Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
Dom
Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
Leonard Pitts Jr.
November 17, 2008
So it seems there's this new couple coming to town (the husband just
got a job with the government). Now they are scouting schools for
their children and people are wondering whether they're going to go
public or private.
Some observers would like Michelle and Barack Obama to send their
daughters to public schools. Doing so, they say, would be a powerful
statement of faith in public education.
All that notwithstanding, I expect the Obamas, like many parents of
means, will choose private schools.
Can we be honest here? I mean, brutally honest? D.C. public schools
are not good enough for the Obama kids. Not because they are D.C.
public schools, but because they are urban public schools.
I'm not doubting the dedication of public school teachers. And yes,
there are exceptional public schools — but the exceptions prove the
rule. Public schools, particularly in urban areas, are largely failing
our children.
Which brings me to Michelle Rhee. You might not know the name yet, but
I'm betting you soon will. She is the Washington, D.C., schools chief
who has drawn national attention for an audacious attempt to remake
some of the nation's worst schools.
Among the changes she has instituted, or is attempting to institute,
is a cash reward for students who meet certain benchmarks of
performance and attendance. She also wants to make it easier to fire
teachers who do not perform; under her plan, educators would give up
tenure protections for a merit plan that would allow the best of them
— i.e., those whose students actually learn something — to earn upward
of $100,000 a year.
Rhee's proposals track closely with some of what I found last year
when I wrote a series of columns on "What Works" to improve education
for at-risk young people. Many educators told me that high on their
wish list would be the ability to reward good teachers and fire bad
ones.
You'd think it would be a no-brainer that people who don't perform get
the ax and those who do get raises. Isn't that the way it works in
most nonunionized professions? But the teachers union apparently
exists in some alternate universe where everyone is rewarded equally
regardless of the quality of their work. So it has fought Rhee with
bitter tenacity, seeking to block her at every step.
Meanwhile, according to the National Center for Education Statistics,
only 48 percent of D.C. eighth-graders had attained basic reading
skills in 2007, "basic" being a term denoting "partial mastery" of
necessary knowledge and skills. Only 12 percent were rated proficient
readers. The corresponding numbers in math: 34 and 8. Those
statistics, dismal as they are, represent an improvement over previous
years.
And D.C. is hardly unique.
All of us, then, have a stake in the success of Michelle Rhee's
experiment. All of us should be yelling for the teachers union to get
out of the way. We need to know if what she proposes will work. And if
it does not, we need to determine what will.
We need, in other words, an urgency we seem to lack.
Too many of us, I think, have made peace with the idea that public
schools don't work, have come to regard it as normal that they crank
out poorly educated kids, have come to accept that certain children in
certain places are ineducable. But I saw the falsity of that with my
own eyes while traveling the country for What Works, saw some of the
nation's best students in some of its most dire places.
The failure here, then, is not the students', but ours — a failure of
will and imagination. We need to reassess things we take for granted.
We need to decide that our children deserve better.
And we need to ask a simple question: if public schools are not good
enough for the president's kids, what makes us think they are good
enough for ours?
• Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated writer in Washington.
iamcaffeinated
her heart in the right place. Teachers should be accountable and good
teachers should be rewarded. The instruments for measuring success,
however, are severely flawed and until this is corrected we will have
no peace in urban schooling.
I'm an ESL teacher in Tennessee and my students take the same
standardized test as their native English-speaking counterparts. I
still can't see how this serves the students, the district, or me.
Since the pressure to achieve on these tests is so high, we've all
become multiple-choice teachers--honing our kids skills at reading
just enough rather than giving them rich literacy experiences.
This is nothing new, of course. We've all heard the same rhetoric
ever since NCLB was passed. I care less about where the new president
sends his kids to school and more about what he does to solve the
problems for the rest of the kids in the nation.
Donna Metler
"iamcaffeinated" <afo...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f949b2ae-9e51-4fca...@c22g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
I'm also a former TN teacher-moved from K-6 public school music teaching to
a poorly paid adjunct position at a university after having my daughter. And
I agree 100% with what you've said above.
In addition, the original author misses one thing about urban schools. Maybe
this isn't true in DC, but it certainly is here and in most urban districts
is that it's not what school DISTRICT you're in, but what school you're
zoned into.
If you live in a high income part of town, there's not a lot of difference
between public and private schools. Both have a lot of bells and whistles
and extras, do a lot of fundraising, and brag about sending children to
exclusive colleges and the number of national merit scholars they produce.
Public schools which serve such neighborhoods often officially are magnet
schools (IB is pretty common) of some form, with open enrollment for the
best and brightest outside the neighborhood, which lets the parents feel
like they're sending their child to a diverse school while actually having
exactly the population they want. Such public schools can largely ignore the
test, because their students will have high test scores no matter what they
do.
In the middle income areas of town, private schools tend to be religious in
nature, subsidized by the church, and most parents who send their children
there are really looking for a religious education. If anything, public
schools often have more bells, whistles, and extras than the private schools
do. Such schools often are labeled as "failing", but if you actually look at
the test scores, are doing well with all but one subgroup (usually ELL or
Special Ed). However, because they're "Failing", the curriculum and
teaching, which had been working for most of the kids, have been altered to
the point that many of these parents are now choosing to homeschool or send
their children to private school due, not to the test scores of the school,
but the changes in instruction which has been forced on the school. This is
where I, personally fall. 10 years ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about
sending my daughter to the neighborhood school we're zoned into, but at this
point, if I want her to learn anything but how to take tests, I have to look
at other options.
In the low income areas of town, the schools were struggling before NCLB,
and NCLB has made things worse. The biggest obstacle these kids face is that
they start school several years behind the kids from middle and upper income
areas already, just due to home experiences and quality of childcare. Unless
a school is operating as a mission and is subsidized, there are no private
schools available to these students. Even if open enrollment or charter
schools are available, many of the students in these schools can't take
advantage of it due to lack of transportation. These schools tend to be
perennially "failing", and, by this point, many have gone through multiple
rounds of changes and restructuring, and the school is in continual panic to
prep for the tests, often to the point that far more time is spent
benchmarking and collecting data on how children are doing than on actual
instruction.
The fact is that it doesn't matter whether Obama sends his children to
private or public schools, because the schools that could handle the secret
service and other things which would come with a presidential child are
going to be the top tier, regardless. And for the vast majority of us, such
schools are simply not an option due to financial status, unless our
children qualify for scholarship assistance or a magnet school placement.
Pubkeybreaker
> "iamcaffeinated" <afow...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
<snip>
> In the low income areas of town, the schools were struggling before NCLB,
> and NCLB has made things worse. The biggest obstacle these kids face is that
> they start school several years behind the kids from middle and upper income
> areas already, just due to home experiences and quality of childcare.
Correct, but IMO, it is more than that. A more basic problem is that
such households tend to treat education with disdain. Education is
something that "whitey" does.
Ask: "why are these households low income"????
The answer is obvious. These households are low income because the
head of
these households is himself/herself poorly educated. And they
convey
their piss-poor attitude toward education to their children.
The second reason was pointed out by Father Drinan. These households
have no father. The fathers tend to follow the FFFFF philosophy.
It is a self-perpetuating problem.
> Unless
> a school is operating as a mission and is subsidized, there are no private
> schools available to these students.
And I doubt whether such households would make use of them even if
they
were available.
Why? Because private education costs money and requires sacrifice on
the
part of the parents for the sake of their children. These households
are too
concerned with "now" to be able to make sacrifices for the future.
Herman Rubin
Pubkeybreaker <pubkey...@aol.com> wrote:
>On Nov 17, 11:02=A0am, "Donna Metler" <dmmet...@nospam.net> wrote:
>> "iamcaffeinated" <afow...@gmail.com> wrote in message
<snip>
>> In the low income areas of town, the schools were struggling before NCLB,
>> and NCLB has made things worse. The biggest obstacle these kids face is t=
>hat
>> they start school several years behind the kids from middle and upper inc=
>ome
>> areas already, just due to home experiences and quality of childcare.
>Correct, but IMO, it is more than that. A more basic problem is that
>such households tend to treat education with disdain. Education is
>something that "whitey" does.
>Ask: "why are these households low income"????
>The answer is obvious. These households are low income because the
>head of
>these households is himself/herself poorly educated. And they
>convey
>their piss-poor attitude toward education to their children.
I come from a low income family, and my parents were
poorly educated by any standards, being themselves
immigrants. My father, who was probably a genius,
had less than one year of formal education.
But this does not mean that they had a poor attitude
toward education of their children. They deliberately
only spoke English at home, except when the visitor
had to use Yiddish, but also told us to learn English
"right" in the public schools. This was no long
possible when I graduated elementary school.
>The second reason was pointed out by Father Drinan. These households
>have no father. The fathers tend to follow the FFFFF philosophy.
>It is a self-perpetuating problem.
>> Unless
>> a school is operating as a mission and is subsidized, there are no privat=
>e
>> schools available to these students.
Get the ones willing and able to learn OUT of those schools.
Decent learning is not possible in a classroom in which a
sizable proportion of the children are either unwilling or
unable to learn in a manner in which the "good" ones can.
Teachers should be talent scouts, looking for the good
students to be taught more and advanced. This might make
their classes do worse on standard exams, but denying this
is directly opposed to education.
>And I doubt whether such households would make use of them even if
>they
>were available.
>Why? Because private education costs money and requires sacrifice on
>the
>part of the parents for the sake of their children. These households
>are too
>concerned with "now" to be able to make sacrifices for the future.
Communities with that attitude need to change, and it
must come from within. We must help the minority of
children capable of changing despite the community to
accomplish what they can, despite their "peer group"
in the community. I know that this goes contrary to
Michelle Obama's thesis, but anything else should be
considered abominable.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hru...@stat.purdue.edu Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
iamcaffeinated
I'm going to have to disagree with the notion that teachers should be
talent scouts, separating the wheat from the chaff. All of the
students have potential and should all be treated as such. It's hard,
very hard, but we can't ascribe the same agency to a teenager that we
do to an adult. I don't think it's fair to say that some kids want to
learn and others don't. They're too young to make these decisions for
themselves.
As to the previous post alleging that the parents of children in
failing schools don't care about education...well...I'm going to
remain cautiously silent. I've seen some really dedicated parents in
my short tenure in American schools and they have really given me hope.
lml...@gmail.com
I am a supporter and firm believer in public schools and I think it
would be huge for Obama to have his two girls attend a public school
in D.C. I feel that a strong statement would be made about how Obama
views and supports public schools if his daughters actually attend
one. Additionally, I feel that the struggling public schools in
Washington D.C. will feel confident that they are able to change and
become "good" schools seeing that the President has faith in them by
sending his daughters to a public school. I don't believe in what
Michelle Rhee is doing with merit pay. Paying teachers extra for
having a successful class or paying students for excelling in school
is not a wise use of money in my mind. Being a successful teacher is
a teacher's job and going to school and studying is the job of
students. So paying students and teachers extra money for doing
something that is expected of them anyways is not right in my mind.
Teachers and students are going to become dependent on merit pay even
after these schools get back on track which could create a problem of
teachers only trying the hardest to educate all of the students only
if they receive additional money. Instead I think this money should
be used for resources in the classrooms. On the other hand, something
has to change in D.C. with the public schools and I don't know what
the answer is to make these schools successful. So I do give credit
to Michelle Rhee for making some drastic changes and trying out things
to get these public schools to be successful again.
Cary Kittrell
>
> I am a supporter and firm believer in public schools and I think it
> would be huge for Obama to have his two girls attend a public school
> in D.C. I feel that a strong statement would be made about how Obama
> views and supports public schools if his daughters actually attend
> one. Additionally, I feel that the struggling public schools in
> Washington D.C. will feel confident that they are able to change and
> become "good" schools seeing that the President has faith in them by
> sending his daughters to a public school.
That's a lovely idea, but don't you think that security considerations
would make it almost impossible?
-- cary
Herman Rubin
>I'm going to have to disagree with the notion that teachers should be
>talent scouts, separating the wheat from the chaff. All of the
>students have potential and should all be treated as such.
They have their individual potentials, but not equal or even
comparable potential. A child who can read at age 3 should
be advanced quickly, while one who has difficulty at age 6
cannot be. A child who has learned abstract mathematics at
age 6, or even at age 9, should not be placed in an elementary
school arithmetic class, where the concepts are not even taught.
Nor should such a child be taught science the kid stuff way;
they are ready to consider mathematical expressions of the
understood laws.
It's hard,
>very hard, but we can't ascribe the same agency to a teenager that we
>do to an adult.
By the time children reach their teens, the educationists
have already done much damage.
I don't think it's fair to say that some kids want to
>learn and others don't. They're too young to make these decisions for
>themselves.
Nonsense. They all want to learn when very young, but even
being with playmates who prefer lots of fun to learning, or
even being with other children whose parents are not teaching
them to read early, can damage or even destroy this.
>As to the previous post alleging that the parents of children in
>failing schools don't care about education...well...I'm going to
>remain cautiously silent. I've seen some really dedicated parents in
>my short tenure in American schools and they have really given me hope.
My statements were general, not universal. Also, many children
do not have the mental ability to learn at a "reasonable" rate;
they need alternate approaches, possibly taking fewer classes at
a time. I took "overloads" quite deliberately, preferring learning
to grades.
akoz...@gmail.com
Although I do agree that it would be a grand gesture for President-
Elect Obama to send his daughters to public school in Washington D.C.,
I do worry about security issues. As with any President and his
family, the type of attention that his girls will receive in school
may be extremely overwhelming. As a President (and as any parent would
agree with), I am sure that he wants what is best for his daughters. I
think that it would be a better gesture if he sat down and really
reviewed the policies that are in place today. I do feel that Obama
has great plans for this country and will turn it around, including
education. However, it is seemingly known that at this current moment,
the schools are not up to par for anyone's standards. In my opinion
Obama should spend time reviewing the policies and making changes to
what is not working in education today, so that he can change the
schools of tomorrow. Having his daughters be young in age may be
helpful and beneficial to us, who are hoping for changes in education.
Hopefully he keeps his daughters' education and the state of D.C.
school's in mind while making changes to the current system. Because
such a drastic change needs to be made in D.C., Michelle Rhee does
need to instate a drastic policy. However, how long lasting will its
benefits be? Only time will tell...
Rowley
Martin
Dom wrote:
> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508482.column
>
> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
Who's kids? I ain't got any.... So are public schools goof enough IMO
for your kids - it was good enough for me when I was a student and
AFAICT, the system where I taught it was good enough... Nowadays - that
might not be true depending on who you ask. Last year the HS campus here
didn't make the grade - mainly due to changes in who now gets included
in having to take the state's standardized tests....
> Leonard Pitts Jr.
>
> November 17, 2008
>
> So it seems there's this new couple coming to town (the husband just
> got a job with the government). Now they are scouting schools for
> their children and people are wondering whether they're going to go
> public or private.
Sound like a reasonable thing to do.... I could see a lot of variables
going into such a decision..... Course, most people tend to disregard
such things as variables...... (sounds a bit too much like some kind of
math problem....)
> Some observers would like Michelle and Barack Obama to send their
> daughters to public schools. Doing so, they say, would be a powerful
> statement of faith in public education.
IMO, that is them ignoring the variables....
> All that notwithstanding, I expect the Obamas, like many parents of
> means, will choose private schools.
My guess is that there will be 'others' that influence the decisions
that they "make".... Secret Service and probably Homeland Security will
pretty much lobby for what ever would make their jobs easier to do -
least that is my guess.... but who am I to second guess what happens?
> Can we be honest here? I mean, brutally honest? D.C. public schools
> are not good enough for the Obama kids. Not because they are D.C.
> public schools, but because they are urban public schools.
Eh, might make sense to simply set up classrooms at their new
residence... I've seen where that happens a lot with child actors....
> I'm not doubting the dedication of public school teachers. And yes,
> there are exceptional public schools — but the exceptions prove the
> rule. Public schools, particularly in urban areas, are largely failing
> our children.
You have your own kids in that school district? Didn't realize that....
> Which brings me to Michelle Rhee. You might not know the name yet, but
> I'm betting you soon will. She is the Washington, D.C., schools chief
> who has drawn national attention for an audacious attempt to remake
> some of the nation's worst schools.
>
> Among the changes she has instituted, or is attempting to institute,
> is a cash reward for students who meet certain benchmarks of
> performance and attendance. She also wants to make it easier to fire
> teachers who do not perform; under her plan, educators would give up
> tenure protections for a merit plan that would allow the best of them
> — i.e., those whose students actually learn something — to earn upward
> of $100,000 a year.
Heck, AFAIK about 1/2 the states in the US are 'Right-to-Work" states,
teacher tenure isn't an issue....
> Rhee's proposals track closely with some of what I found last year
> when I wrote a series of columns on "What Works" to improve education
> for at-risk young people. Many educators told me that high on their
> wish list would be the ability to reward good teachers and fire bad
> ones.
Question is... who determines who is a bad teacher and who is a good
one? I've seen some odd ideas of who is what perpetrated by the local
school administrators here..... but I find it refreshing that you have
some degree of faith that such a process might work... (least it seems
so to me...)
> You'd think it would be a no-brainer that people who don't perform get
> the ax and those who do get raises. Isn't that the way it works in
> most nonunionized professions?
Eh - it's been my experience that sometimes that is true and sometimes
it not.... Office Politics can be just as bad as what goes on in
education.... heck, Scott Adams has made a career from that being the
case.....
Martin
yaycamp
> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
Wouldn't it be great if the Obama girls went to public school? I am a
huge supporter of public schools. Public schools are a place where
students come in contact with peers that come from all different walks
of life. Here, despite differences students learn to work together
and interact with people who are much different than themselves. I
think this is an important life skill. Not to say that people from
different backgrounds don't go to private schools, but I think public
schools offer much more diversity. If people who send their kids to
private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake. What
happens when school is over and these students end up encountering
these ideas or people in the real world?
I think the bigger issue here, however, is if the Washington DC public
schools aren't good enough for the President's kids, then they aren't
good enough for ANY kids. I know huge changes are going on in the DC
school district, but maybe more changes need to be made to make our
public schools a place of equal learning for ALL of our nation's
children.
yaycamp
> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>
Wouldn't it be great if the Obama girls went to public school? I am a
jingojones
"yaycamp" <elea...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:bec02a86-0984-42e9...@1g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
> On Nov 17, 6:29 am, Dom <DR...@teikyopost.edu> wrote:
>> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>>
>> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
>> Leonard Pitts Jr.
