ending public school and public money to universities

[RiverDad]

Right, because poor children who already enter schools ill prepared, compared to their wealthier counterparts, should be punished:roll:

There were no poor children in 1970?

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Well, that sounds like the perfect way to take America from the worst social mobility of the developed nations, to virtually none, effectively dropping us into the league of third world countries.

I cannot even fathom the degree of dogmatism it takes for someone look at any and all spending as inherently bad, even spending that goes to educating children. Do you just not want a government at all? Why don't these people just go make a tribe in the forest somewhere and leave the rest of us who like living in a nice country with opportunities alone?

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

There were no poor children in 1970?

I'm pretty sure there were poor children in 1970.

 

[gmf2126]

Why does someone pointing out the ineffectiveness of the existing system translate to someone having a desire to punish poor children? Maybe we should figure out a way to incent schools/teachers/administrators to do a better job and it doesn't look like a lack of funding is the issue.

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/e...nd-poor-studies-show.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

[RiverDad]

I'm pretty sure there were poor children in 1970.

So look at the change in student performance from 1970 to present and compare to funding per student from 1970 to present. There's a lot more money allocated per student, inflation adjusted, and there are all sorts of programs to help poor students, learning impaired students, today than in the past, not to mention higher levels of staffing. Without a doubt a lot of that staffing is bureaucrats, many of whom are filling some sort of supposed support role for kids, but a good many of the staff are actually on the front line, teachers' aides and specialized teachers which didn't exist or didn't have the same relevance back in 1970.

I know what has changed from 1970 to present but people don't like to read that explanation, so I'm happy to ignore what's going on and just present the student outcome data against spending per student. Where is the money going?

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

Why does someone pointing out the ineffectiveness of the existing system translate to someone having a desire to punish poor children? Maybe we should figure out a way to incent schools/teachers/administrators to do a better job and it doesn't look like a lack of funding is the issue.

.....because Riverdad wants to fund depending on outcome and the one area no one seems to be able to tackle is the ever growing achievement gap between the rich and poor. This would effectively take more money away from schools with large populations of poor students. A lousy idea.

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

So look at the change in student performance from 1970 to present and compare to funding per student from 1970 to present. There's a lot more money allocated per student, inflation adjusted, and there are all sorts of programs to help poor students, learning impaired students, today than in the past, not to mention higher levels of staffing. Without a doubt a lot of that staffing is bureaucrats, many of whom are filling some sort of supposed support role for kids, but a good many of the staff are actually on the front line, teachers' aides and specialized teachers which didn't exist or didn't have the same relevance back in 1970.

I know what has changed from 1970 to present but people don't like to read that explanation, so I'm happy to ignore what's going on and just present the student outcome data against spending per student. Where is the money going?

Per pupil spending is such a bogus measurement. Leave it to the Cato a Institute.

 

[RiverDad]

Well, that sounds like the perfect way to take America from the worst social mobility of the developed nations, to virtually none, effectively dropping us into the league of third world countries.

We're importing millions upon millions of people from Third World countries. Why wouldn't you expect us to be moving towards a Third World future?

 

[RiverDad]

Per pupil spending is such a bogus measurement.

Because?

 

[gmf2126]

.....because Riverdad wants to fund depending on outcome and the one area no one seems to be able to tackle is the ever growing achievement gap between the rich and poor. This would effectively take more money away from schools with large populations of poor students. A lousy idea.

I think it's more to illustrate that funding won't solve the problem and I think your point about the achievement gap is very relevant, as was your point about students being prepared for school prior to entering. These are larger social issues no one wants to address and the solution has historically been......MORE FUNDING! Well I think that's been tried as those graphs showed and it's pretty clear that throwing money at it doesn't work.

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

Because?

First, do pray tell what Cato used as per pupil spending cost if they even disclosed that information.

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

I think it's more to illustrate that funding won't solve the problem and I think your point about the achievement gap is very relevant, as was your point about students being prepared for school prior to entering. These are larger social issues no one wants to address and the solution has historically been......MORE FUNDING! Well I think that's been tried as those graphs showed and it's pretty clear that throwing money at it doesn't work.

Funding per pupil doesn't just cover educational costs. There are other costs that can be thrown in there too. Throwing money is just a cliche.

 

[RiverDad]

This would effectively take more money away from schools with large populations of poor students. A lousy idea.

