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| What's wrong with American Education. |
| 2005-07-05 |
| Sowell sees quite a number of problems in American education. The end product is, in his estimation, a group of young adults who on the whole lack basic information and basic thinking skills: adults who are more apt to act on the basis of how they "feel" about something rather than any sort of reasoned judgement. This is undeniably true. The question is: is this the way things have always been? There are risks in arguing on the basis of test scores from years gone by, but we can compare Americans with other nationalities. Unfortunately Sowell doesn't have a terribly firm grasp of how to analytically use statistics himself, or else he decided to leave the math out. The critical comparison is between the top US students and the top Korean (or other) students. You need to correct for the dropout rates. But using the uncorrected rates, he says the top American students are doing worse than they used to. But I don't have to rely on test scores. I can look at college acceptance rates and compare with the total populations of countries. Americans lose. I can look at the textbooks I used, and the ones my kids are afflicted with. I found a copy of my old high school geometry textbook, and I compared it with the one used in high school now. Mine was proof-oriented and stressed careful reasoning--classical style. The current one is twice as heavy, very colorful, with lots of problem-solving and elementary algebra tie-ins--but not much to do with proofs or careful reasoning. Some, but not very much. A racially integrated team of characters have adventures that introduce each section's theme--at least for the first third of the book. Geometry was dumbed down. When I talk with high school kids, I find huge gaps in their cultural background. You don't need to be Christian or Jewish to know the story of David and Goliath--do you? Not very many kids seem to have the slightest notion what the title "Eyeless in Gaza" might refer to. I was always interested in history, and learned more from other books than my high school texts--I don't remember the textbooks at all--so I haven't tried to compare them. But certainly pop culture is utterly ignorant of any but the most superficial history. I will stipulate that Sowell is correct to claim that American students are, on the whole, very badly educated. The bulk of his book attempts to illustrate why this should be so. Most of the problems boil down to a lack of accountability, but I'm not convinced that accountability would solve all the problems. Demagogic politicians have a vested interest in maintaining victimhood in the regular world as well as the college campus, and I don't see these sorts trying to dispose of the bilingual education disasters, for example. Who says that racial sensitivity courses help? The people who get paid to teach them. There are no solid studies to show that they help, and in fact experience has been the exact contrary: universities that bought into them developed professional victim-finders and developed racial tensions that they didn't have before. Bilingual education is by now known as a notorious (and damaging) boondoggle--known, that is, to all except those with a vested interest in it or a vested interest in racial identity politics. Does a course of study have to have obvious relevance to the students? That's a good question, but the simplistic answer "not if it has no bearing on things in the student's life" is just plain stupid. Some studies are abstract in the beginning, and only show relevance later. I really don't care that you've lived all your life in the desert, and have never seen a lake. You need to know what an ocean is. And in the name of relevance children are given rather startling amounts of political indoctrination. He gives examples of schools where (possibly with good intentions) children are encouraged to take direction from their peers rather than their parents. "Values clarification" started to ring too many alarms, so it has been given new names--but the programs are still out there. In Oregon "school administrators were reluctant to acquaint parents and the general citizenry with their district's use of MACOS [Man: A Course Of Study], either prior to or following its installation." Drug prevention programs haven't reduced drug abuse rates (the Isthmus reported on the DARE program several years ago). Sex education courses coincided with a reversal in the decline in teen pregnancy rates--they started rising, and likewise teen abortion rates rose. "Self esteem" we all know is an utter joke, and the pros are starting to take notice. But it is going to be years before this filters down to the practices in the elementary schools. You don't get better work out of kids by giving them "self esteem;" they get the self esteem from doing well in things they find important. If you enjoy what you are doing, you are more likely to work harder at it. But the goal is accomplishment, not feeling good about things. Schools work hard at making students feel good about themselves and their work; sometimes to the detriment of accomplishment. Cultural "sensitivity" seems to trump everything, including honest judgement. Just as airport security is not allowed to notice that Baptists are under-represented among terrorists, so teachers and students are not supposed to notice that "ghetto culture" has some horrible aspects. Except that students are supposed to notice real and imagined failings of Western culture--these are sometimes on the test. There is no symmetry in sensitivity and