be involved, will they once they start feeding at the 'voucher' trough? I doubt it. They really don't force their parents now--they don't have to; parents who go through the trouble and expense of putting their kids in private schools are already more involved (and invested) in their kids' educations.

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Why don't we put our heads together and see how that fortunate situation can be re-created. (But you'll have to stomp on a few ACLU toes I bet.)

Well, I can tell you that a good place to start is class sizes, and the ACLU won't say 'boo' about that. This is the single most effective means of reducing behavioral problems in the classroom, as well as decreasing distractions in general and increasing one-on-one time with the teacher (all of which have a positive impact on learning). Secondly, a big part of the problem with parental involvement is time spent working: is it just a coincidence that test scores have declined and behavioral problems have increased at school while at the same time real wages have declined and the average time spent working per week has increased? Before we institute laws requiring parents to be more involved in their kids' lives, we must create a system where parents don't have to choose between spending time with their kids and keeping them fed, clothed, and sheltered.

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All you comments are right on Mills, except I'm not yet convinced that public school children of the same soci9economic class are doing as well as private school children or home schoolers. I would have to see some more data on that.

So far as parental involvement, class size, etc., I believe a well designed voucher program would accomplish all that. Once the public schools HAD to compete with the private school in order to keep their funding, they would do whatever it took to compete including doing the right stuff that private schools do. To think otherwise assumes that behavior or SOP wouldn't change in the public schools. It's the behavior and SOP that we precisely want changed in the public schools. If the public schools don't change, there will be plenty of new private schools to meet the lucrative new market for them.

With vouchers, if the public schools cleaned up their act in order to be competitive, and that includes bouncing out the kids who keep the other kids from learning, they could compete with anybody and all that voucher money would be flowing into them. This would be more especially so if your theory is correct that public school teaches are better trained and capable than are the private school teachers.

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spendius wrote:

Mills 75:-

Your post 1352775 is loaded with unexamined assertions and obfustications.It is standard practice I know.It would take a book to deal with just those on this page.

Hello, Pot? This is the Kettle calling: YOUR BLACK!
Actually, my assertions are always based either on personal observations, historical knowledge, news articles and/or analyses/commentary I've read. Since posting on this site is my recreation and not my occupation, I simply don't have the time to provide you with exhaustive citations. And while I am uncertain as to what an 'obfustication' is (I contacted Webster and he's pretty sure that's not a word), I am reasonably certain, after rereading post 1352775, that there are no obfuscations in it.

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Education here has had 130 years to get its house in order and has failed to do so.It has lowered standards for qualifications to such a point where they are more or less meaningless and employers have been forced to arrange themselves accordingly.We have recently arrived at the point that children up to 16 are under curfew after 9 pm so disorderly has their conduct become.I am told,though I can't vouch for it,that the maximum penalty for breaking this curfew is a £5,000 fine and two nights in the cells for the parents.Almost every news broadcast is covering the effects of young people's behaviour.

Is that not a measure of the failure of the educational system.To talk about results in exams is pointless when there are hardly any worthwhile standards left to go by.

Education in America had it's house in order--many school districts still do--but has declined during the last several decades. (Interestingly, education's decline has roughly correlated with a steady worsening of the economic conditions for the average citizen). I cannot speak intelligently of Great Britain's educational system, but I fail to see any connection between increasingly inappropriate youth behavior and schools--parents have far and away the greatest influence and responsibility over their children's behavior. It's simply illogical to lay that problem at the school house doorstep.

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Any bureaucratic swarming over a voucher system would simply represent political failure of nerve.

No, just a fact of politics and logistics. New programs require bureaucracy to administer them.

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There are,of course,more dramatic solutions than the voucher system.If things continue the way they have been doing and the voucher system is successfully resisted by the complacent educational establishments I fear that these more dramatic solutions may gain in credibility and I don't think many of us here would seek such an outcome.

Or we could just get real about the problems facing the educational system and fix them rather than opting for an impractical ideological faux solution.

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There are schools for driving here.For cars and motorbikes,for rigids over 71/2 tons,for articulated trucks up to 44 tons and on into more specialised equipment.These are all worked on a free market basis,more or less,and the results are satisfactory.
Such a system applies to many other trades.

