Abolish local school districts (except for the 20 largest cities and the 50 states), advocates former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner in the Wall Street Journal. Then establish national standards for reading, math, science and social studies with a test to match. Gerstner also wants to set national standards for teacher certification, pay teachers based on their students’ performance and extend the school day and year.
Gerstner’s proposals would take the public out of public education, writes Deborah Meier on Bridging Differences.
Don’t link national standards to the abolition of local control, responds Flypaper.
The state of Hawaii is one big school district. As I understand it — Hawaiians, feel free to chime in — it hasn’t worked well.
You can’t get daycare for six grand. And it is a competitive market.
I’m still waiting to hear how the poorly educated people out there are going to successfully homeschool their kids. Oh, and when. It’s interesting that you’re in Hawaii. The locals I met in Hawaii all worked 2-3 jobs just to make ends meet. When, and how, they’re supposed to homeschool is beyond me. Many, many, people on the continent work those types of hours too. Then again, maybe you were thinking of Hawaiians like Tom Selleck (I hear he lives on Maui)
And, I attended parochial schools for a decade. I remember science classes from no more than one single teacher. I simply read every science book cover to cover on my own.
Parochial schools are another example of selection masquerading as teaching.
In the interests of fairness, Malcolm, the next time Steve finds himself the target of a flame I trust you’ll remind him of his very scholarly “you’re clueless”
Cheers.
(PT): “Malcolm, Since you love offering links for people to read I thought I’d return the favor: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/more-evidence-on-the-lack-of-impact-of-school-choice/”
His conclusion:…
Giving Food Stamp recipients the choice of any Safeway in town would maintain the Safeway monopoly.
I suspected that you would focus on that. As scholars (unlike me, apparently) they are limited to drawing conclusions based on the experiment they performed.
If substance A and substance B are both suspected by the public to cause cancer, and a detailed study of A reveals no such link, no self-respecting researcher will say anything but “B may cause cancer”. It’s not a conclusion.
Sorry, it’s no point in your favor.
(PT): “You can’t get daycare for six grand. And it is a competitive market.
The client to supervisor ratios aren’t the same. Ten kids at $6000 per is $60,000, which is not bad for a rural homeschooling mom. There’s probably lots of inner-city parents who would pay this much to secure their kids from assault and the temptations of drugs and gangs. It’s obviously possible to deliver decent instruction for $6,000, since some other countries and some US parochial schools do it now.
(PT): “I’m still waiting to hear how the poorly educated people out there are going to successfully homeschool their kids. Oh, and when.
In Hawaii, “homeschool” is whatever occurs when a parent has filed an application to homeschool and does not enroll her child in a government school. Nothing in the law requires that parents provide homeschooling instruction or that homeschooling instruction occur between the hours of 0800 and 1430. Legally, groups of parents could extend daycare to age 18.
(PT): “I attended parochial schools for a decade. I remember science classes from no more than one single teacher. I simply read every science book cover to cover on my own.”
You answer your question above. Self-paced progress through a self-selected curriculum. Minus the psychological abuse and peer pressure.
True, but some Safeways are dumpier than others. Letting food stamp recipients choose which Safeway to patronize should result in miraculous elevation of service.
There should be no dumpy Safeways.
Dumpy Safeways should disappear in run-down neighborhoods and reappear all shiny and clean in affluent neighborhoods.
Food stamp recipients can then choose and go to Safeways in affluent neighborhoods.
Sounds like a plan to me!
(PT): “http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2006/09/school-choice-lesson-from-new-zealand.html”
If you earn your pay trashing the life chances of poor and minority kids, I hope low morale is the least of your problems.
You still haven’t answered how these people can be educated enough to educate others since you keep saying that Hawaii schools are the worst.
You also haven’t answered where people are to find the time to homeschool (I’m not talking about Tom Selleck)
That was me. That wasn’t anyone else. Nerds like you and me do not an educated population make. The nerd table was not the nerd tableS.
(PT): “I suspected that you would focus on that. As scholars (unlike me, apparently) they are limited to drawing conclusions based on the experiment they performed. If substance A and substance B are both suspected by the public to cause cancer, and a detailed study of A reveals no such link, no self-respecting researcher will say anything but “B may cause cancer”. It’s not a conclusion. Sorry, it’s no point in your favor.”
It’s not much of an argument against choice if the experiment studies a policy which restricts parents’ options to schools operated by the State monopoly. At that level, I’d expect marginal gains, below statistical significance.
Malcolm,
What you seemingly ignore given the links I’ve posted is the fact that school choice is by no means as rosy and as cut and dried as you and others pretend. If you could make it “work” in a nation of 300 million you’d likely need far more centralization than someone like you is comfortable with. But this is precisely what the choice crowd insists is impossible to do even marginally well.
If I went out and put a Mermaid trap in my backyard I suspect I would not catch any mermaids. In my report, I’d be obligated to state the conditions of my experiment, adding in my discussion the greater likelyhood of find mermaids on the Jersey Shore.
Certainly wouldn’t be an argument against mermaids, and I suspect that on the Jersey Shore there are at least creatures with fins.
