New Charter School Info Out *drumroll*...

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Turns out the alternative education system Mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to as a model for Chicago Public Schools has problems of its own.
State achievement test data released Wednesday for the 2010-2011 school year shows Chicago charter school chains are struggling right along with CPS, some scoring below district averages.
Noble Street for example was the only one of nine charter networks to beat state-average test scores in each of the chain's schools. On the other hand, a majority of schools in Aspira and North Lawndale charter networks scored below average.
In other cases results wildly varied from school-to-school. CICS Hawkins high school was among the bottom high schools in the state with an 8.9 percent passing rate. CICS Northtown saw 38.7 percent passing.

Linky.

I read a comment about this that strikes me as correct: charter schools are about reforming labour, not education.

And what makes this "Noble" chain different? As with most private schools, it seems like simple biased samples:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to stage another publicity stunt in a school on the morning of December 16, 2011. Following a vote by his hand-picked Board of Education to continue expanding the city's charter schools despite growing evidence that the majority of them are "failing" (by the usual measures of school success, such as scores on standardized tests) and that those that "succeed" (such as the Noble Street Network of charter schools) do so by forcing out students who endanger test score "gains," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has scheduled another in his long line of publicity stunts to push his version of reality.

...

The event, coming a little over a year after the screening of the charter school propaganda movie "Waiting for Supermen," will be held at a school that has become notorious among real public high schools for its mistreatment of students who are most likely to lower its all-important test scores. The "Noble Network", since its founding in 1999 by former Wells High School teacher Michael Milkie, has deftly utilized its ability to require conditions for student continuation in the school to force out its least successful students. They then return to their neighborhood high schools, or drop out entirely, but the blame is usually placed on the real public schools, while Noble Street (whose motto is "Be Noble") continues to gather praise from Chicago's plutocracy — and the city's mayor. The students who are pushed out of Noble Street's schools are routinely listed as having "withdrawn" voluntarily.

Linky.

As always, Democratic connections seem to underlay a lot of these schools:

Yet, under a proposal before the Board of Education on Wednesday, the politically connected UNO, with three of its nine schools falling below district averages, is slated for three new elementary schools for 2013. LEARN stands to get a new campus next school year and two more in 2013 despite struggling with its South Shore campus. And Catalyst, whose two campuses appear to be underperforming, is expected to get the OK to open a third school.

Linky.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel reacted angrily Tuesday to questions of whether it was a conflict of interest to award management of six new turnaround schools to the Academy for Urban School Leadership, whose former executives were handpicked by the mayor to help run Chicago Public Schools.

...

The principal of AUSL's Bethune School of Excellence was a co-chair of Emanuel's mayoral campaign. The former chairman of AUSL's board is now president of the city's Board of Education. CPS's new chief operating officer also comes from AUSL.

Linky.

And, shockingly:

Two years after Illinois lawmakers approved a more thorough accounting of charter school performance, the state has released data that will allow the public for the first time to see how individual charter schools are measuring up against traditional public schools.

The report cards are somewhat limiting, only looking at a school's performance in 2010-11. But the trends show that despite their celebrated autonomy, discipline and longer school days, charter schools are struggling to overcome the poverty that so often hampers underperforming neighborhood schools.

Charters with the highest numbers of students from low-income families or those with recognized learning disabilities almost universally scored the lowest last year on state exams, a trend common throughout CPS.

Linky.

Someone call the ******* Mayor! This is such a shocking revelation!

 

[Bri]

Several studies have shown that students at private schools perform no better than those at public schools once you adjust for socioeconomic differences of the students, so it's not a big surprise that charter school students don't perform better than those at traditional public schools.

-Bri

 

[casebro]

Six of nine average or above doesn't like failure, does it?

 

[tyr_13]

Six of nine average or above doesn't like failure, does it?

Actually it does.

 

[shemp]

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Several studies have shown that students at private schools perform no better than those at public schools once you adjust for socioeconomic differences of the students, so it's not a big surprise that charter school students don't perform better than those at traditional public schools.

I have read otherwise.
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1

Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991). This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.