>>
>> November 17, 2008
>>
SNIP of a professional whiner
Pitts Jr. is a syndicated writer in Washington.
>
> Wouldn't it be great if the Obama girls went to public school? I am a
> huge supporter of public schools. Public schools are a place where
> students come in contact with peers that come from all different walks
> of life. Here, despite differences students learn to work together
> and interact with people who are much different than themselves. I
> think this is an important life skill. Not to say that people from
> different backgrounds don't go to private schools, but I think public
> schools offer much more diversity. If people who send their kids to
> private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
> ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake. What
> happens when school is over and these students end up encountering
> these ideas or people in the real world?
It would only be great if the Obamas thought so. You, of course, are free to
send you own children to private schools, too.
>
> I think the bigger issue here, however, is if the Washington DC public
> schools aren't good enough for the President's kids, then they aren't
> good enough for ANY kids. I know huge changes are going on in the DC
> school district, but maybe more changes need to be made to make our
> public schools a place of equal learning for ALL of our nation's
> children.
If the schools in DC aren't good enough for its citizens then those citizens
should work to make those schools meet their standards. Maybe the problem is
the schools already meet the standards required by the DC community.
As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without lowering
expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
Herman Rubin
jingojones <ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote:
>"yaycamp" <elea...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>news:bec02a86-0984-42e9...@1g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
>> On Nov 17, 6:29 am, Dom <DR...@teikyopost.edu> wrote:
>>> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>>> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
>>> Leonard Pitts Jr.
......................
>> I think the bigger issue here, however, is if the Washington DC public
>> schools aren't good enough for the President's kids, then they aren't
>> good enough for ANY kids. I know huge changes are going on in the DC
>> school district, but maybe more changes need to be made to make our
>> public schools a place of equal learning for ALL of our nation's
>> children.
>If the schools in DC aren't good enough for its citizens then those citizens
>should work to make those schools meet their standards. Maybe the problem is
>the schools already meet the standards required by the DC community.
Different members of the community have different standards,
and they should. There is no way that public schools can
get up to the standards of just before I went to them in less
than a generation; it will take that long to get enough
teachers not tainted by the educationists, and knowing their
subjects, not just the trivial pursuit.
>As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without lowering
>expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
grade-a-year must go.
iamcaffeinated
> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
> or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
> grade-a-year must go.
>
Just wanted to comment on this part. I agree, up to a point.
My school district is plagued with "overage" students. That is, we
have several students who are 2 years or more above their grade
level. To illustrate, I have several 15-year old 8th graders.
These students are visibly frustrated at being grouped with younger
students when their social development needs require that they be
around kids closer to their age. We must not forget the role schools
play in acculturating kids to society. Most of the time, these kids
have flunked earlier in their academic careers and are still playing
catch-up. Unfortunately, they also often get automatically jumped
ahead to their proper grade.
Still, the idea that kids should advance a grade simply because
they've survived a year is a bit absurd. The further away you step
from the current structure of American education, the more absurdities
you see. It seems to me that we have 12 grades simply to keep kids in
school until they are 18, regardless of whether or not they are
"prepared" to exit school at that time.
Grouping by ability, though, has drawbacks. Ability grouping can lead
to tracking, thus depriving underperforming students from ever having
a chance at high achievement. I do believe that we have to begin each
day with the attitude that although this kid performed poorly
yesterday, he/she might shock me today.
To get back in the neighborhood of the original post, does anybody
have any concrete suggestions for Obama? What specifically can be
changed?
jingojones
"iamcaffeinated" <afo...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1508ad23-c092-4f0d...@d36g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Education is a local issue so Obama should keep it at arms length.
jingojones
"Herman Rubin" <hru...@odds.stat.purdue.edu> wrote in message
news:gfum87$33...@odds.stat.purdue.edu...
The school system I attended will not likely ever return. When I attended
public school, the system was set up with white schools, separate but equal
schools, and we seldom ever saw a special ed student.
>
>>As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without lowering
>>expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
>
> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
> or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
> grade-a-year must go.
Age grouping can't go until taxpayers are willing to pay for age segregated
classrooms. The local system doesn't allow for students to be held back more
than twice since doing so results in students to old to freely interact with
much younger students that are on a different level with both social and
physical development. Underperformers eventually get stopped at grade 8.5 in
which they go to the high school campus but are not, in fact, HS students.
email.fo...@gmail.com
> Wouldn't it be great if the Obama girls went to public school?
Great for whom? The girls? Obama's career? The teachers, school
staff, students, and parents who have to deal with the additional
hoopla associated with having a pair of students requiring top level
security at all times and constant attempts of intrusion by press,
fans, nutjobs, etc.?
> I am a
> huge supporter of public schools. Public schools are a place where
> students come in contact with peers that come from all different walks
> of life. Here, despite differences students learn to work together
> and interact with people who are much different than themselves.
Not necessarily. Public schools service their surrounding area, and
not all neighborhoods are diverse.
> I think this is an important life skill. Not to say that people from
> different backgrounds don't go to private schools, but I think public
> schools offer much more diversity.
It really depends on the area.
If the Obama's want diversity, Georgetown Day and Sidwell Friends
offer diversity.
> If people who send their kids to
> private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
> ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake.
Are you saying the Obamas are/would do this?
> What
> happens when school is over and these students end up encountering
> these ideas or people in the real world?
Do you think the Obama kids need to attend public school in order to
encounter different people and ideas?
> I think the bigger issue here, however, is if the Washington DC public
> schools aren't good enough for the President's kids, then they aren't
> good enough for ANY kids.
Have you ever stepped foot into a DC public school? I agree that
there are some that aren't fit for any kids, but why do Obama's kids
need to go there?
Should he sell his kids out to make a political statement or do what's
best for his kids? I say give your kids the best opportunity, whether
it's in terms of education, medical care, etc.
> I know huge changes are going on in the DC
> school district, but maybe more changes need to be made to make our
> public schools a place of equal learning for ALL of our nation's
> children.
There will be no chance of that. I'm not being down on public
education - it's just that there are too many factors involved, such
as funding issues, opinions about what's important with regard to the
curriculum and opinions about how to deliver the curriculum.
sf
wrote:
>And we need to ask a simple question: if public schools are not good
>enough for the president's kids, what makes us think they are good
>enough for ours?
Garbage in, garbage out. Don't expect teachers to cure the ills of
society - which they have to do to teach effectively in urban schools.
--
I never worry about diets. The only carrots that
interest me are the number of carats in a diamond.
Mae West
sf
Rubin) wrote:
>Get the ones willing and able to learn OUT of those schools.
>Decent learning is not possible in a classroom in which a
>sizable proportion of the children are either unwilling or
>unable to learn in a manner in which the "good" ones can.
>
>Teachers should be talent scouts, looking for the good
>students to be taught more and advanced. This might make
>their classes do worse on standard exams, but denying this
>is directly opposed to education.
OK, fine. Take the anyone with an aptitude for learning and put them
in a rich academic environment, but don't crucify the teachers who are
stuck teaching the leftovers for not raising test scores.
Greegor
How ironic!
One of the founding fathers of Social Work,
Arthur Wallace Calhoun, in 1919 wrote that
kids are too important to be trusted to mere parents.
If the avowed Socialists who actually started ""Social Work""
had their way, all children would be property of the
"Socialist Commonwealth".
Look up Parens Patriae and you'll find out that
all kids already are "children of the state" in the USA.
It is not only in anticipation of wartime that
children are important to the state.
Ironically, the state has proven over and
over again to be the WORST possible parent.
As such, being "second guessed" by these incompetents
is surreal.
Some other American founders for Social Work
were the Fabians. They had a logo (crest or artwork)
that was a wolf in sheeps clothing, which apparently
the Child Protection INDUSTRY has taken to heart
as evidenced by much of their behavior.
Arthur Wallace Calhoun, PhD
taught at Brockwood Labor College
and the CP's Workers School.
(Communist Party)
A Social History of the American Family:
From Colonial Times to the Present 1919
by Arthur H Clark Company Cleveland, Ohio
In 1927, for the American Academy of Political & Social Science,
he wrote "The Worker looks at government" 176 pages.
"The family goes back to the age of savagery while the
state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern
individual is a world citizen, served by the world,
and home interests can no longer be supreme"...
"socialism is"...
"we may expect in the socialist commonwealth"...
G > Please explain to me where the dignity of the family
G > fits in with that OUTRIGHT socialist political agenda
G > to trash the US Family in general?
http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.050131.homecoming.htm
Early 20th Century American Progressives also saw the care and
teaching of small children at home as a problem. As the historian
Arthur Calhoun wrote in his influential 1918 volume, A Social History
of the American Family:
The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to
society rather than to family. The family goes back to the age of
savagery, while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The
modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home
interests can no longer be supreme.[5]
http://www.newswithviews.com/Cuddy/dennis14.htm
Cuddy article also quoted on several other web sites.
MENTAL HEALTH AND WORLD CITIZENSHIP
By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
August 11, 2004
In a recent article, I related that the Bush administration's
Secretary of Education Rod Paige last October 3 declared that the
U.S.
is pleased to rejoin UNESCO where we could develop common strategies
to prepare our children to become "citizens of the world."
Then on June 21 WorldNetDaily published "Life With Big Brother: Bush
to screen population for mental illness" describing President Bush's
"New Freedom Initiative" that would have every citizen receive a
mental health screening. What one needs to guard against is the use
of
mental health to pursue world government.
The theme of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson was "The
New Freedom" and it pursued the ideals of PHILIP DRU: ADMINISTRATOR,
written in 1912 by President Wilson's chief adviser, Col. Edward M.
House, who wrote of "socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx." Education
would be a primary vehicle for achieving the objective, and John
Dewey, the father of progressive education, promoted socialism. He
said the society or group is most important, and that independent
individualists have a form of "insanity."
By the late 1940s, Dewey's progressive education was becoming
dominant
in American public schools. And in 1948 an International Congress on
Mental Health was held in London with publication of a document
"Mental Health and World Citizenship," declaring that "world
citizenship can be widely extended among all peoples through the
application of the principles of mental health." The Congress
promoted
the U.N. as the vehicle for promoting this objective, and UNESCO's
director-general Sir Julian Huxley the same year wrote in UNESCO: ITS
PURPOSE AND ITS PHILOSOPHY that "political unification in some sort
of
world government will be required."
The 1950s and 1960s saw the growing strength of Dewey's progressive
educational philosophy and mental health advocacy, and in 1965 the
Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children was established. In
1969, the Commission released its report, which stated: "As the home
and church decline in influence...schools must begin to provide
adequately for the emotional and moral development of children....The
school...must assume a direct responsibility for the attitudes and
values of child development. The child advocate, psychologist, social
technician, and medical technician should all reach aggressively into
the community, send workers out to children's homes, recreation
facilities, and schools. They should assume full responsibility for
all education, including pre-primary education."
In the 1970s, a representative of HEW (U.S. Department of Health,
Education and Welfare) approached North Carolina Governor James B.
Hunt, Jr. about developing a model for child health care around the
nation. The N.C. Plan was called "Child Health Plan for Raising a New
Generation," and included establishing a "health care home" for every
child, stating "responsibilities belonging to child and family are
required." The plan was released in 1979, the same year the N.C.
State
Health Plan was adopted, linking in two places religion with mental
illness and mental retardation.
In the same year (1979), Bill Clinton (supported by Hillary Clinton)
began Arkansas' Governor's School for the Gifted and Talented,
modeled
after the first Governor's School in the nation which was established
in 1963 in N.C., was funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation, and
was attended by the writer of this article. We were given various
psychological tests which, I believe, looked at us as guinea pigs to
be remoulded for the Brave New World of the future.
When Hillary Clinton became First Lady of the U.S. in 1993, she was
in
charge of a health care task force, about half the members of whom
were connected with the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation. On the
NBC "Today Show" (January 23, 1990), Dr. Michael Lewis of the New
Jersey Robert Wood Johnson Medical School had claimed: "Lying is an
important part of social life, and children who are unable to do it
are children who may have developmental problems."
What Hillary Clinton's task force was proposing was basically
socialized medicine. Hillary's friend, former N.C. Gov. Hunt, became
director of RWJ's Mental Health Services for Youth program. And
regarding a January 4-5, 1996 symposium in Frankfurt, KY, attended by
attorney Kent Masterson Brown, the attorney said: "He (former Gov.
Hunt) came to Governor Wallace Wilkinson in Kentucky and told him
that
RWJ would like Kentucky to become part of this mental health program
for youth, and said we'll give you $100,000 to plan a
program....That's what they do. I mean, you think that's just buying
legislation. Well, it is."
The next year, early in 1997, former Gov. Hunt was chairman of the
National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) and promoted the Early
Childhood
Public Engagement Campaign that actor Rob Reiner and others were
starting, with the Carnegie Corporation once again playing a critical
role (the Carnegie Institution in 1904 had financed the establishment
of a biological experiment station related to eugenics at Cold Spring
Harbor, NY). The NEGP indicated a desire for the creation of a
nationalized system of child care from age zero based upon the
principles of brain research (mental health). Roy Roemer, Governor of
Colorado at the time, stated: "The ideal system would be...in every
community or county you have an organizational structure that is
responsible for the zero to 6, zero to 3 age level for the
child....And then finally put in a hooker and say, 'Hey, you don't
get
any payments from state on their highways until you do this job.'"
It may be this same type of coercive tactic that is used to
facilitate
the current New Freedom Initiative. Mental health screenings may be
attached to the current vaccines most children are required to
receive
to attend public schools. And for older people, they may be asked by
insurance companies to "voluntarily" accept the screenings if they
don't want their premiums to increase.
In 2001, President George W. Bush worked with U.S. Senator Ted
Kennedy
to pass the federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation, which
includes
provisions for expanding school-based mental health programs. This
fits with the report of The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health,
which stressed that "schools must be partners in the mental health
care of our children."
--------------------------------
Where is all this leading? In the third volume of Arthur Calhoun's A
SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY, published in 1919 and widely
used as a social service textbook, one reads: "The new view is that
the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to
the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the
state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a
world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer
be supreme....As soon as the new family, consisting of only the
parents and the children, stood forth, society saw how many were
unfit
for parenthood and began to realize the need of community care....As
familism weakens, society has to assume a larger parenthood. The
school begins to assume responsibility for the functions thrust upon
it....The kindergarten grows downward toward the cradle and there
arises talk of neighborhood nurseries....Social centers replace the
old time home chimney....The child passes more and more into the
custody of community experts....In the new social order, extreme
emphasis is sure to be placed upon eugenic procreation....It seems
clear that at least in its early stages, socialism will mean an
increased amount of social control....We may expect in the socialist
commonwealth a system of public educational agencies that will begin
with the nursery and follow the individual through life....Those
persons that experience alarm at the thought of intrinsic changes in
family institutions should remember that in the light of social
evolution, nothing is right or valuable in itself."
--------------------
Relevant to this, Clinton administration official Mary Jo Bane said
almost 30 years ago that "in order to raise children with equality,
we
must take them away from families and communally raise them." (TULSA
SUNDAY WORLD, August 21, 1977) And about that same time, HEW
Executive
Assistant Eddie Bernice Johnson (who would later become a
Congresswoman from Texas) advocated the licensing of parents before
they would be permitted to have children. Licensing of parents has
also been proposed by Prof. Gene Stephens (THE FUTURIST, April 1981)
and Dr. Jack Westman (LICENSING PARENTS, 1994).
Under the American socialism planned for our future, government will
increasingly control our lives via mental health screening and
education, among other means. Only if the American people resist
these
efforts as soon as possible will we be successful in thwarting the
plans of the power elite.
© 2004 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved
http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w15.html
The Perils of Parens Patriae, or When the State Becomes Daddy
by William Norman Grigg
"In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield
themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand."
~ Frederick Gates, chairman of the Rockefeller-created General
Education Board, 1902.
For those of us who love and understand individual freedom, it
sometimes seems as if the Atlantic just isn't wide enough to impede
the collaboration of Anglo-American elites seeking to re-mold the
world closer to their hearts' desire.
That last phrase, incidentally, assumes that those elites, who look
at
us with “bright, dead alien eyes,” could be said to have human
hearts.
The government of departing British Prime Minister Tony Blair has
announced a new initiative entitled the “Nurse Family Partnership”
that would (in the words of the Guardian of London) “intervene as
early as possible in troubled families, first-time mothers identified
just 16 weeks after conception [who] will be given intensive weekly
support from midwives and health visitors until the unborn child
reaches two years old.”
This program could be considered a form of pre-emptive parens
patriae;
that phrase refers to the fatherhood of the State. The Guardian
captured the essence of the British early-intervention initiative in
its headline: “Unborn babies targeted in crackdown on criminality.”
The Blair government, summarized that left-leaning periodical, “is
prepared to single out babies still in the womb to break cycles of
deprivation and behaviour.... Under the programme, which has been
copied from the United States, young, first-time mothers will be
assigned a personal health visitor at between 16 and 20 weeks into
their pregnancy. They will continue to have weekly or fortnightly
visits until the child is two....” (Emphasis added.)
“Children belong to the general family, to the state, before
belonging
to private families."
~ French Revolutionary leader Bertrand Barere, whose memory was later
invoked by French parents to scare disobedient children (I'm
serious)
The objective is for these intruders, who are clothed in the supposed
authority of the State (the “coldest of all cold monsters”), to
instruct mothers how to care for their own flesh and blood. The
program is “voluntary,” for now. It will not remain so.
As noted above, the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) was devised in the
United States by Dr. David Olds of the University of Colorado. It has
been implemented in 22 states, and legislation proposed by Senators
Ken Salazar (D-Colorado) and Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) would
“expand access” to the program to all 50 states and the District of
Columbia “through the State Children's Health Insurance Program
(SCHIP) ... providing at-home nurse visits for up to 570,000 first-
time mothers each year.”
For more than a century, collectivist social engineers have extolled
the merits of home visitations by State-assigned social workers as a
way of circumventing parental authority and establishing a
proprietary
claim on children. The most notorious recent examples – on this side
of the Atlantic, in any case – are Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno,
the
latter demonstrating her solicitude for children by immolating more
than a dozen of them at Mt. Carmel and sending stormtroopers to seize
another from his Miami relatives at gunpoint.