I love experimentation and pilot projects. Love them. If you have some ideas, I'm all ears. If those ideas haven't been tried before, I'm willing to support them via argument. The problem here is that we already ran this experiment though:

The education establishment thinks the cure for what ails America’s public schools is more money. But spending a fortune is no guarantee of better schools. It certainly didn’t help a poorly performing school district in the heart of Kansas City, Missouri.

School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ‘85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.

To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms.

But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year, there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best-funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved.

It was a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for backers of vastly increased funding for public schools. From the start, proponents of Kansas City’s desegregation and education plan had touted it as a controlled experiment that would resolve once and for all two radically different philosophies of education.

For decades, critics of excess spending for public schools had said, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” To which educators and public school advocates replied, “No one’s ever tried.”

Kansas City settles the argument. Judge Clark invited the district to “dream.” Forget about cost, he said. He urged administrators to let their imaginations soar and assemble a list of everything they might possibly need to boost the achievement of inner-city blacks. Using the extraordinary powers granted judges in desegregation cases, Clark said he would find a way to pay for it.

The judge may have been misinformed about the solutions. But no one can accuse him of being timid or indecisive. To pay for all the changes. improvements, programs and new schools, he unilaterally increased property taxes 150%, imposed a 1.5% income tax surcharge and, when that wasn’t enough, ordered the state of Missouri to make up for the shortfall.

Suddenly a poor district that had horrible credit and never paid its bills on time was getting hundreds of millions of dollars more every year.

For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three-grade-level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down.​

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

We're importing millions upon millions of people from Third World countries. Why wouldn't you expect us to be moving towards a Third World future?

Yup, we do. And a lot of those people used to actually rise quite a bit in our education system and flood our industries with new ideas. We owed as much as half of our innovation to immigrants, a lot of whom were from poor countries. I mean, they left for a reason, and it wasn't because they wanted to keep living the way they were. It was because they wanted to do more, and do more they did.

These days, however, they are beginning to go back home, or to some other developed nation, or an emerging nation -- really, anywhere but here -- because America no longer offers the meritocracy it once did, nor the kind culture it once did. Not only are we losing our newly educated immigrants, but we're also losing our own citizens. The younger generations are leaving at dramatically higher numbers than usual. We appear to be at the beginning of an exodus.

It's a combination of ridiculous bigotry and fleecing our own of any opportunity and the demonization of our neighbors such as you provide here that helped get us there.

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

I love experimentation and pilot projects. Love them. If you have some ideas, I'm all ears. If those ideas haven't been tried before, I'm willing to support them via argument. The problem here is that we already ran this experiment though:

The education establishment thinks the cure for what ails America’s public schools is more money. But spending a fortune is no guarantee of better schools. It certainly didn’t help a poorly performing school district in the heart of Kansas City, Missouri.

School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ‘85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.

To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms.

But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year, there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best-funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved.

It was a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for backers of vastly increased funding for public schools. From the start, proponents of Kansas City’s desegregation and education plan had touted it as a controlled experiment that would resolve once and for all two radically different philosophies of education.

For decades, critics of excess spending for public schools had said, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” To which educators and public school advocates replied, “No one’s ever tried.”

Kansas City settles the argument. Judge Clark invited the district to “dream.” Forget about cost, he said. He urged administrators to let their imaginations soar and assemble a list of everything they might possibly need to boost the achievement of inner-city blacks. Using the extraordinary powers granted judges in desegregation cases, Clark said he would find a way to pay for it.

The judge may have been misinformed about the solutions. But no one can accuse him of being timid or indecisive. To pay for all the changes. improvements, programs and new schools, he unilaterally increased property taxes 150%, imposed a 1.5% income tax surcharge and, when that wasn’t enough, ordered the state of Missouri to make up for the shortfall.

Suddenly a poor district that had horrible credit and never paid its bills on time was getting hundreds of millions of dollars more every year.

For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three-grade-level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down.​

Did I say a new building/facilities would help test scores or is this a strawman?

 

[RiverDad]

We owed as much as half of our innovation to immigrants, a lot of whom were from poor countries

The US has had a massive influx of Central Americans since 1970. Where are the Mexicans on this list? How many immigrants are we getting from Sweden these days? Not to damn many, a rounding error in the total immigration wave and yet Swedish immigrants are producing more innovation than Central Americans.

 

[RiverDad]

Did I say a new building/facilities would help test scores or is this a strawman?

Do you think that new schools just sit empty? Let me help you here. New schools that are added to a district are staffed up and all of those classrooms are filled, meaning that each teacher now teaches fewer students. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

Do you think that new schools just sit empty? Let me help you here. New schools that are added to a district are staffed up and all of those classrooms are filled, meaning that each teacher now teaches fewer students. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?

