Wasting money on public education

[shiny!]

Re: Wasting money on public education

flintlock,
I believe the Union Teachers have done their work so well that the average man or woman doesn't understand basic (important) mathematical concepts like the power of compounding. The wide spread ignorance of math is demonstrated by how many don't get alarmed by 3-5% annual increases in property taxes. There isn't any coverage of fractional reserve banking or what is money.

It's not the teachers' unions that set the curriculum or choose the textbooks.

Teacher salaries on the coasts and large cities are so good you will be hard pressed to find a teacher painting, landscaping, or working for a summer camp to make ends meet.

Regards.

And why should they? Must doctors, engineers or other professionals take extra jobs or work at summer camps to make ends meet? No.

The common answer to this is that teachers only work 9-10 months out of the year, so are overpaid. But they work overtime during the school year, often not getting lunch or bathroom breaks, grading papers and drawing up lesson plans nights and weekends, expected to do "volunteer" work at sports events and extra-curricular activities, etc. Their paychecks are spread out over the entire year. I don't know about the coasts and large cities, but salaries are pathetic in the states where my husband taught. How does $2000 monthly take home pay for 20 years experience and a dual masters in special education sound? How great is that?

[BK]

Re: Wasting money on public education

shinly,
I was specifically speaking to out of control salaries of New York, New Jersey, pennsylvania, Chicago. I'm sure there are exceptions to the areas with ridiculously high salaries. I'd also argue that the high municipal salaries of the East Coast lead to a higher cost of living which leads to Unions demanding more.......and the cycle continues.

Big difference between teachers and Doctors or Engineers - you need a ton of teachers to run a schools system - this means over paying cascades into outrageous cost for communities. The Tax burden on the East and West coast is making it difficult for young families.

[shiny!]

Re: Wasting money on public education

shinly,
I was specifically speaking to out of control salaries of New York, New Jersey, pennsylvania, Chicago. I'm sure there are exceptions to the areas with ridiculously high salaries. I'd also argue that the high municipal salaries of the East Coast lead to a higher cost of living which leads to Unions demanding more.......and the cycle continues.

Big difference between teachers and Doctors or Engineers - you need a ton of teachers to run a schools system - this means over paying cascades into outrageous cost for communities. The Tax burden on the East and West coast is making it difficult for young families.

I understand what you're saying. Personally, I think the public education system is so broken on so many levels that it can't be fixed. From the original German idea of training children to be docile factory workers, to today's administration-heavy districts with politically mandated rules, and designing curriculum around the misguided idea that every child should go to college (which is actually intended to feed the student loan bubble)... there's no way to fix it. We have to step out of the education box completely and come up with something entirely new. Let the ones who insist on thinking inside the box stew in their own rotten juices. It's too bad for the children.

[charliebrown]

Re: Wasting money on public education

both of my kids could read hop on pop before they fininshed kindergarten. It was because we read this book weekly, it was one of their favorites. I'm sure my elementary school is patting themselves on the back for doing such a great job in reading instruction.

It's not a bad school, but they are the frosting, parents are the cake.

[tastymannatees]

Re: Wasting money on public education

One of the best things a parent can do for their child is READ. Read to the child when they're little. Have plenty of books and magazines in the house, and emphasize the value of reading every day. Make sure your children can read and enjoy reading. Turn off the (*^$(_#)&_^@$ TV and video games and READ. If a child can read and is self-motivated to learn, they can do just about anything.

+1 My daughter loved harry potter so I read that to her and she loves money so Iwould break up the chapters and I would stop at the more interesting parts of the chapter and give her the book so to find out what happened next she would have to read it on her own and to sweeten the pot I added a game of "reading for dollars $$$" where I had a pocket full of dollars and give her one for each page she read aloud to me and when she had enough we would go buy a video game or some toy. By the time we got to the end of the book she was reading on her own.

