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Journal nizo's Journal: What a success the no child left behind program is! 35

Journal by nizo

Wow, this program is such a success, rather than spend funds on things like books or teacher raises or decrepit school facilities, the Department of Education has decided to spend $240,000 on a PR campaign to help us all realize what a wonderful thing no child left behind is! Three cheers for the education president! (and by education president, I mean the one who will finally be able to destroy what is left of our public education system, insuring that only those children who have rich parents will be able to get a decent education).

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What a success the no child left behind program is! More

What a success the no child left behind program is!

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  • ...you weren't being sarcastic, were you? ;-)
    • Much like the definition at dictionary.com:

      sar-cas-tic
      adj.
      1. Expressing or marked by sarcasm.
      2. Given to using sarcasm.
      3. See also: nizo.
      :-)
      • Slight bit formatting and you've got yourself a new .sig.

        But why be sarcastic when the plain truth already stings so badly?

  • No Child Left Behind is, taking a simple view of it, little more than "the Texas Miracle" on a grander scale. There are differences, but, by and large, the ideology that drives it is the same. Note, also, that Texas under Gubner Bush had one of the most embarrisingly dysfunctional education systems in the country, and was threatened with revocation of federal funding on at least one occasion for the astoundingly twisted way they came up with their numbers for dropouts, failures, etc.

    Because pay and promoti
    • Sorry- product of private education for 100% of my life.

      AS for teachers failing to educate: due to some screw up, my high school frosh year of English I was placed in regular english*, instead of Advanced Honors AP Accelerated English++. And those fucking kids were animals. They didn't "want" to learn; they just wanted to fuck around. (I guess thats what normal kids want to do.)

      There is one thing those kids learned that year, and that was synonyms for Banal. (trite, hackeneyed, jejeune, common, cliche,
      • I'm surprisingly in the same boat Mekka. I actually got a four on my AP English (beats me how).

        In highschool, I took a variety of classes to meet my requirements, including, in my senior year, small animal care, to take care of my practical arts credit. Laugh all you want, but being a dog breeder and trainer, it was a super easy class to start my day at eight in the morning. Most of the rest of the students in the class were either agriculture students (aka farm kids), or slacking for their practical ar
        • I actually got a four on my AP English

          And just to prove the quality of the testing procedures, I got a five on that test as well as Calculus (AB, IIRC).

          School vouchers should reimburse home schoolers if they are going to exist at all. Which I don't think they should. It seems some folks have had some success with private schools, but they ignore the huge numbers of schools setup merely to make a buck (look at the DC charter schools), and that have teachers lacking not only a teaching cert (not a negati
      • Let's start out this way....

        If you have more money than I do, such that you can afford a private school tuition, why should my taxes fund that?

        The concept of public schooling is that everyone puts money in, everyone gets something back. That doesn't work with vouchers. If I can't afford to send my kid to private school, and you can, you not only get a better education for your kid, but you still get some of my tax money. And unless taxes go up, that's tax money that's NOT going to my kid anymore.
        • But what if the aformentioned "affording" of private school tuition involves working two jobs and taking on additional debt?

          Doesn't this lower the financial barrier of entry into private school? Sure, it isn't going to give you a full $16,000 a year for the high school of your dreams (no, I didn't pay that, but I know those who did) but it may help you afford that $5k parochial school (or whatever floats your boat).

          The concept of public schooling is that everyone puts money in, everyone gets something b
          • But what if the aformentioned "affording" of private school tuition involves working two jobs and taking on additional debt?

            I don't see how it's relevant how you're paying for it. It's still your choice and you're still affording it, and you're still taking money from me only to better yourself.

            And, yes, it does lower the barrier, but the barrier for some people has to go away completely. Some people just don't seem get it when it comes to poverty. You can't just say one day "oh, I'm just going to work h
            • And regarding the public system, the concept is that it's in your benefit, whether you have kids or not, to support the next generation so that they can keep things going for you. You'd get that from a private school too, but if you only allow the richer members of society to get that education, the only thing you're likely to do is further stratify the classes which doesn't help anybody.

              The point is to try and improve the entire system. Competition and choice are good. So is information transparency, so

              • You're correct, they are controlled to some extent, but I'm talking about politicians wanting to start digging their grimy talons into the system in detail. It's only a matter of time before they're not doing something "right" and some politician starts a committee and uses a loophole to start butting in where s/he doesn't belong.