In her ghost-written opus It Takes a Village, Madame Hillary
rhapsodized that she “can't say enough” about the merits of home
visitation programs. The Nation's Alexander Cockburn, whose household
acquaintances in England included members of the Fabian Socialist
movement, has pointed out that Hillary's blueprint for social
engineering bears a familial resemblance to Fabianism.
"Time and again, reading … It Takes a Village, I was reminded of
[Fabian founder] Beatrice Webb," Cockburn has observed. "There's the
same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition
until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom
that
gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic
policing."
Photo captions: "Home visitation" à la Janet Reno in
Miami.... ...
and in Waco.
In his 1919 book New Worlds for Old, Fabian activist H.G. Wells
(better known for his science fiction offerings), laid out the basic
premise of “therapeutic policing”: “Socialism regards parentage under
proper safeguards as 'not only a duty but a service' to the state;
that is to say, it proposes to pay for good parentage – in other
words, to endow the home.”
By making the mother dependent on subsidies, the State became the
surrogate father. And, as Wells pointed out, the State claims the
right to raise “its” children, should the natural parents be found
unsuitable. This is the tacit but unmistakable threat that
accompanies
every State official who is permitted to violate the sanctity of the
home.
The Blair regime's NFP Action Plan makes this quite plain, at least
to
people alert to the nuances of State-speak:
Section 1.2 of the Action Plan claims a mandate for the government to
assure that nobody is permitted to “waste” his “human potential,”
since this is “bad for the whole country.”
Section 1.6 asserts the State's right and capacity to take
“preventative action” within the home in order to “tackle problems
before they become fully entrenched and blight the lives of both
individuals and wider society.”
Section 1.9 attempts to cast “wider society” as a victim of
unregulated families, since “the behaviour of some people –
particularly some of the most challenging families – causes real
disruption and distress in the community around them.”
ZZ Top they ain't, but they are one of history's most notable power
trios, "The Therapeutic Police": Fabian founders Beatrice and Sydney
Webb (from the left, appropriately), and Fabian popularizer George
Bernard Shaw.
Thus the need, as the Blair regime and its American consultant
describe it, to “develop and promote better prediction tools for use
by front-line practitioners” and take measures “to ensure that those
identified as at risk are followed up.”
Some sense of the purpose of “following up” on “at risk” families can
be found in the British Government's Policy Review paper, “The Role
of
the State”:
“The state ... has the legitimate monopoly of force in a given
territory,” that paper begins, immediately laying a totalitarian
foundation (from Lenin – the State exercises “power without limit,
resting directly on force”; from Mussolini – “Everything within the
State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”).
Photo caption:
The Fabian Socialist crest depicts a wolf in sheep's clothing – a
suitable symbol for that subversive movement, and an apt metaphor for
government "home visitation" programs.
The NFP initiative, the paper continues, is inspired by the vision of
a “strategic and enabling state” which would be “less about command
and control and more about collaboration and partnership.” The state
will “focus on ends, not the means by which [its] goals are
delivered,” working through “a new partnership between the State and
the citizen.”
Ah, but remember that the “collaborator” and “partner” offering its
assistance to the citizen claims “the legitimate monopoly of force,”
which means that in the event of a dispute, it is the citizen, not
the
State, that will be compelled to yield.
To anyone even slightly familiar with the tenets of the Clinton-era
“Third Way,” or the nostrums of the attenuated variety of Marxism
called “Communitarianism,” none of this will be new. It may strike
some as remarkable that the American version of the NFP program has
become so deeply entrenched during the reign of George W. Bush, but
this wouldn't be considered odd by those who understand
“compassionate
conservatism” to be politically enharmonic with Clinton's “I Feel
Your
Pain”-style corporatism.
Furthermore, as much as it pains me to admit it, the British Fabian
Socialists have nothing on their American counterparts regarding the
long, patient campaign to subvert the family.
“Since the 1840s … American social history could be written as the
deliberate dismantling of the home-centered economy, and the
consequent decay of the foundations of our liberty,” observers Dr.
Alan Carlson. “[T]his turn against the home was not a natural
consequence of industrialization or the emergence of a modern
economy.
Rather, the change derived from the application of statist ideology
and consciously-made political and legal choices.”
"The first direct assault on family autonomy grew out of the reform
school movement during the 1830s," whose influence was particularly
strong in New York and Pennsylvania, continues Dr. Carlson. In 1839,
the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, acting on assumptions inspired by the
reform school movement, invoked the concept of parens patriae to
justify the state's actions in supplanting parents it found "unequal
to" or "unworthy of the task" of educating children.
In 1882, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled: "It is the unquestioned
right and imperative duty of every enlightened government, in its
character of parens patriae to protect and provide for the comfort
and
well-being of its citizens.... The performance of this duty is justly
regarded as one of the most important governmental functions, and all
constitutional limitations must be so understood and construed so as
not to interfere with its proper and legitimate exercise." (Emphasis
added.) The principle of parens patriae, properly understood,
requires
the demolition of all constitutional limitations, rather than their
“redefinition.”
In 1913, Dr. Arthur W. Calhoun published A Social History of The
American Family: From Colonial Times to the Present, which would
become an authoritative text for American social-service and welfare
workers. Calhoun was remarkably unabashed in promoting a perspective
on State supremacy that could have been offered by Marx and Engels
(who brazenly called for “abolition of the family!” in the Communist
Manifesto):
"American history consummates the disappearance of the wider [or
extended] familism and the substitution of the parentalism of
society.... The new view is that the higher and more obligatory
relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes
back
to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of
civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the
world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."
By 1930, the year that President Herbert Hoover convened the White
House Conference on Child Health and Protection, it was possible for
an American president to describe, in public, the individual child as
someone "who belongs to the community almost as much as to the
family," and a citizen of "a world predestinedly [sic] moving toward
unity.” The latter phrase seems to foretell, by roughly six decades,
the claim contained in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child that government is the primary custodian of all children,
with the UN itself at the head of a global system of parens patriae.
For more than a century and a half, collectivist cliques on both
sides
of the Atlantic have been engaged in a kind of dialectical pas de
deuxwhere State control over the family is concerned, each side
propelling the other to ever-greater heights of presumption. As I
said, sometimes it seems a pity that England is just one ocean away.
May 26, 2007
Copyright © 2007 William Norman Grigg writes the Pro Libertate blog.
Pubkeybreaker
> On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > If people who send their kids to
> > private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
> > ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake.
My opinion is that most people who send their kids to private
religious schools do so for EXACTLY this reason: to insulate
them from ideas with which they disagree. Diversity and freedom
of thought is the last thing these people want.
<snip>
> > I think the bigger issue here, however, is if the Washington DC public
> > schools aren't good enough for the President's kids, then they aren't
> > good enough for ANY kids.
Yep. I strongly expect that they really are not good enough for
anyone.
Larry Hewitt
President's kids have security needs far beyond those of everyone else's
kids, and providing that security is far more difficult at a large ,
open campus, public school than in a small, closed campus private school.
There is also the consideration of what the security details for the
kids would do to the public school. Four armed secret service agents
walking the halls of a middle school around here would be a major
disruption. The need to get the kids in and out of school away from the
mass of hundreds of kids rushing for the bus or their parents' cars
would be daunting for both the school and the secret service.
Even our governor, despite having his kids in public school before he
was elected, moved them to private school because of the security
problems after some wacko threatened his oldest.
Larry
>
Herman Rubin
iamcaffeinated <afo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
>> or the ones they have brainwashed. =A0Age grouping and automatic
>> grade-a-year must go.
>Just wanted to comment on this part. I agree, up to a point.
>My school district is plagued with "overage" students. That is, we
>have several students who are 2 years or more above their grade
>level. To illustrate, I have several 15-year old 8th graders.
They are probably not prepared for 8th grade.
But having someone who has difficulty repeat the same
material in the same manner does not work either. The
schools do not adequately address the problems of those
with lower ability, either.
>These students are visibly frustrated at being grouped with younger
>students when their social development needs require that they be
>around kids closer to their age. We must not forget the role schools
>play in acculturating kids to society. Most of the time, these kids
>have flunked earlier in their academic careers and are still playing
>catch-up. Unfortunately, they also often get automatically jumped
>ahead to their proper grade.
For most of them, "catch-up" is impossible. It might
be the case if they were for some reason delayed, but
that should have been caught early and attended to.
The only way a slow runner can catch up to a faster
one is if the faster one is slowed down; this is what
the schools are doing now.
Either have students have a "home room", or better,
desocialize the schools completely. It was the
educationists who put in the idea of social development
about 75 years ago, with the attendant destruction of
the quality of the school program.
You cannot have a school as a place to learn and also a
place to socialize with one's age group.
>Still, the idea that kids should advance a grade simply because
>they've survived a year is a bit absurd. The further away you step
>from the current structure of American education, the more absurdities
>you see. It seems to me that we have 12 grades simply to keep kids in
>school until they are 18, regardless of whether or not they are
>"prepared" to exit school at that time.
>Grouping by ability, though, has drawbacks. Ability grouping can lead
>to tracking, thus depriving underperforming students from ever having
>a chance at high achievement. I do believe that we have to begin each
>day with the attitude that although this kid performed poorly
>yesterday, he/she might shock me today.
Allow flexibility; the teachers, alas, are the last
to be able to judge ability. They judge busy work
and regurgitation, as they themselves can do nothing
else. This was brought on by the demand for "objective"
standards by the educationists.
>To get back in the neighborhood of the original post, does anybody
>have any concrete suggestions for Obama? What specifically can be
>changed?
Herman Rubin
jingojones <ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote:
......................
Desegregation would probably not made a difference. Forced
integration could, and did.
As for special ed students, if their difficulty was in a
lack of mental ability, the only way they could survive in
a reasonable class would be to take fewer subjects, and
spend additional time studying or working with tutors on
their subjects. Those with physical difficulties, as long
as their brains can work fast enough and well enough, should
be accommodated.
>>>As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without lowering
>>>expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
>> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
>> or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
>> grade-a-year must go.
>Age grouping can't go until taxpayers are willing to pay for age segregated
>classrooms.
Huh? That is the current system.
The local system doesn't allow for students to be held back more
>than twice since doing so results in students to old to freely interact with
>much younger students that are on a different level with both social and
>physical development. Underperformers eventually get stopped at grade 8.5 in
>which they go to the high school campus but are not, in fact, HS students.
Maybe we need desocialiation of the schools, and more use
of electronic classrooms. An electronic class would only
differ from a present one in that physical presence would
not occur.
Also, the bright and gifted are held back by several years,
and may even be turned off from education completely.
Herman Rubin
Larry Hewitt <larr...@comporium.net> wrote:
>Pubkeybreaker wrote:
>> On Nov 18, 10:13 pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
..................
>It depends on _why_ the schools aren't good enough for the president.
>President's kids have security needs far beyond those of everyone else's
>kids, and providing that security is far more difficult at a large ,
>open campus, public school than in a small, closed campus private school.
This is not clear.
>There is also the consideration of what the security details for the
>kids would do to the public school. Four armed secret service agents
>walking the halls of a middle school around here would be a major
>disruption. The need to get the kids in and out of school away from the
>mass of hundreds of kids rushing for the bus or their parents' cars
>would be daunting for both the school and the secret service.
I doubt it would have made much of a difference in the
schools I went to.
>Even our governor, despite having his kids in public school before he
>was elected, moved them to private school because of the security
>problems after some wacko threatened his oldest.
He didn't have secret service protection, so HE had to
himself find a way to handle the security problem.
>Larry
Larry Hewitt
> In article <sOKdnSnMbNV...@comporium.net>,
> Larry Hewitt <larr...@comporium.net> wrote:
>> Pubkeybreaker wrote:
>>> On Nov 18, 10:13 pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> ..................
>
>> It depends on _why_ the schools aren't good enough for the president.
>
>> President's kids have security needs far beyond those of everyone else's
>> kids, and providing that security is far more difficult at a large ,
>> open campus, public school than in a small, closed campus private school.
>
> This is not clear.
>
It is abundantly clear to anyone who has worked in a public school.
The much larger student body, the much larger campus, the many doors
open throughout the day, the potentially dozens of visitors a day that
would need to be screened, and all the other aspects of a large public
school make security difficult.
>> There is also the consideration of what the security details for the
>> kids would do to the public school. Four armed secret service agents
>> walking the halls of a middle school around here would be a major
>> disruption. The need to get the kids in and out of school away from the
>> mass of hundreds of kids rushing for the bus or their parents' cars
>> would be daunting for both the school and the secret service.
>
> I doubt it would have made much of a difference in the
> schools I went to.
In the schools I went to and the ones I taught at it would be a major
disruption, especially to the classes the agents monitored. Yeah, it
would settle down with time, but not for a while.
Many of my parents would also object to their presence.
>
>> Even our governor, despite having his kids in public school before he
>> was elected, moved them to private school because of the security
>> problems after some wacko threatened his oldest.
>
> He didn't have secret service protection, so HE had to
> himself find a way to handle the security problem.
>
He has state police protection, as does his family, including
transportation. They are not in uniform, and try to be invisible, even
being mistaken for aides, but they are there. Most governors have
similar protection
Larry
>> Larry
>
>
>
>
Donna Metler
"Larry Hewitt" <larr...@comporium.net> wrote in message
news:ssOdnQ5Hrc8...@comporium.net...
> Herman Rubin wrote:
>> In article <sOKdnSnMbNV...@comporium.net>,
>> Larry Hewitt <larr...@comporium.net> wrote:
>>> Pubkeybreaker wrote:
>>>> On Nov 18, 10:13 pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> ..................
>>
>>> It depends on _why_ the schools aren't good enough for the president.
>>
>>> President's kids have security needs far beyond those of everyone else's
>>> kids, and providing that security is far more difficult at a large ,
>>> open campus, public school than in a small, closed campus private
>>> school.
>>
>> This is not clear.
>>
>
> It is abundantly clear to anyone who has worked in a public school.
>
> The much larger student body, the much larger campus, the many doors open
> throughout the day, the potentially dozens of visitors a day that would
> need to be screened, and all the other aspects of a large public school
> make security difficult.
>
can require that they sign in and be accompanied, but that's about it. It
takes a court order, in most cases, to keep someone out of a public school.
And even if you can keep them off campus, in most cases, off campus is a
very small distance away. I taught in a public school where a child had died
due to a shooting in the area, and believe me, we had media on the doorstep
for several days, and had no way to keep them from bothering our students or
families.
In comparison, elite private schools often have campuses which rival college
campuses in size, for relatively small numbers of students. There are
multiple levels of perimeters, and it would be MUCH easier to keep
outsiders, well, out, because it's 100% private property
>>> There is also the consideration of what the security details for the
>>> kids would do to the public school. Four armed secret service agents
>>> walking the halls of a middle school around here would be a major
>>> disruption. The need to get the kids in and out of school away from the
>>> mass of hundreds of kids rushing for the bus or their parents' cars
>>> would be daunting for both the school and the secret service.
>>
>> I doubt it would have made much of a difference in the
>> schools I went to.
>
In addition, most school districts have a pretty strict policy of no weapons
on campus, and yes, that even includes DARE officers and the like,
especially at the elementary level. I taught in a school which also
contained a police substation, and unless responding to an emergency, the
officers would have to leave their weapons at the substation before coming
into other parts of the building.
> In the schools I went to and the ones I taught at it would be a major
> disruption, especially to the classes the agents monitored. Yeah, it would
> settle down with time, but not for a while.
>
> Many of my parents would also object to their presence.
>
I would not want my child in a classroom with armed security, period. If
something goes wrong, it could easily be my child who is "collateral
damage". I've also seen what happens when a child has a 1-1 paraprofessional
due to special needs, and it really does impact the child's relationships
with others, even if the paraprofessional is there only for the child's
physical needs and there are no communications,cognitive, or behavioral
barriers. I would imagine a security detail would, even more, be a barrier
to a child having any sort of normal social experiences.
I like the idea of having a charter school on the White House campus for the
children of White House employees and others. A few teachers, plus use of a
curriculum like K12.com (which is considered a virtual charter school in
many states) would allow students to work at various grade levels, in sort
of a one-room schoolhouse setting, and also give the girls a set of peers
and hopefully friends. It's gotta be hard to be the President's child.
kels...@gmail.com
> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>
> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
> Leonard Pitts Jr.
>
>
> So it seems there's this new couple coming to town (the husband just
> got a job with the government). Now they are scouting schools for
> enough for the president's kids, what makes us think they are good
> enough for ours?
>
This private vs. public school issue is something I have been
pondering in my head the last few months. I am in my first semester a
teacher education program and I always thought I wanted to teach in
public schools. I wanted to teach in public schools because I feel
the children that attend are the ones who need the most support.
However, as my first semester has progressed, I have learned about all
the different policies in place that seem to be hurting children who
attend public schools. After doing an observation at a private
progressive school, I was much more intrigued. Teachers were able to
develop the curriculum as they desired and the children were able to
manipulate it to their interests and talents. With No Child Left
Behind in place, each student is treated as if they learn in the same
way. Standardized tests do not accurately portray the capabilities of
many children and they can poorly reflect on the performance of
teachers.
It is interesting that you started your post talking about the
decision of the Obamas on whether to send their children to private or
public schools. Public schools in urban areas do not have adequate
funding to support the children. I just read the book "Spectacular
Things Happen Along the Way" which is about an urban school in
Chicago. The building the children had to go to every day was
dilapidated; the sinks didn't work, there were only two working
toilets for 700 children, there were bullet holes in the windows, the
heat didn't work at times and children had to wear their coats,
mittens, and hats in the classroom, there wasn't a gym, etc. The
Chicago Public School System had promised Cabrini Green a new school;
they even had plans made and a sign up at the new site....for six
years. The project never ended up happening. However, although the
circumstances at Cabrini Green were dire, the students in this
particular fifth grade classroom had quite a productive year. They
developed a campaign to make repairs at their school and advocated for
the building of a new school. They coordinated a semester long
project and got their ideas out through government officials, news
anchors, and a website they developed. Although in the end the new
school was not built, the children learned so much through their whole
campaign. They had a devoted teacher who was a guide to help
implement their ideas. He gave ownership to the children and allowed
their voices to count. However, in many urban schools, I feel as if
the environment portrays the opposite; so many schools have so little
that is seems no one cares about the children's futures. So, although
there are circumstances where urban schools can be very productive, I
feel as if it is a safer bet to send children to private schools if
one has the funds rather than to inner-city urban schools.