The whole exercise just cost me a couple of hundred dollars and she currently is unsatiable reading 4-5 books a week (barnes & noble stays in business because my daughters habit) and the benefit on the SAT was a 780 score on the reading comprehension. Other benefits were she won two town writing contests sponsored by the local historical society as well as having her own page in the grade school newspaper.

I would say that one small investment in time and money paid more divdends than anything else we have done since.

[Raz]

Re: Wasting money on public education

...
anyone from my age group growing up in my neighborhood knew about the free (or dirt cheap for those who could afford it) nun daycare. There is no such thing now. ... I probably didn't deserve the fantastic quality of education the Church offered me. ...maybe parents are everthing. It's probably true for most kids. I didn't have that luxury. ... But I think that if a kid shows promise and is around the right people, they will do their best to offer opportunities to him/her.

I suppose my ultimate point is that it's not all just parental involvement. If it were, quite frankly, I'd be incapable of writing coherent posts here. It might just actually take a village, as cliche as that is. I wish I had the type of parent you are. But it is not all there is to childhood intelligence and understanding. I'm sure of that.

Quite a story, dcarrigg, and inspiring, at least to me. The problem almost all conservatives and traditionalists have with "it takes a village" can be summed up in this question: what kind of "village"? We must admit that the "village" of your youth isn't what it used to be and beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s the American "village" went through a moral and ethical collapse - and from which we haven't yet recovered.

The United States is a huge country that's regionally diverse. In my section the institutionalized racism of the past has been eliminated and in that regard the "village" has vastly improved. But in most other areas the "village" is much worse off.

[tastymannatees]

Re: Wasting money on public education

dcarrigg

Maybe parents are everything. It's probably true for most kids. I did't have that luxury. But I did't end up dumb and broke either. Maybe it's actually a combination. My mother was 18 when she had me. She wasn't ready. I was lucky to have my grandfolks and the Church. But I think that if a kid shows promise and is around the right people, they will do their best to offer opportunities to him/her.

My wife is a former teacher and had the benfit of a Catholic education with old school nuns so the contrast for her was quite stark between then and now. However while the school was lacking in good education I can not say enough praise about the priests running things they were expert psychologists able to identify a child's strengths and motivate them to do their best in ways I and my wife were unable to.

Adolescent girls have to be the cruelest people on the planet my daughter was the victim of relational aggression in grade school and was quite introverted from the abuse. In any event the school every year puts on a musical production of a Broadway play and the priest convinced my daughter to take the lead in Anna and the King (my daughter is tone deaf and can not sing worth a damn) the priest talked her into doing it against her instincts, built her confidence during the practices, coached her on what to do and during the performances sat in the front row smiling and nodding his head in approval. She was Fantastic! But then that is just my opinion

The guy changed her life as she left the school a rock star, kids from the lower grades were asking her for her autograph and her confidence soared. She has played one of the leads in every high school play since, most recently Malvolo (male role)in twelfth night. When she does presentations in class they are as good as any practiced 30 year old who does it for a living her and friends describe them as awesome and she now reads at church every Sunday in front of hundreds of people.

I am not a Catholic and most of my life in fact I have been something of an atheist but I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the old crippled Irish priest who able to do what I could not and bring the best out of my daughter.

Kids need much personal attention and I believe that the modern school system is not geared for it, teaching these days is more like a "I gotta go make the donuts" approach and again parents have to take a strong interest and if you are really lucky somebody will help you along the way

[radon]

Re: Wasting money on public education

the misguided idea that every child should go to college

This.

I think it would help immensely if we would drop that charade. As it is, we have kids who are otherwise bright and hardworking struggling in their first year or two of college because they are unprepared.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Wasting money on public education

Quite a story, dcarrigg, and inspiring, at least to me. The problem almost all conservatives and traditionalists have with "it takes a village" can be summed up in this question: what kind of "village"?

