Speaking of stupid people...

Sadly, it's nothing new, and even the computer age isn't immune. Some years back, Dad, (he passed in 1995), and I went to the local Target. Motor oil was on sale for 29 cents a quart. Dad got a case, put it in the cart, went to the register. Cashier scanned it, 29 cents. Dad says there's a mistake, I have a case, that's the quart price. Cashier insists the computer's right. Trying to do the right thing, the old man goes to the service desk, gets the same response, "The computer's right." Dad ran up the white flag, went home with 12 quarts of oil for 29 cents. Some days you can't do the right thing, no matter how hard you try.
 
Average spent per student is a potentially misleading statistic. The bulk of the middle require little more than grade-level curriculum and materials. But special-needs students and English-language learners can easily require order of magnitude more resources than the "average" student. These are the kids that regular private schools won't deal with but public schools are required to accommodate.

If a non-verbal kid in a wheelchair rolls up to the local parochial school, they may not overtly discriminate, but they'll do their best to convince the parents that their school is simply unable to meet the family's unique circumstances at that time. When they then enroll their kid in the local public school and establish an IEP, there'll be a full-time paraeducator accompanying the child, plus (at least) weekly sessions with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech pathologists - for starters. The district might even provide some in-home learning support, depending in part on whether they've ever been sued for failing to meet their ADA obligations. Needless to say, the cost to the district for that kid will blow up the "average" per-student cost.

Someone made a comment above about if there was more competition, there would be a private school for everyone. There already is - you just have to have $50,000 a year to pay for it. There was a daycare we looked at for our son that had a boutique K-8 school attached. They marketed themselves for highly individualized attention for severely autistic children (the K-8 portion, the daycare was just a daycare). It was one kid per classroom with three or four full-time employees per kid. How many families can afford that level of intensive services? Those that can't have no choice but to rely on the local public schools, who are required by law to accommodate those students and provide the resources necessary for them to successfully learn to the best of their ability.

Private and charter schools aren't automatically better. Many charter schools have failed entirely, sometimes leaving families without a schooling option in the middle of the year. Most others don't show any better results than local public schools. The few models that do show great success require long hours, significant buy-in from parents, and strict adherence to rules by the families, something that many (most?) families cannot manage.

There's no magic bullet for improving education. Money isn't a panacea, but there are areas where a small amount would make a great difference. I see it on the opposite end of the spectrum, with kids designated "gifted" who are left bored to tears at the pace of the regular classroom. The kid who are two grade levels behind in reading have aides come in and work with them, but there's nothing analogous for the kids who are two years above grade level.
 
kenjen said:
watch the movie "Idiocracy" the future of the human race.
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Ya know, I tried to watch that a few weeks ago after reading a column by Max Boot opining that it was prescient of our current age. But, man-o-man, trying to watch it was so stupefying that I quit maybe ten minutes in. (Would be nice if one could turn off reality like that...)
 
A lot of negative Nellies on this thread. I know quite a few Public School teachers, and everyone of them is under paid and over dedicated to their profession (Much like LEO's). They all work hard and the job is not easy

I also think many of you are selling young people short ( it's the age old complaint, kids these days!). There is a lot of amazing kids out there ( including my own). I will actually feel better when they are in control and running things. I mean just look at what a great job us "smart" older guys have done. :rolleyes:
 
Here in NJ "education " has been used by the politicians as the excuse for more government spending and the taxes to pay for it, yet...
NJ schools suffer from what I call the Rule of 75%-75% of school funding comes from non-parents, and 75% of parents can't be bothered with parent-teacher conferences, the PTA, attending their children's events, etc.
All those 6 year olds with 21 year old mothers living on the dole...
The secret to improving the public schools ? The dreaded T-word-tuition !
When parents have to shell out cold hard cash for their children's schooling and can no longer sponge and freeload off the rest of us...
 
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The Big D said:
...I was so pleased this very afternoon when I stopped at a roadside stand to grab some corn on the cob.

Young lady (late teen's?) said it was close to closing and corn was $3/12 ears. Cannot eat that much despite the deal and asked 'buck for 4?'

She smiled and said 'you're smart;' :) I was rather proud of her.

Be safe...be well.
Click to expand...

We need more like her in the world.
 