(PT): “You still haven’t answered how these people can be educated enough to educate others since you keep saying that Hawaii schools are the worst. You also haven’t answered where people are to find the time to homeschool…”
But I have; parents do not have to be the ones to provide instruction. Ten parents get together, petition to homeschool, hire a college-graduate daughter of a neighbor, send their kids to her house, and go to work. It’s legally possible now (although the bureaucracy threatens parents who propose this). What is missing is support.
The State of Alaska subsidizes homeschooling a $3000 per student, last I looked. It works: homeschooled children of parents with no education beyond highschool outperform the students of the college-educated teachers in Alaska’s conventional schools. The homeschoolers’ 50th percentile score is close to the 80th percentile score of the students in conventional schools, on Alaska’s standardized assessments. The program is so popular, according to __Education Week__, that some districts lost enrollment to the homeschooling policy.
How, do tell, are you going to convince people to do this, and why haven’t you?
In theory, 300 million Americans could simultaneously moon George Bush on Jan 20. Talking everyone into it, I suspect, won’t be that simple.
I think it would be far easier to get Americans to pressure government to ditch crappy math programs. Yet, your intellectual ally thinks this is “clueless”. If we can’t convince a small number of people to do what we want how are we supposed to get millions to do it.
Malcolm, this exchange has been fun, but it’s late here on the east coast. Have a good weekend.
(PT): “…school choice is by no means as rosy and as cut and dried as you and others pretend. If you could make it “work” in a nation of 300 million you’d likely need far more centralization than someone like you is comfortable with. But this is precisely what the choice crowd insists is impossible to do even marginally well.”
Watch that “pretend” stuff,
The conditional “if” in the above puzzles me. I gave an example of the level of centralization I would accept (the credit-by-exam proposal). Here’s another:…
http://harriettubmanagenda.blogspot.com/2005/12/proposal.html
Numerous lines of evidence indicate that overall system performance rises as policy-makers shift authority over curricular (and institutional) decisions away from bureaucrats and to parents. “Choice” is not yes/no but a matter of degree.
“You’re clueless.”
This wasn’t a random evaluation. It related to a specific comment you made and showed that you really don’t know what’s been going on. This affects your whole position, and it showed me that I’m wasting my time.
We have more factual agreement than appears from the style of the discussion. Physics Teachsr attributes many problems to the malign effect of Colleges of Education. I agree. Steve attributes schools’ preference for a spiraling Math curriculum to the imperative for inclusion of low-ability kids. There’s a lot of sense in this comment…
Steve: http://joannejacobs.com/2008/12/01/nationalizing-education/#comment-86212
I suggest that these are related, alomst restatements of the same position.
Physics Teacher has suggested that reform proposals which involve parent control (“choice”: expanded charter schools, school vouchers) will not pass the political process. Basically “Who will bell the cat?” This makes sense. It’s why I recommend homeschooling. Parents cannot afford to wait for the politicians to fix this mess.
(Steve): “I’ve been fighting against fuzzy, low expectation math for years and years. It’s not all disorganized.”
(PT): “Good. But you’ve likely been fighting it pretty much alone because people with potential clout know nothing about it because it’s too local an issue.”
(Steve)”You’re clueless”
(PT): “I see you’re a scholar and a gentleman (That’s sarcasm too)”
(Steve):
This was my impression also, but it’s a bit abrupt. We are all ignorant. That’s not a problem. The problem here is that Physics Teacher won’t listen to someone who spent time in the trenches.
Lame curricula are not accidental, as we agree (see Physics teacher’s comments on Whole Language as well as inept Math instruction). The NCTM had to be pulled down the hall by the scalp, kicking and screaming all the way, to get them to concede that kids won’t invent Math notation by themselves and need to practice.
One problem with clear, self-paced Math instruction is that it would demonstrate the irrelevance of most teachers. That was the point of my credit-by-exam proposal. Once kids learn to read and to add and subtract rational numbers, which parents of normal kids can accomplish by the time their kids are six years old, they can move at their own speed through well-scripted curricula faster than a class moves. Colleges of Education maintain the pretext of “expertise” on which 90$ of the ponderous education industry relies. The State-monopoly education industry has no interest in efficient operation. “Public education” has become an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction and supply contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination.
(MK): “…(P)arents do not have to be the ones to provide instruction. Ten parents get together, petition to homeschool, hire a college-graduate daughter of a neighbor, send their kids to her house, and go to work. It’s legally possible now (although the bureaucracy threatens parents who propose this). What is missing is support.”
(PT): “How, do tell, are you going to convince people to do this, and why haven’t you?
I have convinced a few. http://harriettubmanagenda.blogspot.com/2008/08/whats-linear-differential-operator.html
(btw, what are the html tags which embed the url?)
Why not more? I’m up against 150 years of successful State-worshipful indoctrination, an institution with a $500 billion per-year budget, AND College of Education faculty, who are articulate, have a lot of free time, and strong incentives to protect their $80,000 per year, do-nothing jobs.
Re: html tags
I assume you’re talking about blockquote