Certainly a child's upbringing is affected by the community ("village") they are raised in. What I object to about the Hillary Clinton "it takes a village" worldview is that she wants to use the government to replace those voluntary social relationships that made up the real villages of which she is enamored. She likes the idea of community, so she and those who think like her think that the way to get that is to tax, spend, regulate, and socially engineer. Liberals just don't trust the idea of people voluntarily doing things. They don't trust freedom. They have this sneaking suspicion that unless people are compelled to be caring by bureaucratic dictat that they just won't be caring enough or in the way that Hillary Clinton thinks they should. "It takes a village" turns out then not to be simply an observation that children are affected by their surroundings, and that all of the adults in a community have a responsibility to keep an eye out on what kids are up to, but instead becomes an excuse for liberal social engineering.

I've noticed that in the liberal worldview, there is no place left for charity - voluntary charity, as opposed to state-forced charity via entitlements. The reason is that in the liberal worldview, everything that people need, they automatically have a "right" to, and it should thus be provided by the government. Food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, (and in Europe, even two-week vacations) are something people are "entitled" to. What is left for charity to do? Similarly, "it takes a village", when uttered by a liberal, is a rationalization for making mandatory through regulation and bureaucracy what has always been understood to be an informal, voluntary social norm. The result is nothing like a village; instead you get a society of loafers and criminals with an entitlement mentality. And there is a decreasing sense of a need for charitable actions since charity is compelled by government. I haven't donated to a charity in 25 years because I figure I am giving the government 50% of my income already, of which probably 1% actually comes back to benefit me and the rest is used for "entitlements" and being the world's policeman.

It also blows my mind that liberals can see their spending programs fail decade after decade, and they never decide that maybe they aren't working and we should stop spending on them. There is no learning there, no recognition that their approach doesn't work. Their only proposals are to spend even more on exactly the same kinds of stuff they've already squandered trillions on.

[ER59]

Re: Wasting money on public education

My parents didn’t have a single book and never read to me when I was a child. I went to school and learned to read there. Books became my best friends in school. I have a very good library and tons of books & magazines at home. My daughter sees that reading is paramount to my existence.

When I got pregnant, I started to collect books for my unborn child. When my daughter was young, I read to her every single day in both Russian and English. She was always encouraged to collect her own books. I home schooled her for 2 years. Result: she does not read much.

At the beginning I was puzzled. Then I was stunned. Then I got upset. Then I blamed myself for not being a good parent. I never expected anything like that. Nobody prepared me for "that". I read in every single parenting book: "Read to your child every day and everything will be just fine." No, it is not. It took me 15 years to fully comprehend and accept the fact that she is different. And that is the most difficult part of being a parent (at least, for me): fully accept your child’s personality and support him or her regardless of your own personality and dreams and "agenda" of what your child should be.

[charliebrown]

Re: Wasting money on public education

I have two kids one bio, the other adopted. I think a lot of intellegence, personality, likes and dislikes are wired in. I like to think of the child's mind kind of like a set of shelves. There is a pre structure there. You can perhaps put some things onto the shelves but some of the basic structure is fixed. I try to encourage their raw talents to the best of my ability.

I use my young son's fanatical over the top love of sports to try to get him to read. We read the sports section together and use stats to do math. I have never encouraged sports in the house. Playing them yes, watching never. It came pre-loaded.

[ER59]

Re: Wasting money on public education

I hear you. I remember a story about a jewish boy who was obsessed with boxing. He was weak and small.

Some kids like dinosaurs; little Max Kellerman loved boxing. "I read and reread Ali's bio. It became real hero worship." He turned his pugilistic passion into a comprehensive study of the sport. At 16, he launched Max on Boxing, a hilariously homespun Wayne's World-style public access show in Manhattan. The scrawny teen talked old-time boxing better than cigar-chomping has-beens; his analysis earned him serious fans (Dustin Hoffman called in once) and his first grown-up gig--at ESPN. Kellerman, 30, now headlines I, Max on Fox, and his income approaches seven figures.