Fuck up education? You could hardly fuck up education any more than it already is. We spend more money per student than any other country in the world, but our average test scores are somewhere around those third world countries.

What we need is to abolish government entanglement in education, not increase it.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 02-12-2006 at 09:50 PM.

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Peanut butter ass Shaq Mod booooze lime pole over bench lick:
Some of those countries beating you when it comes to test scores have government so deeply involved with education it would give you a mild stroke.

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Oh, I have no doubt! And Singapore, a totalitarian country, is an economic powerhouse. This doesn't imply a cause-effect relationship and it certainly doesn't mean totalitarianism is a desirable thing.

Privatization of the public school system in this country is exactly what we need to improve public schools. The monopoly has gone on long enough. People should not have to choose between a poor education and paying twice.

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Verily, Maradon! doth proclaim:
Oh, I have no doubt! And Singapore, a totalitarian country, is an economic powerhouse. This doesn't imply a cause-effect relationship and it certainly doesn't mean totalitarianism is a desirable thing.

Privatization of the public school system in this country is exactly what we need to improve public schools. The monopoly has gone on long enough. People should not have to choose between a poor education and paying twice.

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Has that ever worked anywhere?

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JooJooFloping:
Has that ever worked anywhere?

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Sure has... in America...

When Harvard was founded in 1636 the average student was bilingual and proficient in calculus. The average age of admittance was 16.

Let's not forget that our entire higher education system to this day is largely privatized and is among the best in the world.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 02-12-2006 at 10:25 PM.

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ACES! Another post by Maradon!:

Privatization of the public school system in this country is exactly what we need to improve public schools. The monopoly has gone on long enough. People should not have to choose between a poor education and paying twice.

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This is absolute bullshit.

I firmly believe that the level of education that people obtain in schools is primarily a function of their own desire to learn and work at learning. What we don't need is to turn education into more competitive cutthroat business which is exactly what you do if you completely cut the government out.

Don't draw comparison to our university system because frankly primary/secondary school and college are not analogous.

Right now I am in a high school with an International Baccalaureate magnet, basically my core classes are IB, however, for the electives I get I can take traditional classes. Our publically funded program is one of the premier IB programs in the country, and far superior to any nearby private high schools. The difference is that the students in the program actually care about their education. They work hard and some devote almost unbelievable amounts of time to study and some extra-curricular activities. And they are successful students. I have only had a few "traditional" classes the past 4 years, and the change in the attitudes of the students is huge, however, the teachers are about the same. They receive the same support, and are just as knowledgable on the subject matter they teach. (Although through no fault of their own, generally less knowledgeable reaching into the college levels of their subject matter)

I think the problem is we have too high of expectations for our students. We try too hard with them, and spend too much money on them. Ultimately, their education is their own choice and duty; forcing them to be there so you can try and teach them something is futile. We should restructure our public school system, not scrap it.

My personal thoughts are to create different tiers of high-school. Vocational training and college preparatory, similar to a European-style system. There is no sense trying to push someone to learn Algebra II when they will never use it. We should teach them something they will find useful. Conversely, we can just abolish non-college preparatory High School and let them start working at 14, however, I do not favor that course of action. Vocational training would last until 16, at which point they would either start working or move onto something of their choice.

Every child is entitled to the opportunity for an education. Unless you want to hand out the magnets of corruption we call vouchers, we most definately should not abolish public schools.

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Maradon! attempted to be funny by writing:
Sure has... in America...

When Harvard was founded in 1636 the average student was bilingual and proficient in calculus. The average age of admittance was 16.

Let's not forget that our entire higher education system to this day is largely privatized and is among the best in the world.

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Since you decided to go here...

First you have to consider in the past that only the remarkably bright would continue on to college. I bet every admitted person and most of the applying students now are proficient in our more advanced calculus and at least well into learning a second language. Now, our top-ranked private universities have massive endowments (Harvard has over 25 billion dollars for the maybe 20,000ish people who are there at any given time) not to mention their pick of students across the world.

