It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.
I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.
Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.
In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.
You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.
So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.
russia and europe will exhaust themselves
then china will "discover" an old map that "proves" all of siberia used to be chinese territory, like the bullshit about the filipino islands china is stealing, or the territory it is stealing from india, vietnam, etc... all chinese neighbors are victims of han imperialism
there are 10 chinese for every 1 russian. the chinese economy is soaring while russia is tanking. china needs resources badly. every single russian hinterland town has more chinese than russians already. russia's military simply won't keep up, but military won't even matter. china will take siberia the way the usa took texas from mexico: enough population shift, and it becomes a fait accompli
congratualtions putin: you degraded georgia and ukraine, your slavic brothers, and ignored the far east. russia is the most obvious territory for china to take, not the tiny bits in other directions. despite the historical hesitation from cold war era aggression between the two, siberia will become chinese in this century
all hail outer manchuria, qing glorious chinese state reclaimed from barbarian eluosi ren!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Outer Manchuria (known as Priamurye in Russian)[1] is an unofficial term for the territory formerly claimed by the Qing Empire and now belonging to Russia. Russia officially received this territory by way of the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking in 1860. The northern part of the area was also in dispute between 1643 and 1689. The area comprises the present-day Russian areas of Primorsky Krai, southern Khabarovsk Krai, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Amur Oblast. Another Chinese claim also adds the island of Sakhalin. Currently, the People's Republic of China has no claim to this territory.
According to the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, the China–Russia border was the Stanovoy Mountains and the Argun River, which established Outer Manchuria as a part of Qing dynasty China. After losing the Opium War, a series of treaties were forced upon the Qing dynasty that gave away land and ports to the European powers; these were known as the Unequal Treaties. Starting with the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking in 1860, the Sino–Russian border was realigned in Russia's favor on the Amur and Ussuri rivers. As a result, China lost Outer Manchuria, as well as access to the Sea of Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Russian newspapers began to publish speculation that between two and five million Chinese migrants actually resided in the Russian Far East, and predicted that half of the population of Russia would be Chinese by 2050.[29][36] Russians typically believe that Chinese come to Russia with the aim of permanent settlement, and even president Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying "If we do not take practical steps to advance the Far East soon, after a few decades, the Russian population will be speaking Chinese, Japanese, and Korean."[37]
Some Russians perceive hostile intent in the Chinese practise of using different names for local cities, such as Hishnwi for Vladivostok, and a widespread folk belief states that the Chinese migrants remember the exact locations of their ancestors' ginseng patches, and seek to reclaim them.[7] The identitarian concern against the Chinese influx is described as less prevalent in the east, where most of the Chinese shuttle trade is actually occurring, than in European Russia.[27]
Sorry, I can't argue in the hand waving style of "schools nowadays", I need actual data specific data about real places.
My town administration takes 5.5% of the total budget. In the best performing town in my region, it's about half that, but they pay their teachers 79% more and lay out over $17k/student.
My town's high school has 88 staff positions involved directly with student instruction (teachers, teaching aids, special subject tutors), 2 librarians, 3 janitors, three principals/asisstant principals, 4 guidance counselors, and 4 secretaries. That works out to about 85% of the positions involved in instruction. 74% of the head count is teachers in the traditional sense and 11% offload tasks that teachers would have to do otherwise or provide special content area expertise. So as far as my town is concerned your dystopian scenario is pure fantasy.
I totally agree, by the way: you could save a lot of money by not educating special needs students. From the budgets I've seen it takes up maybe as much as 1/3 of the per pupil expenditures. But is not educating those students something you're actually proposing? Or do you have an idea for doing it more efficiently.
The US might spend more on education per student than other nations. But how much of that per student spending is actually spent *on* students? And how much is going to pad administrators' salaries, benefits, and offices?
That's easy to figure out. Pull the school system budgets for your town and read them. It's public record and it takes about twenty minutes to get a feel where the money is going. For example my town spends about $1.4 million in central administration salaries, including the IT department and curriculum support services. This is out of total system-wide salaries of $22.5 million. So about 6%. If you go by total expenses central administration takes up about 5.5% of the budget.
Now here's an exercise that'll make you better informed than 99.99% of the people who weigh in on this topic. Find another school system that gets better results than yours and do the same thing. How are they spending money differently from your town?
"Gee it seems like a lot of money to me," is meaningless drivel. What you want to do is compare your town to the best performing towns; or if we're talking about national policy what a typical school system does vs. what the best school systems do. I have no patience with people who parrot complaints about "administrative costs" they've heard on Fox but can't be bothered to find out how their own local tax money is being spent.
Agreed. People already move about the world completely immersed in what's happening on their smart phones. The fact that you need a certain screen size to have a usable interface and enjoyable experience puts a serious limit on the evolution of that technology. I think there's also going to be a saturation point in the app space when the "cool" has worn off. Something like Google Glass has got to be the next logical extension.
15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.
But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him. But one thing you apparently didn't learn is the difference between "average" and "median". I pulled one of the elementary school budgets for Baltimore, and found that it was spending about 20% of its total budget on special needs personnel -- speech pathologists, psychologists, special ed instructors. Note that this doesn't include the fraction of regular teacher time taken up by this. So it's not unreasonable to assume that per-pupil spending if you discount the mainstreamed special needs kids would look more like $11,000.