A good thing would be to provide an early childhood programs for these students. They start off their first year in school behind their peers and studies show they never really catch up (close the gap). Much of this has to do with lack of early exposure to rich language experiences. This we can do something about but it will cost money.

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

The US has had a massive influx of Central Americans since 1970. Where are the Mexicans on this list? How many immigrants are we getting from Sweden these days? Not to damn many, a rounding error in the total immigration wave and yet Swedish immigrants are producing more innovation than Central Americans.

Yup. And note the top two: countries where social mobility is rather hard to come by, and most people are poor.

The thing with Mexico is that it's close and it shares an enormous border; it's easier for people to get here for whatever reason, whereas for more distance poor nations, it takes drive to get it done. So, yes, simply due to the ease of getting across the border, there will be a proportionally lower percentage of Mexicans who stand out.

The next two after that share language, culture, and in Canada's case, also a border, so it's also very easy and obvious for them. Although since this graph ended -- 2006 -- we're seeing a lot of these people leaving, and more Americans going to their countries than the reverse. There's no incentive to come here, and increasingly little incentive for our own to stay.

Nothing in this graph defeats anything I said.

 

[RiverDad]

A good thing would be to provide an early childhood programs for these students.

That doesn't work either. The early childhood education hypothesis has been tested in numerous experiments and failed to produce expected results. Here is information on the Abbott Districts in NJ:

Abbott districts are school districts in New Jersey that are provided remedies to ensure that their students receive public education in accordance with New Jersey’s state constitution. They were created in 1985 as a result of the first ruling of Abbott v. Burke, a case filed by the Education Law Center. The ruling asserted that public primary and secondary education in poor communities throughout the state was unconstitutionally substandard.[1] There are 31 "Abbott districts" in the state, which are now referred to as "SDA Districts" based on the requirement for the state to cover all costs for school building and renovation projects in these districts under the supervision of the New Jersey Schools Development Authority.[2]

Prior to 2011, the State of NJ did not release the total amount spent per pupil on schooling. Since the Abbott original ruling in 1985, New Jersey increased spending such that Abbott district students received 22% more per pupil (at $20,859) vs. non-Abbott districts (at $17,051) in 2011. [3]

Although key proponents of the measures express optimism that continued spending will eventually help advance students performance, middle and high school students have not improved. For them, the program has been characterized as "a huge failure"

Abbott districts are school districts in New Jersey covered by a series of New Jersey Supreme Court rulings, begun in 1985,[5] that found that the education provided to school children in poor communities was inadequate and unconstitutional and mandated that state funding for these districts be equal to that spent in the wealthiest districts in the state.

The Court in Abbott II[6] and in subsequent rulings,[7] ordered the State to assure that these children receive an adequate education through implementation of certain reforms, including standards-based education supported by parity funding. It include various supplemental programs and school facilities improvements, including to Head Start and early education programs.

Despite decades of strong state funding for Abbott schools, the results are at best mixed. Early education programs including free preschool helped close part of the gaps for Fourth graders whose performance gap "narrowed from 31 points in 1999 to 19 points in 2007, and on state reading tests from 22 points in 2001 to 15 points in 2007."[4] However, as students advanced in grade, their relative performance gains were lost, such that high school students showed no improvement at all and one expert, the Assistant Commissioner at the New Jersey Department of Education from 2002 to 2007 stated, "When you get to middle school, eighth grade, high school – forget about it. This has been a huge failure."​

Anyone with even a first year college-level Introduction to Genetics class in university could explain why the marginal early childhood gains evaporate as the child increases in age. Too bad that genetics isn't a required class for education majors.

They start off their first year in school behind their peers and studies show they never really catch up (close the gap). Much of this has to do with lack of early exposure to rich language experiences. This we can do something about but it will cost money.

You're coming across like you are arguing that this is some new phenomenon, that there were no poor people in 1970. All of that additional funding and no improvement since 1970.

 

[RiverDad]

Nothing in this graph defeats anything I said.

The graph defeats your entire argument. You've now resorted to blustering about motivation or some such swill. It's pretty damn easy for a Swede to emigrate. The tiny proportion of Swedish immigrants is producing more innovation for America than 50 million Central Americans.