respect--Western culture is denigrated whenever possible. And who gets to be a teacher? You have to be credentialed, and in most states take regular education courses. The problem is that the education courses are far and away the least scholarly, least challenging, and most jargon-filled in a university. "The crucial importance of these courses, and the irreparable damage they do, is not because of what they teach or do not teach. It is because they are the filter through which the flow of teachers must pass. Mediocrity and incompetence flow freely through these filters, but they filter out many high-ability people, who refuse to subject themselves to the inanity of education course, which are the laughing stock of many universities." On average, education students are almost the dumbest, excepting of course the big sports athletes. And then we go to college. For Sowell the love of tenure is the root of all sorts of evils. He holds out as his examples the fear of tenured faculty to express unpopular opinions, and the "fearlessness" of think tank scholars. The latter example isn't terribly germane--there aren't very many of these folks compared to the number of college faculty. But it is perfectly obvious that the high pressure publish or perish scramble for tenure prevents young professors from actually working hard on teaching. Some universities call "teacher of the year" awards the kiss of death, because naive young professors who work hard at teaching discover that they don't have enough publication record, and are terminated. And in college you have biased admissions. Favorite types of minorities are admitted--no, sought after--at colleges where their test scores alone would make them ineligible. You can argue that they have useful life experiences, but the unpleasant fact remains that your success in the academic life of a college is pretty well predicted by your test scores. So top colleges rope in students to fail, who would be successful in less pressured environments. The middle rank colleges rope in the lower tier students, who also are more likely to fail. You can argue that college is more than academic work. That may be true, but academic scholarship is central to the college's mission. Sowell detests the effect research has on teaching. Professors spend more time on research than on teaching (and if they have to raise grant money to support staff and students, they wind up having to spend a lot of time on paperwork as well--though Sowell doesn't mention this). So undergraduate students spend more time with grad students or short term teachers, and less with the professors who are supposed to be the expert scholars. I am a researcher and not tenured. Every year I find out if our group will have enough money to keep me around.Political correctness in universities is so well known that I won't bother summarizing his descriptions of it. Mickey Mouse programs such as feminist studies or black studies are so stupid that even those who agitated for them didn't try to take them--they just wanted a forum for their identity politics in the university, with a captive audience of students required to repect and even sometimes study these "subjects." |
| Posted by:Korora |
| #33 Well, .com, I hear the new NASA administrator has four or five postgraduate degrees; if it's just getting a strong engineering education that's the problem (although so few people are trying these days) we ought to find out after about a decade and a half of this guy. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-05 23:45 |
| #32 ...I've always believed that the true key to determining how bad a given school system REALLY is is to see how many former superintendents its paying. My home town of Cleveland at one point was paying over a million dollars a year to IIRC four former superintendents. These guys were smart enough to ask for five-year pay-or-play contracts knowing that in the political environment there, if they lasted 18 months it would be a miracle. Oh, and we can't forget Judge John Battisti, who held the Cleveland system hostage for more than a decade under an insane busing program that had grade schoolers attending schools twenty miles from their homes. When His Honor passed away, he was about to order that since desegregation by busing hadn't worked (parents moved out of the Cleveland district to avoid it), parents would have to get HIS permission to move, regardless of the reason. Yeah, you and I both know he couldn't do it, but what's scarier - the fact that he was going to order it in the first place, or the fact that he thought nobody could call him on it? Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2005-07-05 21:57 |
| #31 Just peachy, PhilF. BTW, I don't particularly need short concise statements, they're appreciated, but not necessary. I can "take it" regards complex logic and reasoning that naturally leads to a salient point. I mentally awarded you the Rosemary Woods S-t-r-e-t-c-h Medal on that first post and, in my response to it, relevance was my point. My reference to NASA, unlike yours in that first post no matter how you revise, was both a directly relevant response to M4D and, stand and be amazed, also directly relevant to the topic of the article. I hope I've been clear enough, as well. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 21:11 |
| #30 3 great articles by Fred Reed on the state of education Down With Education Reinventing The Bushman Johnny Can't Add |
| Posted by: john 2005-07-05 20:37 |
