We toured, applied to, got accepted into and received financial aid from an International Baccelaureate academy. The kid would be going there in the fall except that the aid wasn't quite enough. She's three. I went to public school but I went to a public school set up for nuclear scientists' kids run by nuclear scientists' wives combining the resources of the city, the state and the Department of Energy. I hated the fuck out of it but hot diggity damn the curriculum had some rigor. My wife went through the challenge program here and got a full ride to college. She's whip smart but she doesn't know a lot of things for the simple reason that she was never taught. Dated a girl. She went to public school up here. Her sister went to Lakeside. Girl I dated hung out with drug dealers, worked at the pea plant, dated a long string of physically abusive men and has been divorced three times. Her sister hung out with the children of CEOs, taught math in Switzerland, dated two guys I'm still friends with (one of which runs a 20-person software company) and is a tenured professor at Berkeley. I'm not about to shoot down any levees or tax packages designed to improve the state of education around here, but I'm also planning on private school for the kid from before she knows how to read.
Wow. This is really sad. I went to a public high school and loved it. (It's actually an IB school, too, for 11th and 12th grades, a program I enrolled in. I also now coach at this school.) And while it wasn't as good a school as Park, Gilman, Boy's Latin, Friend's, or McDonogh -- some of top-tier schools in and around Baltimore, private, where the rich parents send their kids -- I loved it. IB was a rigorous program, even if only a minority of students went through the program. That number is growing. But I mainly attended class with poor or middle-class black kids. I was disappointed in hearing how assured a decision it was to decide on private school. But I'm thinking about it, and it's undeniable: while I may have had a very good experience at a public high school, most students do not, and nary a one of us got the experience of rubbing shoulders with the children of CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists, not to mention sitting in front of the teachers those tuition dollars secure. And if I get past the initial defensiveness of my own public school experience, I realize how, even at a magnet high school, there was some woefully inadequate schooling going on in some parts. Sigh.
Right? Thing of it is, I know teachers. I know tutors. I know educators and I know administrators. And the misadventure that was No Child Left Behind exacerbated the problem and the whiplash of Common Core isn't fixing it. If I had the ability to make it better for everybody I would. Knew a guy who spent half a day every week being the science teacher for whatever class his daughter was in; he'd work with the teacher, buy the supplies, come up with a curriculum and volunteer 10% of his work week to be Bill Nye, effectively. And I admire the fuck out of the sentiment and I won't say a single bad thing about the guy but it shouldn't come to that, you know? Education is so much more political than educators want to admit and it's been losing for decades. Even the glorious misadventure that was my high school is no more; about a year after I left the Cartels moved in and it got gutted by black tar heroin. Meanwhile everybody that wears black and listens to Marilyn Manson is probably going to take a shotgun to the gym one fine day so you can't even be a reasonable miscreant, despite the metal detector. I know my kid would rip ass in public school. I know she'd get an "education." But I also know that the people who will be buying and selling everyone else won't be in class with her unless I fuckin' pay for it because that's the way the world runs.
You had mentioned somewhere previously that the never-in-a-zillion-years solution to this might be to stop anchoring school district funding to local property taxes, but instead pool property taxes nationally and provide for an egalitarian education that way. And the reason, as you said, that that will never happen? Politics. And while do-gooders and well-wishers us all will continue to decry the sorry state of things around us, no sense in not setting up our progeny to receive the very best education, which happens now to be at a private institutions.
Not my idea. Elizabeth Warren's. She wrote a book about it more than a decade ago. But then, she's a marxist/socialist/anarchist/whatever so who cares what she thinks.
The idea has an implied association that there is a very good correlation between money spent on education and outcomes. I don't think that's necessarily true I found conflicting data that seems to imply we dont have a really good way to compare school systems. A lot of the money is simply wasted on stupid shit like "technology", Ipads, administrators and non common text books. Also im going to take a soft stab at you and point out that if $spent per pupil is highly correlated with outcomes this program would benefit people like you that send their kids to private school by decreasing the pool of potential viable high performing competitors. (More people in the middle less on the edges where they can compete with private schools). I dont think that's what you were thinking of when you brought up the idea but I figured it would be worth mentioning. Ref:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-the-least-on-education-in-one-map/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/ Would imply poor correlation but i think their methodology is fucked http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/01/15/247-wall-st-states-best-schools/21388041/ would imply pretty good correlation. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/01/15/247-wall-st-states-best-schools/21388041/ medium good correlation
It doesn't, actually. It implies that when a school district's funding is determined by its property taxes, the wealthy will congregate in wealthy school districts while the poor will be marginalized into impoverished ones. Further, that pursuit of decent education becomes transformed into the pursuit of pricy real estate which further drives the stratification of education and society. I'm not going to go toe-to-toe on four links that refute an argument I didn't make. I linked to a book; you wanna attack "me", read the book.The idea has an implied association that there is a very good correlation between money spent on education and outcomes.
That makes more sense I guess I would have to go read the book to see what data she uses to support that argument. I always assumed wealthy people congregated in the same area even if that wasn't the case due to the safety, prestige and networking aspect but I could be wrong.
I grew up in Los Alamos, the son of two kids who grew up in Los Alamos, who used to go to Christmas parties at Carson Mark's house, with Norris Bradbury, Richard Feynman, occasionally Edward Teller and Stephen Hawking in attendance, and I have never before heard that term. My mother moved to Los Alamos in 1946. My father made his way there about 1947. Los Alamos was known by then but the guard towers are still up. They stopped checking IDs in '79 or so but started checking them again the last couple times I went back ('08, '11). Most towns had police; we had police, Pro Force (DOE contractors with machine guns), SWAT and Delta. During the Reagan era the guard towers regained 20mm anti-tank guns. On the plus side, I knew more Russians than the average middle American in the '90s.
Damn guys, this was good stuff. Education is always political in a very personal sense. I have a good friend that has family in Syria. His extended family in Damascus is currently hostage to Al Bassad's regime of soldiers that were indoctrinated as wards of Syyria that now do its bidding unquestionably. In fact, soldiers that might defect are shot on the spot by comrades. As a result, they are willing to do very horrific things to spare themselves and their families. This is the worst outcome of education. Is it time then that we, in the states, extend "All men are created equal..." and include some sort of guarantee toward an unfettered education in reasoning and logic?