I heard a few weeks ago about Michelle Ree and her proposal for
students in Washington D.C. Motivating kids with money; is that
really what it has come down to? Can teachers no longer find ways to
intrinsically motivate their students that we must pay them for the
hard work they produce? I think this system sends a very poor message
to students. Students need to develop pride in the work they do
simply because it is an achievement, not because they are making money
off it. If she really wants to motivate children with money, instead
of money going to individual children, the money earned by each
student could be put back into the school somehow. Each classroom
could decide how they wanted to spend their money or it could be a
school wide process. Either way, I do not believe it is a good idea
to motivate children with money or teachers for that matter.
Something definitely needs to be changed in urban public school
systems. Their resources and funding are so low compared other public
schools and private schools. This inequity needs to be changed;
however, I am unsure how to accomplish this.
Larry Hewitt
Exactly
>>>> There is also the consideration of what the security details for the
>>>> kids would do to the public school. Four armed secret service agents
>>>> walking the halls of a middle school around here would be a major
>>>> disruption. The need to get the kids in and out of school away from the
>>>> mass of hundreds of kids rushing for the bus or their parents' cars
>>>> would be daunting for both the school and the secret service.
>>> I doubt it would have made much of a difference in the
>>> schools I went to.
> In addition, most school districts have a pretty strict policy of no weapons
> on campus, and yes, that even includes DARE officers and the like,
> especially at the elementary level. I taught in a school which also
> contained a police substation, and unless responding to an emergency, the
> officers would have to leave their weapons at the substation before coming
> into other parts of the building.
>
Thanks for reminding me.
That applies here, too, The school police resource officer --- a regular
police officer assigned to school duty, is unarmed when in the building
unless responding to an emergency, He is armed outside, theoretically to
keep the bad people out.
>
>> In the schools I went to and the ones I taught at it would be a major
>> disruption, especially to the classes the agents monitored. Yeah, it would
>> settle down with time, but not for a while.
>>
>> Many of my parents would also object to their presence.
>>
> I would not want my child in a classroom with armed security, period. If
> something goes wrong, it could easily be my child who is "collateral
> damage". I've also seen what happens when a child has a 1-1 paraprofessional
> due to special needs, and it really does impact the child's relationships
> with others, even if the paraprofessional is there only for the child's
> physical needs and there are no communications,cognitive, or behavioral
> barriers. I would imagine a security detail would, even more, be a barrier
> to a child having any sort of normal social experiences.
>
> I like the idea of having a charter school on the White House campus for the
> children of White House employees and others. A few teachers, plus use of a
> curriculum like K12.com (which is considered a virtual charter school in
> many states) would allow students to work at various grade levels, in sort
> of a one-room schoolhouse setting, and also give the girls a set of peers
> and hopefully friends. It's gotta be hard to be the President's child.
>
>
Might work.
Larry
>
>
>
>
>
Greegor
G > Some other American founders for Social Work
G > were the Fabians. They had a logo (crest or artwork)
G > that was a wolf in sheeps clothing, which apparently
G > the Child Protection INDUSTRY has taken to heart
G > as evidenced by much of their behavior.
http://www.silver-investor.com/charlessavoie/images/cs_may05b.jpg
http://www.freedom-force.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=fabianwindow
http://www.freedom-force.org/pics/fabianwindow.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/magazine_enl_1146138585/img/1.jpg
This is the stained-glass window from the Beatrice Webb House in
Surrey, England, former headquarters of the Fabian Society. It was
designed by George Bernard Shaw and depicts Sidney Webb and Shaw
striking the Earth with hammers to "REMOULD IT NEARER TO THE HEART'S
DESIRE," a line from Omar Khayyam. Note the wolf in sheep's clothing
in the Fabian crest above the globe. The window is now on display at
the London School of Economics (LSE), which was founded by Sydney and
Beatrice Webb.
"The window was subsequently stolen from the house in 1978," says
LSE's archivist, Sue Donnelly. "It surfaced in Phoenix, Arizona, soon
after, but then disappeared again until it suddenly resurfaced at a
sale at Sotheby's in July 2005." The window was purchased by the Webb
Memorial Trust and now is on loan to the LSE where it is displayed in
the schools Shaw Library. In April of 2006, the window was officially
unvieled by a ceremony attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
who is a member of the Fabian Society. [1]
The Fabians originally were an elite group of intellectuals who formed
a semi-secret society for the purpose of bringing socialism to the
world. Whereas Communists wanted to establish socialism quickly
through violence and revolution, the Fabians preferred to do it slowly
through propaganda and legislation. The word socialism was not to be
used. Instead, they would speak of benefits for the people such as
welfare, medical care, higher wages, and better working conditions. In
this way, they planned to accomplish their objective without bloodshed
and even without serious opposition. They scorned the Communists, not
because they disliked their goals, but because they disagreed with
their methods. To emphasize the importance of gradualism, they adopted
the turtle as the symbol of their movement. The three most prominent
leaders in the early days were Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George
Bernard Shaw. [2] A stained-glass window from the Beatrice Webb House
in Surrey, England is especially enlightening. Across the top appears
the last line from Omar Khayyam:
Dear love, couldst thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire!
Beneath the line Remould it nearer to the heart's desire, the mural
depicts Shaw and Webb striking the earth with hammers. Across the
bottom, the masses kneel in worship of a stack of books advocating the
theories of socialism. Thumbing his nose at the docile masses is H.G.
Wells who, after quitting the Fabians, denounced them as "the new
machiavellians." The most revealing component, however, is the Fabian
crest which appears Between Shaw and Webb. It is a wolf in sheep's
clothing!
http://www.freedom-force.org/pics/FabianCrest.gif
http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2005/08/mensheviks-fabians.html
Monday, August 22, 2005
Mensheviks & Fabians
Here's some history everyone should know, especially the social
democrats who have the nerve to call themselves liberal:
Before the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party had two wings:
Bolshevik and Menshevik. The Bolsheviks believed in the immediate
establishment of socialism through violence. The Mensheviks (who also
called themselves social democrats) argued for a gradual, non-
revolutionary path to the same goal. Liberty and property were to be
abolished by majority vote.
The Bolsheviks won, but after committing unimaginable crimes, they
have pretty much disappeared. The Mensheviks, however, are taking over
America.
[...]
Our local Menshevism has its roots not in Lenin's Russia, but in the
London of 1883, when a group of go-slow socialists founded the Fabian
Society. Headed by the appropriately named Herbert Bland, its most
famous members were playwright George Bernard Shaw, authors Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, and artist William Morris.
The Fabians took their name from Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman
general who defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War by refusing to
fight large set-piece battles (which the Romans had lost against
Hannibal), but only engaging in small actions he knew he could win, no
matter how long he had to wait.
Founded the year of Marx's death to promote his ideas through
gradualism, the Fabian Society sought to "honeycomb" society, as
Fabian Margaret Cole put it, with disguised socialist measures. By
glossing over its goals, the Fabian Society hoped to avoid galvanizing
the enemies of socialism.
[...]
The Fabian stained glass window, now installed at Beatrice Webb House
in Surrey, England, shows George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb
reshaping the world on an anvil, with the Fabian coat of arms in the
background: a wolf in sheep's clothing.
That wolf is now at our door. Lew Rockwell, "The New Fabians"
Dan Sullivan
> Dan, Do you advocate go-slow socialism?
I don't know what it is.
And I don't care to know.
Greegor
DS > I don't know what it is.
DS > And I don't care to know.
LOL Brain trust material eh?
Do you advocate socialism Dan?
Did you see how the Fabian Society and the Mensheviks
work to bring about socialism gradually, inch by inch?
Did you look at their crest depicting a wolf in sheeps clothing?
Dan Sullivan
"Greegor" <Gree...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:bf475881-e814-4b69...@y18g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>G > Dan, Do you advocate go-slow socialism?
>
> DS > I don't know what it is.
> DS > And I don't care to know.
>
> LOL Brain trust material eh?
>
> Do you advocate socialism Dan?
No.
> Did you see how the Fabian Society and the Mensheviks
> work to bring about socialism gradually, inch by inch?
No.
> Did you look at their crest depicting a wolf in sheeps clothing?
No.
Mark Peters
<4bfc55d1-5500-429b...@h20g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
kels...@gmail.com wrote:
The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
Rowley
Martin
Donna Metler wrote:
> "Larry Hewitt" <larr...@comporium.net> wrote in message
> news:ssOdnQ5Hrc8...@comporium.net...
>
>>Herman Rubin wrote:
>>
>>>In article <sOKdnSnMbNV...@comporium.net>,
>>>Larry Hewitt <larr...@comporium.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Pubkeybreaker wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On Nov 18, 10:13 pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>..................
>>>
>>>
>>>>It depends on _why_ the schools aren't good enough for the president.
>>>
>>>>President's kids have security needs far beyond those of everyone else's
>>>>kids, and providing that security is far more difficult at a large ,
>>>>open campus, public school than in a small, closed campus private
>>>>school.
>>>
>>>This is not clear.
>>>
>>
>>It is abundantly clear to anyone who has worked in a public school.
And to anyone that has worked in the security industry....
The police officers we have on campus here (TX) are armed.
>
>>In the schools I went to and the ones I taught at it would be a major
>>disruption, especially to the classes the agents monitored. Yeah, it would
>>settle down with time, but not for a while.
>>
>>Many of my parents would also object to their presence.
And probably to the background checks......
>>
>
> I would not want my child in a classroom with armed security, period. If
> something goes wrong, it could easily be my child who is "collateral
> damage".
One thing for people to remember.... Secret Service agents' priority
would be the safety of the President's kids......
Martin
jingojones
"Herman Rubin" <hru...@odds.stat.purdue.edu> wrote in message
news:gg1ebu$2g...@odds.stat.purdue.edu...
Desegregation? Wouldn't know about that. My district was forced to integrate
and is still operates under judicial decree. My feeling is that the subgroup
scores are likely close to what they were before integration with some
dumbing down of the upper subgroup due to directing most efforts to the
lower end of the spectrum in an effort to meet NCLB requirements.
>
> As for special ed students, if their difficulty was in a
> lack of mental ability, the only way they could survive in
> a reasonable class would be to take fewer subjects, and
> spend additional time studying or working with tutors on
> their subjects. Those with physical difficulties, as long
> as their brains can work fast enough and well enough, should
> be accommodated.
I was thinking mainly of the learning disabled students. When I was in K12,
the bulk of the learning disabled were in what was essentially a separate
school system.
>
>>>>As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without
>>>>lowering
>>>>expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
>
>>> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
>>> or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
>>> grade-a-year must go.
>
>>Age grouping can't go until taxpayers are willing to pay for age
>>segregated
>>classrooms.
>
> Huh? That is the current system.
Not locally, though it might appear so at first glance, The primary grouping
is by social age. If we truly grouped by age then there would be, for
instance, separate 4th grade classes for those 4th graders that had already
reached puberty. As far as I know, my district only allows student to be
held back just a few years in their PreK-8 as most parents don't want their
younger children unduly influenced by those kids that are several years
ahead socially.
>
> The local system doesn't allow for students to be held back more
>>than twice since doing so results in students to old to freely interact
>>with
>>much younger students that are on a different level with both social and
>>physical development. Underperformers eventually get stopped at grade 8.5
>>in
>>which they go to the high school campus but are not, in fact, HS students.
>
> Maybe we need desocialiation of the schools, and more use
> of electronic classrooms. An electronic class would only
> differ from a present one in that physical presence would
> not occur.
Many of us send our children to school precisely so that they can have the
socialization.
>
> Also, the bright and gifted are held back by several years,
> and may even be turned off from education completely.
I've parented one of those - she resented being taken away from her age
peers.
jingojones
<kels...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:4bfc55d1-5500-429b...@h20g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
> On Nov 17, 4:29 am, Dom <DR...@teikyopost.edu> wrote:
>> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>>
>> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
>> Leonard Pitts Jr.
Snip of the professional whine.
>> . Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated writer in Washington.
>
> This private vs. public school issue is something I have been
> pondering in my head the last few months. I am in my first semester a
> teacher education program and I always thought I wanted to teach in
> public schools. I wanted to teach in public schools because I feel
> the children that attend are the ones who need the most support.
> However, as my first semester has progressed, I have learned about all
> the different policies in place that seem to be hurting children who
> attend public schools. After doing an observation at a private
> progressive school, I was much more intrigued. Teachers were able to
> develop the curriculum as they desired and the children were able to
> manipulate it to their interests and talents. With No Child Left
> Behind in place, each student is treated as if they learn in the same
> way. Standardized tests do not accurately portray the capabilities of
> many children and they can poorly reflect on the performance of
> teachers.
That's OK, not everyone has what it takes to be a public school teacher.
Don't beat yourself up over it.
NCLB doesn't require that students learn in the same way. NCLB, instead,
requires that states teach their children in such a way as to allow those
children to meet the state's own educational standards. My state's solution
to the problem of students not being able to reach its standard is to raise
the standard. My state gets good marks for raising educational standards,
but poor marks in meeting those standards.
There's not much wrong with standardized tests as a gross measure. Feel
free, of course, to rationalize that standardized testing doesn't meet your
needs, but it really doesn't have to do so.
So if you want to send your kids to a private school then do so. Private
schools, however, vary quite a bit in purpose and performance.
>
> I heard a few weeks ago about Michelle Ree and her proposal for
> students in Washington D.C. Motivating kids with money; is that
> really what it has come down to? Can teachers no longer find ways to
> intrinsically motivate their students that we must pay them for the
> hard work they produce? I think this system sends a very poor message
> to students. Students need to develop pride in the work they do
> simply because it is an achievement, not because they are making money
> off it. If she really wants to motivate children with money, instead
> of money going to individual children, the money earned by each
> student could be put back into the school somehow. Each classroom
> could decide how they wanted to spend their money or it could be a
> school wide process. Either way, I do not believe it is a good idea
> to motivate children with money or teachers for that matter.
The compulsory attendance laws are such that children have no choice but to
attend school. Many attend because they enjoy school. Some only attend
because the state forces them to do so. Attending school is not a right ,
it's not a privilege, and it's not a "job", - school attendance is just
what the law demands even if most try to make the best of it. We don't feel
badly about paying prisoners for their work and we shouldn't feel too badly
if paying students motivates them to do well in school.
If you want teachers to teach in a school that has a problem getting
teachers then you'll either pay the teachers whatever it takes to get them
in the door or you'll end up closing the school or turning the school over
to the state. If you end up getting your certification then feel free, of
course, to work just for the sheer joy of it.
>
> Something definitely needs to be changed in urban public school
> systems. Their resources and funding are so low compared other public
> schools and private schools. This inequity needs to be changed;
> however, I am unsure how to accomplish this.
It's easy, all one need do is to revive the urban economy such that parents
can afford to build the schools their children deserve (or send them to
private schools.)
Greegor
DS > I don't know what it is.
DS > And I don't care to know.
G > LOL Brain trust material eh?
G > Do you advocate socialism Dan?
DS > No.
G > Did you see how the Fabian Society and the Mensheviks
G > work to bring about socialism gradually, inch by inch?
DS > No.
G > Did you look at their crest depicting a wolf in sheeps clothing?
DS > No.
Closing your eyes, Dan? LOL
Dan Sullivan
I'm just not interested.
Greegor
DS > I don't know what it is.
DS > And I don't care to know.
G > LOL Brain trust material eh?
G > Do you advocate socialism Dan?
DS > No.
G > Did you see how the Fabian Society and the Mensheviks
G > work to bring about socialism gradually, inch by inch?
DS > No.
G > Did you look at their crest depicting a wolf in sheeps clothing?
DS > No.
G > Closing your eyes, Dan? LOL
DS > I'm just not interested.
You pretend to fight the agencies, yet you think
their socialist underpinnings are not important?
The Fabian Society actually has a stated goal
of infiltrating throughout US society and
government and very gradually implementing socialism.
They even avoid using the word Socialism.
Their OWN crest depicts a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Hey Dan, Doesn't this partly explain the
cult like mindset of Child Protection caseworkers?
What ARE your politics, anyway, Dan?
Dan Sullivan
> G > Dan, Do you advocate go-slow socialism?
>
> DS > I don't know what it is.
> DS > And I don't care to know.
>
> G > LOL Brain trust material eh?
>
> G > Do you advocate socialism Dan?
>
> DS > No.
>
> G > Did you see how the Fabian Society and the Mensheviks
> G > work to bring about socialism gradually, inch by inch?
>
> DS > No.
>
> G > Did you look at their crest depicting a wolf in sheeps clothing?
>
> DS > No.
>
> G > Closing your eyes, Dan? LOL
>
> DS > I'm just not interested.
>
> You pretend to fight the agencies, yet you think
> their socialist underpinnings are not important?
Not to me.
> The Fabian Society actually has a stated goal
> of infiltrating throughout US society and
> government and very gradually implementing socialism.
Post the URL for that information.
> They even avoid using the word Socialism.
>
> Their OWN crest depicts a wolf in sheeps clothing.
>
> Hey Dan, Doesn't this partly explain the
> cult like mindset of Child Protection caseworkers?
The crest?
Herman Rubin
jingojones <ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote:
......................
Desegregation was what was mandated. The courts interpreted
it as integration, and this is a clear failure. Even the
time spent on busing is totally lost time.
>> As for special ed students, if their difficulty was in a
>> lack of mental ability, the only way they could survive in
>> a reasonable class would be to take fewer subjects, and
>> spend additional time studying or working with tutors on
>> their subjects. Those with physical difficulties, as long
>> as their brains can work fast enough and well enough, should
>> be accommodated.
>I was thinking mainly of the learning disabled students. When I was in K12,
>the bulk of the learning disabled were in what was essentially a separate
>school system.
What is "learning disabled"? Students with autism may e a
problem, as with dyslexia, but these do not make them learning
disabled, nor do physical problems. Those with lesser mental
ability are truly learning disabled, and they cannot learn much
unless in separate classes, or the whole class is slowed down
to what they can do.
>>>>>As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without
>>>>>lowering
>>>>>expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
>>>> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
>>>> or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
>>>> grade-a-year must go.
