They can have as many secret closed-door meetings as they like. The votes are still open. If you don’t like how your representative has voted or behaved, vote for someone else.
Blah, blah, blah. Do you get all of your arguments from bumper stickers?
I don’t. I think the DoE is a waste of money. Public education, however, is not the DoE.
Incidentally, about 35% of DoE expenditures are kept for overhead. Well within charitable giving guidelines.
Try again, this time, bring something besides blind rhetorical devices. Maybe something like, I dunno…facts?
Speaking of strawmen, that wasn’t the point. One of your lapdogs claimed that so-called public schools should be called public because they are funded by the public. I responded that by that logic, closed door meetings — such as the ones I’ve documented — should be called public gatherings (since Congress is funded by the public), which of course is ridiculous since the public can’t get in. You changed the subject to voting.
Your rebuttal would fit nicely on a car’s butt.
Well, it thinks it is. Review Public Law 102-119.
I don’t know where you get your numbers from, but waste at the DOE is as legendary as it is everywhere else in government:
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Speaking of strawmen, that wasn’t the point. One of your lapdogs claimed that so-called public schools should be called public because they are funded by the public. I responded that by that logic, closed door meetings — such as the ones I’ve documented — should be called public gatherings (since Congress is funded by the public), which of course is ridiculous since the public can’t get in. You changed the subject to voting.
[quote]
You’re such a fucking idiot. Public schools are public because they are funded by the public, and open to any child of the public.
Please explain how public schools are not public, being instead private.
What, IDEA? The government found that states were not giving an equal education to people with disabilities, so Congress stepped in and wrote regulations outlining how states had to comply with federal guarantees of equal protection and opportunity. DoE did not write that law and did not create the regulations.
Second, the DoE merely administers the special education guidelines set out by Congress, performs studies and allocates distribution funds based on guidelines set out by Congress. It does not choose textbooks, does not choose the curriculum, does not choose individual state teaching credential requirements, does not choose individual state special ed teaching credential requirements, does not decide what teachers are paid, does not charter new schools, does not
set guidelines on student-teacher ratios, does not mandate school budgets, etc., etc., etc.
I got my numbers from the GAO. $65 billion was spent on outlays, about $100 billion spent total.
Waste listed at the DoE didn’t total so much as $200 million and it looks from your link to be by far the least wasteful of the government agencies listed.
In other words, I’m kicking your ass in this and you keep having to toss up strawmen in order to even stay in the game. Gotcha.
At least I’m smart enough to preview and fix any formatting problems.
Ah, the new goalpost. Originally, so-called public schools were public only because they are funded by the public. Now, you’ve disowned Cheddarsnax’s original claim because I have refuted it. Unfortunately, your new claim does not survive scrutiny either. Expulsions from so-called public schools are routine. And interestingly, these expulsions, are systematically skewed toward the poorest and blackest students. (Cite.)
False dichotomy. The schools you know so little about are neither public schools nor private schools; they are government schools — implementations of socialism.
Yes, 1997 HR 5, Chapter 2, Section 687, Subsection (d), Paragraph (1) Part (a) states that the purpose of the act is “to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education.” Section 603, Paragraph (a) — the Establishment Clause — establishes the “Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in the Department of Education” as the “principal agency in such Department for administering and carrying out this Act”. Thus, the Department of Educaton is identified by statute as the principle agent for public education, directly refuting your assertion that the DOE is unrelated to public education.
Holy cow! You mean you find it acceptable that a government bureaucracy seized $65 billion of money solely for self-preservation that could have gone to education?
It does, doesn’t it. That you are reduced to braying proudly that the DOE is somewhat less hideous than the other rapscallions reveals the utter weakness of your argument.
Um, I hate to be the one to inform you of this, but you engaged me — that is, you addressed my argument already in progress. Therefore, any strawmen are definitively from you.
I appreciate the impled compliment, but I think we’re about to start going around in circles. Mostly, I wanted a clearer picture of what your stance on the subject was, which I’ve gotten. I doubt either of us is going to convince the other.
Thanks for the conversation, though. It was interesting.
Um, no. You refuted nothing of the sort. Congress is a public institution that happens to have private meetings. Why are they public? Because they’re publicly funded.
I decided to not start the matter up with you and tacked on the extra rider of public access so as to just get the ridiculous argument over with in order to move on.
Public schools are public because they’re paid for by the public.
And then they gasp go to another public school.
Government schools are just public schools with a retarded new monicker. Is that the best you can do?
From Merriam-Webster:
1 a : exposed to general view
2 a : of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area of a nation or state b : of or relating to a government c : of, relating to, or being in the service of the community or nation
Public schools meet the definition pretty much exactly. Public school budgets are public record, their regulations are public record, their policies are public record, board meetings are generally open to the public, their school boards are elected by the public.