Joshua Angrist
"Randomized Trials and Quasi-Experiments in Education Research"
NBER Reporter, summer, 2003

One of the most controversial innovations highlighted by NCLB is school choice. In a recently published paper,(5) my collaborators and I studied what appears to be the largest school voucher program to date. This program provided over 125,000 pupils from poor neighborhoods in the country of Colombia with vouchers that covered approximately half the cost of private secondary school. Colombia is an especially interesting setting for testing the voucher concept because private secondary schooling in Colombia is a widely available and often inexpensive alternative to crowded public schools...

A comparison of voucher winners and losers shows that three years after the lotteries were held, winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished eighth grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades. Lottery winners also scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. A follow-up study in progress shows that voucher winners also were more likely to apply to college. On balance,
our study provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the possible benefits of demand-side financing of secondary schooling, at least in a developing country setting.(6)

Herman Brutsaert compared student performance in government and parochial schools in Belgium (which subsidizes parents' choice of school) and found (a) higher mean scores in parochial schools and (b) a lower correlation between parent income and performance in parochial schools (i.e., government schools exacerbate inequality).
Multi-country comparisons of independent and government schools consistently find a private school advantage both in performance and cost.

 

[tyr_13]

I'd like to see how they controlled for confounding factors. I see this argument sometimes with how prevalent 'private education' is in Japan, ignoring the fact that much of that is in the form of extra education and high-end schools from high competition and social emphasis on one.

In short I'm questioning the applicability of your citations here as they have been so misapplied in the past.

 

[Beth]

Six of nine average or above doesn't like failure, does it?

Actually it does.

Why do you say that? What would constitute success to you?

 

[Brainster]

Actually it does.

Only compared to Lake Woebegon.

 

[fuelair]

Linky.

I read a comment about this that strikes me as correct: charter schools are about reforming labour, not education.

And what makes this "Noble" chain different? As with most private schools, it seems like simple biased samples:



Linky.

As always, Democratic connections seem to underlay a lot of these schools:



Linky.



Linky.

And, shockingly:



Linky.

Someone call the ******* Mayor! This is such a shocking revelation!

Any school - public or private or semi-private (charter schools) - that can choose it's students will perform better than any school that must take students by selected geographic location or random assignment. Any school that can select at will students to remove as needed will do almost as well.

With no offense, any near idiot or better should be able to follow that point. There are no magic teaching behaviors that can overwhelm the level of the average student in the school past early elementary level (Pre-K-3rd grade for all practical purposes). One single (multiple)study verified thing covers that: students who cannot read at grade level or very near it by 9 years old can never learn to read well enough to be able to read for learning- i.e. they cannot ever read at the level of the textbooks for any course above low elementary level.

That was drummed into we teachers in ca. 2002-2005 by the schools and the newsrag Orlando Sentinel - and shortly after each time it was brought up again, the high schools were castigated because too many students with Level one (low elementary school level per multiple tests) reading ability were not improving in reading - which according to the brain-based studies that showed they could not they could not. And, therefore, they were failing classes because they could not comprehend the material but the high school teachers were being blamed for it. That is still going on in Florida (and most other states at varying levels) though no research has changed that basic point...

 

[Dancing David]

I have read otherwise.
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1Joshua Angrist
"

Your quote cites two dated studies?

And the source is very dated ; "The data are drawn from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted in 1994-1995 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement "

 

[Dancing David]

IHerman Brutsaert compared student performance in government and parochial schools in Belgium (which subsidizes parents' choice of school) and found (a) higher mean scores in parochial schools and (b) a lower correlation between parent income and performance in parochial schools (i.e., government schools exacerbate inequality).
Multi-country comparisons of independent and government schools consistently find a private school advantage both in performance and cost.

Thiss one?
A study of 1,795 Belgian elementary students in 15 public and 25 Catholic schools indicated that Catholic schools influenced high academic achievement in children of low socioeconomic status to a greater degree than public schools did. (SK)

Home and School Influences on Academic Performance: State and Catholic Elementary Schools in Belgium Compared. Published in 1998?

Seriously?

No recent studies?

 

[Alt+F4]

Your quote cites two dated studies?

And the source is very dated ; "The data are drawn from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted in 1994-1995 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement "

Not only is it dated, it only included 7th and 8th graders and only looked at results in math and science.

 

[Alt+F4]

Any school - public or private or semi-private (charter schools) - that can choose it's students will perform better than any school that must take students by selected geographic location or random assignment. Any school that can select at will students to remove as needed will do almost as well.