>>>Age grouping can't go until taxpayers are willing to pay for age
>>>segregated
>>>classrooms.
>> Huh? That is the current system.
>Not locally, though it might appear so at first glance, The primary grouping
>is by social age. If we truly grouped by age then there would be, for
>instance, separate 4th grade classes for those 4th graders that had already
>reached puberty.
No, the primary grouping is by chronological age. Grouping
by "social age" would be worse; it would slow down the loners
even more than the present system does.
As far as I know, my district only allows student to be
>held back just a few years in their PreK-8 as most parents don't want their
>younger children unduly influenced by those kids that are several years
>ahead socially.
The ones who would be held back that far need separate facilities.
However, bright children are not harmed by being with children
who are many years older; they should be greatly accelerated.
>> The local system doesn't allow for students to be held back more
>>>than twice since doing so results in students to old to freely interact
>>>with
>>>much younger students that are on a different level with both social and
>>>physical development. Underperformers eventually get stopped at grade 8.5
>>>in
>>>which they go to the high school campus but are not, in fact, HS students.
Does it allow, and even encourage, the bright to advance?
Bright children, and especially gifted, should graduate
high school several years earlier, learning more with
less effort than now.
>> Maybe we need desocialiation of the schools, and more use
>> of electronic classrooms. An electronic class would only
>> differ from a present one in that physical presence would
>> not occur.
>Many of us send our children to school precisely so that they can have the
>socialization.
So some schools should concentrate on socialization, to the
detriment of learning forced by that.
>> Also, the bright and gifted are held back by several years,
>> and may even be turned off from education completely.
>I've parented one of those - she resented being taken away from her age
>peers.
This is because it did not start early enough.
Larry Hewitt
Apples and oranges.
Here, for ex., my school district spends about 85% per pupil what the
adjacent Charlotte Mecklenberg system spends.
But CMS is a large, urban system and we are a small suburban/rural district.
They wrestle with problems we don't have, like 20% of the student body
not speaking english as a first language, higher percentage of students
living in poverty, and a higher percentage of students with special
needs. It costs about twice as much to educate a , for ex., blind
student than a seeing student.
Other, often surprising, factors are involved. You'd think that our per
pupil transportation costs would be higher, given that were are a less
densely populated area.
But for some reason about 60% of parents here drive their kids to
school, so transportation costs are minor.
More than 90% of CMS schools use school provided/funded transportation.
Larry
jingojones
"Herman Rubin" <hru...@odds.stat.purdue.edu> wrote in message
news:gg45jf$3a...@odds.stat.purdue.edu...
As far as I know, Herman, autism wasn't around when I went through K12. I
know that learning disabled included such things as down's and such. I also
know that it seemed that most in my classes were capable of producing
passing work. There were certainly no students that would be considered
"mainstreamed."
>
>
>
>
>>>>>>As for equal learning, there's no way you can insure that without
>>>>>>lowering
>>>>>>expectations to the point that even fence post graduate cum laude.
>
>>>>> This should be clear, but is not accepted by the educationists
>>>>> or the ones they have brainwashed. Age grouping and automatic
>>>>> grade-a-year must go.
>
>>>>Age grouping can't go until taxpayers are willing to pay for age
>>>>segregated
>>>>classrooms.
>
>>> Huh? That is the current system.
>
>>Not locally, though it might appear so at first glance, The primary
>>grouping
>>is by social age. If we truly grouped by age then there would be, for
>>instance, separate 4th grade classes for those 4th graders that had
>>already
>>reached puberty.
>
> No, the primary grouping is by chronological age. Grouping
> by "social age" would be worse; it would slow down the loners
> even more than the present system does.
We may be arguing the same thing, Herman. I'm just telling you that,
locally, failing children are passed to the next grade because of the
social problems they might create if they were held back until they were
finally able to meet the academic exit requirements of the grade level in
question. It is also felt that if the system is going to hold a child back
then it's better to do so in preK and K. I also don't accept that loners are
slowed by social grouping since the primary grouping still is determined by
the ability to pass the academic requirements. Loners that perform move
forward already. Loaners that don't meet academic requirements initially
change grade levels at a slower rate but eventually end up with an offset of
a few years from their nominal age-appropriate grade level.
>
> As far as I know, my district only allows student to be
>>held back just a few years in their PreK-8 as most parents don't want
>>their
>>younger children unduly influenced by those kids that are several years
>>ahead socially.
>
> The ones who would be held back that far need separate facilities.
> However, bright children are not harmed by being with children
> who are many years older; they should be greatly accelerated.
So you assert. It is the parent's call. One shouldn't fault parents for
thinking their child should be in a class with students that are very much
older when those older students are there because they haven't been able to
perform at their nominal age academically. Separate facilities is currently
out of the question due to the politics of doing so even if the district had
the monies to fund such an effort.
>
>>> The local system doesn't allow for students to be held back more
>>>>than twice since doing so results in students to old to freely interact
>>>>with
>>>>much younger students that are on a different level with both social and
>>>>physical development. Underperformers eventually get stopped at grade
>>>>8.5
>>>>in
>>>>which they go to the high school campus but are not, in fact, HS
>>>>students.
>
> Does it allow, and even encourage, the bright to advance?
> Bright children, and especially gifted, should graduate
> high school several years earlier, learning more with
> less effort than now.
Indeed, bright children can advance at a faster rate if they submit to
becoming SPED property. The system doesn't do much "encouraging' since the
Republicans came up with NCLB. Most efforts are now focused on getting
children to perform at the "basic" level on the state assessment tests.
Those that already exceeding that level of performance are more and more
being put on the back burner since it requires little effort to insure they
pass the assessments in good style.
>
>>> Maybe we need desocialiation of the schools, and more use
>>> of electronic classrooms. An electronic class would only
>>> differ from a present one in that physical presence would
>>> not occur.
>
>>Many of us send our children to school precisely so that they can have the
>>socialization.
>
> So some schools should concentrate on socialization, to the
> detriment of learning forced by that.
It's not an either/or situation, Herman.
>
>>> Also, the bright and gifted are held back by several years,
>>> and may even be turned off from education completely.
>
>>I've parented one of those - she resented being taken away from her age
>>peers.
>
> This is because it did not start early enough.
And how is it that you know this? It's not like we're raising the "boys from
Brazil," you know. My daughter would have resented it even before she
started school.
toto
<ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote:
>As far as I know, Herman, autism wasn't around when I went through K12. I
>know that learning disabled included such things as down's and such. I also
>know that it seemed that most in my classes were capable of producing
>passing work. There were certainly no students that would be considered
>"mainstreamed."
Autistic children were classified as mentally retarded and
institutionalized back when you were in school.
Autism has been around for a long time. Just because you didn't see
it, does not mean it did not exist.
--
Dorothy
There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..
The Outer Limits
toto
<mpe...@nospam.wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
>successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
Cite?
Naperville spends plenty of money on the schools. Their property
taxes are higher than Chicago's property taxes. The median household
income in Naperville is $88,771. The median household income in the
city of Chicago is $38,625.
Do you really think that this is not relevant to the achievement of
students in these schools?
jingojones
"toto" <scar...@wicked.witch> wrote in message
news:98fdi4tstjf86coie...@4ax.com...
jingojones
clicked where it was used to clicking instead of where it should have
clicked.
"toto" <scar...@wicked.witch> wrote in message
news:98fdi4tstjf86coie...@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:28:08 -0600, "jingojones"
> <ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote:
>
>>As far as I know, Herman, autism wasn't around when I went through K12. I
>>know that learning disabled included such things as down's and such. I
>>also
>>know that it seemed that most in my classes were capable of producing
>>passing work. There were certainly no students that would be considered
>>"mainstreamed."
>
> Autistic children were classified as mentally retarded and
> institutionalized back when you were in school.
>
> Autism has been around for a long time. Just because you didn't see
> it, does not mean it did not exist.
I'm not stupid, Dorothy. My point is that insofar as the school system was
concerned, autism wasn't around. Nor were the ?DDs. As I recall, it wasn't
until perhaps the mid-80s that the local schools even started to handle
students that previously would have been "schooled" in dedicated facilities.
My overall point is that those that remember how schools were so much better
in the good ol'days often conveniently forget that not everyone was served
by the public schools system.
Donna Metler
"jingojones" <ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote in message
news:4926c30e$0$5467$bbae...@news.suddenlink.net...
Not only that, but many, many children who Herman would consider worthy,
myself included, would have been excluded in pre-PL 94-142 schools. I have
cerebral palsy. I also certainly qualify as gifted, and ended up either
entering college 2 years early or 3 years late, depending, since I had
several years where I was classified as dual enrollment, including 3 years
where I took NO high school coursework, so that I could continue to be
classified as a special ed student and get speech and physical therapy.
Fortunately, my state was, at the time, really working on transition plans
and, for a very short time, did a wonderful job of working with different
agencies to provide wrap-around services as students finished public
education.
Even as late as the early 90's, though, I had a college professor, in a
class on special populations, claim that children with CP were mentally
retarded. Gee...guess she hadn't bothered to read my 504 plan, or it hadn't
registered that the reason I was in the front row with my portable computer
and tape recorder, and had testing accommodations on file WAS CP, or, for
that matter, that there were at least 4 other students with various forms of
cerebral palsy enrolled at the university, most more affected than I was-the
university I attended had a very good physical campus for students with
physical disabilities, and had a good support system for such students-and,
in the early days of mainstreaming, we were the students who were
mainstreamed first, so there were a fairly large number of us all hitting
college at about the same time, and mostly going to a small number of
schools which were able and willing to work with us. I don't think there's
the same degree of clustering now that there was in the late 80's/early
90's. Somewhere, along the way, the rules had changed and she hadn't changed
with them.
Both in undergrad and grad school, I had faculty members express concern
that I'd be able to keep up, and warn me that they wouldn't slow the class
down for me. And most of them sounded a lot like Herman. I took great pride
in making sure I had a PERFECT average in those classes. Not just a good
one, not just an A average, a PERFECT one. And I still occasionally get such
statements. I will be teaching an Orff music class this Spring in the same
college demonstration classroom where, about a decade ago, one of the top
professors in the field told me that she didn't believe I was physically
capable of teaching Orff. Now, I'm not only teaching Orff, but teaching Orff
TEACHERS-in the same top program that I was supposedly incapable of
managing.
Had I been born with my combination of disablilities and skills, even 10
years earlier, the outcome would have been MUCH different. And I know this,
because I had a family member, 10 years older than I, with a very similar
profile. He was pretty much shuffled through whatever school program wanted
to get rid of him, got little or no therapy, and eventually managed to make
it through a community college degree, but was extremely limited in his work
prospects because his speech was so greatly affected. (He died in his late
20s). I suspect it took him more effort to make it through 2 years of CC
than it did for me to make it through graduate school.
Cary Kittrell
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>
> On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:28:08 -0600, "jingojones"
> <ma...@nospamjones.com> wrote:
>
> >As far as I know, Herman, autism wasn't around when I went through K12. I
> >know that learning disabled included such things as down's and such. I also
> >know that it seemed that most in my classes were capable of producing
> >passing work. There were certainly no students that would be considered
> >"mainstreamed."
>
> Autistic children were classified as mentally retarded and
> institutionalized back when you were in school.
>
> Autism has been around for a long time. Just because you didn't see
> it, does not mean it did not exist.
Plus, there seems to be a certain malady de jour quality to the
sharp rise in diagnoses of autism. No doubt there's a much
wider recognition of the condition than existed decades ago,
but there's always the risk of becoming a bit faddish, like TMJ or
chronic fatigue syndrome did in the 80s and 90s.
-- cary
Cary Kittrell
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A lovely post; thanks for writing it.
-- cary
Beliavsky
> On Nov 18, 10:13 pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
> > > ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake.
>
> My opinion is that most people who send their kids to private
> religious schools do so for EXACTLY this reason: to insulate
> them from ideas with which they disagree. Diversity and freedom
> of thought is the last thing these people want.
My wife is Hindu and I am an atheist, and we have sent our eldest son
to a Catholic school for kindergarten and 1st grade simply because the
public schools have rigid age-based rules for admission to KG and 1st
grade. Since he could read fluently before he turned 4, we thought he
was ready for KG. Although he is only 5 and is the youngest in his 1st
grade class, his teacher said he was one of the best students.
Especially in the early grades, public schools operate as if they were
free babysitting services for parents and jobs programs for teachers
rather than academic institutions where the goal is to maximize
learning.
Beliavsky
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:28:06 -0600, Mark Peters
>
> >The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
> >successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
>
> Cite?
>
> Naperville spends plenty of money on the schools. Their property
> taxes are higher than Chicago's property taxes. The median household
> income in Naperville is $88,771. The median household income in the
> city of Chicago is $38,625.
>
> Do you really think that this is not relevant to the achievement of
> students in these schools?
It is relevant because smarter people make more money than less-smart
people on average. They tend to have smarter children, because
intelligence, like other traits such as skin color, hair color,
height, etc. has a strong genetic component. Smarter kids do better in
school than less-smart ones on average.
Lots of supposedly intelligent people ignore the genetic reason for
the positive correlation between parental income and student success,
assuming that the reasons for the correlation are solely the
environments that affluent parents create for their children. Genetic
explanations are politically incorrect.
Mark Peters
toto <scar...@wicked.witch> wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:28:06 -0600, Mark Peters
> <mpe...@nospam.wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>
> >The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
> >successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
>
> Cite?
>
> Naperville spends plenty of money on the schools. Their property
> taxes are higher than Chicago's property taxes. The median household
> income in Naperville is $88,771. The median household income in the
> city of Chicago is $38,625.
>
> Do you really think that this is not relevant to the achievement of
> students in these schools?
The Chicago public schools spend more per student than the Naperville
pubic schools spend per student. If the Chicago public schools taxed at
the same rate as the Naperville public schools, the Chicago public
schools would have even more money to spend per student.
Many factors outside of school affect the achievement of students. The
original post referred to the Chicago school systems lack of money.
Bob LeChevalier
>On Nov 21, 9:03 am, toto <scarec...@wicked.witch> wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:28:06 -0600, Mark Peters
>>
>> <mpet...@nospam.wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>> >The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
>> >successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
>>
>> Cite?
>>
>> Naperville spends plenty of money on the schools. Their property
>> taxes are higher than Chicago's property taxes. The median household
>> income in Naperville is $88,771. The median household income in the
>> city of Chicago is $38,625.
>>
>> Do you really think that this is not relevant to the achievement of
>> students in these schools?
>
>It is relevant because smarter people make more money than less-smart
>people on average.
Doubtful. I suspect that it is true for part of the spectrum, but the
extremely intelligent do not tend to make more money than the merely
"very intelligent".
In addition, differences in achievement aren't necessarily the same
thing as differences in intelligence.
>They tend to have smarter children,
Wealthy people tend to have FEWER children, which of course means that
their children are relatively even more wealthy than others, than
their parents were.
>Smarter kids do better in school than less-smart ones on average.
Again, I am not sure that this is true for the entire spectrum, and
suspect that it is not.
>Lots of supposedly intelligent people ignore the genetic reason for
>the positive correlation between parental income and student success,
>assuming that the reasons for the correlation are solely the
>environments that affluent parents create for their children. Genetic
>explanations are politically incorrect.
Sometimes they are simply WRONG.
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist
loj...@lojban.org Lojban language www.lojban.org
email.fo...@gmail.com
This may be true of your school district, but not true for all of
them. Some of my first grade students are writing chapter books and
adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers.
Herman Rubin
<email.fo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 21, 1:10=A0pm, Beliavsky <beliav...@aol.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 19, 6:56=A0am, Pubkeybreaker <pubkeybrea...@aol.com> wrote:
>> > On Nov 18, 10:13=A0pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > > On Nov 18, 1:06=A0am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > > > =A0If people who send their kids to
>> > > > private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
>> > > > ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake. =A0
>> > My opinion is that most people who send their kids to private
>> > religious schools do so for EXACTLY this reason: to insulate
>> > them from ideas with which they disagree. Diversity and freedom
>> > of thought is the last thing these people want.
>> My wife is Hindu and I am an atheist, and we have sent our eldest son
>> to a Catholic school for kindergarten and 1st grade simply because the
>> public schools have rigid age-based rules for admission to KG and 1st
>> grade. Since he could read fluently before he turned 4, we thought he
>> was ready for KG. Although he is only 5 and is the youngest in his 1st
>> grade class, his teacher said he was one of the best students.
>> Especially in the early grades, public schools operate as if they were
>> free babysitting services for parents and jobs programs for teachers
>> rather than academic institutions where the goal is to maximize
>> learning.
>This may be true of your school district, but not true for all of
>them. Some of my first grade students are writing chapter books and
>adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers.
They should not be in first grade, at least for language.
As far as adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers, why stop
at 2? Learning the mechanics for arbitrary length is not
one bit harder than for length two. However, this does not
teach anything about what addition and subtraction mean.
dejablues
"Beliavsky" <beli...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:77a8b1b3-2b06-4de2...@j39g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
On Nov 19, 6:56 am, Pubkeybreaker <pubkeybrea...@aol.com> wrote:
> On Nov 18, 10:13 pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > On Nov 18, 1:06 am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > If people who send their kids to
> > > private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from certain
> > > ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake.
>
> My opinion is that most people who send their kids to private
> religious schools do so for EXACTLY this reason: to insulate
> them from ideas with which they disagree. Diversity and freedom
> of thought is the last thing these people want.
>My wife is Hindu and I am an atheist, and we have sent our eldest son
>to a Catholic school for kindergarten and 1st grade simply because the
>public schools have rigid age-based rules for admission to KG and 1st
>grade. Since he could read fluently before he turned 4, we thought he
>was ready for KG. Although he is only 5 and is the youngest in his 1st
>grade class, his teacher said he was one of the best students.
Of course they admitted him! You're a paying customer in a time when
Catholic schools are struggling.
Reading ability is only one small part of school readiness. The age gap
between your son and the others in his class will catch up with him,
eventually. Be prepared for subtle discrimination, as well, since he is a
non-Catholic, and Indian to boot. Catholic school systems favor white
Catholics.
>Especially in the early grades, public schools operate as if they were
>free babysitting services for parents and jobs programs for teachers
>rather than academic institutions where the goal is to maximize
>learning.