And public schools affect the whole area of a nation or state. They relate to government. And they are in the service of the community.
For general English language, public schools are aptly named. If this doesn’t jive with your immature little philosophy, so be it. The rest of us will sit here in reality, while you sit there and wallow in your shallow mental masturbation.
I said nothing of the sort. The DoE is certainly related to public education.
And second, you dumb piece of shit, learn to read. Or at least to comprehend what you read. The DoE is not the principle agent for public education. That statute says it is the principle agent for ensuring that people with disabilities have access to appropriate public education. Do you see the difference, idiot?
No, you dumb fuck.
$65 billion was what went to education. GAO outlays are what the Department is NOT spending in overhead.
Who’s braying, you ignorant mule?
Did you forget already that I said the DoE was a waste of money?
Don’t be fucking stupid. Strawmen do not originate with whoever came into the argument second.
What, because Somalia has one of the most advanced telecommunication networks in Africa, largely due to a free market? That’s the only connection Somalia has to libertarianism.
No, they are *government * funded. If you’re going to dig down to mediate levels, you can stop at any arbitrary point. Why not call them “employer schools”? After all, most of the money government seizes from the public comes from their employers.
Apparently, you didn’t read the report. What happens with the vast majority is that they drop out.
Maybe you can ask me that when you find a better monicker than “retarded”.
Well, then, my house is a public house. Its assessed value is a matter of public record, its zoning regulations are public record, its acreage and soil content is public record, a portion of it is eased to the public, and the bastards who claim eminent domain over it are elected by the public.
Same same for churches.
Oh, it tags its whole team at once! How endearing.
Then you retract your statement, “Public education is not the DoE”?
Speaking of mental masturbation, you must be on the verge of orgasm. Your phrases are becoming akin to hard breathing, and you are flailing uncontrollably. “The U.S. Department of Education (ED) enforces Section 504 in programs and activities that receive funds from ED.” (Cite.)
No, no, no. You misunderstood the question, oh neurotic one. The $35 billion is complete waste. The $65 billion is a self-serving seizure of assets for the purpose of self-preservation. It’s the money it redistributes. Were there nothing to redistribute, it would have nothing to do, and therefore no reason to exist.
Continue to elevate the level of your argument, and it might eventually emerge from the sewer. Are there any cites to support whatever your position is? Are there any words that might describe it? Is there anything to it other than angry spit?
Then why are you defending it?
Counting to two is difficult for you, isn’t it. Since a strawman is a substitution for the original argument, and since the argument originated with person number one, a strawman comes from person number two. Antecedents and consequents and whatnot.
Maybe I’m missing something, but these stats seem pretty weird to me. (I’ve read the rest of the thread, and didn’t see folks point out these problems; my apologies if I missed something).
First off, you seem to be implying a cause and effect relationship between private schooling and improved test scores. While it is likely that this exists to some degree, there is an alternative explanation: perhaps parents who value their child’s education highly are more likely to send their children to private schools, and perhaps there’s a cause and effect relationship between a child’s test scores and the amount of emphasis a parent puts on education. In other words, it seems likely to me that the discrepancy between public and private school test results is due in part to the selection of kids, not to the value of the education offered.
Second, “20% of 12th graders who are privately schooled take AP placement tests for college, even though they account for only 7.5% of the total” leaves me baffled. 7.5% of the total test takers? 7.5% of the total population? And how is that statistic meaningful?
Imagine a group of 1,000 students. 75 of them are private-school kids; of these, 15 take the AP test. What does that tell us? For all we know from that statistic, 300 of the public school students are taking the AP test, meaning that private-school kids take the test is smaller numbers.
Or maybe you mean that of the 1000 students taking the AP test, 75 of them are private-school kids, and that they’re pulled from a total private-school population of 375 students. Again, I’m not sure what we learn from this statistic.
Maybe something is missing from it. I just don’t understand its significance.
That said, I don’t see public school as the lofty pillar of education to which we should all aspire. I see it as a starting point. Kids whose parents are concerned about education will definitely have a huge advantage, and may find that public school doesn’t offer them much at all.
But kids whose parents don’t care about education shouldn’t have the sins of the fathers visited wholly upon them, either. By having mandated public schooling, we increase the child’s chances of encountering adults who love and care about education, who can introduce the kid to the joys of learning, despite the poor parenting skills they face at home.
And once in awhile, public schooling rises above its baseline. Whether it’s the fifth-grade teacher I had who drilled words like “tenacity,” “langorous,” and “insipid” into our ten-year-old minds, or the sixth-grade teacher who worked with us on comparitive mythology, or the tenth-grade teacher who used Socratic Method to teach us the principles of natural selection, or the twelfth-grade teacher who brought calculus alive, there were examles of shining brilliance among the teachers I had in the public schools. Plenty of abject losers, to be sure–but it wasn’t all mediocrity.