Posts Tagged ‘education reform’

Arthur Camins: Don’t Be Fooled: In a Democracy, Public Schools Are Better than Private Schools

Posted: April 1, 2017 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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I am the product of public education. My daughter is a teacher, all grades including college, is currently doing a stint as a Principal. I have no formal college degrees, but did attend years of formal trade schools, some paid for, but some provided by public education as well. I should have stayed in college after Nam, but had a little PTSD, unknown to me, so I spent a lot of time racing motorcycles, boats, pretty much anything with wheels or a hull. Would not trade my life, but I also am not a great example either. However I did learn from my mistakes an raised up and intelligent well educated daughter with multiple degrees. This is a reblog so pay attention to the redirect of you would like to see the original blog from the original author quoted, or Diane Ravich, it is making its way around the circuit!

Diane Ravitch's blog

Arthur Camins, scientist and specialist in innovation, kicks off our celebration of April Fools Day with his timely warning not to be fooled by Trump and DeVos: in a democratic society, public schools are better than private schools. They are the only path to a better education for all. We need them. We do not need to resurrect the segregation that existed before the Brown decision. We have not achieved its democratic goals, but we should not abandon them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58deb703e4b03c2b30f6a629

He writes:

“It’s April Fools Day, which reminds me: Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos want us to think that private schools are better, not just for rich folks like them, but for everyone else too– Just like with Paul Ryan and health care. Don’t be fooled. It is a ruse. Public is better!

“Growing up, I knew the meaning of private places. Private places were about gates, both physical and…

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Aggressive Capitalism, Good, or Bad?

Posted: May 30, 2014 in News and politics
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I have tried a few times to put down on paper my thoughts on our economy and those of Canada, the British empire and northern European countries like Germany, for example. Robert Reich posted a recent blog, which explains it well, and all in one place, so I am going to reblog it here, and I quote; “For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed. It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system. But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure. Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well. That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database is so shocking. The fact is, we’re falling behind. While median per capita income in the United States has stagnated since 2000, it’s up significantly in Canada and Northern Europe. Their typical worker’s income is now higher than ours, and their disposable income – after taxes – higher still. It’s difficult to make exact comparisons of income across national borders because real purchasing power is hard to measure. But even if we assume Canadians and the citizens of several European nations have simply drawn even with the American middle class, they’re doing better in many other ways. Most of them get free health care and subsidized child care. And if they lose their jobs, they get far more generous unemployment benefits than we do. (In fact, right now 75 percent of jobless Americans lack any unemployment benefits.) If you think we make up for it by working less and getting paid more on an hourly basis, think again. There, at least three weeks paid vacation as the norm, along with paid sick leave, and paid parental leave. We’re working an average of 4.6 percent more hours more than the typical Canadian worker, 21 percent more than the typical French worker, and a whopping 28 percent more than your typical German worker, according to data compiled by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. But at least Americans are more satisfied, aren’t we? Not really. According to opinion surveys and interviews, Canadians and Northern Europeans are. They also live longer, their rate of infant mortality is lower, and women in these countries are far less likely to die as result of complications in pregnancy or childbirth. But at least we’re the land of more equal opportunity, right? Wrong. Their poor kids have a better chance of getting ahead. While 42 percent of American kids born into poor families remain poor through their adult lives, only 30 percent of Britain’s poor kids remain impoverished – and even smaller percentages in other rich countries. Yes, the American economy continues to grow faster than the economies of Canada and Europe. But faster growth hasn’t translated into higher living standards for most Americans. Almost all our economic gains have been going to the top – into corporate profits and the stock market (more than a third of whose value is owned by the richest 1 percent). And into executive pay (European CEOs take home far less than their American counterparts). America’s rich also pay much lower taxes than do the rich in Canada and Europe. But surely Europe can’t go on like this. You hear it all the time: They can no longer afford their welfare state. That depends on what’s meant by “welfare state.” If high-quality education is included, we’d do well to emulate them. Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries in literacy and numeracy. That spells trouble for the U.S. economy in the future. They’re also doing more workforce training, and doing it better, than we are. The result is more skilled workers. Universal health care is another part of their “welfare state” that saves them money because healthier workers are more productive. So let’s put ideology aside. The practical choice isn’t between capitalism and “welfare-state socialism.” It’s between a system that’s working for a few at the top, or one that’s working for just about everyone. Which would you prefer?” Conservatives have to be careful not to follow a lot of their constituents over a line that has not been drawn by them, but by well moneyed interests who have been telling them how to think. Liberals have to weed out the bleeding heart that wants everything regardless of the cost. There is a happy medium, one that a lot of countries have obviously found and are using to their advantage, and just as obvious that we are failing to do the same. So the message is, wise up!