I remember talking with a Columbia admittance officer who firmly said that they could throw out the the 4000 people they admit and after drawing from their applicant pool another time the classes would be virtually indistinguishable.

She also said that it is the students who make the university, which is why they take such care in admittance. High calibre students permit the professors and staff to move a quicker pace and develop ideas significantly more.

I think that saying that our private universities, to which admission is highly competitive and selective, are better is correct. However, if all of our schools could pick and choose their students, the quality of course would jump up. But then you might be leaving people behind who don't want to.

Noxhil2 fucked around with this message on 02-12-2006 at 11:04 PM.

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Maradon! stopped beating up furries long enough to write:
Oh, I have no doubt! And Singapore, a totalitarian country, is an economic powerhouse. This doesn't imply a cause-effect relationship and it certainly doesn't mean totalitarianism is a desirable thing.

Privatization of the public school system in this country is exactly what we need to improve public schools. The monopoly has gone on long enough. People should not have to choose between a poor education and paying twice.

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No, but you're blaming the state of the American educational system on government intervention while you will find that most of the countries which by your own benchmark beat the US in test scores have in fact implemented the opposite of what you propose. If there is no cause-effect relationship between government-run education and student performance, then it doesn't matter how the system is funded anyway.

If you privatize Education in the U.S. the people will pick schools which provide what they desire for their kids and thus create demand for it and the market of course will provide it. However, what people want for their kids isn't neccessarily the best education possible by 'test score'-standards. You know all those pro-abstinence only people? Yeah. You know all those creationists? Yeah. Private schools in the U.S. today are acceptable because the people who can afford them are generally pretty smart. If you start handing out vouchers prepare for the McSchool:

Imagine schools trying to compete in presenting themselves as as puritan as possible. 24/7 video surveilance to make sure little Sally isn't being impregnated by negro hoodlums? RFID tomfoolery? Censorship of any and all materials students come into contact with? Not far fetched at all under the umbrella of in loco parentis and extremely marketable under the auspice of protecting kids from pornography or blasphemy and / or keeping them safe. Hell look at those crazy "Tranquility Bay"-type offshore brainwashing camps parents send their children to, do you really want those to become more commonplace?

You may contend that this works for the higher education system without any such insanity, but keep in mind that universities are primarily picked out by students, with some gentle pressure from the parents, when the students are 18. High schools are picked out by the parents alone when the kid is ten or twelve.

In this one case I'm going to flat-out fulfill the leftist stereotype and say it: The state knows better, if only because constitutional restraints keep some of the most insane ideas it would think of in check. The only way to keep the above from happening is to have the state set criteria for schools which can redeem vouchers, which in turn creates a quasi-state run system anyway with privatized intermediaries trying as hard as they can to circumvent government regulations, only with a meaningless sheet of paper voters get to hold for a little while.

Mod fucked around with this message on 02-12-2006 at 11:07 PM.

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Maradon! had this to say about the Spice Girls:
Sure has... in America...

When Harvard was founded in 1636 the average student was bilingual and proficient in calculus. The average age of admittance was 16.

Let's not forget that our entire higher education system to this day is largely privatized and is among the best in the world.

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On a historical note, the fundamental theorem of calculus wasn't stated explicitly by Newton until his October, 1666, tract, based on his work in 1665. That would be a 29-30-year difference from the founding of Harvard, and across the Atlantic, at that. I'm not saying they weren't well-versed in mathematics, just not calculus.

And "bilingual" was probably an understatement or misnomer, since most students at that time were comfortable in both Latin and Ancient Greek, a lack found in today's youth (most of Newton's famous papers were at least titled in Latin, e.g., De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum, "The Methods of Series and Fluxions"). Latin and Greek were still considered at the time to be the languages of science. Many were also fluent in French, Spanish, and Dutch, trading partners and rivals at the time.

