Isn’t it funny how school rankings correlate nicely with the median income of its district? People with money move into good school districts, pushing up property values, making poor performing school districts cheap by comparison, compounding the problem. Poor people tend to lack the resources or time to have sufficient foresight and drive to make their kids do well in school. Schools with a lot of unmotivated kids tend to do bad.
So the solution is to mix up school districts, but obviously the already good schools’ districts fight against this for good reasons at the detriment of the poorer schools.
There have been a couple of documentaries on this: my high school was a result of federal integration intervention in which the entire city had one huge high school that everyone in the city limits would go to. We had a complete representation of “real world” demographics in our school. And it was a great school. The same month the federal oversight was lifted, ground broke on two new high schools in the more affluent areas of the city. Now, as anyone could have predicted, the high school I went to is one of the worst, if not the worst, performing schools in the state.
So yeah, we don’t necessarily tolerate low performing schools but the solution to increasing the performance turns those already in good schools off.
Because Democrats and Progressives have a vested interest to keep a large % of the population ignorant. Therefore they really don’t want to fix the schools.
An answer that on one hand is flippant, on the other hand 100% serious.
I can see the one hand, but the other hand is serious as a heart attack, and just as healthful.
Democrats have no interest in keeping people ignorant. That’s ridiculous.
As for puddleglum’s cite, I encourage him to write “Correlation does not equal causation” 400 times on the blackboard. If traditional educational methods work, this’ll discourage him from posting such sloppy, partisan cites in the future.
Funding models, like everything else, depends on the state in question. I totally agree that there are definitely models like you describe. I remember looking for a house in the Albany, NY area and in the the areas we were looking at there were basically three possibilities. Two areas had good schools that ran something like $4,000 a year in school tax. One area had good schools that were lower, about $2,000 a year in school tax, but that was because that town happened to have a lot more commercial property to use as a tax base. And the third area was Albany itself, which was about $4,000 a year in school tax for terrible schools. The whole area–whether it was school districts or something else–was massively balkanized in a way that seems extremely wasteful.
New Mexico has plenty of problems with education and educational rankings. A look at school rankings just in Albuquerque clearly shows a correlation with economics and race. Not counting a couple special schools, there are twelve public high schools in Albuquerque in one massive district and of course lots more middle and elementary schools to feed into the high schools. And it all clearly correlates with income at every level. Same story, of course, throughout the state. What New Mexico does do well, at least to some degree, is attempt to equalize funding throughout the state to reduce the disparity. So my taxes don’t go just to my local schools (which are quite good) or the district as a whole, but to schools throughout the state. It’s not perfect, but I like this model better than what I was seeing in New York.
Do you happen to have the SAT and ACT results or college admissions, etc. organized by race and economic level for those years? Or are you simply relying on a “memory” that the segregated* schools you attended happened to be OK? You obviously avoided seeing Backboard Jungle (1955) or reading Up the Down Staircase (1964) with their social commentaries on inner city schools of which even popular media was aware at the time–a time before your “social activism” could have played a role.
*(Not segregated in the sense of Jim Crow South, but simply the de facto outcome of all “those people” never actually living in places where you would encounter them.)
What is a bad school? From what I have seen over the years bad schools are caused mainly by apathetic parents and a high proportion of undisciplined kids that really don’t seem to be all that intellectually engaged or academically able. You can construct whatever social justice fantasies you wish, but I’m tired of the trope that no kids can be left behind. Kids are left behind all the time and there is no fix.
Poor people, on average, are not going to be as smart or scholastically engaged as middle or upper-middle income people. Sure there’s a lot of overlap, and there’s smart poor people and middle-class-upper class not smart people but they don’t tend to cluster that way on average. And I’m not saying this as the smug parent of academic superstars, my kids lived with my academically dis-engaged ex and they were marginal performers at best.
Poor people in a capitalist society will always have relatively shittier schools and a lot of that is simply inherent to how engaged the parents are in making sure the kids get things done. If you come from a house where there is no life of the mind or validation of the importance of education there’s not much most teachers will be able to do unless the kid is innately smart enough to be engaged. The almost religious belief and emphasis on “good” teachers being the saviors of poor kids is a liberal fantasy (and I consider myself a progressive).
Short of giving poor kids a new set of parents in a different demographic there’s not much you can do to make kids with shitty attitudes and marginal intellectual skills academic performers.