Of course. The top high school in NYC, Stuyvesant, is staffed by union teachers as is the worst high school. What's the difference? Stuyvesant (like the other top schools) has a specialized test to determine admission. These schools only admit students they want.

 

[tyr_13]

Why do you say that? What would constitute success to you?

The premise is that public schools are failing badly, so the 'average' would be failing. If three of nine were doing worse than that, then they must also be failing. I assume that the 'average or above' six of nine were not one average and five above or it would have been absurd to combine the two categories together, meaning at least two were average, which is failing. That's at least five out of nine failing then, which if it were a test, would fail.

 

[Beth]

The premise is that public schools are failing badly, so the 'average' would be failing. If three of nine were doing worse than that, then they must also be failing. I assume that the 'average or above' six of nine were not one average and five above or it would have been absurd to combine the two categories together, meaning at least two were average, which is failing. That's at least five out of nine failing then, which if it were a test, would fail.

Thank you. That's an interesting train of logic. I wouldn't have figured it out on my own.

 

[Puppycow]

I'd like to see how they controlled for confounding factors. I see this argument sometimes with how prevalent 'private education' is in Japan, ignoring the fact that much of that is in the form of extra education and high-end schools from high competition and social emphasis on one.

In short I'm questioning the applicability of your citations here as they have been so misapplied in the past.

In Japan, you have to have great grades and very high test scores to even get into the best public high schools.

It's hard to make comparisons when the schools choose their students.

Any school that gets to pick its students and/or kick out the students it doesn't want can't be compared with a school that has to accept every student.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

I'd like to see how they controlled for confounding factors. I see this argument sometimes with how prevalent 'private education' is in Japan, ignoring the fact that much of that is in the form of extra education and high-end schools from high competition and social emphasis on one.

Neither condition describes the work I reference above. The random-assignment voucher lottery is as close to a double-blind trial as you'll get in education research.

In short I'm questioning the applicability of your citations here as they have been so misapplied in the past.

You can see for yourself that these studies address the question. In any case. I gave the references to two (Lassibile and Gomez, Angrist. et. al) so you can check. I mention also Herman Brutsaert, but you'll have to search with that name, since I don't recall the publication. See also Lockheed and Jiminez (referenced above) and various studies of the Chilean voucher policy.

Andrew Coulson pointed out a defect of studies that "control" for parent income: they use "free and reduced lunch" as a proxy for "poor". Government schools use this classification. If a parochial school does not offer government-subsidized lunch and charges one price, it will have no use for the classification. All such a school's students will be classified as "non-free/reduced price lunch", whatever their parents' income. Caroline Hoxby has pointed out a second difficulty with studies that compare charter schools to the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools): the proper comparison is to the schools that charter kids would otherwise attend, not to all government-operated schools.

 

[ponderingturtle]

The answer is clear, to improve test scores we as a society need to stop trying to educate the worthless kids.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Not only is it dated, it only included 7th and 8th graders and only looked at results in math and science.

When Chubb and Moe studied the factors that influence school success, they used gains between 10th and 12 grade, iirc, on standardized tests of reading, Math, and Science. They did not use Social Studies because Social Studies scores did not correlate with anything (which is pretty funny if you know any statistics). When I studied the impact of district size and age (start) of compulsory attendance, I used 4th and 8th grade Reading and Math scores. I prefer 8th grade because schools have had more time to add value and overwhelm parent impact than 4th grade scores. 8th grade is better than 12 th grade unless you follow individual students (which I cannot do since NCES will not release data at thet level of detail to unaffiliated researchers). because too many students leave before 12 the grade.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

In Japan, you have to have great grades and very high test scores to even get into the best public high schools.

It's hard to make comparisons when the schools choose their students.

Any school that gets to pick its students and/or kick out the students it doesn't want can't be compared with a school that has to accept every student.

The proper comparison is between policy regimes, not schools. If you fed all the animals in the zoo one standard diet, only the omnivoires would thrive. One size does not fit all.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Several studies have shown that students at private schools perform no better than those at public schools once you adjust for socioeconomic differences of the students, so it's not a big surprise that charter school students don't perform better than those at traditional public schools.

Cite?