                Also, I don't see how vouchers create competition. The private schools are going to exist, regardless. I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the fact that the vo
                • Also, I don't see how vouchers create competition. The private schools are going to exist, regardless.

                  It's about creating competition among public schools, along with competing with private ones. "Competition" can only exist if your own well-being is at risk -- which for a school means "exodus of students because you suck and therefore you loose funding".

                  Increasing choice can only be a good thing AFAICS.

                  Vouchers? Mmmmmm no. If I had a kid, I couldn't afford to send him/her to a public school even wit

      • If you take the existing system and just add vouchers, here's what happens:
        1. People (like me) already sending their kids to private school get a regressive federal handout.
        2. Selective schools cherry-pick a large percentage of the higher-achieving public students.
        3. Public school becomes a dumping ground for the mentally handicapped (who cost a LOT more to educate), slackers, and misbehavers. Can you say "downward spiral"?

        My personal proposal [geocities.com]: any accredited school may accept vouchers ONLY IF they have ope

        • Dude, I was crafting a response, but I can't seem to think in a straight linge.

          Below are the crappy ramblings. perhaps I'll string together a coherent post but things are rough at work... I've got design reviews on the brain.

          ---whatev...

          Don't selective schools cherry-pick a large percentage of high achieving public school students ANYWAY? Unless you are arguing that this is a bad thing (which I'm not sure I agree with, but thats a tangent), kids who can't pay but who can perform get the need-based schol
          • Sorry I was unclear. Restatement:

            With unrestricted vouchers there is absolutely no way that the public system can compete with private schools, because by law they are required to enroll all comers. Therefore, unrestricted vouchers are the destruction of public education, period.

            At which point we enter pure plutocracy, and severe widening of the class divide. That's a road to disaster.

            BTW, where will you get the money for those need-based scholarships you mentioned?
            • BTW, where will you get the money for those need-based scholarships you mentioned?

              From the tuition of those who pay in full!

              (actually, this is damn true of my alma mater)
              (undergrad tuition is a mere pittance to the research dollars) (which is why you get taught by TAs... professors are far t busy to mess around with undergrads!)
  • if this is what it takes to finally kill the federal department of education, then good. As far as I am concerned, let the states come with what they want their educational standards to be. Refund the percentage of money that was taken from the residents of the states.

    The only function I see the Dept of Ed being good for, is overseeing the Federal student loan programs.

    jason
    • So instead of actually doing this, lets create a program that creates huge new problems before it crashes and burns. Good idea.

      I'd have some respect for Bush if he actually said straight out he wanted to abolish it. He might be surprised how many people could be convinced to agree with him, if he made the right arguments (by the way: because the national teacher's union likes a federal dept of education is not a good reason to abandon it, whether you like the union or not).

      • Yeah but The NEA would like anothing that gives them a focal point for their lobby efforts. If there were none, then they wouldn't have an excuse to extort so much money from the local branches to pay for federal lobbying. Currently the teacher unions in Idaho pay lip service only to the NEA because the NEA is so wildly out of step with our state. If the locals could just cut loose the national, then the locals would probably get more done with less money, and they wouldn't have the overhead of being ass
        • Sounds like every other union national organizatin I've had any exposure to, so I hope you're not expressing surprise :-)
          • Nope. More like disappointment and resignment as I am currently trying to gain employment at a unioned police department, though by all accounts their union is actually not bad (insider information).

            jason
    • This is exactly the sentiment expressed by Fuck the South [fuckthesouth.com]. If such a plan could be implemented with a reasonable phase-in, I'm all for it.

  • I'm not an American, but I've noticed that here in Belgium (Europe) schools are dropping their educational levels as well. We have 3 levels of high schooling, with multiple sublevels that allow you to specialize in certain directions.

    • Special Education: For kids with learning disabilities and mental handicaps. It is for kids that suffer from autism or terrible hyper-kineses and generally can't be handled properly inside an "ordinary" classroom.
    • Technical Education: For kids that aren't interested in sch
  • A fundamental problem is the buying of airtime by government departments. Keep an eye out for the number of ads on TV that are government funded. Anything that isn't selling a product, but is instead selling social morals, is 99% likely government funded. Sometimes it appears every commercial break has at least one of these 'spots' in it.

    Keep an eye out for it. You will probably be suprised to find more than you expected.

    And as all those media companies become dependent on that revenue stream, they become

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