It’s true that I haven’t generally looked to movies and books - both of which have a vested interest in exaggerating and dramatizing the message they want to get across in order to drive home a point or make them interesting - as a way to form my opinions on various social issues.
But be that as it may, remember when I said almost all of the country’s students were able to get a quality education in those days? Certainly problems existed in inner city schools back then. But even among the population of black people then the number of students in inner city schools when compared to the overall number of black students in the country is a small minority. In other words, not every black student lived in a big city ghetto.
Take a look at newsreel footage of some of the black students involved in demonstrations seeking to integrate schools from back in those days and listen to them speak. They’re well dressed, well-spoken and obviously well educated…at least when compared to today’s standards. True, they were seeking to obtain the even better education they felt would accrue to them were they allowed to attend segregated white schools, but they were also seeking to break down racial barriers and achieve integration. This is evidenced by the many other demonstrations in those days that took place at other venues like amusement parks and so forth where black people were demonstrating simply to seek admittance and to be able to attend and have fun like anybody else.
So while it’s true that inner big city kids received poorer educations than almost everyone else, their numbers were relatively small and don’t significantly reflect on the educational standards or successes of that time.
Still, most of the societal changes that liberalism has wrought over the last fifty years that have negatively impacted education have nothing to do with addressing racism. Please explain to me how racism has been positively addressed by any of the following:
[ul]
Abandonment of and scorn for family values, values which at one time served to provide a stable home life for children and which involved most parents actively taking an interest in seeing to it that their children behaved properly and did well in school.[/ul]
[ul]
[li]The cache surrounding and eager adoption of drugs, which the counterculture crowd glommed onto like manna from heaven and which have unquestionably been the most destructive and harmful thing to have happened to American society since the dawn of the 20th century. Take a look at Woodstock. Lots of drugs, practically no black people. So you can’t say everyone became a druggie because racism. I live in the middle of white bread America in a small suburb of a large city and every school here from middle school up is filled with stoners and drugs in ready supply if you know who to ask. In the 50s and 60s virtually nobody was on drugs or knew anybody who was on drugs. [/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The breakdown of discipline, both at home and at school. Liberals have taken the attitude that to spank a kid at home or to give him swats for misbehaving at school is ‘beating’ him, and they’ve taken this belief to the point that it’s now criminalized. The result of course is unruly kids who think they don’t have to behave and this carries over to their schoolwork as well. It also impacts on other kids and encourages them to behave likewise. It also leaves teachers virtually helpless to deal with kids in a way that shuts them down and forces them to behave, with a similarly ripple effect on the other kids too. [/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Teacher unions that make it virtually impossible to get rid of bad teachers. As time goes by and more and more bad teachers add up, more and more students suffer the consequences.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The astoundingly idiotic practice of ‘social promotion’, whereby it’s been determined that to fail a kid negatively impacts his self-esteem so he gets passed from grade to grade and eventually graduates with a high school diploma even if he slept through every class and can’t make heads or tails of “See Jane run.” The shame and embarrassment of failing a class used to motivate apathetic kids well enough to at least learn enough to pass the courses in order not to fail. Now it’s considered less esteem damaging somehow to send him out in the world to try to earn a living unable to read road signs, a paycheck (if somehow he’s able to obtain one) or bank statement, or do basic math. ‘Social promotion’ is a complete and willful abandonment of the very reason schools exist in the first place.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Liberal attitudes toward and eager promotion of casual sexual relationships, which has caused a huge underclass of students born to single mothers, often ill-educated themselves and young enough to be a sister rather than a mother. Kids growing up in such households rarely have the kind of parental support necessary to do well at school. The parent is often absent when the kid gets home from school, or if present wholly lacks the education and ability (and often the motivation) to help their kids with their schoolwork.[/li][/ul]
Etc., etc., etc.
Put all this together and it’s a wonder that American kids don’t come in lower than they do when compared to kids in other countries. It’s also easy to see why the question of how to deliver a quality education in this country has become such a mystery.
My parents were “education parents” and I did homework, read on my own time, etc, without much need for pushing (since their kids adopted these values from very young). My sister has a daughter who has been raised the same way, and my niece doesn’t like doing homework or reading, and doesn’t respect the faculty.
I don’t think the issue was necessarily the parent, but sometimes it’s the kid. Unlike Peter the Great’s theory (who supposedly chained unwilling students to benches in his medical school) I don’t think it’s possible to force people to learn. My niece goes to a school where there’s a wide variety of backgrounds and academic outcomes, so I don’t think the issue is poverty, subcultures, etc. Just a bad attitude.