 

[Denver]

I think these tests and test scores, while a useful metric, are not enough. I'd like to see graduating students tracked for, say, 5 more years, and their success in life during that period also contributing to a charter school, or any school's, evaluation. Perhaps also down to the teachers who directly contributed to that student's education.

 

[leftysergeant]

I have read otherwise.
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1Joshua Angrist
"Randomized Trials and Quasi-Experiments in Education Research"
NBER Reporter, summer, 2003Herman Brutsaert compared student performance in government and parochial schools in Belgium (which subsidizes parents' choice of school) and found (a) higher mean scores in parochial schools and (b) a lower correlation between parent income and performance in parochial schools (i.e., government schools exacerbate inequality).
Multi-country comparisons of independent and government schools consistently find a private school advantage both in performance and cost.

This still does not mean that it is a good idea to privatize education. Not everybody is going to have access to a decent school. The poor kids will still be stuck with scholls run as a charity with walking or a short drive from the homes. The best schools will still find it most profitable to operate in Yuppieville. Screw the bumpkins in the hinterlands. They haven't got the money even with a subsidy, and how much book learnin' do you need to plow, plant and reap?

My beef with charter schools is the same that I have with the vouchers that can be used at acedemies for yuppie larvae. They most help those who need help the least and leave those who most need help taking what they can get.

Working poor parents are just not able to keep up their part of the bargain and commit the time that is required by the charter system.

If there is really any difference between the charter schools and the public schools, it makes sense that the public schools could do the same thing and everyone comes out ahead.

But the charter schools are just a back door to privatizing the whole system, a cruel joke played by the vouchers advocates.

What advances a few select kids is not what is best for America. A broad base of educated people able to recognize and resist the blandishments of the corporatist swine who put our culture in the toilet is what we need.

This is, of course, why so much private money is going into the campaigns to replace public schools with vouchers.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

I think these tests and test scores, while a useful metric, are not enough. I'd like to see graduating students tracked for, say, 5 more years, and their success in life during that period also contributing to a charter school, or any school's, evaluation. Perhaps also down to the teachers who directly contributed to that student's education.

More information is usually better, but why is the default option, while we wait, retention of the State-monopoly school system? I don't know if you fall into this category, but one characteristic difference between free marketeers and defenders of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy is the free marketeers' implicit assumption that the burden of proof rests on the advocates for the use of organized violence (the State), while defenders of the cartel implcitly assume that the burden of proof rests on the advocates of non-violence.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Seriously?
No recent studies?

Darwin published On the Origin of Species over 150 years ago. Einstein published "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" more than 100 years ago. Research comparing State-monopoly enterprises to firms in a competitive market is beating a dead horse. That argument should have died with the Soviet Union.

 

[tyr_13]

Neither condition describes the work I reference above. The random-assignment voucher lottery is as close to a double-blind trial as you'll get in education research.You can see for yourself that these studies address the question. In any case. I gave the references to two (Lassibile and Gomez, Angrist. et. al) so you can check. I mention also Herman Brutsaert, but you'll have to search with that name, since I don't recall the publication. See also Lockheed and Jiminez (referenced above) and various studies of the Chilean voucher policy.

Andrew Coulson pointed out a defect of studies that "control" for parent income: they use "free and reduced lunch" as a proxy for "poor". Government schools use this classification. If a parochial school does not offer government-subsidized lunch and charges one price, it will have no use for the classification. All such a school's students will be classified as "non-free/reduced price lunch", whatever their parents' income. Caroline Hoxby has pointed out a second difficulty with studies that compare charter schools to the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools): the proper comparison is to the schools that charter kids would otherwise attend, not to all government-operated schools.

After some digging I did find them. The first you linked to referred to is far to narrow a focus and isn't even attempting to address what you claimed, and thus I would call it not applicable when coupled with the age of the research. Your second is highly criticized, but that doesn't make it invalid. However, I'm certainly not going to at this point trust a study whose very methodology is under fierce debate at least until that's ironed out. At any rate, neither invalidates the more recent data.

Darwin published On the Origin of Species over 150 years ago. Einstein published "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" more than 100 years ago. Research comparing State-monopoly enterprises to firms in a competitive market is beating a dead horse. That argument should have died with the Soviet Union.