They have those here, too. And many, many people drive incompetently--an excellent example of effective free-market education in practice.

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I know of one infant teacher who is on the scales at over 300lbs in wieght.What an example.How on earth does such a person come to be in authority over children?She is just an extreme.She can't be sacked,it seems,because the bureaucracy would have to define obesity and if that argument got started who knows what would happen.Under a voucher system she would not be chosen by most parents.

What is an 'infant teacher' and why should her weight be any factor at all? Does her job entail lying on top of infants? (I imagine that's a bad idea even if the person was of 'normal' weight.) Does she teach gymnastics or other activities where the equipment is rated safe only for lighter people? If she's a good teacher, I can't imagine why most parents wouldn't want her for their children's teacher.

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Bringing in to the argument conditions in the free market during the birth pangs of capitalism is a red herring.All societies moving from feudalism to modern capitalism will experience such things.One might feel sorry for them and seek to mitigate them but they are unavoidable.What matters is that they no longer apply.We have moved on.

You might have moved on, but I assure you capitalism hasn't. The 'growing pains' you refer to are simply the logical and unavoidable outcomes of unregulated or insufficiently regulated capitalism. Indeed, with an ever increasing number of Americans without health insurance, a steadily decreasing real wage, and an overly business-friendly government that has consistently hampered proper regulation by those agencies responsible for workplace safety, the environment, and fair business dealings we might well be seeing a move back to those good old days.

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Privatization is seen as a success here with the possible exception of the railways.

Again, I can't speak to the current political, social, and economic climate of Great Britain. Most attempts at privatization in America appear to be to the detriment of the people affected by them.

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Obviously the government will see to it that any voucher system works reasonably well.To raise objections to it based on guesses or lack of confidence in the government is hardly an argument.It is defeatist.

Anytime one seeks to predict, one must make a guess. In my case, the guess is based on consideration of governmental handling of previous programs (the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior), the dominant political ideology, and the ideological origins of the idea in question. Those who predict that vouchers would be an effective method of improving education make no less a guess than I.

However, I take exception with labeling the pro-public school position "defeatist." Those in this camp want to fix the current system rather than switch to an ill-conceived one. Surely the pro-voucher/pro-privatization camp must proudly claim the label of defeatist.

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...The products of our educational system seem hell-bent on wrecking everything they can lay their hands upon.

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Parents are failing to rear their children properly and this is somehow the school's fault? I'm beginning to understand your position now--you seek to make schools the scapegoat for all of society's ills. In an earlier post you used the term 'sociology.' It's ironic that someone who lacks the ability to think sociologically would be "satisfied with the sociology..."

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I don't need to look at polls.I listen to what people say and I will bet that 90% of them believe that the educational system is failing the children and failing society.Sooner or later that is bound to translate into political action of a non-tinkering sort.

Of course many (surely not 90%--you might want to change your sampling technique) people believe the schools are failing their children--they're being told this just about everyday by some conservative pundit or another. Many schools are failing, but not because of problems private schools have magically solved.

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Are not the dollar bills you have vouchers.How would things be if a bureaucracy decided how your needs and desires were satisfied.That would be communism surely?And the Soviets discovered the uselessness of that.

The practicality and desirability of communism and the reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union are surely topics for different thread. As for the rest, it's a disingenuous analogy. Even the neoliberals concede that the government must be responsible for some services--no intelligent individual argues that people should have the right to decide that their country's military is inadequate and should get a voucher to subsidize private military protection.

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You make some large assumptions.

Few assumptions, lots of educated guesses; after all, we really wouldn't for absolute certain how a voucher system would play out. However, if I were in a damaged boat that was leaking heavily, I wouldn't need to experiment with bailing water into the boat to know that would worsen the situation.

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When spendius' painful to read prose is broken up in blocks as it is in Mills' response posted above, the ridiculousness of his criticism of education is made patently clear.

Did spendius ever attend school?

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Foxfyre wrote:

All you comments are right on Mills, except I'm not yet convinced that public school children of the same soci9economic class are doing as well as private school children or home schoolers. I would have to see some more data on that.