BLACKHAWKNJ said:
Here in NJ "education " has been used by the politicians as the excuse for more government spending and the taxes to pay for it, yet...
NJ schools suffer from what I call the Rule of 75%-75% of school funding comes from non-parents, and 75% of parents can't be bothered with parent-teacher conferences, the PTA, attending their children's events, etc.
All those 6 year olds with 21 year old mothers living on the dole...
The secret to improving the public schools ? The dreaded T-word-tuition !
When parents have to shell out cold hard cash for their children's schooling and can no longer sponge and freeload off the rest of us...
Click to expand...

I'll have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn 20 minutes after that happens.
 
The fact that my bro-in-law is a teacher says a lot about the state of education. His kids, my nephews, couldn't read an analog clock until they were teenagers!

Last year, he told me that they needed teachers and that I could be a teacher, too(!). After all I had a degree. I said no. Not just no, but heck no!

If the standards are so low that they'd consider ME for a teaching job, we are truly in trouble!
 
A few years ago I was asked if I could hire some kids out of vocational program at local school. What happened was the local high schools did away with General Education and only had college prep or kids were hauled to new vocational school. If that isn't bad enough they only have a few fields of study. The kids interested in those fields are put in the classes and then the rest of the kids are plugged into classes that have vacancies. This is about 50%. I got kids that were in carpentry that couldn't read a tape. I got kids from Machine Trades that had no idea what went on. So the instructors made them clean up men. There was a lot of hell raised over this and the teachers and administrators fought tooth and nail for these programs. Why, because of the money granted for them. The worst thing I saw was 50% of kids coming out of their couldn't read and write well enough to fill out an application.
 
JS Esq. said:
Average spent per student is a potentially misleading statistic. The bulk of the middle require little more than grade-level curriculum and materials. But special-needs students and English-language learners can easily require order of magnitude more resources than the "average" student. These are the kids that regular private schools won't deal with but public schools are required to accommodate.
Click to expand...

Point being there ARE such private schools. And there would be more of them if we weren't required to support dysfunctional public schools.

If a non-verbal kid in a wheelchair rolls up to the local parochial school, they may not overtly discriminate, but they'll do their best to convince the parents that their school is simply unable to meet the family's unique circumstances at that time. When they then enroll their kid in the local public school and establish an IEP, there'll be a full-time paraeducator accompanying the child, plus (at least) weekly sessions with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech pathologists - for starters. The district might even provide some in-home learning support, depending in part on whether they've ever been sued for failing to meet their ADA obligations. Needless to say, the cost to the district for that kid will blow up the "average" per-student cost.
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More baloney. The figure I quoted is excepting special ed. In any event that level of staffing isn't provided EVEN BY THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Please don't tell me different, I've SEEN it. For severely disabled kids they're warehouses. For those with moderate disabilities there's no motivation to actually help the kids improve- set the goals low and wait for the next IEP.

Someone made a comment above about if there was more competition, there would be a private school for everyone. There already is - you just have to have $50,000 a year to pay for it. There was a daycare we looked at for our son that had a boutique K-8 school attached. They marketed themselves for highly individualized attention for severely autistic children (the K-8 portion, the daycare was just a daycare). It was one kid per classroom with three or four full-time employees per kid. How many families can afford that level of intensive services? Those that can't have no choice but to rely on the local public schools, who are required by law to accommodate those students and provide the resources necessary for them to successfully learn to the best of their ability.
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$50k a year? For whom? How would the lack of services not be solved by vouchers for everyone? Note my comment above- Public schools do not provide that level of services EITHER.

Private and charter schools aren't automatically better. .... The few models that do show great success require long hours, significant buy-in from parents, and strict adherence to rules by the families, something that many (most?) families cannot manage.
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That's generally a requirement for success anywhere. So you're advocating warehousing kids as a viable solution? That's public education. How well has that worked out? LOL

And how do you know what most families can't manage? If we weren't stuck paying for an "educational" system that puts the kids last, imagine what families would be capable of.

I'll posit that private schools provide a better product for less cost. Because. It's. True.
It seems like you either work for the system or someone you know does- but I hate to break it to you, the system is broken.
The proof is in the abysmal outcomes from the public schools.
 
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I had the joy and privilege of being an Army brat. That meant that I changed schools about every 2 years, which was both a blessing and a curse.

3rd through 6th grades we lived in England I went to school first at Lakenheath AFB, and then at Eastcote Elementary in London. Standards were high, and discipline was strict.

Just before 7th grade we came back stateside so that Dad could attend the Vietnamese Language School at Biggs Field (Ft. Bliss) in El Paso. I began Junior High in what I thought was hell.