| #29 It's not clear to me how public education can clean up its act when: (1) the teachers as undergraduates were not qualified to enter any other professions, (2) the administrators at the school level are former PhysEd teachers who got tired of the lockerroom smell, (3) the bureaucracy above them is just that, and (4) the superintendent of schools is an overpaid political hack who spends half of his/her time just avoiding being fired. Not that I'm biased or anything, but I spent about $7,500 on Catholic school tuition last year so that my kids could go to school where the history classes are tough, the principal is a former English teacher, and the principal has the final say (including telling troublemakers to take a hike). Oh, and my kids' books are far better than the ones I had in public school 35 years ago. |
| Posted by: Tom 2005-07-05 19:53 |
| #28 OK, .com, trying to break things down into some short concise statements: * I realize that Texas has a better educational system than Louisiana does. * I realize that both states have problems with making a whole lot of stupid people. * OTOH, there's also problems going on with the _smart kids_ being turned out, in that IMHO they're not really being trained to think either. The declining number of native US science and engineering graduates, and their quality, bothers me. I worry that a lot of the smart ones are being steered away from engineering and science, and the ones who are left aren't being taught the best way to do things. * As an example, I've lost about a month this year having to deal with the fallout from a spreadsheet done by someone else who didn't understand elementary numerical analysis or the atan(x) function, and why it will sometimes return the exact wrong value. * As another example, I'd like to suggest the rantings of an apparent former physics student, who's described some of the problems thereof a lot better and more succinctly than I ever could: Electron Band Structure of Germanium, My Ass. * Finally, I wasn't the one who mentioned space first. I think the problems with the space program are remarkably similar to those described in Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. I also realize that to a large extent Louisiana is also part of the problem: the external tanks for Shuttle (and for the new Shuttle-derived vehicles) are made here, and Congress's concerns will be driven more by the new program's need to keep employing people at NASA's Michoud facility in New Orleans (and other facilities elsewhere) than actually producing sustainable spaceflight infrastructure. * I think Kuhn's book describes a lot of problems both in science education and in other branches of the educational institutions here. Is this clear enough? |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-05 17:52 |
| #27 PhilF - No big deal, but you need to get off your horsey about NASA and space and the whole shootin' match. I got it the first time. And it's just fucking silly to whack a state like that, IMHO, and try to drag your hobby into this thread. I could be nasty about old LA, if'n I was inclined. I met a cajun MSgt with a railroad tie on his shoulder about Texans when I attended the little soiree called Basic Training at that shithole named Ft Polk. I peeled enough potatoes and stood KP as Pots n' Pans man enough times to have it seared, seared I say, into my memory. I loved Tiger Land, too, just as much. Only place I've ever been that was worse than Polk was Leesville. But hey, that's the first and last time you'll hear that sort of thing from me - I don't pick out or pick on LA. All the states are hosed and for the same reasons. Excellent thread with most of the culprits and BS clearly identified. I'm impressed with the suggestions regards how to fix this bitch. Good stuff all around. If I was King of the World... heh. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 16:38 |
| #26 .com: I'll rewrite what I was trying to say tonight or tomorrow after I've had more sleep. I just got in from lunch and had to fix someone else's attempt at kinetic maintenance... g'night kids. I realize I wasn't being clear enough when I wrote it. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-05 16:23 |
| #25 "Anyone who wonders at the state of American education today never dated an El-Ed major in college." -- P. J. O'Rourke |
| Posted by: Steve White 2005-07-05 15:55 |
| #24 The meltdown in education comes from the confluence of three trends, in essence a perfect storm: 1. The Feminist movement discouraged young women from going into teaching, urging them instead to become lawyers. This deprived education of many of its best teachers. Many of the ones that were left, quite frankly, were not that bright and quite simply had no grasp of the subject matter they were supposed to teach. 2. The rise of "professional" educators who concentrated more on the process of teaching than what was being taught. This resulted in an environment where parents often were better educated than the teachers to whom they entrusted their children's education. 3. The triumph of political correctness. When the best and the brightest eschewed education for more lucrative careers, the ones left behind promulgated a philosophy of collaboration rather than competion in which it was more important to feel good than to learn. Once through the looking glass of self-esteem, we find ourselves with alternate realities that approach self-parody, places where ebonics and black egyptian pyramid builders are taught but "dead white guys" and the civilization they created are ignored, places where history, logic, and perception have become so twisted and perverted that Huxley and Orwell couldn't recognize them. Perhaps the best description of these worlds comes from Ayn Rand. |