I don’t think it’s possible to force a kid to pay attention in class or respect faculty. Not unless you plan on sitting behind them every class. You teach your kid the values, and you hope they adopt them.
This particular point is a big issue in Canada. Every province and territory here has a “literacy test” (math and literacy, really) which is not controlled by the local school board. You have to take it at age 16. Many students pass grades but fail the test, which means they should not have passed the previous grades. I think it’s literally the biggest reason for kids dropping out of school.
Which only proves my point: There were people in the 1950s and 1960s, before your claims for when the bad stuff occurred, that recognized that the problems already existed.
It did not have to be a ghetto, per se. Black students were segregated by law in the South and by de facto housing segregation in the north where black schools were routinely underfunded. Topeka, Kansas, is not in any way a part of the (Jim Crow) South, but Brown v Board of Education was brought as a suit because the black kids were being denied an education in that “northern” city.
Nope. You are simply displaying your prejudices regarding dress codes, again. How many kids from that period have you actually seen interviewed? Three? Five? You do realize that the major networks would have made an effort to select only the most articulate (white sounding) kids to interview in those days, right? As to your dress code fetish, you are picking and choosing what you regard as well-dressed, otherwise you should be complaining that the gentlemen are not all wearing wigs and the ladies are not all wearing bonnets in public. Styles change; get over it.
The numbers were “relatively small” because black kids were encouraged to drop out and take low-paying jobs. Hardly a recommendation for the high quality of education that you assert existed.
And back to your typical and oft-repeated litany in which you describe some bad things as being more prevalent than they actually are, conflating cause and effect for other problems, and moaning that evil things only began with the rise of “liberals.” have you ever actually tried to learn real history in the 14 years you’ve been hanging out, here? Your claims about “social promotion” is a case in point. There have been a few people in the field of education that have made those sort of noises about not harming kids’ psyches and demagogues on the Right have picked those up and waved them around as though they were gospel beliefs among educators. Yet, going back to 1955’s Blackboard Jungle we already have a teacher claiming that they were just going to promote all the kids out of school, just to get them out of the way. So it was already recognized as a policy intended for the benefit of the schools and not the kids, long before you claimed it began.
With all due respect basing your history on newsreel footage vs the realities of the segregated south, about which information is readily at hand, is so lazy it’s not even hand waving. Jim Crow’s Schools
I think part of issues is ‘out of sight out of mind’ . There is not enough attention about bad schools in poor cities. There will be something on the news once in awhile about schools closing b/of a lack of funding people protesting to save their schools .
Then people forget all about it a in a few days.
This is an importance topic and I think the OP should write an open letter and send it their newspapers to get people talking about it again. This is a very complex issues , bad schools are mostly in poor cites and towns so how do you bring businesses into town and cities were there is very little money ?
I’m busy right now and will have to answer tomndebb later, but apparently you missed the fact I referenced news reel footage as an example and not as the basis for my knowledge of history. Believe it or not I actually knew some black people in the 50s and 60s, and had full access to the news broadcasts and magazines of the day.
What do you think this proves. I haven’t claimed no problems existed then, only that many of the problems that exist now didn’t exist then. And among those that did, many have both grown worse and much more widespread. In other words the last fifty years has seen problems that affected a relatively small percentage of the nation’s students become both much worse and more widespread. To say they’ve become endemic would not be an exaggeration.
Again you’re missing the point, which isn’t that black kids were getting schooling and education equal to white kids back then, but rather that they were getting better educations despite that than they are now, for the reasons I listed and more.
Wrong again as usual. Surely you’re aware by now that I lived in this country for twenty years before the great fuckedupedness ever began. I knew black kids personally, I saw they way they dressed, and I witnessed a demonstration in the mid-60s that was conducted for the purpose of integration a large local amusement park which involved at least a couple hundred black kids and adults. They dressed like everybody else did in those days when the occasion called for dressing up, the girls in dresses and the guys in slacks and and knit pullover or dress shirts. If the occasion didn’t call for dressing up they dressed casually just like the white kids did, in jeans and knit pullovers for the guys and slacks, ‘pedal-pushers’, shorts, etc. and blouses for the girls. I don’t know what bizarre idea you have of black kids in those days scrounging around in sackcloth and ashes but the reality for black kids in most of the country was quite different.