Again you're using examples that are simply not applicable. Electrodynamics and the observations made in Darwin's book simply do not change by society to society, by year to year, and by country to country. Trying to make the collapse of the Soviet Union as applicable to all government services is so non-applicable that it's ridiculous, and should give everyone pause as to the validity of any of your observations.

 

[leftysergeant]

Research comparing State-monopoly enterprises to firms in a competitive market is beating a dead horse. That argument should have died with the Soviet Union.

Horse feathers. Some things are supposed to be state-run. Schools should be one of them. They are not intended to maintain the status quo, or to prepare the bosses' larvae to be bosses and the working class kids to be good robots. They are supposed to level the playing field so that those who have potential can achieve it. Private schools just prep the elite hatchlings to grow up to be elite
vultures like their daddies.

We all benefit from public schools because it opens doors for any kid who applies himself to grow up to displace one of the sons of the useless rich. I have no problem with being taxed to subsidize that, although I would prefer that it be from an income tax distributed without regard to the wealth of a community, so that the leaches on Snob Hill pay more to trrain their future work force than does a struggling fry cook in Farmville.

I also want to see all ther for-profit prisons taken over by the states and the managers and executives of the corporations that run them locked up until they can be cleared of the current accusations of abuse of prisoners. That must remain the business of the state. It is abyssmally stupid to think that for-profit prisons achieve the stated purposes for which the law allows incarceration.

I also think that the whole power grid should be nationalized and run by PUDs.
(ENRON.)

 

[leftysergeant]

More information is usually better, but why is the default option, while we wait, retention of the State-monopoly school system? I don't know if you fall into this category, but one characteristic difference between free marketeers and defenders of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy is the free marketeers' implicit assumption that the burden of proof rests on the advocates for the use of organized violence (the State), while defenders of the cartel implcitly assume that the burden of proof rests on the advocates of non-violence.

Utter twaddle. Public schools worked for decades, and then went down hill when the racists who didn't want their kids going to scholl with dark-skinned kids and the capitalists who wanted to destroy the ecconomic egalitarianism of the New Deal started screwing with it.

You anarcho-capitalists have to prove that your way is better for ALL socio-ecconomic classes or sod off. We have no reason to subsidize yuppie larvae to a better education than a working class family.

We consent to be governed only because it will allow a better life style than will the chaos of anarcho-capitalism.

 

[WildCat]

This still does not mean that it is a good idea to privatize education. Not everybody is going to have access to a decent school. The poor kids will still be stuck with scholls run as a charity with walking or a short drive from the homes. The best schools will still find it most profitable to operate in Yuppieville. Screw the bumpkins in the hinterlands. They haven't got the money even with a subsidy, and how much book learnin' do you need to plow, plant and reap?

My beef with charter schools is the same that I have with the vouchers that can be used at acedemies for yuppie larvae. They most help those who need help the least and leave those who most need help taking what they can get.

I don't think you have the slightest idea what charter schools actually are.

Not a whole lot of "yuppie larvae" attending the ones in Chicago.

 

[leftysergeant]

Not a whole lot of "yuppie larvae" attending the ones in Chicago.

Last I heard, though, the parents were supposed to be able to participate more extensively in their children's education than is the case in public schools. With the decline in real income among the working classes, how many of them are able to spend more time at it? Is a non-native English speaker who has to work two jobs to feed his kids really going to be able to participate fully in the kid's education?

 

[Alt+F4]

Last I heard, though, the parents were supposed to be able to participate more extensively in their children's education than is the case in public schools. With the decline in real income among the working classes, how many of them are able to spend more time at it? Is a non-native English speaker who has to work two jobs to feed his kids really going to be able to participate fully in the kid's education?

Charter schools are public schools. As for participating in a child's education, that can be done equally in both charter public schools and traditional public schools. As a teacher I can tell you, I don't give a damn if a parent is working 10 jobs, there is always time to take 5 minutes to call school, or write a note. And yes, in big school systems like Chicago, NYC and LA there are translation services available to both teachers and parents for free.

Being poor is NEVER an excuse to neglect what is going on in a child's education.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

... At any rate, neither invalidates the more recent data.

What "more recent data"? Link=___?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...Research comparing State-monopoly enterprises to firms in a competitive market is beating a dead horse. That argument should have died with the Soviet Union.