| Posted by: Hupeater Cleater4727 2005-07-05 14:38 |
| #23 Good ideas Ed, I would make teachers ACCOUNTABLE and have promotions and pay-raises based on MERIT and not senority. And get rid of the farking teachers union. Utterly abolish it and pay the teachers a decent wage according to their merit and subject knowledge. And start teaching history again. When my niece went through public schools (80's and 90's) she did not have one single history class -- not one!. But she had lots and lots of 'feel-good' classes. Oh, and she was told not to worry about her handwriting (which is terrible) - since everyone would be using keyboards and nobody would be 'writing things down on paper' by the time she graduates..... And make the budget transparent so everyone can see what their money is being spent on. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-07-05 13:52 |
| #22 When I was in public school, most of the younger teachers were not nearly as bright as the older teachers, and some true dim bulbs. I had to drop out of a few required classes and test out to graduate because I could not stand to relearn what I already learned in middle school. In my undergrad university days, the education majors had the lowest SAT scores of any college (excepting scholarship athletes and before ethnic and gay/lesbian studies came into vogue). These dim bulbs are now the age where they are running the educational systems, and though I hope cream rises to the top, the politicized education system leaves me with a queasy feeling. So how do we inject bright people into education when there are so many better opportunities? Pay can be raised, but $40-50K for 8 months work isn't bad and unless astromonically increased, won't solve the problem of less intelligent students choosing education majors. I would encourage, set up traing programs, and make it easier for older adults to enter teaching. The education degrees are barriers to entry to smart, motivated and knowledgeable who would like to teach. Why shouldn't an engineer teach math or physics, a biologist teach biologyl, or a well educated stay at home mommy teach in her former specialy now that her kids are older and more independent? I would make schooling year round. This vastly increases the number of learning days. Kids also forget too many lessons during the summer break and the first month or two of the school year is devoted to reviewing last year's material, decreasing real learning days. Clamp down on discipline. Let the trouble makers, who take up 80% of the teacher's time, know they will be separated from the regular student body and taught separately. Institute uniforms to erase class and sex lines. Finally, drop all the touchy-feely BS and make classes harder. Emphasize math, science, language skills, history, philosophy/social organization, debate and marketable skills. Add lots of contests between classes, schools, and districts. Flame way. |
| Posted by: ed 2005-07-05 12:58 |
| #21 DB - Spot on. School administration, just as with all other perceived "power" positions in public life, has attracted the inveterate Moonbat do-gooders who are going to "fix" us (here, through our children) whether we're broken or not and whether we like it or not. Everything from School Boards to City Councils to County Administration to Unions to Academia to Civil Service, etc - all thoroughly and utterly infected with pure idiots. If it stopped there, we'd survive them, but they are generally activist - not satisfied to merely prevent progress - oh no, they're determined to reshape our world to fit their moronic socialist twaddle view. That this has so successfully sneaked up on us and did not "out" itself from the closet until the Clintoon's Camelot II era is what startles me. I saw a few signs, but had no idea of the real scope. I know it's my generation doing most of this - and I'll be happy when we're gone. AC is more optimistic than I am, and he's smack in the middle of this topic, so I'll take his word that this idiocy will not succeed, Grid willing. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 12:15 |
| #20 PhilF - That was one extremely loose and fuzzy connection in a big juicy vat of rationalization, lol! Congrats on your inventiveness, full points. Factually? Pfeh. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 12:01 |
| #19 .com, you touched on a big problem with schools that doesn't get addressed......idiot administrative types running the joint and dictating what will be done. I'm not a teacher, but I've had to deal with some of the geniuses running the administration for different school districts. I've only been doing it for 9 months, but believe me, there are some school districts out here in AZ that any future kids of mine will NEVER attend. I feel horrible for the teachers who have to deal with those dolts. No wonder schools are so messed up. |
| Posted by: Desert Blondie 2005-07-05 11:46 |
| #18 All in all, if I had to choose my rulers between a bunch of dumb victims of the Louisiana public school system who read at a sixth grade comprehension level or a bunch of 98th percentile intelligence graduates of "elite" colleges who believe that history started and ended in 1848 I'd pick the former. They haven't had their full intelligence channeled into making sure they NEVER EVER THINK. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-05 09:41 |
