More on our Public Schools
Here's a bunch of "bullet point" thoughts on our public school system:
I personally don't like throwing money at a problem in the hopes it will go away. Not every child is going to succeed in school, not every taxpayer has children attending public school, and not everyone likes to be held hostage and forced to tithe to a system that is non-responsive, bloated, and apparently utterly incompetent. Competition makes entities better, and the public school system is hostile and opposed to fostering any type of competition.
The value of a service is the amount that people are willing to pay for it on the open market. Private school teachers, by and large, make LESS than public school teachers with no where near the benefits package. This makes me think the teacher's union/government bureaucrats are paying MORE than the market would typically bear. Many teachers do work hard, but they have lifetime tenure after a few years, great retirement packages, and work 180 days out of the year. Additionally, they are basically immune from being fired for performance reasons.
It is fairly well established that individuals who go into education/teaching tend to be less qualified than those who go into other fields. The median and mean GRE scores of those who receive education PHDS or Masters Degrees are LOWER than they are for every other single area of study. That's right, the graduate area of study for education attracts those with the lowest test scores. This is an enormous problem. Teaching additionally appeals to those who value security over performance and incentives for success; that is not the way to attract result-oriented individuals.
Centralization causes more ills than it cures in the context of individual schools, teachers, and school boards. The reason why liberals love centralization is that they can make sure that everyone, everywhere, is being taught exactly what they want them to be taught. We can see from private schooling and home-schooling that people are rejecting this norm, and we are on the brink of a taxation crisis as people continue to insist on vouchers and tax-rollbacks so that they can avoid a school system they see as non-responsive and bloated.
How arrogant is it to presume that everyone has to go to college to be worthwhile, or that being a white collar professional is better than being a mechanic (frankly, being a mechanic seems like a more certain career path at this point). Make kids learn the basics up to their first year or two of high school, then let them take three shop classes if that's what they want. Who are we to say that being a plumber or an electrician is inferior, and you should be forced to take four years of Political Science? We turn-off an entire subsection of the school populace to education in general with this attitude.
We ignore our brightest and best. Not enough people graduating or performing well on the federal tests? The answer is to rework the grading, change the criteria, or dumb down the curriculum. School should be hard, not easy, and grade inflation is an enormous problem. Why are people so "up and arms" about standardized tests? Because they do a damn good job of actually determining who is learned and talented, there's no way to jiggle the grades or "make things come out right". With all the talk about the SAT/GRE/LSAT being culturally biased, you don't hear a lot of complaining from those minority groups who consistently outperform "whites". Asians and Jews outperform everyone else by a large margin. Why the Asian community has not reacted more vehemently to the constant anti-Asian discrimination here in California I will never understand. The UC Regents, in particular, has fostered policies that place Asians at such a disadvantage for undergraduate, medical, and law schools that are insane.
The top 10% of students would outperform the bottom 10% regardless of how much money was spent in an attempt to achieve parity.For those who want to abolish standardized testing, you can put the day of reckoning off, if you want, but eventually people will actually have to produce results and be compared to others within the same field/profession. At that point, pretending that everyone is equally capable simply becomes a farce.
I think the biggest factor in whether a kid is going to do well at school is how intelligent he is. Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do to increase a person's innate scholastic aptitude (although a whole bunch of factors can decrease it). That being said, why is our school system here in California entirely geared towards preparing kids for college? Not everyone is scholastically inclined, and frankly, a large percentage of the population will not be suited to a traditional four year college courseload no matter what environment they are raised in or what kind of schooling is provided. Why have we abandoned vocational/trade coursework? Why do we label kids as failures and essentially force them to come to school, feel inadequate, and become disciplinary problems? If by age 16 you have displayed no aptitude for the classical areas of learning, but you know how to overhaul a V8 engine, rewire an office network, or re-tile a bathroom, why not recognize that there are a ton of worthwhile/lucrative professions that do not require you to place the French Empire under Napoleon into the sociological/historical context of the "Total War" paradigm.
After 19 years of public schooling I have come to the conclusion that I will do whatever I can to avoid having my children attend the type of public schools I attended in Los Angeles.
Standardized testing is the best way to compare the individual aptitudes of various people. Are they perfect? No, but the exceptions are the vast minority. I think that many people just do not like the results, so they assume that something must be wrong with the test. Study after study has shown that the most reliable way to measure intelligence and scholastic aptitude is with standardized testing. Conversely, grades have been shown to be far less accurate a measure of ability
The dirty secret of vouchers is that the public education establishment opposes them not because it would reduce the funding per student (it actually increases it), but that the wide-scale implementation of the system would require sizeable lay-offs of Union teachers and bureaucrats.