...Trying to make the collapse of the Soviet Union as applicable to all government services is so non-applicable that it's ridiculous, and should give everyone pause as to the validity of any of your observations.

I do not say "all". I have posed the following two questions repeatedly in this forum:...
1. From State (government, generally) operation (or subsidization) of what industries does society as a whole benefit? You may imagine either a dichotomous classification, A = {x:x is an unlikely candidate for State operation}, B={x:x is a likely candidate for State operation}, or a continuum...
(highly unlikely) -1_________.________+1 (highly likely).
2. What features of an industry determine its classification or position on the continuum?
3. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". The State cannot compel attendance at school without a definition of "school". Compulsory attendance laws mean nothing unless some school has to take students rejected everywhere else. Call these default-option schools "the public schools".
(a)What does society gain from a policy which restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy to such schools? (b)What does society gain from a policy which gives to private corporations (the NEA, AFT, AFSCME) exclusive contracts to supply labor to these schools?

 

[leftysergeant]

I do not say "all". I have posed the following two questions repeatedly in this forum:...
1. From State (government, generally) operation (or subsidization) of what industries does society as a whole benefit?

Water supply. Electric power generation and distribution. Wire-based communications. Mail delivery. Hospitals. Schools. Railroads.

Manufacturing of consumer goods , food preparation and service and farminng are more appropriately private ventures, altough any of them could be feasibly operated as collective activities. Mining and logging are feasible as private industries as long as certain regulations to preserve the environment are obeyed. Since the last two are dependent on access to the commons, they can, reasonably, be conducted on a leased basis, which is to say that the operator pays the state or whatever collective entity represents the interests of the people as reasonable sum for the right to extract those resources.

2. What features of an industry determine its classification or position on the continuum?

The use of finite resources which cannot be created merely by labor cannot rightly be considered the property of an individual. Nobody created the rain or filled an aquifer with glacial melt water. It passes through or underlies the rightful dominion of entire populations. It is unreasonable to say that any one person or family may own it outright. Power production and distribution and wire communications require transmission facilities that cross the properties of other citizens, sometimes requiring an easement which cannot be refused. Why should any individual be allowed to force another to participate in his venture without a share of the profits of that venture?

3. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". The State cannot compel attendance at school without a definition of "school". Compulsory attendance laws mean nothing unless some school has to take students rejected everywhere else. Call these default-option schools "the public schools".

You are not going to get away with that seismosaurus-sized, Klieg-light-illuminated, garishly-painted false premise. You are trying to call the public schools loser academies, and you are not going to get away with it. The public schools exist to make available to ALL children the lore and the sciences and the shared knowledge of ouyr repective cultures, whether here in an industrialized nation or in a sparsely-populated agrarian one. It is to the collective advantage of all members of the collective, whether we are talking about a state, a city, a village or just isolated bands, that the young be prepared to contribute to their own upkeep and to the upkeep of their collective. The most efficient way to assure that all children have access to this lore is to cewntralize the transmission of the lore into a few places within easy reach. Since not all citizens posess all the eccessary bits of lore to make it all loook like a coherent and inter-related whole, this usually entails assigning the task of transmitting such lore to a few people with a broad knowledge of all the accumulated and preserved lore. We call them "teachers" and their labor, being a benefit to all of us, should be born by all of us, in proportion to the amount of material benefit we derive from membership in the collective.

Should an individual have sufficient wealth beyond his immediate needs after making his contribution to the commons, in proportion to the benefit he has derived from the commons, to send his children to a distant or separate ceter of learning, by all means, let him. But but no means should this excuse him from making his appropriate contribution to ther collective schools. They are still a part of the commons from which he derives his livelihood. If every snob with money were allowed to remove both his child and his rightful dues to the collective from the schools, it would eventually and inevitably cause the collapse of the collective schools, leaving them unable to function. If the privatge schools set standards which exclude too many children, then, eventually, many of them will have no access to any education worth the effort.

This aint about your just paying to have your own larvae educated. It is about maintaining the health of the entire population. If you are not making your proper contribution to the well-being of the collective, what reason have we, other than your ability to hire violent savages to guard your stash, not to come and take it away from you by force?

(a)What does society gain from a policy which restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy to such schools?

It won't work any other way. Like I said, it aint all about you and your spawn.

