Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for Superman

[zoog]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

Our public schools are set up as political indoctrination centers. Otto Von Bismarck started this trend back in the late 19th century. This has been expanded on greatly by the Cultural Marxists and their operating fronts, the Foundation system (Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation), whose mission is to implement "social change". Look at the Ford Foundation home page if you don't believe me.

Cultural Marxism aims to destroy all effective and meaningful interpersonal relationships in "old-fashioned" society (the family unit, traditional marriage, free-market business relationships) and replace these wide-ranging relationships with a single relationship, that of the person to the state. All individuals are to be defined strictly by their relationship to the state (or by their relationship to those state-sponsored corporate entities, which serve the state's interests).

By this criterion, the public education system isn't failing, it's succeeding brilliantly.

Of course, the common people who treasure traditional relationships, and the free market, are horrified and view the educational system as a failure. Consequently, the mainstream media has to respond to these feelings, and they do so by publishing a constant stream of "why Johnny can't read", "why Johnny can't do math", and "why is Johnny bringing guns to school and killing people" types of hand-wringing stories that, of course, offer no meaningful solutions because they don't define the problem correctly to begin with. Johnny can't read because the goal of the system is NOT to get Johnny to read; that is simply the window dressing required to move the agenda forward, on their terms.

Reminds me of Dumbing Us Down, published almost 20 years ago. He starts with the seven things he felt like he actually taught students in school:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional Dependency
5. Intellectual Dependency
6. Provisional Self-Esteem
7. Can't Hide

All to turn us into complacent and compliant consumers and coworkers.

[santafe2]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

How do you do that when teachers are getting laid off, and the administrator bureaucrats making those decisions aren't?

The members of the Board of Education must face election every 4 years. Change the board and the direction begins to change. We're interviewing challengers to the least desirable incumbent up for election next year and with luck will find a good candidate. Then we'll mount a grass roots campaign. That's more my area of expertise; organizing, planning and keeping people on task.

It's a huge task for non-professional campaign managers to accomplish but if we want to really put our kids first we have to ensure the BOE wants that as well.

Our task is more difficult because we have only focused on our school for the last few years while the BOE has picked off several other small schools in the district where the parents were too busy simply making ends meet to fight for their school.

The BOE now makes the "rich" vs. "poor" argument to push for the warehousing of all public school children in our district. As in, it's not fair to allow your school to remain in a small school environment while the children from other schools are now in a school 4-5X that size.

I'm not sure this is the case everywhere but the current BOE plan here is fairly simple. Use public bond funds to spend millions on a public school to bring it up to modern standards, close it and sell it or lease it to a private school. Hopefully the community has the will to create the opportunity for change.

But of course if we do pull this off, many folks will learn that losing is easy and winning only creates a lot of work. We'll see how it turns out.

[Ghent12]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

The Small Schools Myth

Thank you for posting this. The second chart on that is especially telling.

[santafe2]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

The Small Schools Myth

While this is statistically interesting, it's not correct. Small schools and small classrooms provide the best learning environment for all kids and especially children from less than ideal backgrounds. The myth is the ability of the Mc-warehouse school to educate.

[BK]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

Santafe,
Do you have any data that supports the small classroom? My child has 26 in his class. But, everyone wears a uniform and B/S from any child is not tolerated. Parent involvement is very high and there are very few children from broken homes.

The Small class room concept and high Union salaries in Public schools has many Towns in USA on the brink or bankruptcy.

[sunskyfan]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

At least with respect to middle and high schools it is not the small classroom that is the goal. It is the small overall school population that is the goal. The social disruption of large school populations and the social dynamics are simply not worth the savings they imply. I have my kids in a charter school not because of the silly charter. They are there because the student population of less than 200 for a four year High School is manageable. Even though many of the students come from challenging situations my kids are never afraid to go to school and they know all their classmates and teachers first hand. They receive a good education without any ultra-control concepts such as uniforms.

Creating a good metric to measure performance of schools, like performance of society, is hard to create. Order and uniformity does not mean effectiveness it just makes you feel good and gives the illusion of direction for a short time.

[santafe2]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

Santafe,
Do you have any data that supports the small classroom? My child has 26 in his class. But, everyone wears a uniform and B/S from any child is not tolerated. Parent involvement is very high and there are very few children from broken homes.

The Small class room concept and high Union salaries in Public schools has many Towns in USA on the brink or bankruptcy.

You make a valid point BK. The real problem is lack of parental involvment. Our school is the same, great parents, intact families, great support for our small school. But where this background environment does not exist, small schools create a much more calm environment for learning. While I'm not yet an expert on the subject, I'm sure that small schools cost less than large ones. Of all the elementry schools in our district, we are academically the best and 2nd lowest in cost per student. The Mc-Schools are at the highest end and sometimes double the cost per student and none of them meet AYP.