| #17 .com: I point the finger at Texas because m4d was talking about moon landings, that's where JSFC is, and where there's a strong congressional delegation dedicated to ensuring that the "space program" remains a jobs program first and ensures that space exploration is a very distant fourth, behind making sure the jobs program has an appearance of being space exploration and "proving" that that program is the only way to do space exploration. I think someone mentioned the line item veto in this thread. Did you know that a DoD followon to the DC-X program was one of the only uses of the Line Item Veto, between when the Republicans gave it to Clinton and when the Supreme Court took it away from him? It was something like a 50 million dollar program, or .0025% of the federal budget. Equivalent to about 1/300 of the current budget for NASA. The bureaucracy perceived it as a threat, so IT got singled out as a particularly egregious part of govenment waste. (ALl this happened the year after one of Clinton's DoD people had refused to spend the money Congress had allocated on the project). So there may be bright spots in the Texas educational system; there may be bright people in those parts of the government space program based in Texas. But collectively they seem caught up in very stupid behavior, which I think gets encouraged by the educational system, both in the public schools and the private institutions, and in primary school, secondary school and college. And I think some of the worst things that happen in the system happen with the really smart kids who are getting an education that's both difficult and _almost_ good but subtly wrong, with bright kids being channeled into "liberal arts" educations about as relevant as the old Chinese mandarin indoctrination system. They're taught a religion and how to rationalize it, and told that this is thinking. And since it is difficult compared to the prole education system it actually encourages them to believe in their superiority and discourages them from rationally evaluating their own dogma. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-05 09:37 |
| #16 And, oh yeah, I'd add we need several lawsuits going in the Board's favor to stop the "fear of lawsuits" that are so rampant in local school boards. Our litigious society is affecting our kids, and it doesn't bode well for the future of our country with so many frivilous lawsuits. |
| Posted by: BA 2005-07-05 08:58 |
| #15 Bingo, Dave D! Typically, I'm more of a Republican conservative, but in this arena, I more agree with the libertarians (Neal Boortz in Atlanta, specifically). Note that the Dept. of Education came into being in the late 70s (Carter's admin. I believe) and it's been driven downhill since then (probably even before then, but this accelerated it). When you have local school boards tied to the Fed. teet, and those Feds attach all sorts of strings to the $ coming down (including the multi-culti, GLBT agenda, revisionist history, etc.), it's just a receipe for disaster. Two personal stories: Both of my parents, my sister and my wife are all EX-teachers. My mom stayed home when I and my sis were born (mid-70's up to mid-80's) and then went back to teaching. She said she could tell a HUGE difference just in those 10 years she was gone in the "level" of education and that it only got worse. What happened during those 10+ years? Formation of Federal DoEd, the removal of corporal punishment, heck, some would even argue the removal of prayer. During the 90's, she would come home and b!tch about the multi-culti stuff she had to "teach", and she was in a VERY Southern county here in GA (extremely country/"redneck"). My wife taught in N. GA before we were married (in another very country county), which was changing from mostly white to a lot of immigrants (mostly Mexicans, whose parents worked in the carpet mills in that area). Probably 90% of the kids, I'd imagine had no computer at home. And yet, the school got a "grant" to be 1 of the first in the country to have a full-blown, "research" lab with computers. So, I'd come to visit and all these elementary kids, who had no computers at home, would be sitting there, zombie-like playing the latest computer games. What it had to do with true learning, I'll never know (they also had a room where they'd select students to do "morning news" live over the TVs in each room, instead of just simple announcements over the intercoms). I've come to realize several things...one of which my grandfather used to tell me. The more the locals are relying on Fed. $, the more screwed up things get. And, I'd agree that this "Self-esteem" crap has gotta go, and I'd even argue that we need to bring back corporal punishment. My mom sums it up this way: "It used to be that parents would ask 'What did Johnny do today to get in trouble?' Now, it's 'What did you do to Johnny?'" Parents don't want to believe lil' Johnny could act up, and that interrupts all the other kids trying to learn. |
| Posted by: BA 2005-07-05 08:55 |
| #14 "Here's the 64-dollar question: if our politicians know Americans of all stripes are so unhappy with both these issues (the polls continually show this), why do they continually refuse to act on them?" Republican politicians don't act because they don't have the courage to do what it would take: rip up the entire system-- at gunpoint, if necessary-- and start over. Democrats don't act because they don't want the system to work; to them, the education system is doing exactly what it should be doing: turning out ignorant, illiterate, incompetent people whose inability to think critically makes them easy prey for socialist flim-flam artists. They want the education system to indoctrinate, not educate. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-07-05 08:11 |