I also note that you chose two of the highest cost places in the country to run a school as representative of the whole. Really, it's expensive to educate kids in NYC? Who'd a thunk it? As long as we're cherry picking, let me in the same spirit of fairness reach into the bag of scrabble tiles and "randomly" pick -- Mississippi. Mississippi spends close to the bottom of states on a per pupil basis, and is at the very bottom of the nation in student achievement.
Let's pick another state at "random" -- oh, look I got Massachusetts. Massachusetts perennially tops the list of states by student achievement by nearly every conceivable measure. But at $14k it's in the top quintile for per student spending . To a certain mentality Mississippi is getting a better deal because it gets away with spending only $7.9k/student. Specifically that's the mentality that isn't alarmed by the fact that almost 2/3 of Mississippi's eighth graders fail to meet minimum standards of proficiency and reading and math.
Here's a fun fact. The same percentage of Massachusetts eight graders score "advanced" by national standards for mathematics as Mississippi students score "proficient" -- 18%. How much would it be worth for the 18% advanced score to be *typical* of states rather than twice the national average? How much do you reckon it would be worth to pay on a per-student basis for the impact that would have on America's long-term economic prospects? Well compared to the national average, Massachusetts spend $3000/student more. That seems like a bargain to me.
"Renewable" means that natural processes replenish the energy extracted so that we can repeat that extraction indefinitely. It's quite possible to exhaust a renewable resource sustainably, so long as that resource will be replenished. For example you can completely harvest an annual crop from a field and use it for biomass, and that resource is fully expended. But you can harvest that same field next year. I think the confusion comes from other renewables like hydropower that are replenished continually rather than intermittently. Those renewables are in a sense inexhaustible, but finite. You can only draw so much power from those, but you can draw it continuously and indefinitely.
The idea of moving from extractive resources to renewable ones is identical to the idea of living off interest rather than principle. If a twenty year-old inherits two million dollars he can live quite magnificently by spending that money for what seems to someone that young to be a very long time. But if he invested that money he could live very comfortably for the rest of his life, although that entails difficult choices and work.
We are entering an interesting period of human history -- a transitional one. It's like we're that 20 year old at age 30. We've still got a lot of natural resources in the bank, but pretty soon we're going to have to cut back on our lifestyle unless we get a lot smarter about using them.
It's not a doom-and-gloom scenario, we just have to smarten up. We've been through this before. I remember in the 70s people thought that fuel economy and emission standards were going to emasculate our beloved cars. Now we look back at those cars and they look laughably bad and obnoxiously dirty. It may be cool to drive that '66 Barracuda in the classic car parade, but it's still a filthy low-tech brick that takes 9.1 seconds to do 0-60. A modern family mini-van would smoke it in a drag race, handle better, and go twice as far on a gallon of gas.
Endless educational financing is already available.
In what universe would that be?
world governments to USA in public: "we are outraged about the NSA!"
world governments to USA in private: "everything is coming along nicely"
world governments, we-hate-USA-edition, in public: "we are outraged about the NSA!"
world governments, we-hate-USA-edition, in private: "so how soon can we have NSA style abuses to add to our extensive portfolio of abuses?"
americans should complain loudly about the NSA
but the rest of the world, you should clean up your own fucking house, your government is feeding you manufactured NSA outrage as a distraction while it does the same
Well as usual it depends upon what you choose as your baseline. By choosing the baseline year you can get either a very slight increase or more or less flat suicide rate for 15-24 year old up through 2013, the last year for which we have complete data. But it's nothing like the rate of smartphone or social media adoption.
This doesn't preclude a clinician from experiencing a dramatic trend in her practice that would alarm any reasonable person. That's why we have to look at both the statistical aggregate and clinical experience. When experience tells you there has been a dramatic change, and the statistically aggregated data say there's been no change, you put those together and what you're seeing is a change in the circumstances of suicide. That's not as alarming as a dramatic and systematic increase in rates, but it's still important.
There is no right to create a hostile working environment for women.
You are right. There's no reason to make boob-grabbing a sport at work, or install under-table cameras and post the up-skirt shots in the Intranet. There's no reason to announce publicly the menstruation periods of every girl in the office, or enforce a dresscode that ignores female anatomy. Definitely sex should not be a condition for promotion, and meetings should not start with blowjob requests, made in order of beauty to the attending women. Likewise, putting a single toilet for women into the basement while having men toilets everywhere.
Oh wait, you were talking about a software joke project on some random Internet site that nobody is forced to visit or even know about? Yeah, that definitely is the dictionary case for "hostile working environment".
the entire back office being papered over with pinups
That's absolutely the same as a random Internet site that nobody... why am I wasting my time here, a monkey would see the difference.
This.
Half the world doesn't understand why blowing people to pieces is afternoon TV, but showing kids the same nipple that they sucked on a few years before is a national scandal.
Let's live in a perfectly politically correct world where our jokes, every sentence we speak and every message we write is controlled by the thought police.
And I say that as someone who was bullied at school. But here's the point: There's harassment, which has a victim and there's jokes about a class the size of half the worlds population and either you are incredibly insecure or unbelievably egomaniac to consider yourself the individual target.
Every real woman I've met in my life laughs about jokes that ridicule women in general the same way that I laugh about jokes where guys in general are the target. These jokes are funny exactly because they contain a piece of truth.
Everything, taken to extremes, is evil. That includes feminism, no-harassment policies and political correctness. No, wait. That last one is evil from the start.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