That statement does not apply to all public schools, not at all. Have you
ever visited a classroom?
email.fo...@gmail.com
> In article <67cffce8-47da-4caf-b9a0-91fc99533...@s20g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
Why not?
> As far as adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers, why stop
> at 2? Learning the mechanics for arbitrary length is not
> one bit harder than for length two. However, this does not
> teach anything about what addition and subtraction mean.
At this stage they are acting out addition and subtraction using
models (tens sticks and ones blocks) to come up with the answer, so
they do get what addition and subtraction means. A couple of kids are
starting to use the standard algorithm, but only after starting off
with using tools. Half of my class is trying out 2 digits, and the
other half is working on single digit addition and subtraction.
Herman Rubin
dejablues <deja...@comcast.net> wrote:
The so-called age gap is a fiction of the socialist educationists.
Get the schools back to teaching subject matter, and if necessary
completely desocialize them. The academic level is abysmal; those
who should be going to college are able to learn the material in
less than half the time. The present schools give a diploma on
twelve years of imprisonment with good behavior, and this says
nothing about how much they have learned.
Anyone who holds a child back even in just one subject should be
subject to a fine of at least a full year's salary; that is how
much damage is done to society. In addition, there should be a
payment to the child for lost income.
>>Especially in the early grades, public schools operate as if they were
>>free babysitting services for parents and jobs programs for teachers
>>rather than academic institutions where the goal is to maximize
>>learning.
>That statement does not apply to all public schools, not at all. Have you
>ever visited a classroom?
It is a major factor, and will not be really changed until all
age oriented practices are eliminated, as well as heterogeneous
classes. The educationists justified their actions as preparing
children for rust belt industry; this was 75 years ago. Now we
have generations miseducated in that manner.
Herman Rubin
<email.fo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 22, 7:42=A0pm, hru...@odds.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) wrote:
>> In article <67cffce8-47da-4caf-b9a0-91fc99533...@s20g2000yqh.googlegroups=
>.com>,
>> =A0<email.for.lau...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >On Nov 21, 1:10=3DA0pm, Beliavsky <beliav...@aol.com> wrote:
>> >> On Nov 19, 6:56=3DA0am, Pubkeybreaker <pubkeybrea...@aol.com> wrote:
>> >> > On Nov 18, 10:13=3DA0pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
>> >> > > On Nov 18, 1:06=3DA0am, yaycamp <eleadh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> > > > =3DA0If people who send their kids to
>> >> > > > private schools are trying to protect or insulate them from cert=
>ain
>> >> > > > ideas or types of people, I think that is a huge mistake. =3DA0
>> >> > My opinion is that most people who send their kids to private
>> >> > religious schools do so for EXACTLY this reason: to insulate
>> >> > them from ideas with which they disagree. Diversity and freedom
>> >> > of thought is the last thing these people want.
>> >> My wife is Hindu and I am an atheist, and we have sent our eldest son
>> >> to a Catholic school for kindergarten and 1st grade simply because the
>> >> public schools have rigid age-based rules for admission to KG and 1st
>> >> grade. Since he could read fluently before he turned 4, we thought he
>> >> was ready for KG. Although he is only 5 and is the youngest in his 1st
>> >> grade class, his teacher said he was one of the best students.
>> >> Especially in the early grades, public schools operate as if they were
>> >> free babysitting services for parents and jobs programs for teachers
>> >> rather than academic institutions where the goal is to maximize
>> >> learning.
>> >This may be true of your school district, but not true for all of
>> >them. =A0Some of my first grade students are writing chapter books and
>> >adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers.
>> They should not be in first grade, at least for language.
>Why not?
Because they already know more than will be taught in the first
grade. They should be learning more, and more, and more. Your
attitude is the anti-educational attitude which pervades the
entire public school system, and which is destroying the quality
of the universities now.
>> As far as adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers, why stop
>> at 2? =A0Learning the mechanics for arbitrary length is not
>> one bit harder than for length two. =A0However, this does not
>> teach anything about what addition and subtraction mean.
>At this stage they are acting out addition and subtraction using
>models (tens sticks and ones blocks) to come up with the answer, so
>they do get what addition and subtraction means. A couple of kids are
>starting to use the standard algorithm, but only after starting off
>with using tools. Half of my class is trying out 2 digits, and the
>other half is working on single digit addition and subtraction.
They cannot get what addition and subtraction means without using
an axiomatic approach, with explicit use of variables. Alas, few
of those teaching "mathematics", even at the high school level,
know anything about the foundations of the number system.
The oldest record of arithmetic we have is that of the Sumerians,
and what you are doing is lower level than that. Do YOU understand
any of the concepts of the number system? They are very precise,
and can be taught to children, but not how you are teaching them.
BTW, to teach the foundations of the number system, do NOT use
the representation by decimal (or other) digits. One can
understand the numbers and their properties, including how to
derive and use the positional system, without any facility in
carrying out arithmetic. Do you understand this?
I would have first graders learn this. We have found, alas,
that prospective teachers cannot.
Geekman
> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>
> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
> Leonard Pitts Jr.
>
>
> So it seems there's this new couple coming to town (the husband just
> got a job with the government). Now they are scouting schools for
>
> And we need to ask a simple question: if public schools are not good
> enough for the president's kids, what makes us think they are good
> enough for ours?
>
> • Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated writer in Washington.
We keep ignoring why "public schools are failing", the first teachers
public school students have are their parents. Even immigrant parents
who were not literate, nor able to speak English, stress the
importance of education, revered the teacher, and prepared their
children for school. This preparation included an understanding of the
importance of the education they were receiving and the consequences
of failure and shaming the family by inappropriate behavior. Teachers,
then, were able to continue and focus the education of the children
before them. That is no longer the case in public schools. A very
important part of the equation for success is missing. The teachers
who teach and guide the children before they reach the school building
and when they return from it have abdicated they responsibilities.
Gary Latman (Chicago Public School educator for 32 years)
Rowley
<snippage>
>
>
> We keep ignoring why "public schools are failing",
And we will probably continue to do so....
> the first teachers
> public school students have are their parents.
See you're ignoring the why already.....
Martin
Herman Rubin
Geekman <gee...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 17, 6:29=A0am, Dom <DR...@teikyopost.edu> wrote:
>> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508...
>> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
>> Leonard Pitts Jr.
>> November 17, 2008
...................
>We keep ignoring why "public schools are failing", the first teachers
>public school students have are their parents. Even immigrant parents
>who were not literate, nor able to speak English, stress the
>importance of education, revered the teacher, and prepared their
>children for school. This preparation included an understanding of the
>importance of the education they were receiving and the consequences
>of failure and shaming the family by inappropriate behavior. Teachers,
>then, were able to continue and focus the education of the children
>before them. That is no longer the case in public schools. A very
>important part of the equation for success is missing. The teachers
>who teach and guide the children before they reach the school building
>and when they return from it have abdicated they responsibilities.
>Gary Latman (Chicago Public School educator for 32 years)
About 75 years ago, the schools adopted the policy of
advocating that they do ALL the educating, excluding the
parents. This was not changed until after Sputnik. The
reason given was that the children should not be confused.
Children who had learned to read well before going to school
were punished for that; and this was in the days when the
schools were just using the alphabet as a collection of
symbols, with the words being somehow encoded.
This also went with the idea that children should be grouped
by chronological age, and proceed a grade a year. Necessarily
this required that content be reduced. If the schools are to
keep up any advocacy of education by the parents, they have to
get back to subject matter education and throw out the rest of
the garbage they have put in instead. If the children cannot
learn at the "standard" rate, they must learn slower, and there
are various ways of achieving this. If they can learn faster,
let them; much of this can be done by just letting them study.
The present teachers are products of this atrocity, and can no
longer do anything else. There is no way the public schools can
be improved now; their personnel are ignorant, and it seems can
no longer understand precise concepts (my late wife was cajoled
into teaching mathematics for elementary teachers, and was
appalled by their lack of ability to understand anything) and
can only understand memorization and routine, which can be tested
by "objective" tests.
We need to redo the whole works, and it cannot be done by the
public schools with their "certified" teachers and educationist
administrators.
Herman Rubin
>> We keep ignoring why "public schools are failing",
>And we will probably continue to do so....
>> the first teachers
>> public school students have are their parents.
>See you're ignoring the why already.....
As I wrote elsewhere, this is what used to be before the
Depression. Illiterate immigrants may still take this
attitude, but not "educated Americans".
>Martin
>> Even immigrant parents
>> who were not literate, nor able to speak English, stress the
>> importance of education, revered the teacher, and prepared their
>> children for school. This preparation included an understanding of the
>> importance of the education they were receiving and the consequences
>> of failure and shaming the family by inappropriate behavior. Teachers,
>> then, were able to continue and focus the education of the children
>> before them. That is no longer the case in public schools. A very
>> important part of the equation for success is missing. The teachers
>> who teach and guide the children before they reach the school building
>> and when they return from it have abdicated they responsibilities.
>> Gary Latman (Chicago Public School educator for 32 years)
iamcaffeinated
I feel your pain on this one, but I personally am so sick of hearing
this carp that I wonder whether or not it actually rings true. I've
heard it so many times that I imagine parents at home forcing junk
food through their children's nostrils and beaming television signals
straight into their brains.
Rather, I think we should focus on the changing role (if the role has
indeed changed) of parents in education in modern times. Kids are
expected to take in a great deal of information and maybe it's not so
clear how parents should help and assist their children. Furthermore,
what kinds of parent/school structures are available? My school has a
PTO, but it's fledgling.
email.fo...@gmail.com
> In article <a7463278-3d28-4b35-a2dc-573101c45...@20g2000yqt.googlegroups.com>,
>
Agreed. That's why I'm teaching them beyond what is mandated for
first grade. These children did not enter my room knowing how to
write chapter books and add/subtract 2 digit numbers - that is
something that I am teaching them because they have demonstrated
readiness for those things.
> Your
> attitude is the anti-educational attitude which pervades the
> entire public school system, and which is destroying the quality
> of the universities now.
You appear to have misunderstood me.
Given your expertise in math, I would like to know specifically how
you would teach math to children in the primary grades. Have you
written any books or papers on the topic?
Herman Rubin
<email.fo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 23, 8:34=A0pm, hru...@odds.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) wrote:
>> In article <a7463278-3d28-4b35-a2dc-573101c45...@20g2000yqt.googlegroups.=
>com>,
>> =A0<email.for.lau...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >On Nov 22, 7:42=3DA0pm, hru...@odds.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) wrote=
>:
>> >> In article <67cffce8-47da-4caf-b9a0-91fc99533...@s20g2000yqh.googlegro=
>ups=3D
>> >.com>,
>> >> =3DA0<email.for.lau...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> >On Nov 21, 1:10=3D3DA0pm, Beliavsky <beliav...@aol.com> wrote:
>> >> >> On Nov 19, 6:56=3D3DA0am, Pubkeybreaker <pubkeybrea...@aol.com> wro=
>te
>> >> >> > On Nov 18, 10:13=3D3DA0pm, email.for.lau...@gmail.com wrote:
...............
>> They cannot get what addition and subtraction means without using
>> an axiomatic approach, with explicit use of variables. =A0Alas, few
>> of those teaching "mathematics", even at the high school level,
>> know anything about the foundations of the number system.
>> The oldest record of arithmetic we have is that of the Sumerians,
>> and what you are doing is lower level than that. =A0Do YOU understand
>> any of the concepts of the number system? =A0They are very precise,
>> and can be taught to children, but not how you are teaching them.
>> BTW, to teach the foundations of the number system, do NOT use
>> the representation by decimal (or other) digits. =A0One can
>> understand the numbers and their properties, including how to
>> derive and use the positional system, without any facility in
>> carrying out arithmetic. =A0Do you understand this?
>> I would have first graders learn this. =A0We have found, alas,
>> that prospective teachers cannot.
>Given your expertise in math, I would like to know specifically how
>you would teach math to children in the primary grades. Have you
>written any books or papers on the topic?
I have posted some details. Here is a sketch.
First, teach the general use of variables. A variable is a
temporary name for something, not even necessarily a noun od
pronoun. They can be used to disambiguate ordinary language,
and should be taught very early.
Next, start with the ordinal characterization of the non-negative
integers. The Peano Postulates do a good job of this. I recommend
Landau's _Foundations of Analysis_, the first part. However, I
would start with 0 for several reasons, one being the later
development of the "base" systems.
In this, the representation of a number would be a string
starting with 0 and having a number of tick marks after it.
Addition is the process of adding 0 by leaving the number
alone, and adding x' by adding x and then using another
tick mark. Multiplying y by 0 gets 0, and by x' adds y
to the product with x. One can develop all the properties
of the integers from this, and even develop the usual base
representations. This requires developing integer powers
of integers.
They should produce their own addition and multiplication
tables, not memorize existing ones. This should be done
for several bases, so the idea is firmly implanted.
With this in place, the usual addition and multiplication
procedures make sense, and there is nothing arbitrary
about them.
One also needs practice, but not beyond the point of
mastery. Busy work is a mistake.
Chookie
> We keep ignoring why "public schools are failing", the first teachers
> public school students have are their parents. Even immigrant parents
> who were not literate, nor able to speak English, stress the
> importance of education, revered the teacher, and prepared their
> children for school.
Um, did you ever read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy? I know it's
semi-fictional, but are you saying that there were never ANY thugs back in the
Good Old Days who would beat up a teacher? And that there wasn't even a grain
of truth to Welcome Back Kotter? No hoodlums in Brooklyn that played up in
school back then? And, of course, truancy is a recent phenomenon? Riiiight.
--
Chookie -- Sydney, Australia
(Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)
Rosalie B.
>In article
><72e70b2c-63ba-453c...@d23g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
> Geekman <gee...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We keep ignoring why "public schools are failing", the first teachers
>> public school students have are their parents. Even immigrant parents
>> who were not literate, nor able to speak English, stress the
>> importance of education, revered the teacher, and prepared their
>> children for school.
>
>Um, did you ever read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy? I know it's
>semi-fictional, but are you saying that there were never ANY thugs back in the
>Good Old Days who would beat up a teacher? And that there wasn't even a grain
>of truth to Welcome Back Kotter? No hoodlums in Brooklyn that played up in
>school back then? And, of course, truancy is a recent phenomenon? Riiiight.
After my dad graduated HS he got a job in a one room school up in the
mountains of Colorado. He took it with the understanding that he
could use corporal punishment (like a baseball bat or something he
said). Because many of the children that attended this school were
children of a moonshiner and he (the dad of the children) would send
his big older sons to school drunk, and they would lock the teacher in
the outhouse and let school out. He wanted his kids at home
working, and not in school. This would have been about 1922.
Fortunately my dad got a scholarship to college, and went (although
his dad disowned him because his dad wanted him to stay home and work
in the store.) so it didn't actually come to where he had to use it.
Geekman
> Chookie <ehreben...@fowlspambegone.com.au> wrote:
> >In article
> ><72e70b2c-63ba-453c-97b7-ccb830efd...@d23g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
Chookie,
I was generalizing. But my position is supported by 32 years of
teaching in 5 different Chicago Public Schools (narratives and
observations). Three of them were at inner city schools and two of
them were at college prep. schools. When I've had problems with
students' performance and/or behavior, I work with the students
directly, but when the kids don't cooperate, e.g. do their homework,
come to me for assistance when I request it, stay awake in class,
correct inappropriate behavior, bring their materials to class, take
notes, and so on (all of the behaviors necessary for me to do my job
well), I need to communicate with the adult(s) who raised them,
monitor their work, and send them to me. If that person is unavailable
(disconnected phone number, no longer raising the child, not
interested, passed the child on to a relative), not only does it
communicate to me a serious dysfunction at home, but possibly a
history of not supporting their child's educational nourishment. If
there are several students like this in my classes, it's manageable,
but if the majority of the students come from dysfunctional homes, it
makes my job extremely difficult and greatly limits my success. This
has been the case when I've taught in inner city schools. Again, let
me remind you that I am generalizing. I've had many successful
students during my tenure at the schools where I have worked. Often
these successes are comparative and cumulative, but at the end of a
year with me, many of my students still won't score very high on the
standardized test, and so the student and I would be considered a
failure by those who measure us by test scores.
In order to keep as many middle class and/or white families in the
city, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created academies and magnet
schools. These schools do not have to accept anyone who wants to go
there. They can screen the students. Low reading and math scores? I'm
sorry you don't qualify. Special needs student? I'm sorry, we are at
our maximum level. You want to enroll in our school? I'm sorry, we are
at the maximum level of enrollment. At the neighborhood high school,
where I taught for 18 years, we could not screen our enrolling
students to see whether they could read or do math, nor could we set a
level for the number of special needs students, and we could not cap
the overall enrollment. Therefore, we used storage room and offices
for classrooms. We, also, had 30-35% of our students labeled as
special needs. We were almost always under resourced, but still held
to the same accountability and standardized test measures. NCLB does
not look at the makeup of the student body and offer any compensation
to ensure that no child is left behind; it just mandates it, and then
takes punitive measures for the school's failure. That's the reality
some of us deal with. It's unfair, and really morally reprehensible,
but we still do our best, because we are teachers. We are
professionals.
The final insult for me was when, at the end of the first semester
last school year, our CEO and the Chicago Board of Ed took what it
considered "decisive action". The entire staff was fired. The school
was reconstituted. My school became a "turn around" school. And guess
what? It still has the same problems that it had before. It was more
politically expedient to blame the teachers than fix the problems.
Gary Latman
toto
(Cary Kittrell) wrote:
>Plus, there seems to be a certain malady de jour quality to the
>sharp rise in diagnoses of autism. No doubt there's a much
>wider recognition of the condition than existed decades ago,
>but there's always the risk of becoming a bit faddish, like TMJ or
>chronic fatigue syndrome did in the 80s and 90s.
Imo, the rise in the diagnosis is simply due to the fact that we have
a better idea of how to diagnose austism now than we did. The rise in
the diagnosis has been complemented by a decrease in diagnoses of
mental retardation. There has also been a broadening of the
criteria. Asperger's syndrome was not diagnosed before the 70s.
I don't see chronic fatique syndrome or TMJ as faddish either. These
are very real conditions.
From the cdc:
A variety of studies by CDC and others have shown that between 1 and 4
million Americans suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). They are
seriously impaired, at least a quarter are unemployed or on disability
because of CFS. Yet, only about half have consulted a physician for
their illness. The earlier a person with CFS receives medical
treatment the greater the likelihood that the illness will resolve.
