Publics Schools

[_Tarski]

Droopy likes to go on about education but he has no real experience.

1) I went to a public school in NY that was second to none. We were doing Euclidean proofs in 3rd grade.

2) My best friend is an accomplished mathematican who went to public schools, was given apportunities through grants from the NSF and was inspired by many public school teachers. He was doing real analysis theorems in 11th grade (look it up).
He has stated many times that he would not have been able to do any of it without the public support.

3) Unlike Droopy, I have been teaching for 30+ years. I have a handle on it. I have taught at the university level. I have been working in training and edifying K12 teachers through a large public grant. I see the daily struggles, and the issue with kids both at K12 level and in the university all the way up to graduate school (have PhD students myself).

4) I have taught at an expensive private high school in the Valley (LA) where only the famous and elite attended. I have been bullied by administration to give good grades to lazy kids of famous parents on the basis that they "paid" for it. This is what is in demand! That is capitalism. It was the worst school academically but maintained a great reputation by the power of marketing and various other sneaky methods familiar to profit orient people.

Droopy is totally clueless--no experience with reality and no idea of what causes challenges in education.
I do. He doesn't.

[_ajax18]

Have you taught in a public high school before Tarski?

I've heard professors complain about public university students before (especially freshmen), but it seems to me that most kids and more importantly their parents have a very different attitude about college than public school for the simple reason that they now have a choice to pay for it or not. They have a choice to be there or not. A university can flunk a kid out. If a public school flunks a kid, they're stuck with him another year. When the student fails in college, it's the student's fault. The student gets stuck with debt and no degree or chance at a better paying job. When the student fails in public school, it's the teacher's fault.

If you've been teaching a long time and are well decorated with letters after your name, you probably got the most motivated kids as well. Sure, there's a minority of people that take advantage of public education. If a kid is motivated, he can learn in a public school. But for many of the kids, it's just babysitting.

You know all this. At least high school teachers should have their own business, just like college is run now.

[_Kevin Graham]

Great points Tarski, and I'll go ahead and throw my hat in the ring since I too have experience teaching. When in Brazil I taught at the most expensive school available in Brasilia, and quite possibly the entire country. It was where all the diplomats from other countries sent their kids. The price tag on an education like that was around R$8,000/month, or roughly $3,500 American. I really couldn't believe how much these people were paying, but in most cases the tuition was paid for by whatever government their parents were representing. Brasilia is where embassies of other nations were located, and so naturally these families wanted the best education money could buy.

Anyway, what drove me nuts the most was the administration and the way they would constantly pander to the parents requests. There were four "psychologists" on standby because every time a child misbehaved, they were careful to diagnose the child with some kind of mild learning disability that required "special attention" and of course that meant more money for the school. The kids would walk into class listening to headphones, and the administration decided that it was OK. When I told them how insane it was to allow them to do this (I couldn't even expect them to listen to me when I called out their names during roll call!), one administrator explained to me that some studies have proven that music helps the brain during learning stages... I was like, this is friggin insane. After numerous chats with the other teachers I realized that the reason they did this was because they knew these kids were a bunch of spoiled brats who could easily tell their parents "i don't like this school anymore" and so they'd pull them out and place them in some other private school.

That's capitalism, when profit becomes the most important aspect of the business.

And with all this nonsense about charter schools being so much superior to public schools, what people don't understand is that these private schools get to pick the students they want. They have entrance exams. So they don't allow the kids who perform poorly, and in the rare cases that they do, they later kick them out because their existence drives down the school's scores. Why? Because they don't really care about educating anyone. They only care about making money, and the best way to do that is to get the best students in the school so they can use their scores to market the school to newcomers. It is a dumb game in the system which so many Right Wingers simply do not understand.

Like Tarski said, there are excellent public schools and poor public schools. The thing that determines which is which, has nothing to do with the lack of market mechanisms, but rather geography. It is a simple matter of fact that a public school in Beverly Hills is going to outperform a public school in Brooklyn. And you could swap out the teachers from each school and the scores are going to remain constant because what affects a child's performance more than anything is how they were raised, and also if they are in an environment conducive to further learning. The thing about public education is that it is forced to accept everyone, whereas private schools get to cherry pick the kids that will make them look good.

[_Droopy]

Droopy likes to go on about education but he has no real experience.

1) I went to a public school in NY that was second to none. We were doing Euclidean proofs in 3rd grade.

2) My best friend is an accomplished mathematican who went to public schools, was given apportunities through grants from the NSF and was inspired by many public school teachers. He was doing real analysis theorems in 11th grade (look it up).
He has stated many times that he would not have been able to do any of it without the public support.

3) Unlike Droopy, I have been teaching for 30+ years. I have a handle on it. I have taught at the university level. I have been working in training and edifying K12 teachers through a large public grant. I see the daily struggles, and the issue with kids both at K12 level and in the university all the way up to graduate school (have PhD students myself).

4) I have taught at an expensive private high school in the Valley (LA) where only the famous and elite attended. I have been bullied by administration to give good grades to lazy kids of famous parents on the basis that they "paid" for it. This is what is in demand! That is capitalism. It was the worst school academically but maintained a great reputation by the power of marketing and various other sneaky methods familiar to profit orient people.

Droopy is totally clueless--no experience with reality and no idea of what causes challenges in education.
I do. He doesn't.

