Just learned that Redwood City school district dropped music from their curricula. It seems NCLB is stripping our schools of the important aspects of our children's education caused by the underfunded mandates. It's funny that people continue to insist vouchers are the answer to all these problems.
Really? How many times were local school taxes voted on and discussed?
Foxfyre wrote:
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.
Well, you exhibit so many flaws in your ability to learn that you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Besides, a "tiny one horse town oil patch town" has nothing in common with New York or Chicago or Detroit other than the high teen pregnancy rate.
Foxfyre wrote:
I define 'literate' as being able to read and write sufficiently to competently fill out an employment application. I define 'literate' as being able to read and understand instructions and directions. I define 'literate' as being able to read a ballot in order to be sufficiently informed to know what your vote is intended to accomplish. You get my drift.
An unacceptable number of current highschool dropouts and highschool graduates cannot do any of these things much less so many business functions that require extensive reading comprehension plus ability to write coherently.
Here is an expression of low expectations followed by a totally illiterate sentence. The woman condemns herself constantly.
Foxfyre wrote:THe money is already budgeted. All the vouchers will accomplish is to give the parents the right to direct funding allocated for their child to a school of the parents' choice. All of course won't take that option as the voucher will not cover private school tuition but it will help parents who could not otherwise afford private school tuition. The vouchers will have absolutely nothing to do with capital expenditures. Federal monies generally don't touch capital expenditures anyway as all of these come from state and local sources mostly via property taxes.
If enough parents do take advantage of some help to get their kids into a better school, the local public school will do what it has to in order to compete which of course will mean the public school will make whatever changes are necessary in order to compete. When the funding is guaranteed to the public school whether or not they are doing a good job, many will not bother to be any better.
Then why isn't this budgeted money being spent now?
Wait! While the rest of her compatriots argue against spending money, FoxFyre argues for spending money that is currently being withheld from the system.
Ah! Ha! The Republicans do want the public schools to follow the Koran down the toilet!
Foxfyre wrote:Squinney, I have been as vocal as anybody in noting the weaknesses of NCLB. The only reason I defend it at all is that it is producing improvement iin many schools and any improvement is better than no improvement. At least it is an attempt to actually change things instead of just throwing more and more money at the same flawed, failed system.
Nobody seems to want to work with anybody to amend and improve NCLB, however. Most seem to either condemn it with no suggestions for an alternative systemic change or some seem to commend it as the solution. I think both approaches are short sighted.
But there have always been schools and teachers who were willing to 'cheat' to pump up their own image. Scrapping NCLB won't change that.
Don't you think that NCLB hasn't been around long enough to produce results?
Atkins wrote:... Ah! Ha! The Republicans do want the public schools to follow the Koran down the toilet!
Talk about somebody invalidating their own argument while simultaneously demeaning themself by means of ignorant pronouncement ... great job, there.
It was rather impressive.
From the NYT:
June 3, 2005
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
By DAMIEN CAVE
Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.
Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.
Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.
"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."
Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.
Mothers and fathers around the country said they are terrified that their child will have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.
Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.
At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.
A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003. "Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."
Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.
The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.
Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.
"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."
Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.
Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "
Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.
"I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility."
Military officials are clearly concerned. In an interview last month, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of United States Army recruiting, said parental resistance could put the all-volunteer force in jeopardy. When parents and other influential adults dissuade young people from enlisting, he said, "it begs the question of what our national staying power might be for what certainly appears to be a long fight."
In response, the Army has rolled out a campaign aimed at parents, with television ads and a Web site that includes videos of parents talking about why they supported their children's decision to enlist. General Rochelle said that it was still too early to tell if it is making a difference.
But Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war.
"They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Col. Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service."
Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism.
But, he added, parents are also reacting to what they see as the military's increased intrusion into the lives of their children.
"The recruiters are in your face, in the library, in the lunchroom," he said. "They're contacting the most vulnerable students and recruiting them to go to war."
The access is legally protected. As recently as 2000, said one former recruiter in California, it was necessary to dig through the trash at high schools and colleges to find students' names and phone numbers. But No Child Left Behind mandates that school districts can receive federal funds only if they grant military recruiters "the same access to secondary school students" as is provided to colleges and employers.
So although the Garfield P.T.S.A. voted last month to ban military recruiters from the school and its 1,600 students, the Seattle school district could not sign on to the idea without losing at least $15 million in federal education funds.
"The parents have chosen to take a stand, but we still have to comply with No Child Left Behind," said Peter Daniels, communications director for the district. In Whittier, a city of 85,000 10 miles southeast of East Los Angeles, about a dozen families last September accused the district of failing to properly advise parents that they had the right to deny recruiters access to their children's personal information.
Mr. Terrazas, 51, the father of a Whittier High School junior, said the notification was buried among other documents in a preregistration packet sent out last summer.
"It didn't say that the military has access to students' information," he said. "It just said to write a letter if you didn't want your kid listed in a public directory."
A few years ago, after Sept. 11, the issue might not have gotten Mr. Terrazas's attention. His father served in World War II, his brother in Vietnam, and he said that he had always supported having a strong military able to defend the country.
But after the war in Iraq yielded no weapons of mass destruction, and as the death toll has mounted, he cannot reconcile the pride he feels at seeing marines deliver aid after the tsunami in Asia with his concern over the effort in Baghdad, he said.