I hate to sound like a broken record but nope, wrong yet again. The numbers were relatively small in the context I was speaking of because most of the country’s black kids didn’t live in the squalor of inner city ghettos like those to found in NYC, Chicago, etc. The vast majority of the country’s black kids lived and went to school in cities and towns all over America that were far removed from the type of existence those in big city hotspots lived in. And most their parents didn’t have to worry about them becoming drug addicts or drug dealers, or getting killed in drive-by shootings or for their sneakers or the wheels on their cars, or for most of the other reasons young black guys are killing each other these days.
Such as?
Again, such as?
I haven’t said anything ‘only’ began with the rise of liberals. What I’ve said time and time again is that the 50s and 60s were not a perfect time but they were a hell of a lot better than they are now in a great many ways, and that is a fact that is irrefutable. And one of the ways they were better then is in the realm of public education.
Oh, I’ve long suspected that the real motivation for social promotion was simply to allow school teachers and administrators to bail on problem students who were resistant to leaning. I don’t know what you think it proves to point out that a teacher in The Blackboard Jungle suggested doing that very thing way back when, but the point is that it eventually began to happen. And the reason for that is explained perfectly in the complaints I’ve listed upthread. Young, apathetic, ill-educated single mothers, largely absent from participating in their kids’ education, an almost utter lack of discipline either at home or at school, widespread drug use, lousy teachers who can’t be gotten rid of, etc. I’d probably want to kick 'em on up and out myself if faced with trying to educate kids in the environment they’re growing up in today. But that’s exactly my point: things have gotten so bad in today’s society that no real solution exists as to how we stop tolerating bad schools and create good ones to take their place.
And for that claim we have only your unsupported personal feelings.
More personal feelings. I have already asked for citations of comparative scores on the SAT and ACT, stats on college admissions, etc. for which you have provided no information.
Funny. In my world, today, black kids and white kids tend to dress in the same sorts of clothes as each other for the same sort of venues. For that matter, in most of the large companies at which I have worked, (I’ve been able to avoid banks), ties are frequently not seen and colorful shirts are common. Yes, I remember when women were required to wear dresses or skirts in the workplace and school, but that tradition has changed. Seeing that change as some sort of terrible destruction of culture simply means that you should be protesting the fact that women began to be permitted to show their ankles around 1920.
So what was “the context” you were speaking of? That s not in any way clear. After the Great Migration of the 1920s, the overwhelming majority of black kids in the North lived in inner cities because large cities were where the jobs were. There their schools were underfunded, they were discouraged from seeking to attend college, and they left school at earlier ages to find work. I am aware of the small black communities in the North; they, too, were segregated and their kids were only occasionally offered equal (or even adequate) education.
We know what your feelings are on the topic, as unrelated to reality as they are.
Your claim was that social promotion was done for the purpose of not hurting the kids’ feelings and implied that it began in the late 1960s. You got your history wrong, demonstrating that your conclusions are based on errors.
[/QUOTE]
Such as?
[/quote]
Such as your exaggerated claims in your first and last paragraphs that you then attribute to “liberal” changes in society while ignoring both the fact you have exaggerated those claims and that a lot of other events–only a few of them “liberal”–have led to those situations.
The question is not why are American schools bad but why do we tolerate bad schools. I think we tolerate bad schools because we assume that as long as it’s not our kids going to bad schools, then it’s not a problem to us. Out of sight, out of mind. Just like how Americans think about so many other things, like from global warming to cancer screening. I think this is especially true among the descendants of White Anglo-Americans who have typically keeping power at the local level rather than creating large centralized bureaucracies. Local control enables local community activists to create schools that maintain a status quo of White Christian supremacy.
Dude, we all can see what you’re claiming. There’s no confusion about what you’re claiming. The only confusion is why on earth you think anyone should take your claims seriously: they’re completely unsourced, they look ridiculous (“Schools are bad because boys don’t wear knit pullovers as much anymore!” or something), and you may as well be arguing that schools are bad because we’ve stopped putting out saucers of milk for the Wee Folk.
If you want to be taken seriously, bring some clear stats to back up your claim. Otherwise, when you go on these unsourced, bizarre rants about nice clothes and how there were drugs but no black people at Woodstock (seriously, WTF do you think we’re gonna make of that?), I for one will just think about kobolds and pookahs. They’re just as likely, and a lot more interesting.