Our Nation; what our youth know about it!

Posted: May 25, 2014 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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Our nations independence was July 4, 1776. Eight out of ten people on the street could not tell me the year, and almost half could not tell me the damn day! Which means they have no idea what July 4th is all about. The ones that did mostly referenced the movie Independence Day. When asked about why, most said it was over tea. After the successful conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British government decided to make its North American colonies pay more of the costs of governing and defending them. Over the next 12 years Britain imposed a series of new taxes and other revenue-raising measures on the colonies that aroused heated opposition. The American colonists resented the trade regulations by which Britain utilized American economic resources to its own advantage, and they likewise resented their lack of representation in the British Parliament. British intransigence to these grievances spurred a growing desire for independence on the Americans’ part. When was the civil war? The civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865. Not one single person was able to tell me the correct answer to that question. Most thought Washington was president during that conflict! They also thought the war was about political and economic issues not connected to slavery and that the only reason Lincoln freed the slaves was to help win the war and for no other reason. The truth is in the 1860 presidential election campaign led by Abraham Lincoln, he opposed the expansion of slavery into United States’ territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8% for the six.[5] Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln’s inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on “King Cotton” that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America. Watch the movie that came out a year or so ago about Lincoln. It is historically accurate and a good history lesson.

The history of WWI and WWII, well I might as well have been asking questions about molecular biology. No one knew when, why, or how we got into each. WWI began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. The great powers in Europe had been at each others throats, so to speak, for about 4 decades. The defining moment that started WWI was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, an ethnic Serb and Yugoslav nationalist from the group Young Bosnia, which was supported by the Black Hand, a nationalist organization in Serbia. The more immediate cause for the war was tensions over territory in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary competed with Serbia and Russia for territory and influence in the region and they pulled the rest of the Great Powers into the conflict through their various alliances and treaties. WWII was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, though some related conflicts in Asia began before 1939. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people, from more than 30 different countries. In a state of “total war”, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust, the Three Alls Policy, the strategic bombing of enemy industrial and/or population centers, and the first use of nuclear weapons in combat, it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities. This made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history. The Alls Policy was something I was not familiar with. It was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three “alls” being kill all, loot all, destroy all! I will stop there, as my conversations with individuals about Nam and current or recent conflicts is something I am still studying. The history of the world in general gets into the age of the earth, evolution, religion, and would take volumes, plus is not a popular subject where I come from. So I may tackle that, as I have some strong opinions based on facts, science, and yes, the bible, but does not need to be discussed to prove my current point. My point is, people I talk to have never taken courses in local, state, and federal forms of government. They have no accurate sense of our history, or how we came into being. This includes people who are proud to cite parts of the constitution, especially certain amendments, but have no idea of how or what was going on when they were drafted. They think they do, and are sure they have the straight of it, but when pressed, actually have no clue. These, I believe, represent the majority of our voters. It is also why we follow whoever inundates us with the most information prior to our elections, and couches this information in a way that catches our imagination, but is neither factual nor true in even a minor way in most cases. Yet we follow like lemmings with no true idea of why we are running off of a cliff by the millions.

I have no problem with rich people; I think the fact that you can become rich is part and parcel of what America is about. But it cannot happen at the expense of the vast majority of the American public, the poor, or the middle class!  Their spending power is what makes the economy work, now, in the past, and in the future. If they don’t have extra coin in their jeans to spend, our economy will not grow. Plain and simple folks, it is how it is. So basing a company on profit only at the expense of the worker will cause economic failure. Shipping jobs overseas, hiding money offshore to keep from paying taxes here at home, this all has to stop, must stop. Most people do not even understand the difference between the national debt and deficit, they think it is one and the same. They also do not understand that the deficit comes first before the debt even comes into consideration, and the middle class pays the bill, not big business, and it never has except to create a growing prosperous middle class, not disassembling it. Understanding this means you have to also be a student of history, a student of the local, state, and federal governments and how it is supposed to work. Without both you cannot understand economics. And listening to a powerful rich person is also a mistake. Study after study shows most know nothing outside the realm of the business they are succeeding in. This means they should not be advising you, so you need to advise yourself. So take a careful look, if you cannot see the majority of the population thriving, not just existing, then the policies that make that scenario a reality are absolutely wrong.