I'd also like to point out that it was only the most upper-elite who even achieved Bachelor's Degrees, a situation which I'm glad has been remedied in the past few centuries.

To remedy the current situation, however, it'd probably be best to try for improved parental involvement, since studies and experience have shown that parents who are involved in their child's learning tend to have more successful students. It's a cultural, rather than governmental, problem. The countries that have successful students, like Japan, also attach large amounts of shame to poor school performance. (And as a libertarian, anything that increases governmental control or power is preferably avoided.)

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Maradon! had this to say about Optimus Prime:
Sure has... in America...

When Harvard was founded in 1636 the average student was bilingual and proficient in calculus. The average age of admittance was 16.

Let's not forget that our entire higher education system to this day is largely privatized and is among the best in the world.

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I'm talking grade school.

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How.... Mod.... uughhhhhh:
Stuff.

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You're radical conservative doomsday scenario is failing to consider several factors. The one which I think is most important is that High School, at least in the United States, has become more and more about getting accepted to a university. If parents send their child to a school which has questionable scholastic standards then the grades that they get at that school will hold much less weight with a university. If your objection is that students will not get a proper education, this market force will force education standards to be high. If you just don't want kids being brainwashed into being right wing fundies you don't have a leg to stand on. Just because you don't like it and think it's wrong for whatever reason dosn't mean that it isn't within the rights of people who live in the United States.

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How.... Naimah.... uughhhhhh:
You're radical conservative doomsday scenario is failing to consider several factors. The one which I think is most important is that High School, at least in the United States, has become more and more about getting accepted to a university. If parents send their child to a school which has questionable scholastic standards then the grades that they get at that school will hold much less weight with a university. If your objection is that students will not get a proper education, this market force will force education standards to be high. If you just don't want kids being brainwashed into being right wing fundies you don't have a leg to stand on. Just because you don't like it and think it's wrong for whatever reason dosn't mean that it isn't within the rights of people who live in the United States.

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Naimah are you becoming a moral relativist? That would truely warm my heart. Nevertheless, we're talking about people deciding not for themselves but for their children which really breaks down the argument about personal freedom in this case. There's a difference between allowing people to shoot heroin and allowing people to shoot heroin into their ten year old.

The reformed high school market will shape the higher education market as much as the higher education market will shape the high school system. If suddenly a large percentage of high school graduates come from McSchools, universities will attempt to tap into that demand. I also still maintain that the ability to sell slightly higher than average SAT scores will be by far outmarketed by schools which sell 'peace of mind' and christian values.

I also consider the educational system a pillar of democracy more than a mere tool for increasing the marketability of one's labour. To have a functioning democratic system of government the voting population must be educated to a relatively far-reaching extent. Holding elections within a group of illiterates is a meaningless sham.

Also vouchers themselves have a ton of flaws. First off, they would be a roundabout way of using government money to fund religious institutions and thus circumvent that pesky seperation of chuch and state. (Unless, again, you start applying the same standards to voucher-funded schools as you do to public schools, in which case you end up with the same system you have now only with an even more mastodonic administrative apparatus to keep track of vouchers and enforce standards). Another sticking point is that with a fleet per-student amount paid to schools vouchers aren't exactly a free market system since you're imposing a pretty severe lower price cap on education per child. There is no incentive for schools to lower their costs below one voucher per year and student since they can't be priced out of the market by competitors who offer the same service for less, thus again encouraging a waste of government funds.

To have a truely private system of education you would have to do the libertarian thing and just cut everyone's taxes by what the abolished department of education cost them and let the market work itself out. In addition to all the problems outlined abovoe you'd also end up with a lot of kids screwed over because their parents decided to spend the extra money on crack or boat payments.

Mod fucked around with this message on 02-13-2006 at 02:44 PM.