"Because of the situation we're in now, I would not want my son to serve," he said. "It's the policy that I'm against, not the military."
After Mr. Terrazas and several other parents expressed their concern about the school's role in recruitment, the district drafted a new policy. On May 23, it introduced a proposed opt-out form for the district's 14,000 students.
The form, said Ron Carruth, Whittier's assistant superintendent, includes an explanation of the law, and boxes that parents can check to indicate they do not want information on their child released to either the military, colleges, vocational schools or other sources of recruitment. Mr. Carruth said that next year the district would also prohibit all recruiters from appearing in classrooms, and keep the military ones from bringing equipment like Humvees onto school grounds, a commonly used recruitment tool.
He said that some of the information from the 11-by-17-inch poster that Mr. Terrazas sought to post, including how to verify recruiters' claims about financial benefits, will be part of a pamphlet created by the school for students.
And at least a dozen other districts in the area, Mr. Carruth added, up from three in November, are considering similar plans.
Unlike Mr. Terrazas, Ms. Rogers, 37, of High Falls in the upper Hudson Valley, had not thought much about the war before she began speaking out in her school district. She had been "politically apathetic," she said. She did not know about No Child Left Behind's reporting requirements, nor did she opt out.
When her son, Jonah, said he was thinking of sitting out a gym class that was to be led by National Guard recruiters, Ms. Rogers, who works part time as a clerk at the local motor vehicles office and receives public assistance, said she told him not to be "a rebel without a cause."
"In this world," she recalled telling him, "we need a strong military."
But then she heard from her son that the class was mandatory, and that recruiters were handing out free T-shirts and key chains - "like, 'hey, let's join the military. It's fun,' " she said.
First she called the Rondout Valley High School to complain about the "false advertising," she said, then her congressman.
On May 24, at the first school board meeting since the gym class, she read aloud from a recruiting handbook that advised recruiters on ways to gain maximum access to schools, including offering doughnuts. A high school senior, Katie Coalla, 18, stood up at one point and tearfully defended the recruiters, receiving applause from the crowd of about 70, but Ms. Rogers persisted.
"Pulling in this need for heartstrings patriotic support is clouding the issue," she said. "The point is not whether I support the troops. It's about whether a well-organized propaganda machine should be targeted at children and enforced by the schools."
Laura Cummins, inAccord, N.Y., contributed reporting for this article.
The folks who don't like the idea of military recruiters having access to schools have two very simple, very clear-cut options; forgo Federal funding, or work to re-instate the draft. What's the problem?
Or Plan C: protest and raise hell with their elected officials in D.C. to allow public schools to protect their children from dangerous predators without facing further tightening of the already too-tight financial belt.
Out of curiosity, why is the thinking of those on the right trapped in a tiny dimly-lit box of absolutism--America: love it or leave; 'If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists'; etc.
Let's try to remember that we live in a democratic republic. Checking the iniquities of government, rather than being treasonous or unpatriotic as many of the right's demagogues claim, is the highest form of civic virtue.
The provisions allow for the parents to withhold their child's information if they choose to do so, and currently it is an all volunteer military. All the schools have to do to eliminate any military presence on their campuses is to refuse federal funding.
Meanwhile, the Constitution, which the President and every member of Congress is sworn to uphold, mandates that the government shall provide for the national defense and by everybody's criteria that means maintaining armed forces capable of providing such defense. Those parents better be terrified for their children if our government fails to do that.
Or they can exercise their democratic rights and fight to get the federal government to change the law. Federal funding isn't Lil' Georgie's private piggy bank so he can buy control of the playground--that's public money. People have a perfectly legitimate right to fight for the disbursal of federal funding on terms other than Bush's or the 'yes' cronies he surrounds himself with.
The Constitution charges the federal government with providing for the national defense; since the federal government is, legally, a servant of the people, it's the people who have the final say on how adequately or inadequately that job is being done, and on how that goal is to be accomplished.
If the military is having such a tough time, then perhaps they should simply raise pay and signing bonuses and give recruits a clear-cut deal and contract rather the used car salesmanship they employ now.
Or we could impeach Bush for squandering our military resources and sending thousands of U.S. soldiers to their deaths in Iraq so he could look tough and presidential.
Gets easier every day to understand the plight in which The Democratic Party finds itself.
That says a whole lot coming from the right when Bush's performance rating is one of the lowest in recent history. Seems rather shameful, myself.
United States - Average number of years of school adults have had - 12. Rank No #1 of 25 countries.
Average class size - age 13 - 18.3 students - Rank No. 15 of 25 countries.
Average class size - age 9 - 23.5 students - Rank No. 6 of 25 countries
Math proficiency - 12th grade - Rank No. 17 of 19 countries
http://www.nationmaster.com/cat/Education
Per capita spending is also instructive. This is up considerably since 1995 but
this will provide some idea:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/backgrounders/school_funding.html
Take the average and multiply by the number of kids in a classroom and you can see how much money is involved. Now the teacher isn't getting a whole lot of that. It sure isn't going for books and school supplies. So where is the money going?
This is an email from someone close to me:
Reading the McCullough bio of John Adams... Adams
thought:
"Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially
for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise
and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no
expense for this purpose would be thought
extravagant."
>.<
He must be spinning in his grave.
He's not sitting upright.