I personally don't like throwing money at a problem in the hopes it will go away. Not every child is going to succeed in school, not every taxpayer has children attending public school, and not everyone likes to be held hostage and forced to tithe to a system that is non-responsive, bloated, and apparently utterly incompetent. Competition makes entities better, and the public school system is hostile and opposed to fostering any type of competition.
The value of a service is the amount that people are willing to pay for it on the open market. Private school teachers, by and large, make LESS than public school teachers with no where near the benefits package. This makes me think the teacher's union/government bureaucrats are paying MORE than the market would typically bear. Many teachers do work hard, but they have lifetime tenure after a few years, great retirement packages, and work 180 days out of the year. Additionally, they are basically immune from being fired for performance reasons.
It is fairly well established that individuals who go into education/teaching tend to be less qualified than those who go into other fields. The median and mean GRE scores of those who receive education PHDS or Masters Degrees are LOWER than they are for every other single area of study. That's right, the graduate area of study for education attracts those with the lowest test scores. This is an enormous problem. Teaching additionally appeals to those who value security over performance and incentives for success; that is not the way to attract result-oriented individuals.
Centralization causes more ills than it cures in the context of individual schools, teachers, and school boards. The reason why liberals love centralization is that they can make sure that everyone, everywhere, is being taught exactly what they want them to be taught. We can see from private schooling and home-schooling that people are rejecting this norm, and we are on the brink of a taxation crisis as people continue to insist on vouchers and tax-rollbacks so that they can avoid a school system they see as non-responsive and bloated.
How arrogant is it to presume that everyone has to go to college to be worthwhile, or that being a white collar professional is better than being a mechanic (frankly, being a mechanic seems like a more certain career path at this point). Make kids learn the basics up to their first year or two of high school, then let them take three shop classes if that's what they want. Who are we to say that being a plumber or an electrician is inferior, and you should be forced to take four years of Political Science? We turn-off an entire subsection of the school populace to education in general with this attitude.
We ignore our brightest and best. Not enough people graduating or performing well on the federal tests? The answer is to rework the grading, change the criteria, or dumb down the curriculum. School should be hard, not easy, and grade inflation is an enormous problem. Why are people so "up and arms" about standardized tests? Because they do a damn good job of actually determining who is learned and talented, there's no way to jiggle the grades or "make things come out right". With all the talk about the SAT/GRE/LSAT being culturally biased, you don't hear a lot of complaining from those minority groups who consistently outperform "whites". Asians and Jews outperform everyone else by a large margin. Why the Asian community has not reacted more vehemently to the constant anti-Asian discrimination here in California I will never understand. The UC Regents, in particular, has fostered policies that place Asians at such a disadvantage for undergraduate, medical, and law schools that are insane.
The top 10% of students would outperform the bottom 10% regardless of how much money was spent in an attempt to achieve parity.For those who want to abolish standardized testing, you can put the day of reckoning off, if you want, but eventually people will actually have to produce results and be compared to others within the same field/profession. At that point, pretending that everyone is equally capable simply becomes a farce.
I think the biggest factor in whether a kid is going to do well at school is how intelligent he is. Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do to increase a person's innate scholastic aptitude (although a whole bunch of factors can decrease it). That being said, why is our school system here in California entirely geared towards preparing kids for college? Not everyone is scholastically inclined, and frankly, a large percentage of the population will not be suited to a traditional four year college courseload no matter what environment they are raised in or what kind of schooling is provided. Why have we abandoned vocational/trade coursework? Why do we label kids as failures and essentially force them to come to school, feel inadequate, and become disciplinary problems? If by age 16 you have displayed no aptitude for the classical areas of learning, but you know how to overhaul a V8 engine, rewire an office network, or re-tile a bathroom, why not recognize that there are a ton of worthwhile/lucrative professions that do not require you to place the French Empire under Napoleon into the sociological/historical context of the "Total War" paradigm.
After 19 years of public schooling I have come to the conclusion that I will do whatever I can to avoid having my children attend the type of public schools I attended in Los Angeles.
Standardized testing is the best way to compare the individual aptitudes of various people. Are they perfect? No, but the exceptions are the vast minority. I think that many people just do not like the results, so they assume that something must be wrong with the test. Study after study has shown that the most reliable way to measure intelligence and scholastic aptitude is with standardized testing. Conversely, grades have been shown to be far less accurate a measure of ability
The dirty secret of vouchers is that the public education establishment opposes them not because it would reduce the funding per student (it actually increases it), but that the wide-scale implementation of the system would require sizeable lay-offs of Union teachers and bureaucrats.
posted by O.C. Mike at
9:06 AM
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