[mooncliff]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

Yes, a group of about 150 is about the biggest one can keep track of. Above that number, administration becomes an increasing burden. It seems that most villages do not exceed that number, and once businesses exceed that number of employees, the dynamics of the personnel change.

Education is one of the subjects in which it is absolutely crucial to avoid finding the correct answer to the wrong question.

The correct question in this case would be something like:
If all schools were reduced to 200 students or fewer, would the students be better off over the courses of their entire lives?
(The country and the world as a whole presumably best served by that outcome.)
Looking at short term test scores is a proxy for "better off over the courses of their entire lives", but the two things can have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Initially, in programs like Headstart, it was shown that IQs went up several points. Success!
Then it was found that they went back down to initial levels by the age of 18. Complete failure! Waste of money!
But when the participants were tracked over a longer period, rates of incarceration were lower, teenage pregnancies were lower, welfare dependency was lower, etc.
So, IQ was initially used as a predictor for better lives, but then when the IQs went back down, again it was assumed that IQs were predictors, and therefore the undertaking was a waste of time and money. But in the end, what really matters was measured, and that showed that such programs can really pay off in a big way (not that money is the way to measure existence or the value of lives) under particular circumstances at particular times.

Within this decade, what computers can do will really explode. In the same time period, we will also confront the intellectual firepower of the entire planet. We are not trying to help children deal with the world the way it is now. We are trying to help them handle the world in 2020, 2030, 2050, and the dawn of the 22nd century since perhaps as many as half of them will still be alive in 2101.

[mooncliff]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

The world into which these children will go will include, I think, things like this.

Detection of Earthlike planets around Sunlike stars announced by next year.
Further evidence that meteorites from Mars do in fact contain fossils of bacteria.
Sample return of live bacteria from the subsurface of Mars, perhaps the Moon, perhaps asteroids or comets, within a couple of decades. Confirmation of biological material on the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
By 2020, we scan half the Galaxy and detect no artificial signals, or First Contact.

Personalized medicine. Drugs given only for those for whom the drugs work, at doses specific for the patient. Simple cheap drugs to slow the rate of aging. Functional lifespan extended by decades.

Computers mining what is known, bringing to our attention patterns we could not see. Computers evolving designs.

Huge decreases in the costs of energy, education, information, and manufactured goods over the very long term... with all the disruptions that they imply.


We have already gone from a world in which diseases like progeria are mysterious illnesses in which children die of what appears to be old age to
"Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) is a childhood disorder caused by a point mutation in position 1824 of the LMNA gene, replacing cytosine with thymine, creating an unusable form of the protein Lamin A. Lamin A is part of the building blocks of the nuclear envelope."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeria


As college classes started a couple of weeks ago, I was really depressed. All I could think of was "College... with an iPad... Missed it by only a couple of decades... Damn..."


I am the biggest science geek I know, and even my speculations have proven to be way too conservative and lacking in imagination. I hope to be surprised and delighted over the next few decades.

[flintlock]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

The Mc-Schools are at the highest end and sometimes double the cost per student and none of them meet AYP.

Or sometimes more than double!

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/public-scho...ry?id=11462095

[jpatter666]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

As college classes started a couple of weeks ago, I was really depressed. All I could think of was "College... with an iPad... Missed it by only a couple of decades... Damn..."

College, hell -- think middle and high school! What I would have given not to lug exceptionally heavy backpacks filled with books from class to class.....

[Starving Steve]

Re: Schools: The Disaster Movie ~ Waiting for "Superman"

May I remind Mooncliff, that so far mankind has found absolutely NOTHING in space, and nothing even remotely related to what we know of as life. If we ever find anything in our space exploration, it would probably be something that we carried from Earth to the site of the finding and mistaken for life in another world. Meteors falling upon the Earth with a supposed trace of something living probably carried that trace of something living because of their fall through the Earth's atmosphere. The meteors were contaminated by Earth's biosphere......... The point is that I am skeptical of claims of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos. So, convince me that I am wrong.

The last thing this planet needs another religion, and science-fiction is a new religion. Like the old religions on Earth, science-fiction is short on facts and long on faith. Let's play the classroom game, "CONVINCE ME". I'm the really slow learner here:
What there ought to be in space and what we have actually found in space are paradigms apart.... So far, we have found absolutely NOTHING in space.

There was once water flowing on the surface of Mars. That is all that humanity has found. So let's not get too excited about funding space exploration, especially when we are bankrupt. There may have been life on Mars, eons ago. So...... fill-in the blanks in this understanding of Mars with real science and not speculation and theory.

What is there on Mars? Why should it be there? Where are we going to find it on Mars? What would it likely be? How much will the exploration cost? What would we learn from the exploration that we need to know about?