Equally important, about 40% of people in the general population who
report symptoms of CFS have a serious, treatable, previously
unrecognized medical or psychiatric condition (such as diabetes,
thyroid disease, substance abuse). CFS is a serious illness and poses
a dilemma for patients, their families, and health care providers.
This web site aims to provide evidence-based information concerning
the illness, its manifestations, and treatment.
TMJ is less well understood but the symptoms are still real.
toto
New research suggests that genes are actually not immutable, but
interact with the environment.
Most traits are not the result of single genes, of course.
http://www.dnafiles.org/keywords/Gene-Environment+Interaction
http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2006/07/25/gene-environment-interactions-and-the-brain/
toto
<mpe...@nospam.wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>In article <ocfdi4121e7oiorat...@4ax.com>,
> toto <scar...@wicked.witch> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:28:06 -0600, Mark Peters
>> <mpe...@nospam.wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>>
>> >The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
>> >successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
>>
>> Cite?
>>
>> Naperville spends plenty of money on the schools. Their property
>> taxes are higher than Chicago's property taxes. The median household
>> income in Naperville is $88,771. The median household income in the
>> city of Chicago is $38,625.
>>
>> Do you really think that this is not relevant to the achievement of
>> students in these schools?
>
>The Chicago public schools spend more per student than the Naperville
>pubic schools spend per student. If the Chicago public schools taxed at
>the same rate as the Naperville public schools, the Chicago public
>schools would have even more money to spend per student.
>
Cite? Where are you getting this?
The Chicago Public Schools where I taught did NOT spend more money per
student than the suburbs.
There were, of course, certain moneys spent that were probably less in
the suburbs. Our kids had more free lunches, more title I tutoring,
etc. There were more special education students being served and
those students are more costly.
>Many factors outside of school affect the achievement of students. The
>original post referred to the Chicago school systems lack of money.
And?
Herman Rubin
toto <scar...@wicked.witch> wrote:
>On Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:24:27 -0800 (PST), Beliavsky
><beli...@aol.com> wrote:
>>On Nov 21, 9:03am, toto <scarec...@wicked.witch> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:28:06 -0600, Mark Peters
>>> <mpet...@nospam.wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>>> >The Chicago public schools spend more money per student than very
>>> >successful school districts such as CUSD 203 and 204.
......................
>>It is relevant because smarter people make more money than less-smart
>>people on average. They tend to have smarter children, because
>>intelligence, like other traits such as skin color, hair color,
>>height, etc. has a strong genetic component. Smarter kids do better in
>>school than less-smart ones on average.
>>Lots of supposedly intelligent people ignore the genetic reason for
>>the positive correlation between parental income and student success,
>>assuming that the reasons for the correlation are solely the
>>environments that affluent parents create for their children. Genetic
>>explanations are politically incorrect.
>New research suggests that genes are actually not immutable, but
>interact with the environment.
Of course genes are immutable; geneticists discuss mutations.
And of course the expression of a person's genes is affected
by the environment. But this does not mutate the genes.
>Most traits are not the result of single genes, of course.
Who said they were?
It still remains the case that the major part of mental
ability is inherited. It does take an appropriate
education to bring out the use of these abilities, and the
type of education we now have can go a long way to keep
minds from developing, or even induce permanent damage to
abilities.
>http://www.dnafiles.org/keywords/Gene-Environment+Interaction
>http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2006/07/25/gene-environment-interactions-and-the-brain/
>--
>Dorothy
>There is no sound, no cry in all the world
>that can be heard unless someone listens ..
>The Outer Limits
Greegor
BL > Sometimes they are simply WRONG.
Is that absent of ideological basis, Bob?
Bob LeChevalier
>> >Lots of supposedly intelligent people ignore the genetic reason for
>> >the positive correlation between parental income and student success,
>> >assuming that the reasons for the correlation are solely the
>> >environments that affluent parents create for their children. Genetic
>> >explanations are politically incorrect.
>
>BL > Sometimes they are simply WRONG.
>
>Is that absent of ideological basis, Bob?
A "genetic explanation" that is contradicted by scientific testing is
simply WRONG.
If you want to call a bias against things (in the scientific arena) in
which science has found no merit an "ideology", that is your
privilege.
Herman Rubin
Bob LeChevalier <loj...@lojban.org> wrote:
>Greegor <Gree...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> >Lots of supposedly intelligent people ignore the genetic reason for
>>> >the positive correlation between parental income and student success,
>>> >assuming that the reasons for the correlation are solely the
>>> >environments that affluent parents create for their children. Genetic
>>> >explanations are politically incorrect.
>>BL > Sometimes they are simply WRONG.
>>Is that absent of ideological basis, Bob?
>A "genetic explanation" that is contradicted by scientific testing is
>simply WRONG.
>If you want to call a bias against things (in the scientific arena) in
>which science has found no merit an "ideology", that is your
>privilege.
There are no studies which show that there is no merit
in the difference of mental traits among races. There
may be arguments against some of the studies which show
that these differences exist, but that is not to deny
that there are differences.
There have been studies which did not find "statistically
significant differences". This is very commonly interpreted
as saying that no difference exists, or that no practically
significant difference exists. Both of these conclusions
are incorrect uses of the statistical religion, and not at
all compatible with intelligent decision making.
Greegor
How ironic!
One of the founding fathers of Social Work,
Arthur Wallace Calhoun, in 1919 wrote that
kids are too important to be trusted to mere parents.
If the avowed Socialists who actually started ""Social Work""
had their way, all children would be property of the
"Socialist Commonwealth".
Look up Parens Patriae and you'll find out that
all kids already are "children of the state" in the USA.
It is not only in anticipation of wartime that
children are important to the state.
Ironically, the state has proven over and
over again to be the WORST possible parent.
As such, being "second guessed" by these incompetents
is surreal.
Some other American founders for Social Work
were the Fabians. They had a logo (crest or artwork)
that was a wolf in sheeps clothing, which apparently
the Child Protection INDUSTRY has taken to heart
as evidenced by much of their behavior.
Arthur Wallace Calhoun, PhD
taught at Brockwood Labor College
and the CP's Workers School.
(Communist Party)
A Social History of the American Family:
From Colonial Times to the Present 1919
by Arthur H Clark Company Cleveland, Ohio
In 1927, for the American Academy of Political & Social Science,
he wrote "The Worker looks at government" 176 pages.
"The family goes back to the age of savagery while the
state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern
individual is a world citizen, served by the world,
and home interests can no longer be supreme"...
"socialism is"...
"we may expect in the socialist commonwealth"...
G > Please explain to me where the dignity of the family
G > fits in with that OUTRIGHT socialist political agenda
G > to trash the US Family in general?
http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.050131.homecoming.htm
Early 20th Century American Progressives also saw the care and
teaching of small children at home as a problem. As the historian
Arthur Calhoun wrote in his influential 1918 volume, A Social History
of the American Family:
The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to
society rather than to family. The family goes back to the age of
savagery, while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The
modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home
interests can no longer be supreme.[5]
http://www.newswithviews.com/Cuddy/dennis14.htm
Cuddy article also quoted on several other web sites.
MENTAL HEALTH AND WORLD CITIZENSHIP
By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
August 11, 2004
In a recent article, I related that the Bush administration's
Secretary of Education Rod Paige last October 3 declared that the
U.S.
is pleased to rejoin UNESCO where we could develop common strategies
to prepare our children to become "citizens of the world."
Then on June 21 WorldNetDaily published "Life With Big Brother: Bush
to screen population for mental illness" describing President Bush's
"New Freedom Initiative" that would have every citizen receive a
mental health screening. What one needs to guard against is the use
of
mental health to pursue world government.
The theme of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson was "The
New Freedom" and it pursued the ideals of PHILIP DRU: ADMINISTRATOR,
written in 1912 by President Wilson's chief adviser, Col. Edward M.
House, who wrote of "socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx." Education
would be a primary vehicle for achieving the objective, and John
Dewey, the father of progressive education, promoted socialism. He
said the society or group is most important, and that independent
individualists have a form of "insanity."
By the late 1940s, Dewey's progressive education was becoming
dominant
in American public schools. And in 1948 an International Congress on
Mental Health was held in London with publication of a document
"Mental Health and World Citizenship," declaring that "world
citizenship can be widely extended among all peoples through the
application of the principles of mental health." The Congress
promoted
the U.N. as the vehicle for promoting this objective, and UNESCO's
director-general Sir Julian Huxley the same year wrote in UNESCO: ITS
PURPOSE AND ITS PHILOSOPHY that "political unification in some sort
of
world government will be required."
The 1950s and 1960s saw the growing strength of Dewey's progressive
educational philosophy and mental health advocacy, and in 1965 the
Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children was established. In
1969, the Commission released its report, which stated: "As the home
and church decline in influence...schools must begin to provide
adequately for the emotional and moral development of children....The
school...must assume a direct responsibility for the attitudes and
values of child development. The child advocate, psychologist, social
technician, and medical technician should all reach aggressively into
the community, send workers out to children's homes, recreation
facilities, and schools. They should assume full responsibility for
all education, including pre-primary education."
In the 1970s, a representative of HEW (U.S. Department of Health,
Education and Welfare) approached North Carolina Governor James B.
Hunt, Jr. about developing a model for child health care around the
nation. The N.C. Plan was called "Child Health Plan for Raising a New
Generation," and included establishing a "health care home" for every
child, stating "responsibilities belonging to child and family are
required." The plan was released in 1979, the same year the N.C.
State
Health Plan was adopted, linking in two places religion with mental
illness and mental retardation.
In the same year (1979), Bill Clinton (supported by Hillary Clinton)
began Arkansas' Governor's School for the Gifted and Talented,
modeled
after the first Governor's School in the nation which was established
in 1963 in N.C., was funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation, and
was attended by the writer of this article. We were given various
psychological tests which, I believe, looked at us as guinea pigs to
be remoulded for the Brave New World of the future.
When Hillary Clinton became First Lady of the U.S. in 1993, she was
in charge of a health care task force, about half the members
of whom were connected with the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ)
Foundation. On the NBC "Today Show" (January 23, 1990),
Dr. Michael Lewis of the New Jersey Robert Wood Johnson
Medical School had claimed: "Lying is an important part of
social life, and children who are unable to do it
are children who may have developmental problems."
What Hillary Clinton's task force was proposing was basically
socialized medicine. Hillary's friend, former N.C. Gov. Hunt, became
director of RWJ's Mental Health Services for Youth program. And
regarding a January 4-5, 1996 symposium in Frankfurt, KY, attended by
attorney Kent Masterson Brown, the attorney said: "He (former Gov.
Hunt) came to Governor Wallace Wilkinson in Kentucky and told him
that
RWJ would like Kentucky to become part of this mental health program
for youth, and said we'll give you $100,000 to plan a
program....That's what they do. I mean, you think that's just buying
legislation. Well, it is."
The next year, early in 1997, former Gov. Hunt was chairman of the
National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) and promoted the Early
Childhood
Public Engagement Campaign that actor Rob Reiner and others were
starting, with the Carnegie Corporation once again playing a critical
role (the Carnegie Institution in 1904 had financed the establishment
of a biological experiment station related to eugenics at Cold Spring
Harbor, NY). The NEGP indicated a desire for the creation of a
nationalized system of child care from age zero based upon the
principles of brain research (mental health). Roy Roemer, Governor of
Colorado at the time, stated: "The ideal system would be...in every
community or county you have an organizational structure that is
responsible for the zero to 6, zero to 3 age level for the
child....And then finally put in a hooker and say, 'Hey, you don't
get
any payments from state on their highways until you do this job.'"
It may be this same type of coercive tactic that is used to
facilitate
the current New Freedom Initiative. Mental health screenings may be
attached to the current vaccines most children are required to
receive
to attend public schools. And for older people, they may be asked by
insurance companies to "voluntarily" accept the screenings if they
don't want their premiums to increase.
In 2001, President George W. Bush worked with U.S. Senator Ted
Kennedy
to pass the federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation, which
includes
provisions for expanding school-based mental health programs. This
fits with the report of The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health,
which stressed that "schools must be partners in the mental health
care of our children."
--------------------------------
Where is all this leading? In the third volume of Arthur Calhoun's A
SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY, published in 1919 and widely
used as a social service textbook, one reads: "The new view is that
the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to
the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the
state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a
world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer
be supreme....As soon as the new family, consisting of only the
parents and the children, stood forth, society saw how many were
unfit
for parenthood and began to realize the need of community care....As
familism weakens, society has to assume a larger parenthood. The
school begins to assume responsibility for the functions thrust upon
it....The kindergarten grows downward toward the cradle and there
arises talk of neighborhood nurseries....Social centers replace the
old time home chimney....The child passes more and more into the
custody of community experts....In the new social order, extreme
emphasis is sure to be placed upon eugenic procreation....It seems
clear that at least in its early stages, socialism will mean an
increased amount of social control....We may expect in the socialist
commonwealth a system of public educational agencies that will begin
with the nursery and follow the individual through life....Those
persons that experience alarm at the thought of intrinsic changes in
family institutions should remember that in the light of social
evolution, nothing is right or valuable in itself."
--------------------
Relevant to this, Clinton administration official Mary Jo Bane said
almost 30 years ago that "in order to raise children with equality,
we
must take them away from families and communally raise them." (TULSA
SUNDAY WORLD, August 21, 1977) And about that same time, HEW
Executive
Assistant Eddie Bernice Johnson (who would later become a
Congresswoman from Texas) advocated the licensing of parents before
they would be permitted to have children. Licensing of parents has
also been proposed by Prof. Gene Stephens (THE FUTURIST, April 1981)
and Dr. Jack Westman (LICENSING PARENTS, 1994).
Under the American socialism planned for our future, government will
increasingly control our lives via mental health screening and
education, among other means. Only if the American people resist
these
efforts as soon as possible will we be successful in thwarting the
plans of the power elite.
© 2004 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved
http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w15.html
The Perils of Parens Patriae, or When the State Becomes Daddy
by William Norman Grigg
"In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield
themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand."
~ Frederick Gates, chairman of the Rockefeller-created General
Education Board, 1902.
For those of us who love and understand individual freedom, it
sometimes seems as if the Atlantic just isn't wide enough to impede
the collaboration of Anglo-American elites seeking to re-mold the
world closer to their hearts' desire.
That last phrase, incidentally, assumes that those elites, who look
at us with “bright, dead alien eyes,” could be said to have
human hearts.
The government of departing British Prime Minister Tony Blair has
announced a new initiative entitled the “Nurse Family Partnership”
that would (in the words of the Guardian of London) “intervene as
early as possible in troubled families, first-time mothers identified
just 16 weeks after conception [who] will be given intensive weekly
support from midwives and health visitors until the unborn child
reaches two years old.”
This program could be considered a form of pre-emptive parens
patriae;
that phrase refers to the fatherhood of the State. The Guardian
captured the essence of the British early-intervention initiative in
its headline: “Unborn babies targeted in crackdown on criminality.”
The Blair government, summarized that left-leaning periodical, “is
prepared to single out babies still in the womb to break cycles of
deprivation and behaviour.... Under the programme, which has been
copied from the United States, young, first-time mothers will be
assigned a personal health visitor at between 16 and 20 weeks into
their pregnancy. They will continue to have weekly or fortnightly
visits until the child is two....” (Emphasis added.)
“Children belong to the general family, to the state, before
belonging to private families."
~ French Revolutionary leader Bertrand Barere, whose memory was later
invoked by French parents to scare disobedient children (I'm
serious)
The objective is for these intruders, who are clothed in the supposed
authority of the State (the “coldest of all cold monsters”), to
instruct mothers how to care for their own flesh and blood. The
program is “voluntary,” for now. It will not remain so.
As noted above, the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) was devised in the
United States by Dr. David Olds of the University of Colorado. It has
been implemented in 22 states, and legislation proposed by Senators
Ken Salazar (D-Colorado) and Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) would
“expand access” to the program to all 50 states and the District of
Columbia “through the State Children's Health Insurance Program
(SCHIP) ... providing at-home nurse visits for up to 570,000 first-
time mothers each year.”
For more than a century, collectivist social engineers have extolled
the merits of home visitations by State-assigned social workers as a
way of circumventing parental authority and establishing a
proprietary
claim on children. The most notorious recent examples – on this side
of the Atlantic, in any case – are Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno,
the
latter demonstrating her solicitude for children by immolating more
than a dozen of them at Mt. Carmel and sending stormtroopers to seize
another from his Miami relatives at gunpoint.
In her ghost-written opus It Takes a Village, Madame Hillary
rhapsodized that she “can't say enough” about the merits of home
visitation programs. The Nation's Alexander Cockburn, whose household
acquaintances in England included members of the Fabian Socialist
movement, has pointed out that Hillary's blueprint for social
engineering bears a familial resemblance to Fabianism.
"Time and again, reading … It Takes a Village, I was reminded of
[Fabian founder] Beatrice Webb," Cockburn has observed. "There's the
same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition
until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom
that gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as
therapeutic policing."
Photo captions: "Home visitation" à la Janet Reno in
Miami.... ... and in Waco.
In his 1919 book New Worlds for Old, Fabian activist H.G. Wells
(better known for his science fiction offerings), laid out the basic
premise of “therapeutic policing”: “Socialism regards parentage under
proper safeguards as 'not only a duty but a service' to the state;
that is to say, it proposes to pay for good parentage – in other
words, to endow the home.”
By making the mother dependent on subsidies, the State became the
surrogate father. And, as Wells pointed out, the State claims the
right to raise “its” children, should the natural parents be found
unsuitable. This is the tacit but unmistakable threat that
accompanies
every State official who is permitted to violate the sanctity of the
home.
The Blair regime's NFP Action Plan makes this quite plain, at least
to people alert to the nuances of State-speak:
Section 1.2 of the Action Plan claims a mandate for the government to
assure that nobody is permitted to “waste” his “human potential,”
since this is “bad for the whole country.”
Section 1.6 asserts the State's right and capacity to take
“preventative action” within the home in order to “tackle problems
before they become fully entrenched and blight the lives of both
individuals and wider society.”
Section 1.9 attempts to cast “wider society” as a victim of
unregulated families, since “the behaviour of some people –
particularly some of the most challenging families – causes real
disruption and distress in the community around them.”