Absolutely, utterly, pathetically, insultingly worthless anecdote. Scientifically, logically, empirically, statistically worthless. We have the numbers. We have the test scores. We have the NAEP results. We have the studies. We have the surveys. By state, by city, and according to international comparisons, thirty some years of them, and they all point in exactly the same direction. The almost complete degeneration of American public schooling is long standing, common knowledge. There is no question, no argument, and no disagreement here among anyone with the slightest education or lingering remains of normal adult intelligence.

Ideological babbling about class apocalypse and how the vast majority of Americans are moonshine-swilling, monobrowed rubes who care nothing about education and only want their children to become a cross between Archie Bunker and Bull Connor only further demonstrates both your almost incomprehensible sense of intellectual condescension and your substantial decoupling from the real world, a world that continues to exist around the hermetically sealed bubble chamber you term your "mind."

Stop insulting everyone's intelligence. Any major public library, college library, or university library is stocked to the rafters with books and and monographs detailing the long and critical deterioration of American public education. The teachers union's depredations are legendary. The serious deterioration of academic content, the politicization of the teachers colleges and the classroom, and the psychological manipulation of students is probably the best documented social problem we face.

All schools have not succumbed. There are a few islands of competence and even excellence, but these exist in a sea of mediocrity and failure. There is no argument here, at least not empirically.

In any case, I don't think you care all that much about the academics. What you fear, as I said, is losing ideological control over public education.

That would keep you up nights.

[_Kevin Graham]

You have the data Droopy, the test scores? Let's see them. Hurry, run to Heritage, where your thinking is already done for you.

The single most influential factor on the decline of American education, is quite simply poverty. As I already mentioned in the other thread, all you have to do is scour an interactive website for real estate to see how the high scoring schools find themselves conveniently nestled in the wealthier districts, while the poorer scoring schools are always in the poorer areas. This isn't a coincidence.

The teachers teaching at the good schools usually have experience teaching at the bad schools, and vice versa. The teachers aren't the problem. The problem is poverty, but also family. More and more kids are being raised in single parent households, and that has an affect on their willingness and their capacity for learning.

[_Droopy]

Great points Tarski, and I'll go ahead and throw my hat in the ring since I too have experience teaching. When in Brazil...

Come back, when you can, from the Third World with some relevant experience and data, and with something besides a single person's unverifiable anecdotes and stories.

Like Tarski said, there are excellent public schools and poor public schools. The thing that determines which is which, has nothing to do with the lack of market mechanisms, but rather geography. It is a simple matter of fact that a public school in Beverly Hills is going to outperform a public school in Brooklyn.

This is absolute, patent nonsense. There have long been excellent schools in places like Brooklyn and New York City, private and religious, and they have long outperformed the atrocious public schools on all subjects and at much less cost per pupil.

Its the mind-shattering destruction of Graham's card-house worldview that would ensue if he were actually to do some broader, more expansive reading and do a little of his own homework that's probably what keeps him trapped in his own intellectual Matrix. He believes he's a part of the real world but, unfortunately, its all a complex illusion created by his own belief in it. Its all Maya. Such is the fate of the "liberal," doomed always to repeat the endless lessons of history he cannot understand and, even in understanding, refuses to accept.

The rest of Graham's stuff here is just more NEA/AFT propaganda for the cause.

[_Kevin Graham]

This is easily verified fact Droopy. Stop being so lazy. Go ahead and explain to me why the "10" rated Public schools have smart kids living in wealthy districts while the poorer scoring schools rated "5" or lower, are almost always in crappy neighborhoods.

Go ahead and explain that for us and explain how this isn't a matter of geography and income.

[_Droopy]

You have the data Droopy, the test scores? let's see them. Hurry, run to Heritage, where your thinking is already done for you.

Do you own homework, pal. This problem is at least THIRTY YEARS OLD and is among the most studied, analyzed, and well documented major social problems of our age. You missed it? Tough. You get to look like what you are: a leftist intellectual hack raised on a steady diet of prepackaged, tightly controlled, monochromatic mainstream media gruel that you like because it flatters your preexisting prejudices and biases and its easy to digest. You don't even have to chew. Just swallow it whole. That's the way you drink Kool-Aid: hold your breath and guzzle.

[_Droopy]

This is easily verified fact Droopy. Stop being so lazy. Go ahead and explain to me why the "10" rated Public schools have smart kids living in wealthy districts while the poorer scoring schools rated "5" or lower, are almost always in crappy neighborhoods.

Go ahead and explain that for us and explain how this isn't a matter of geography and income.

Its a matter of neither. The problem here is culture, not income (of which there is no particular historical precedent), or, of all things, geography.

[_EAllusion]

American public schooling has been consistently getting better. It has not been getting better at the same rate as competitor nations. When you unpack that data, what's really happening is that America's elite students at public schools are the best in the world and the rest is a strong performer with the exception of a severely under-performing group mostly located in America's large cities with heavy minority and poor populations. If you are in a suburban public school, chances are you are in a school that is in the upper tier of what industrialized, western nations offer. If you are in a poor, inner city school your much more likely to have an outcome closer to the bottom of that same group.

Private schools, as a group, tend to marginally to moderately outperform public schools. Apples to apples comparisons are hard, though, for a variety of reasons. The two most important are that private schools can be selective about which students they allow to attend while public schools have to be more open and private schools are more likely to pull students from families that care about and invest in their children's education. All things being equal, private schools should do significantly better because they can kick out the bad students, which in addition to being more likely to be poor performers, can have a detrimental effect on their peers. They also are likely to draw from a pool of students who have more family resources which is known to be a strong predictor of positive school performance.