The problem is that up until this point, virtually all the relevant research has failed to account for socio-economic background.

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So far as parental involvement, class size, etc., I believe a well designed voucher program would accomplish all that. Once the public schools HAD to compete with the private school in order to keep their funding, they would do whatever it took to compete including doing the right stuff that private schools do. To think otherwise assumes that behavior or SOP wouldn't change in the public schools. It's the behavior and SOP that we precisely want changed in the public schools. If the public schools don't change, there will be plenty of new private schools to meet the lucrative new market for them.

The problem isn't that schools won't change. Schools change relatively frequently now and have done so for several decades (indeed, some of the pro-voucher arguments have come from folks who specifically cite this fact). Teachers and administrators, contrary to what seems to be popular opinion here, are well educated and are always looking for ways to improve. When your children are/were home because there was a "teacher inservice," which most school districts have three-four times per year, the teachers aren't/weren't getting caught up on their grading, they're going to training sessions to learn about new teaching strategies that will potentially make them better teachers and enhance learning.

The problem is that vouchers leach vital funds from an already overstressed system.

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With vouchers, if the public schools cleaned up their act in order to be competitive, and that includes bouncing out the kids who keep the other kids from learning, they could compete with anybody and all that voucher money would be flowing into them. This would be more especially so if your theory is correct that public school teaches are better trained and capable than are the private school teachers.

You're right: if we could simply get rid of our problem students, we might very well not be having this debate. But this is a result of the will of the public--believe it or not, public schools are responsible and governed by the voting public. If a student is too big of a behavioral problem, that student should be placed in an alternate environment or simply barred from public schools; if a student consistently fails but tests negative for any mental or emotional impairment, then that student should be placed in an alternate setting; not only doesn't NCLB address these issues, it mandates that these problem students have to pass, too. However, public schools are legally bound to admit these students and provide them with an education.

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Even with students that may have some potential, they are relegated to classes to pass a test. That's not 'teaching' or 'learning.' Those schools failing to show 'improvement' on those tests are penalized with reduced funding for the following year. That's what happened to Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California. They rank in the top ten school in California, but because they are rated with a low-performance school in East Palo Alto, they will lose funding for next year, because they didn't show "marked" improvement.

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The facts that NCLB manages to penalize good schools and is, in effect, changing the objective of school curricula from providing well rounded education to "test prep" can't be reiterated enough.

When looking at the requirements of NCLB and the White House's refusal to compromise or even exercise a modicum of common sense, I'm forced to conclude that NCLB is not about improving schools, but pushing a pro-voucher/privatization agenda. Having 95% of students show up and take the test (because of test security, there's a window of only two-four days--students can't simply take it whenever they finally show up) is ridiculous unless the administration is going to authorize and provide law enforcement personal, or perhaps the National Guard, to go door-to-door and physically drag every student to school. Having an eventual goal of 100% of students passing the tests defies statistical logic.

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...and common sense.

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BTW, Parents of school children in San Francisco have demonstrated against the NCLB mandate for the military to have access to their children. I hope this gains momentum, and most parents will demonstrate across the country to show Bush and his Criminals that it's against not only 'decency' and 'fair play,' but it's a crime of the worst order.

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Mills writes

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The problem is that up until this point, virtually all the relevant research has failed to account for socii-economic background.

Thomas Sowell grew up as a poor black kid in a segregated inner NYC school. He gives a great account of how he received an education that allowed him to compete with anybody. He doesn't buy for a minute that poor kids are less able to learn than are the rich kids. Parental involvement is the key. It was required when he was in school and it can be required now. All it takes is the will to require it. The private schools do. Conversely, the public schools too often give the appearance they don't want parental involvement.

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The problem is that vouchers leach vital funds from an already overstressed system.

Then it is time to 'unstress' those schools. If the schools are too stressed to provide an education for the children, then we need a completely different system. This is not about the schools. It is about educating children.

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However, I take exception with labeling the pro-public school position "defeatist." Those in this camp want to fix the current system rather than switch to an ill-conceived one. Surely the pro-voucher/pro-privatization camp must proudly claim the label of defeatist.