And if some parents decide to spend money on religious schooling, that's fine. If religious schools get, say, 20% of the students... then about 20% of the tax money would be coming from people who would send their children there. Any disparity would still be a much lesser evil than forcing parents who are against a secular education from paying for one.

An election among illiterates would be a sham, but no more so than an election of people educated under a system put in place by those already elected. I can't possibly see how you can think, under any system, more than 2% or so of people would be illiterate. It's impossable to function in a first world country without being litereate, and just as impossable to have and raise kids in a first world country while being illiterate.

And I completely agree with that assessment, but I think the voucher argument is that the quality of education would actually increase, over what we have now.

Kinanik fucked around with this message on 02-13-2006 at 03:51 PM.

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Verily, Mod doth proclaim:
Naimah are you becoming a moral relativist? That would truely warm my heart. Nevertheless, we're talking about people deciding not for themselves but for their children which really breaks down the argument about personal freedom in this case. There's a difference between allowing people to shoot heroin and allowing people to shoot heroin into their ten year old.

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You're drawing my argument out to an absurdity. One demerit. By your logic the child should have the right to refuse to be taken to church. The government does not have the right to tell a parent how they must raise their child with infinite degrees of freedom. Choosing how their child is to be educated, both morally and scholasticly, is very well within the realm of responsibilities of the parents.

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The reformed high school market will shape the higher education market as much as the higher education market will shape the high school system. If suddenly a large percentage of high school graduates come from McSchools, universities will attempt to tap into that demand. I also still maintain that the ability to sell slightly higher than average SAT scores will be by far outmarketed by schools which sell 'peace of mind' and christian values.

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Sure, DeVry might change their standards but Harvard, MIT, Princton, UT, etc. will not. They have more demand then they know what to do with at the moment. If a parent wants their child to succed then they will place their child in a enviroment where those institutions are not excluded as a matter of fact.

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I also consider the educational system a pillar of democracy more than a mere tool for increasing the marketability of one's labour. To have a functioning democratic system of government the voting population must be educated to a relatively far-reaching extent. Holding elections within a group of illiterates is a meaningless sham.

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I think it is assumed that if you are desireable for a professional job that you are well enough educated to understand the meaning of politics. The people that work Wal-Mart as a carrier are always going to exist, it's a matter of fact. They are just marginalized by their apathy.

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Also vouchers themselves have a ton of flaws. First off, they would be a roundabout way of using government money to fund religious institutions and thus circumvent that pesky seperation of chuch and state. (Unless, again, you start applying the same standards to voucher-funded schools as you do to public schools, in which case you end up with the same system you have now only with an even more mastodonic administrative apparatus to keep track of vouchers and enforce standards). Another sticking point is that with a fleet per-student amount paid to schools vouchers aren't exactly a free market system since you're imposing a pretty severe lower price cap on education per child. There is no incentive for schools to lower their costs below one voucher per year and student since they can't be priced out of the market by competitors who offer the same service for less, thus again encouraging a waste of government funds.

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They way vouchers are legislated can easily be used to get around this percieved flaw. Lower income families cou8ld be alloted more vouchers, while those of the upper incomes would recieve less. The lower income would be able to send their children to a better school while still spending none of their own money on it, while the higher income families would have the same oprotunities open to them, with more out of pocket expenses. This is an idea that took me all of 30 seconds to concieve of. Nothing says that one voucher equates to one students education.

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To have a truely private system of education you would have to do the libertarian thing and just cut everyone's taxes by what the abolished department of education cost them and let the market work itself out. In addition to all the problems outlined abovoe you'd also end up with a lot of kids screwed over because their parents decided to spend the extra money on crack or boat payments.

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While I like the idea of an entirely independant education system, many people would call foul on it adversly affecting the poor, and I would have to agree. If the current system is to be changed to something that is better affected by market forces it would need to be some variety of a voucher system.

Naimah fucked around with this message on 02-13-2006 at 04:08 PM.