ZZ Top they ain't, but they are one of history's most notable power
trios, "The Therapeutic Police": Fabian founders Beatrice and Sydney
Webb (from the left, appropriately), and Fabian popularizer George
Bernard Shaw.
Thus the need, as the Blair regime and its American consultant
describe it, to “develop and promote better prediction tools for use
by front-line practitioners” and take measures “to ensure that those
identified as at risk are followed up.”
Some sense of the purpose of “following up” on “at risk” families can
be found in the British Government's Policy Review paper, “The Role
of the State”:
“The state ... has the legitimate monopoly of force in a given
territory,” that paper begins, immediately laying a totalitarian
foundation (from Lenin – the State exercises “power without limit,
resting directly on force”; from Mussolini – “Everything within the
State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”).
Photo caption:
The Fabian Socialist crest depicts a wolf in sheep's clothing – a
suitable symbol for that subversive movement, and an apt metaphor for
government "home visitation" programs.
The NFP initiative, the paper continues, is inspired by the vision of
a “strategic and enabling state” which would be “less about command
and control and more about collaboration and partnership.” The state
will “focus on ends, not the means by which [its] goals are
delivered,” working through “a new partnership between the State and
the citizen.”
Ah, but remember that the “collaborator” and “partner” offering its
assistance to the citizen claims “the legitimate monopoly of force,”
which means that in the event of a dispute, it is the citizen, not
the
State, that will be compelled to yield.
To anyone even slightly familiar with the tenets of the Clinton-era
“Third Way,” or the nostrums of the attenuated variety of Marxism
called “Communitarianism,” none of this will be new. It may strike
some as remarkable that the American version of the NFP program has
become so deeply entrenched during the reign of George W. Bush, but
this wouldn't be considered odd by those who understand
“compassionate conservatism” to be politically enharmonic
with Clinton's “I Feel Your Pain”-style corporatism.
Furthermore, as much as it pains me to admit it, the British Fabian
Socialists have nothing on their American counterparts regarding the
long, patient campaign to subvert the family.
“Since the 1840s … American social history could be written as the
deliberate dismantling of the home-centered economy, and the
consequent decay of the foundations of our liberty,” observers Dr.
Alan Carlson. “[T]his turn against the home was not a natural
consequence of industrialization or the emergence of a modern
economy.
Rather, the change derived from the application of statist ideology
and consciously-made political and legal choices.”
"The first direct assault on family autonomy grew out of the reform
school movement during the 1830s," whose influence was particularly
strong in New York and Pennsylvania, continues Dr. Carlson. In 1839,
the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, acting on assumptions inspired by the
reform school movement, invoked the concept of parens patriae to
justify the state's actions in supplanting parents it found "unequal
to" or "unworthy of the task" of educating children.
In 1882, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled: "It is the unquestioned
right and imperative duty of every enlightened government, in its
character of parens patriae to protect and provide for the comfort
and
well-being of its citizens.... The performance of this duty is justly
regarded as one of the most important governmental functions, and all
constitutional limitations must be so understood and construed so as
not to interfere with its proper and legitimate exercise." (Emphasis
added.) The principle of parens patriae, properly understood,
requires the demolition of all constitutional limitations, rather
than their “redefinition.”
In 1913, Dr. Arthur W. Calhoun published A Social History of The
American Family: From Colonial Times to the Present, which would
become an authoritative text for American social-service and welfare
workers. Calhoun was remarkably unabashed in promoting a perspective
on State supremacy that could have been offered by Marx and Engels
(who brazenly called for “abolition of the family!” in the Communist
Manifesto):
"American history consummates the disappearance of the wider [or
extended] familism and the substitution of the parentalism of
society.... The new view is that the higher and more obligatory
relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes
back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the
age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen,
served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."
By 1930, the year that President Herbert Hoover convened the White
House Conference on Child Health and Protection, it was possible for
an American president to describe, in public, the individual child as
someone "who belongs to the community almost as much as to the
family," and a citizen of "a world predestinedly [sic] moving toward
unity.” The latter phrase seems to foretell, by roughly six decades,
the claim contained in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child that government is the primary custodian of all children,
with the UN itself at the head of a global system of parens patriae.
For more than a century and a half, collectivist cliques on both
sides
of the Atlantic have been engaged in a kind of dialectical pas de
deuxwhere State control over the family is concerned, each side
propelling the other to ever-greater heights of presumption. As I
said, sometimes it seems a pity that England is just one ocean away.
May 26, 2007
Copyright © 2007 William Norman Grigg writes the Pro Libertate blog.
Bob LeChevalier
>There are no studies which show that there is no merit
>in the difference of mental traits among races.
Since there is no scientific definition of multiple races, there can
be no scientific studies showing any differences. All studies are
based on self-described or other subjective determinations of race.
Mark Peters
toto <scar...@wicked.witch> wrote:
According to the Illinois State Board of Education, in 2007 the Chicago
public schools spent $11,032.92 per student, CUSD 203 spent $10,224.89
per student and CUSD 204 spent $9,221.99 per student. According to
another responder, the Chicago tax rate for schools was the lowest.
Bob LeChevalier
>According to the Illinois State Board of Education, in 2007 the Chicago
>public schools spent $11,032.92 per student, CUSD 203 spent $10,224.89
>per student and CUSD 204 spent $9,221.99 per student. According to
>another responder, the Chicago tax rate for schools was the lowest.
You didn't provide a URL, so I went searching and found the report
card website:
http://iirc.niu.edu/ListDistricts.aspx?searchtext=B
I then started gathering data on schools in and around Chicago. This
wasn't easy until I figured out that there was a comparison function
to make it east. I got some elementary only and high school only
districts before that point.
I quickly noticed some patterns.
Elementary only districts were lower cost and high school only
districts higher cost. Those places without a unified district almost
certainly had the highest tax rates since many of the elementary
districts alone had higher tax rates than unified districts, and
people in those districts would also be paying for a high school
district as well.
CUSD in 2007 was higher than most, but not the highest, among USDs in
both instructional and operating costs. North Chicago and Barrington
in Lake county were higher. But I noticed that Chicago in particular
seemed to have had large increases in the last 2 years, so I collected
data for the same districts 5 years earlier (toto was teaching in
Chicago more than 5 years ago). 5 years ago Chicago was a little
closer to the average in expenditure.
I did not see a strong correlation with the percentage of low income
(%LI) students. Chicago did have the loweest tax rate in 2005, but
not in 2000.
tax per student
EAV/stu rat instr oper
2008 2005 165,380 3.3 - 2006-2007 6,577 11,033 Chicago USD 84%LI
2008 2005 345,911 3.4 - 2006-2007 6,749 11,660 Barrington USD 12%LI
2008 2005 181,715 4.8 - 2006-2007 5,889 9,479 Elmwood Pk USD 33%LI
2008 2005 164,876 5 - 2006-2007 5,749 9,222 Ind Prar USD 6%LI
2008 2005 242,197 4.1 - 2006-2007 5,842 10,065 Lake Zurich USD 5%LI
2008 2005 59,503 5 - 2006-2007 6,673 11,825 North Chicago USD 72%LI
2008 2005 195,406 3.9 - 2006-2007 4,648 9,395 Wauconda USD 18%LI
2008 2005 70,216 5.9 - 2006-2007 5,386 9,365 Waukegan USD 43%LI
2008 2005 74,184 5.6 - 2006-2007 4,436 7,866 Round Lake USD 63%LI
2003 2000 105,878 3.9 - 2001-2002 5,286 8,482 Chicago USD -5yrs
2003 2000 246,311 3.3 - 2001-2002 5,661 9,909 Barrington USD -5yrs
2003 2000 101,746 6.7 - 2001-2002 4,312 7,504 Elmwood Pk USD -5yrs
2003 2000 122,944 4.9 - 2001-2002 4,820 7,909 Ind Prar USD -5yrs
2003 2000 159,469 4 - 2001-2002 4,223 7,462 Lake Zurich USD -5yrs
2003 2000 39,581 5.4 - 2001-2002 5,179 9,077 North Chicago USD -5yrs
2003 2000 136,229 4.3 - 2001-2002 3,868 7,211 Wauconda USD -5yrs
2003 2000 55,329 4.6 - 2001-2002 4,286 8,328 Waukegan USD -5yrs
2003 2000 58,753 5.3 - 2001-2002 3,861 6,251 Round Lake USD -5yrs
2008 2005 729,131 2 - 2006-2007 7,624 15,088 Leyden HSD
2008 2005 576,219 2.2 - 2006-2007 6,978 11,660 Cons HSD
2008 2005 313,751 3 - 2006-2007 7,728 13,230 Bloom Twp HSD
2008 2005 294,589 3.3 - 2006-2007 7,512 12,241 Bremen HSD
2008 2005 438,332 3.2 - 2006-2007 5,979 13,088 Grayslake ESD
2008 2005 605,684 2 - 2006-2007 6,929 12,450 Comm Cons ESD
2008 2005 446,160 2.3 - 2006-2007 6,561 11,476 Glencoe ESD
2008 2005 337,695 3.2 - 2006-2007 6,068 10,821 Arlington Hts ESD
2008 2005 82,178 4.9 - 2006-2007 5,438 10,406 Dolton ESD
2008 2005 94,605 4.6 - 2006-2007 5,827 9,457 Chicago Ht ESD
2008 2005 176,752 3.8 - 2006-2007 5,364 9,244 Cook Co ESD
2008 2005 69,575 3.4 - 2006-2007 4,641 7,939 Cicero ESD
2008 2005 - - - 2006-2007 5,808 9,907 State Average
Chookie
<810099fd-8be4-4e2e...@f20g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>,
Geekman <gee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was generalizing. But my position is supported by 32 years of
> teaching in 5 different Chicago Public Schools (narratives and
> observations). [...] When I've had problems with
> students' performance and/or behavior, I work with the students
> directly, but when the kids don't cooperate, e.g. do their homework,
> come to me for assistance when I request it, stay awake in class,
> correct inappropriate behavior, bring their materials to class, take
> notes, and so on (all of the behaviors necessary for me to do my job
> well), I need to communicate with the adult(s) who raised them,
> monitor their work, and send them to me. If that person is unavailable
> (disconnected phone number, no longer raising the child, not
> interested, passed the child on to a relative), not only does it
> communicate to me a serious dysfunction at home, but possibly a
> history of not supporting their child's educational nourishment. If
> there are several students like this in my classes, it's manageable,
> but if the majority of the students come from dysfunctional homes, it
> makes my job extremely difficult and greatly limits my success. This
> has been the case when I've taught in inner city schools.
My feeling is that you have cause and effect mixed up here. Sure it's true
that seriously dysfunctional families *fail* to support their children's
education, but that is not the same as *refusing* to support their child's
education. A friend of mine taught in a deprived school and often had kids
who turned up at school with nothing -- no bag, no lunch, no pencils, no
paper, no money. These parents are just not able to provide their kids with a
nutritious breakfast or a packed bag, stress the importance of education,
revere the teacher, make sure the kids get to bed in good time, etc. The
level of chaos in such families beggars belief, and I think you have to remove
that overall chaos (especially when it involves mental illness, which it
usually does) before deciding whether the parents truly disapprove of their
children being educated. Some parents truly don't approve of education, as
Rosalie mentioned, and some have never seen its relevance, and some probably
would love to see their kids doing well at school, but the voices in their
heads prevent them from helping much.
My feeling is that these families do benefit from (1) not being all lumped
together into what the British charmingly call "sink estates", but from being
spread evenly across the community, in the hope that normal living will appear
normal, rather than something you only see on TV programs, and (2) much better
coordination and tailoring of resources to precise needs.
My second point arises because in my country, there are plenty of resources
available to help people, but they have to apply for them. As a result, they
cannot be accessed by people who don't know they have a problem, don't know
the help available, don't know how to access the service, can't fill in the
form or remember to mail it... No wonder these problems are generational!
Beliavsky
> My feeling is that these families do benefit from (1) not being all lumped
> together into what the British charmingly call "sink estates", but from being
> spread evenly across the community, in the hope that normal living will appear
> normal, rather than something you only see on TV programs, and (2) much better
> coordination and tailoring of resources to precise needs.
Do the benefits that accrue to them from being spread out exceed the
costs imposed on the people currently living in the good
neighborhoods? In the U.S., it was found such an "anti-poverty"
program caused crime rates to increase in the areas that poor people
moved to
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
American Murder Mystery
by Hanna Rosin
Atlantic, July/Aug 2008
> My second point arises because in my country, there are plenty of resources
> available to help people, but they have to apply for them. As a result, they
> cannot be accessed by people who don't know they have a problem, don't know
> the help available, don't know how to access the service, can't fill in the
> form or remember to mail it... No wonder these problems are generational!
They are generational in part because they are genetic.
Chookie
<67a3dc31-1919-4830...@x14g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
Beliavsky <beli...@aol.com> wrote:
> On Dec 4, 6:23 am, Chookie <ehreben...@fowlspambegone.com.au> wrote:
>
> > My feeling is that these families do benefit from (1) not being all lumped
> > together into what the British charmingly call "sink estates", but from
> > beingspread evenly across the community, in the hope that normal living will
> > appear normal, rather than something you only see on TV programs, and (2)
> > much better coordination and tailoring of resources to precise needs.
>
> Do the benefits that accrue to them from being spread out exceed the
> costs imposed on the people currently living in the good
> neighborhoods? In the U.S., it was found such an "anti-poverty"
> program caused crime rates to increase in the areas that poor people
> moved to
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
You will note that the poor people were *not* spread evenly across the
community, but pushed into slightly-better-than-ghetto communities (a mere
20-40% poverty rate, for Heaven's sake!), and often lost other social
supports. That is hardly what I mean. I was thinking of something like a
uniform 5% poverty rate across an entire city: one or two poor families in
each street, AND -- Boolean and! -- interventions tailored to each family.
> > My second point arises because in my country, there are plenty of resources
> > available to help people, but they have to apply for them. As a result,
> > they
> > cannot be accessed by people who don't know they have a problem, don't know
> > the help available, don't know how to access the service, can't fill in the
> > form or remember to mail it... No wonder these problems are generational!
>
> They are generational in part because they are genetic.
If you mean genetic in the sense of "determined by genes *as opposed to*
environment", you are flat wrong about any of the problems I
mentioned/implied, such as mental illness, criminality, poverty, illiteracy,
ignorance and domestic violence.
I think the word you are looking for is *heritable* -- "capable of being
inherited", which is true of most mental illnesses, and some learning
disorders. Children of people with (say) depression are *more likely* to
develop depression, but they are not *certain* to. When it comes to complex
social phenomena like criminality or poverty, it is extremely difficult to
sort out which elements might be heritable as opposed to environmental, and to
what extent.
However, the existence of heritability of traits does not mean that
environment has no effect on a trait (we know childhood malnutrition decreases
intelligence), nor that environmental interventions are ineffectual in
controlling it (eg the remarkable success of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy on
mood disorders).
Clisby
> In article
> <67a3dc31-1919-4830...@x14g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
> Beliavsky <beli...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> On Dec 4, 6:23 am, Chookie <ehreben...@fowlspambegone.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>> My feeling is that these families do benefit from (1) not being all lumped
>>> together into what the British charmingly call "sink estates", but from
>>> beingspread evenly across the community, in the hope that normal living will
>>> appear normal, rather than something you only see on TV programs, and (2)
>>> much better coordination and tailoring of resources to precise needs.
>> Do the benefits that accrue to them from being spread out exceed the
>> costs imposed on the people currently living in the good
>> neighborhoods? In the U.S., it was found such an "anti-poverty"
>> program caused crime rates to increase in the areas that poor people
>> moved to
>>
>> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
>
> You will note that the poor people were *not* spread evenly across the
> community, but pushed into slightly-better-than-ghetto communities (a mere
> 20-40% poverty rate, for Heaven's sake!), and often lost other social
> supports. That is hardly what I mean. I was thinking of something like a
> uniform 5% poverty rate across an entire city: one or two poor families in
> each street, AND -- Boolean and! -- interventions tailored to each family.
>
A uniform 5% poverty rate across a city? I can't think of a single
city in my state where that would be possible.
Clisby
arunraj...@gmail.com
> http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-pitts1117.artnov17,0,508482.column
> Are Public Schools Good Enough For Our Kids?
> Leonard Pitts Jr.
>
> November 17, 2008
>
>
> Some observers would like Michelle and Barack Obama to send their
> daughters to public schools. Doing so, they say, would be a powerful
> statement of faith in public education.
>
> All that notwithstanding, I expect the Obamas, like many parents of
> means, will choose private schools.
>
> Can we be honest here? I mean, brutally honest? D.C. public schools
> are not good enough for the Obama kids. Not because they are D.C.
> public schools, but because they are urban public schools.
>
> rule. Public schools, particularly in urban areas, are largely failing
> our children.
>
> Which brings me to Michelle Rhee. You might not know the name yet, but
> Among the changes she has instituted, or is attempting to institute,
> is a cash reward for students who meet certain benchmarks of
> performance and attendance. She also wants to make it easier to fire
> teachers who do not perform; under her plan, educators would give up
> tenure protections for a merit plan that would allow the best of them
> — i.e., those whose students actually learn something — to earn upward
> of $100,000 a year.
>
> when I wrote a series of columns on "What Works" to improve education
> wish list would be the ability to reward good teachers and fire bad
> ones.
>
> the ax and those who do get raises. Isn't that the way it works in
> exists in some alternate universe where everyone is rewarded equally
> regardless of the quality of their work. So it has fought Rhee with
> bitter tenacity, seeking to block her at every step.
>
> Meanwhile, according to the National Center for Education Statistics,
> only 48 percent of D.C. eighth-graders had attained basic reading
> readers. The corresponding numbers in math: 34 and 8. Those
> statistics, dismal as they are, represent an improvement over previous
> years.
>
> And D.C. is hardly unique.
>
> out of the way. We need to know if what she proposes will work. And if
> it does not, we need to determine what will.
>
> We need, in other words, an urgency we seem to lack.
>
> Too many of us, I think, have made peace with the idea that public
> certain places are ineducable. But I saw the falsity of that with my
> own eyes while traveling the country for What Works, saw some of the
>
> The failure here, then, is not the students', but ours — a failure of
> We need to decide that our children deserve better.
>
> And we need to ask a simple question: if public schools are not good
>
> • Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated writer in Washington.