The voucher system In no way signals defeatism. It signals that there is a better way to educate children and parents should have the right for that option for their children. If the public schools wish to compete they have to remember that they are supposed to be in the business of educating children rather than being in the business of being schools.

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You're right: if we could simply get rid of our problem students, we might very well not be having this debate. But this is a result of the will of the public--believe it or not, public schools are responsible and governed by the voting public. If a student is too big of a behavioral problem, that student should be placed in an alternate environment or simply barred from public schools; if a student consistently fails but tests negative for any mental or emotional impairment, then that student should be placed in an alternate setting; not only doesn't NCLB address these issues, it mandates that these problem students have to pass, too. However, public schools are legally bound to admit these students and provide them with an education.

The private schools are not legally bound to admit problem students and can expel them when they need to. The public schools can do the same. it just means telling the ACLU to take a hike and telling the unions to back off and allowing some real reform that allows them to be educators, not administrators running an institution. Once they do that, they will definitely have an edge on the more expensive private schools.

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Quote, "Thomas Sowell grew up as a poor black kid in a segregated inner NYC school. He gives a great account of how he received an education that allowed him to compete with anybody. He doesn't buy for a minute that poor kids are less able to learn than are the rich kids."

Any general rule can be refuted by some examples, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the huge handicap presented to a poor child. For any Thomas Sowell success story, there are 100s of those poor children that are not successful. You don't need to "buy" anything; the numbers speak for themselves.

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BTW, that doesn't mean poor children don't have the potential to succeed. They have a bigger hurdle to climb, and most don't understand what those hurdles are. They don't understand the handicaps to a good education in which they live.

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One other thought. Even as important as the quality of education received, there is an intangible factor of values held by many parents. These parents want their children to be taught proper etiquette, deportment, real manners, real concern for others, respect for authority, and ethics. They do not expect the schools to teach morality or religious principles to their children, but they do expect the schools not to intentionally undercut these and other important family values. They expect students and faculy to have and enforce a dress code and they expect to find order and a good environment for learning when they visit.
There was a time when the public schools provided all of that. They can again if there is the will to demand it.

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CI writes:

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Any general rule can be refuted by some examples, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the huge handicap presented to a poor child. For any Thomas Sowell success story, there are 100s of those poor children that are not successful. You don't need to "buy" anything; the numbers speak for themselves.

Thomas Sowell would say that poor children in good schools can do about as well as rich kids in good schools. It is all in the quality of the education provided. See his article here:
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/fulltext/ed21st/79.pdf

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Still at it with the "control talk" I see.

Why don't you give Cohen's book on the subject a go and see how it's set up.Doing it unconsciously is real naff.

You could try Orwell's appendix to 1984.

There was a comic on the BBC the other night who made an appeal on behalf of the children all these do-gooders were playing around with in order to get money to pollute the earth more.He was dressed to look weary,wasted and worn out.It was heart-wrenching.

Anything like that on American TV.

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I could also say "poor children in good schools can do about as well as rich kids." That's the essence of the problem; "equal" doesn't exist in our schools. Talk is cheap. NCLB is a failure, and those who think it's headed in the right direction doesn't understand anything about educating our children to meet "their needs." No matter how one tries to fit a square block into a round hole will never succeed. Children are "NOT" created equal.

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Well C.I., in my opinion, a child is far less likely to make it if s/he is told s/he is 'stupid', 'poor', 'disadvantaged', 'handicapped', 'a victim' or any other characterization suggesting s/he just isn't as up to it. And a child will feel that way when s/he realizes s/he is expected to achieve less than what is expected of other kids.

And children of all socioeconomic circumstances can and do succeed with a teacher who believes they can. When I went to school I was in class with kids who were considered 'poor' and there were kids who were very rich. For various reasons I would have been considered an 'at risk' kid by today's public school mentality. The thing was, nobody told the teachers and nobody told me that I was less able to be educated than were the more fortunate kids. It never occurred to me I couldn't do what they did. Some who didn't get it on the first try were held back to repeat a grade, but, like Thomas Sowell, I and virtually all my classmates got an education that allowed us to compete with anybody.

The graduation rate was virtually 100% year after year with most going on to get additional education. And this was in a tiny one horse town oil patch town that was barely on the map.

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