There is a dumbing down of America. We have dropped to the bottom of the pile of industrialized nations in education. We are not one of the countries where the population is happy with its countries policies, and we are fast sliding down that list like an out of control bobsled on the Matterhorn. If you are a conservative, you need to round off the sharp corners, if you are a liberal, you may need to accept some realities that are harsher than you would like. But if you look at things with no preconceived notions, and try to improve the basic education I think is necessary, I firmly believe your decisions will be different, and better, regardless if your political beliefs are conservative, liberal, or other leanings that proliferate out there.

The Love Chronicles; Education In America Sucks

Posted: January 23, 2014 in Life
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American Education Sucks

 

 

A report out last week by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that U.S. students are falling further and further behind their peers in other countries.

Students in Latvia, Chile and Brazil are making gains in academics three times faster than American students, while those in Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia and Lithuania are improving at twice the rate.

The study’s findings support years of rankings that show foreign students outpacing their American peers in education. Students in Shanghai who recently took international exams for the first time showed up with exam scores higher than any other school system on the planet! In the same test, American students ranked 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading. I suspect even then the tested students did not come from inner city schools in our largest population centers.

Just 6 percent of U.S. students performed at the advanced level on an international exam administered in 56 countries in 2006. That proportion is lower than those achieved by students in about 30 other countries.

 

In a comparison of education in different countries, we find that many countries not only have a longer school day, but a longer school year. This gives teachers more opportunity to present new material.

 

Successful education in other countries has some things in common. They actively recruit teachers from the top 10% of the class, and they require all teachers to have a Masters degree. Instead of spending money on standardized testing they spend it on teacher education. Also, in order to attract competent teachers they pay them well and treat and respect them for the professionals they are, and allow them the freedom to know how to teach without being told how by someone who does not have their credentials.   Additionally, each community, whether poor or affluent, is funded equally. I believe this to be one of the more important aspects of education and where we fail miserably.

 

We have turned our schools in the poorer areas of our inner cities, and elsewhere, into simply housing our youth to keep them off the streets, but not actually educating them. These schools have little to offer a student that actually wants an education. Studies show that even students with very high grade point averages do not do well in college because their education did not prepare them to compete at the college level. They do not even do well in junior colleges that have programs that are designed to help these very students. So unless you have a genius IQ and can educate yourself and learn at an accelerated rate once you reach an institution of higher learning, as the title suggests, your education coming out of a very large percentage of American schools, sucks!

 

We need to treat education for what it really is, the only way to end the inequality of our nations residents. Sure I rail against all the loopholes that in my opinion make the top 10% in this country tax dodgers. I also think that we subsidize big energy companies, you know the ones making billions in profits, for more money than it would take to fix our schools and fund them all equally no matter where they are situated. But no matter how you feel, be you left or right leaning, our school system is failing.

 

Ok, here is where I may get a little too radical for some of you. I don’t believe our schools should just be housing students. Students who don’t really want to be there and make it hard for the ones that do should be released. So I propose that school be a privilege, not a mandate. If you do not pay attention in class, are disruptive, or you have been caught breaking the law, the school has the right to not continue to educate you. It should be a privilege to go, and I do not mean everyone has to have a high IQ, only that they are using the school to the best of their ability. Now I know that a howl just went up, but this is one of the most insidious problems with large inner city schools. Gangs, drugs, intimidation, even of teachers, are the norm. We have to change this environment. We also need to have a way for students who have been “let go” to earn a way back in. Complicated, of course. Does this mean we will have more people wandering the streets of large cities with no way to earn a decent wage without resorting to crime, sadly yes. So this idea has to come with ideas about how to handle the problems associated with not using our schools as a place just to house our youth. Part of that, an important part, is what I have already mentioned, funding all schools equally. Paying teachers well and requiring a Masters degree to teach. This way you attract highly qualified professionals to the craft of education. Also we need to allow more freedom for the individual school and teachers to decide how to teach and what to teach. Teachers being the key word, not politicians or school boards who do not hold Masters degrees in teaching disciplines.

 

In our current situation, some form of testing is needed, and the new testing does seem to require the student to think not just learn how to pass the test. However, if what I propose is done, mandated testing would not be needed, and this money could be spent keeping teachers updated and in tune with an ever changing world in order for them to better enrich their students lives.