Discipline was non-existent, standards were lax, and I was bored out of my skull except for Texas History which was all new to me. It wasn't until I was half way through my Freshman year that I thought that my peers had finally caught up to where I was at the end of 6th grade. Because Dad finished his schooling, went to Vietnam, and then retired, I was able to do all four years in the same High School.

My experience was one of the reasons why I wasn't about to let discipline problems get in the way of education while substituting, and as recorded earlier in this thread.
 
Spent 33 years educating visually impaired students from a vocational arena. I wonder where those that are bashing public schools got their education? Now with the Vid I wait to see how well the bashers will educate their children from home.
 
I bash pubic schools because New Mexico's are ranked dead last and have been near the bottom since I can remember.

I hated it at the time, but I'm so thankful that my parents sacrificed and sent me to Catholic school. However, I went the local public high school for summer school and witnessed first hand between public and private education. Private schools have standards and make sure they are met - there's no such thing as social promotion. Parents are very involved - after all they are shelling out all that money. Anything goes in a public school and parents see public schools as babysitters.

I don't have kids, but if I did, I'd do whatever it takes to keep them out of public schools - ANY public school.
 
FWIW, I am not "bashing" public schools, and yes I attended them myself - 10 of them in fact. My parents split up and got back together several times then divorced and both remarried. So I moved a lot - 10 schools by freshman year, but I was able to finish all 4 years of high school in the same school.

That doesn't change the math.

Thirteen million a year for one high school (of many - all equally funded) is a LOT of dough, I don't care how you slice it, dice it, spend it or waste it. Lack of money isn't the problem.

I also have a couple of friends who work in the schools. They are good people and are barely paid a living wage - far less than someone with their level of education would make just about anywhere else. That isn't where the money is going.

Where too much of it is going IMO is administration. When the number of administrators equal or outnumber teachers and the administrators are paid better than the teachers, that's at least a significant part of the problem right there.

Every district has a superintendent and all their equally well-paid administrative support staff, and a lot of that administration is duplicated effort. They need to combine/reduce the number of districts and eliminate a lot of that redundant administrative overhead.

100 years ago when travel and communications weren't what they are today, small districts and multiple administrative positions made sense. Not anymore. If Fortune 500 companies can trim administration through the use of technology, so can the schools.

Next they could start eliminating funding for nearly all extra-curricular programs and activities that don't contribute to improving the kids' education. If people want their kids involved in the extra curricular stuff, they can pay for it instead of the taxpayer.

Trimming the "fat" as corporations have done would free up a lot more money for paying teachers and buying books, supplies, and computers, and getting back to teaching more fundamentals and less indoctrination would serve the kids needs a whole lot better.
 
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As one teacher put it, "Children should be sent to school to be educated, not raised." An illegitimacy rate of 40%, a high divorce rate-most divorces involve children. A college professor I knew back in 1988 told me that in his daughter's 6th grade home room in the Plainsboro, NJ system, out of a class of 25 she was ONE of THREE living with BOTH parents. Many school systems have eliminated all parent-child events to avoid embarrassing the divorced children.
Mike Royko said of Chicago's troubled school system-"The city where everything works" -that "the public schools have to take them all-the dumbbells, the dope heads, and the dangerous." And a New Jersey judge told a welfare queen who appeared before him-as a plaintiff-that she was using her children as "meal tickets".
I am in favor of alternate schools for troublesome students provided they are properly run, and here I have in mind something on the order of the Joseph Stalin School for the Correction of Anti-Social Tendencies or the Mao Tse-Tung School for the Rectfication of Wrong Attitudes against the People. The latter features lots of self-criticism.
 
In HS I had 3 years of Algebra, calc, trig and all the fun math. My grandsons were given problems with the answers to explain how they calculated the answer. Getting the answer was easy until the NEW math was involved.
Give today's engineers a problem and a slide rule~ watch them jump from tall buildings!
In my business I paid people according to their worth to the company. Today, under that plan, there would be a few very wealthy teachers and professors. Sadly, a higher number would be on EBT.
 
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JS Esq. said:
Average spent per student is a potentially misleading statistic. The bulk of the middle require little more than grade-level curriculum and materials. But special-needs students and English-language learners can easily require order of magnitude more resources than the "average" student. These are the kids that regular private schools won't deal with but public schools are required to accommodate.