(b)What does society gain from a policy which gives to private corporations (the NEA, AFT, AFSCME) exclusive contracts to supply labor to these schools?

Private corporations my dying ass! They are the representatives of the colective made up of the teachers. They represent workers, not useless bleedin' investors who contribute nothing directly to the process of transmitting the lore of our civilization to our collective children.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

1. From State (government, generally) operation (or subsidization) of what industries does society as a whole benefit?

Water supply. Electric power generation and distribution. Wire-based communications. Mail delivery. Hospitals. Schools. Railroads¹.

Strike "Mail delivery. Hospitals. Schools" and the rest exhibit a common feature--a high degree of "natural monopoly". I don't accept that the natural monopoly argument decides the issue, but it is a reasonable consideration.

Manufacturing of consumer goods , food preparation and service and farminng are more appropriately private ventures, altough any of them could be feasibly operated as collective activities². Mining and logging³ are feasible as private industries as long as certain regulations to preserve the environment are obeyed. Since the last two are dependent on access to the commons, they can, reasonably, be conducted on a leased basis, which is to say that the operator pays the state or whatever collective entity represents the interests of the people as reasonable sum for the right to extract those resources.

With the exceptions of mail delivery, schools, and hospitals, we see the same relative positions on the continuum of regulation or operation (1-3-2), apparently for approximately the same reasons. This does not lead us to the same conclusion.

2. What features of an industry determine its classification or position on the continuum?

The use of finite resources which cannot be created merely by labor cannot rightly be considered the property of an individual. Nobody created the rain or filled an aquifer with glacial melt water. It passes through or underlies the rightful dominion of entire populations. It is unreasonable to say that any one person or family may own it outright. Power production and distribution and wire communications require transmission facilities that cross the properties of other citizens, sometimes requiring an easement which cannot be refused. Why should any individual be allowed to force another to participate in his venture without a share of the profits of that venture?

In practice, "finite" is a matter of degree. The mass of the Earth is finite. The oxygen, water, gold, and iron available to humans are finite. Of course, they are eternally recycleable.

3. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". The State cannot compel attendance at school without a definition of "school". Compulsory attendance laws mean nothing unless some school has to take students rejected everywhere else. Call these default-option schools "the public schools".

You are not going to get away with that seismosaurus-sized, Klieg-light-illuminated, garishly-painted false premise. You are trying to call the public schools loser academies, and you are not going to get away with it.

No. I'm not calliing the current government-operated schools "loser academies". I'm recommending a transition to a legal regime in which parents determine which institution provides "education" and the State contracts with a few organizations (such as the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, KIPP, Edison, etc.) to operate default-option schools.

The public schools exist to make available to ALL children the lore and the sciences and the shared knowledge of our repective cultures¹, whether here in an industrialized nation or in a sparsely-populated agrarian one. It is to the collective advantage of all members of the collective, whether we are talking about a state, a city, a village or just isolated bands, that the young be prepared to contribute to their own upkeep and to the upkeep of their collective². The most efficient way to assure that all children have access to this lore is to centralize the transmission of the lore into a few places within easy reach³. Since not all citizens posess all the neccessary bits of lore to make it all loook like a coherent and inter-related whole, this usually entails assigning the task of transmitting such lore to a few people with a broad knowledge of all the accumulated and preserved lore⁴. We call them "teachers" and their labor, being a benefit to all of us, should be born by all of us, in proportion to the amount of material benefit we derive from membership in the collective⁵.

1. This is anti-historical and currently counter-factual. The public school system originated in Protestant indoctrination and anti-Catholic bigotry. The "public" (i.e., government-operated) school system does not perform as you describe.
2. We agree. I do not see that this requires a government presence. Rather, the opposite.
Albert Einstein

To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and self-confidence of the pupil. It produces the submissive subject. . . It is comparatively simple to keep the school free from this worst of all evils. Give into the power of the teacher the fewest possible coercive measures, so that the only source of the pupil's respect for the teacher is the human and intellectual qualities of the latter.

Albert Einstein
"Autobiographical Notes"
Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.