| #13 Here's the 64-dollar question: if our politicians know Americans of all stripes are so unhappy with both these issues (the polls continually show this), why do they continually refuse to act on them? Because the lobbyists for the teachers unions, cheap-labor advocates, and anti-sovereignty groups are louder and more focused than the votes for good schools and immigration reform. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-05 07:45 |
| #12 One young man told me he didn't know who DeGaulle was because his generation was only required to study stuff that was "Re-vuh-lunt," a category that evidently does not include the correct pronunciation of "relevant." |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-05 07:42 |
| #11 Fortunately this country doesn't need scientists and engineers since we can outsource all that work to India and China. That will leave all the "real" work here - CEO's, lawyers, and burger-flippers. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2005-07-05 07:38 |
| #10 I could write a book about the things my students have managed to get to college without learning. Some examples from my own classes: -One young lady did not know that there is more than one national military force in the world. She thought that all "military" everywhere were under direct orders from the Pentagon. (This amazing assumption emerged in the context of the Moon Landing Hoax claim. It was her response to my point that most military organitions around the world were capable of monitoring the Apollo transmissions and determining their authenticity). -In one class, only 2 of 38 students had ever heard of Charles DeGaulle, and one of those was a French history major. More than half could correcty identify multi-cult pseudo-hero Crispus Attucks, however. (Note that the PBS link manages to take a swipe at authentic revolutionary John Adams even while glorifying Attucks.) -One young man was thoroughly confused about the much-publicized retirement of the Concorde, since he was sure that IT had crashed in France a while back. -An ROTC student insisted that Sweden could not have armed forces because it was a "neutral country." Others backed him on this. Another argued, conversely, that every man in Sweden was drafted into the Army and had to keep his weapon at home (he meant Switzerland, of course). -Several did not know whether the Civil War or the World Wars had happened first. -More knew that Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner than that he had authored the Declaration of Independence. A sizable percentage (~25%) had no idea who he was. I don't have any general diagnosis of the educational meltdown, separate from the overall decline of reason in a sound-byte, image-oriented society, but I do not think the situation is hopeless. The multi-cult/PC rot actually ran wild in the 80s and has only been challenged during the past decade or so. A new generation of scholars, some of them quite brilliant, has arrived to challenge the moth-easten paradigm of the 60s generation. It will take many years for this nascent revolution to make its way into the public schools, but the future is not entirely bleak. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-05 07:36 |
| #9 It's hardly a uniquely US problem. IMO, once corporeal panishment in schools was abolished, the battle was lost. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2005-07-05 07:24 |
| #8 mac - I believe every President comes to office with an "Education Reform Program". They build the legislative package to fund and implement it, and task their congressional critters, House Whips and such, to shepherd it through the process. And there it dies an ugly death. The old saw about a camel being the result of a committee designing a racehorse makes the point, I think. The sponsors don't recognize what finally comes out the other end. One of the most obvious flaws of our legislative system is the lack of rules preventing asinine amendments and unrelated riders -- and / or a line item veto. Obviously the former would be infinitely more effective and beneficial - vetoing means starting over, time and energy wasted. The need a sort of Legislation Cop, lol, to keep them hard on-topic - and the ability to actually punish those who put forward frivolous crap and attempt to attach it to important legislation, rather than making it stand alone for an up or down vote. This deficiency is HUGELY wasteful and often makes a sham of the entire process. Any year's Highway Funding bill, for example, would probably serve to illustrate the point. Bridges to nowhere and Liberace Museums in S.D. It's the always popular big pile of semi-discretionary cash given to State Highway Depts - with a gazillion sponsors and guaranteed passage. Got a Porky Project you need to get that big donor on-board? No sweat, attach here. Need help in learning how it's done? Just ask Sen Byrdman of the KKK, he's the resident pro, but they're all at least semi-skilled in the game... or they don't come back next term. My cheap seats view. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 06:33 |
| #7 Guys, There are two problems in this country that everyone I know is mad as hell over: illegal immigration and the state of the public schools. I don't know one person with kids who doesn't a)homeschool, b)send their kids to private school (at considerable expense), or c)desperately wish they could do either a or b while cursing the local public schools for all they're worth. Here's the 64-dollar question: if our politicians know Americans of all stripes are so unhappy with both these issues (the polls continually show this), why do they continually refuse to act on them? |
| Posted by: mac 2005-07-05 06:03 |