If a non-verbal kid in a wheelchair rolls up to the local parochial school, they may not overtly discriminate, but they'll do their best to convince the parents that their school is simply unable to meet the family's unique circumstances at that time. When they then enroll their kid in the local public school and establish an IEP, there'll be a full-time paraeducator accompanying the child, plus (at least) weekly sessions with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech pathologists - for starters. The district might even provide some in-home learning support, depending in part on whether they've ever been sued for failing to meet their ADA obligations. Needless to say, the cost to the district for that kid will blow up the "average" per-student cost.

Someone made a comment above about if there was more competition, there would be a private school for everyone. There already is - you just have to have $50,000 a year to pay for it. There was a daycare we looked at for our son that had a boutique K-8 school attached. They marketed themselves for highly individualized attention for severely autistic children (the K-8 portion, the daycare was just a daycare). It was one kid per classroom with three or four full-time employees per kid. How many families can afford that level of intensive services? Those that can't have no choice but to rely on the local public schools, who are required by law to accommodate those students and provide the resources necessary for them to successfully learn to the best of their ability.

Private and charter schools aren't automatically better. Many charter schools have failed entirely, sometimes leaving families without a schooling option in the middle of the year. Most others don't show any better results than local public schools. The few models that do show great success require long hours, significant buy-in from parents, and strict adherence to rules by the families, something that many (most?) families cannot manage.

There's no magic bullet for improving education. Money isn't a panacea, but there are areas where a small amount would make a great difference. I see it on the opposite end of the spectrum, with kids designated "gifted" who are left bored to tears at the pace of the regular classroom. The kid who are two grade levels behind in reading have aides come in and work with them, but there's nothing analogous for the kids who are two years above grade level.
Click to expand...

Lol. I don't need your location top right to know that you don't live in Nevada. When faced with angry parents wondering why their special needs kid isn't getting any help, principals and administrators here are trained to say in a cheery voice, "Ah! I take it you've just moved to Nevada."
 
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Being a retired machinist, I knew the instructor of the Metal Machining Class at the local community college. He said that he was always getting calls from the local companies wanting machinist to enter their apprentice programs. He said he had a 100% placement ratio of his graduates. A few years ago the community college got a new female president and after touring the campus, she decided to eliminate the Metal Machining Class because it "was dirty, smelled funny and made a lot of noise". The shop was torn out and replaced with cosmetology classes. And yes, the placement ratio of the cosmetology graduates was less then 25%.
 
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ladder13 said:
Maybe the 10th Amendment applies here. I see nothing in the Constitution about the establishment of a Dept of Education.
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Nothing in the Constitution about an Air Force, NASA, an internet, Railroad Acts, Homestead Act, etc, either. The Constitution is a charter that sets how rules are made, and not a set of statutes.

We absolutely agree about the US Dept. of Education. The only schools the Feds actually run are a tiny, tiny portion of K-12 schools; ask around about how well their few schools work. Fully 88% of the funding for K-12 schools nationally is local money. The Feds lack the successful practical experience to tell schools how they should be run; they also don't pay for much. If the Dept. of Education disappeared tomorrow, states & local governments could easily soldier on without them.

My wife did occupational therapy for K-12 schools for over a decade. That meant all of her students/patients had identifiable disabilities. A small number were profoundly developmentally and cognitively disabled and were never, ever going to be able to successfully tie their shoes - they still were in school every day by law. Pity those poor souls; also accept that a school is not ever going to improve their lives.
 
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My brother was a whiz in math and spelling, me, not so much. Same public school, even many of the same teachers.

I still can not spell worth beans. Math, forget it! I struggled for years as an adult taking adult classes to learn much of anything past adding/subtracting fractions. Multiply/divide fractions was and is still a mystery to me. Algebra is something from another planet.

But I could always tear things apart and put them back to together. And they usually worked! Much better then my brother could.


I learned over the years that some people can spell, some can't. Some can do math, some can't. Some people can fix things, some can't.
 
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One school administrator in Bucks County, PA told me years ago they started holding back welfare checks to families whose kids constantly skipped school until the "parent" came in to talk about it.
Many school districts require the teenage mothers to bring their babies to school, and when "Mommy" isn't in class, she's in the nursery.
In his book "The Russians" Hedrick Smith said there were schools in Moscow that were "blackboard jungles"-he said one teacher said he was pressured to pass students socially, so even the "homeland of Socialism" had problems like ours.
 
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