Marvin Minsky
Interview
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (1994-July)

...the evidence is that many of our foremost achievers developed under conditions that are not much like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child pattern of genius. Macurdy reviews the early education of many eminent people from the last couple of centuries and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents and (2) that generally they were relatively isolated from other children. This is very different from what most people today consider an ideal school. It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens.
Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

3 (a). "A few places" and "within easy reach" are mutually exclusive.
(b) Again, the State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". State operation of an industry implies standardization and uniform job descriptions, which produce a poor fit when the industry operates on highly variable inputs (e..g., individual children's interests and abilities).
4. Elementary school teachers are polymaths? Really? Parents do not need to know everything. There are these amazing resources which experts call "books".
5. If we paid teachers in proportion to their contribution to collective welfare, some of them would hang from streetside lightpoles.

This aint about your just paying to have your own larvae educated. It is about maintaining the health of the entire population. If you are not making your proper contribution to the well-being of the collective, what reason have we, other than your ability to hire violent savages to guard your stash, not to come and take it away from you by force?

That's how a lot of us feel about public-sector compensation.

(a)What does society gain from a policy which restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy to such schools?

It won't work any other way.

Belgium, Chile, Hong Kong, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, among others, subsidize attendance at independent schools. The education industry is not a natural monopoly.

 

[fuelair]

Lefty - the big problem with your statement above in 35 is that very few of the persons/teachers have a broad enough background to interlink the lore/tie all the factors (or at least the big ones) together - and most students are unhappy with those who do
because- at least at this age/maturity level - most are looking to do as little work as possible yet still be "rewarded" with a good grade. They are not concerned (and, in my experience, neither are their parents) with links and interactions that make up our society/ies.

 

[tyr_13]

What "more recent data"? Link=___?

The OP.

I do not say "all". I have posed the following two questions repeatedly in this forum:...
1. From State (government, generally) operation (or subsidization) of what industries does society as a whole benefit? You may imagine either a dichotomous classification, A = {x:x is an unlikely candidate for State operation}, B={x:x is a likely candidate for State operation}, or a continuum...
(highly unlikely) -1_________.________+1 (highly likely).
2. What features of an industry determine its classification or position on the continuum?
3. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". The State cannot compel attendance at school without a definition of "school". Compulsory attendance laws mean nothing unless some school has to take students rejected everywhere else. Call these default-option schools "the public schools".
(a)What does society gain from a policy which restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy to such schools? (b)What does society gain from a policy which gives to private corporations (the NEA, AFT, AFSCME) exclusive contracts to supply labor to these schools?

Maybe you should make a thread on it to avoid being accused of red-herring throwing.

Too much begging the question too. Your base premise and further questions are worded in such a way to restrict the answers you want to argue against, directing the discussion into one about unions, you're pet enemy.

Too many solutions for lagging education gains are put forth as magic bullets, and it simply isn't true. Privatization is just taking it's turn again like block secuduals, year-round, etc have in the past.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Too much begging the question too. Your base premise and further questions are worded in such a way to restrict the answers you want to argue against, directing the discussion into one about unions, you're pet enemy.

The "enemy" are people who want from government services which government (the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in a locality) is ill-suited to deliver. Many of my friends are "the enemy" in this sense.

Too many solutions for lagging education gains are put forth as magic bullets, and it simply isn't true. Privatization is just taking it's turn again like block secuduals, year-round, etc have in the past.

We disagree, here. Charter schools are corporate contractors to the State. The difference between Individual contractors who supply services to the State and State employees is principally a matter of who is responsible for taxes and other paperwork. Employees are contractors to their employer. State-monopoly enterprises lurch from fad to fad because they are State-monopoly enterprises. Federalism and markets institutionalize humility on the part of State actors. If a policy dispute turns on a matter of taste, numerous local policy regimes or a competitive market in goods and services allow for the expression of varied tastes, while the contest for control over a State-monopoly provider must inevitably create unhappy losers (who may comprise the vast majority; imagine the outcome of a State-wide vote on the one size shoes we all must wear). If a policy dispute turns on a matter of fact, where "What works?" is an empirical question, numerous local policy regimes or a competitive market in goods and services will generate more information than will a State-monopoly enterprise. Furthermore, competitive markets align rewards for successful experiments with the stakes involved.

 

[Apathia]

The answer is clear, to improve test scores we as a society need to stop trying to educate the worthless kids.

I was a worthless kid and "never amounted to anything."