| #6 PhilF - Why pick on Texas? They, at least, have "No Pass, No Play" thanks to Ross Perot - and over the screeched objections of every school district in the state, save a very very few - because they live off of football (and other sports) revenues. You hail from Cajun territory I believe? And you're pointing fingers at Texas? Lol! Your points, sans the finger, are spot-on, though - no argument there, lol! |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 03:45 |
| #5 M4D - The people who put the US on the moon (I'll use 1970 for argument's sake - add/subtract 5 yrs either way) were probably aged about 40 on average. That means they were born around 1930. That means that they were getting their college degrees in the 1955-1965 timeframe. That was 40 plus yrs ago. Today's education system is one helluvalot different than the one that produced those fine engineers and scientists. Toss in that a core component in that program were Germans, too, lol! The blogger is critiquing Sowell's book. Though I only have excerpts from the book, located via search engine and selected by others with unknown agendas, it seems to me that both Sowell and the blogger make multiple valid points. I don't think anyone with 2 neurons to rub together would disagree with the statement that our education system ranges from off course to totally broken. I can verify, as a father, that the education my daughter received was very different and, in real-world terms, grossly inferior to what I received - particularly in terms of analysis and reasoning. Compacting my meaning down to one or two sentences is a bear. Example: Math - they taught her formulas, rote-style. Very little went into how to cherry-pick the facts from reality that were relevant and into which variables these values should be plugged. If you gave her the relevant terms, she could solve the equation, but she always need help in selecting the terms and determining where they fit into the equation. Essentially, what we call common sense was not in vogue during my child's education. On a particularly memorable occasion I took her to an evening school presentation of a new program. She was invited to join what they were calling the Star Student program. Sounded regal, lol, and she was interested so we went to see the presentation. They showed slides of the curriculum overview and then examples in the various areas. Math was first up and, on the second slide of sample problems and how this system would benefit gifted students, I noted an error. It was a simple thing, but the answer shown was an order of magnitude off. Like the shy and retiring type I am, I interrupted the presentation and pointed out the error. The responses, from the teachers, the principal and program admin, and the audience were telling. The audience reaction was a mixture of sniggers and shock that I would dare interrupt, lol. The teacher on the stage who ran the Math Dept was chagrined, but she was honest and immediately confirmed I was right. The principal and the program administrator were simply outraged - they couldn't have cared less if there was an error... it was a personal affront to them and they sniffed and puffed for a solid 2 or 3 minutes playing damage recovery regards this program out of some Ivy League Think Tank which had called upon the best minds at Harvard and Yale and yadda3 to consult in creating this program. It was probably just a typo - that was what I presumed, anyway. They should've laughed it off and the "damage" would've been zilch. Instead, it was outrage and damage control like you'd see in a political circus. And you know what? That's exactly what it was... later we found out that our school received a "grant" from the vendor for enlisting a certain threshold of participating students. Further, it turned out that this grant was discretionary - no particular strings were attached. No one could identify where, even generally speaking, this money had been applied to benefit our school or students. We further found out that the program's vendor had been paid very handsomely from school tax funds when our school district signed up. Wanna bet there was a "bonus" of some kind, also sans strings, that went to the School District Administration? That was where the trail ended, so I never found out, but this was a classic kickback scheme - obvious even to the cub reporter who made his bones with it. Broken? Yes. Crooked? Yes. Inept? Yes. Accountable? No. How to fix it? How long have you got? Lol! |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 03:39 |
| #4 Re: Landing on the moon... I'd like to see people in Texas do it for less than ten billion dollars a year. Or more recently than twenty-three years ago. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-05 02:41 |
| #3 The critical comparison is between the top US students and the top Korean (or other) students. theren lyes teh keyz! thisn flaw from em start. ima liken see how kimmys kidz stak up in eenglish an u.s. histry. ifn they so good an we so bad how come we haver komet bomin teknolojees an they dont? fase it. wez beter dood. ima liken see chad lan a man on teh moon. or korea. |
| Posted by: muck4doo 2005-07-05 02:36 |
| #2 Mucky, no offence, but... if your spelling is a typical example of the results of US edumacayshun, then I would say that the article hit it right smack on the head. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt--please explain where the author bullshits, in your view, specifically, and I may ponder your points. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2005-07-05 02:20 |
| #1 thisn arnikle bulshit. >:( |
| Posted by: muck4doo 2005-07-05 01:16 |