 

[rabbitcaebannog]

That doesn't work either. The early childhood education hypothesis has been tested in numerous experiments and failed to produce expected results. Here is information on the Abbott Districts in NJ:

Abbott districts are school districts in New Jersey that are provided remedies to ensure that their students receive public education in accordance with New Jersey’s state constitution. They were created in 1985 as a result of the first ruling of Abbott v. Burke, a case filed by the Education Law Center. The ruling asserted that public primary and secondary education in poor communities throughout the state was unconstitutionally substandard.[1] There are 31 "Abbott districts" in the state, which are now referred to as "SDA Districts" based on the requirement for the state to cover all costs for school building and renovation projects in these districts under the supervision of the New Jersey Schools Development Authority.[2]

Prior to 2011, the State of NJ did not release the total amount spent per pupil on schooling. Since the Abbott original ruling in 1985, New Jersey increased spending such that Abbott district students received 22% more per pupil (at $20,859) vs. non-Abbott districts (at $17,051) in 2011. [3]

Although key proponents of the measures express optimism that continued spending will eventually help advance students performance, middle and high school students have not improved. For them, the program has been characterized as "a huge failure"

Abbott districts are school districts in New Jersey covered by a series of New Jersey Supreme Court rulings, begun in 1985,[5] that found that the education provided to school children in poor communities was inadequate and unconstitutional and mandated that state funding for these districts be equal to that spent in the wealthiest districts in the state.

The Court in Abbott II[6] and in subsequent rulings,[7] ordered the State to assure that these children receive an adequate education through implementation of certain reforms, including standards-based education supported by parity funding. It include various supplemental programs and school facilities improvements, including to Head Start and early education programs.

Despite decades of strong state funding for Abbott schools, the results are at best mixed. Early education programs including free preschool helped close part of the gaps for Fourth graders whose performance gap "narrowed from 31 points in 1999 to 19 points in 2007, and on state reading tests from 22 points in 2001 to 15 points in 2007."[4] However, as students advanced in grade, their relative performance gains were lost, such that high school students showed no improvement at all and one expert, the Assistant Commissioner at the New Jersey Department of Education from 2002 to 2007 stated, "When you get to middle school, eighth grade, high school – forget about it. This has been a huge failure."​

Anyone with even a first year college-level Introduction to Genetics class in university could explain why the marginal early childhood gains evaporate as the child increases in age. Too bad that genetics isn't a required class for education majors.



You're coming across like you are arguing that this is some new phenomenon, that there were no poor people in 1970. All of that additional funding and no improvement since 1970.

I'm not impressed from the results from the Head Start Programs and when I did an observation on the program, I was not pleased with what I saw. I'm talking high quality early childhood programs. One similar to the one our public school offered but only on a lottery basis. If we could get rid of the lottery and ensure all poor children could enter. Only then we could start closing the gap. We have insanely good results with those who make it in.

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

The graph defeats your entire argument. You've now resorted to blustering about motivation or some such swill. It's pretty damn easy for a Swede to emigrate. The tiny proportion of Swedish immigrants is producing more innovation for America than 50 million Central Americans.

No, it doesn't. The highest contributors are from poor nations. I never said anything about Mexicans. And the fact that people from nice countries don't really come here unless it's so culturally obvious that it's a no brainer actually works in favor of my argument, and in fact strengthens it by showing this trend has been in effect for quite a while.

 

[RiverDad]

I'm not impressed from the results from the Head Start Programs and when I did an observation on the program, I was not pleased with what I saw. I'm talking high quality early childhood programs. One similar to the one our public school offered but only on a lottery basis. If we could get rid of the lottery and ensure all poor children could enter. Only then we could start closing the gap. We have insanely good results with those who make it in.

If going to make some guesses here. The program that you observed looked good during your brief period of examination and it looked good because you saw activities taking place which you thought were beneficial to student outcomes. Then you checked to see whether objective measures of student outcomes had improved compared to a control group of students who hadn't been included in any early childhood program.

What you didn't do is check the follow-through years after the students had completed the program and determine whether a gap was closed or narrowed. Every single program fails on this measure. Maybe yours won't but you haven't provided any evidence of that.

Here's why they fail. When children are young, adults (parents, teachers, caregivers) have immense power to shape their environments. This is why "nice white ladies" want to get their hands on all those young minority children who are being raised poorly by their parents. They can create more enriched learning environments for these children, environments which match those experienced by children raised in homes of better educated parents. They can control the behavior of the child, their diet, their nap times, the subject matter of instructional material, they can create very verbal environments, they can create tactile environments and swamp the child's world with the early childhood experience thus minimizing the influence of the child's home life.

Where this all falls apart is when the child ages and as we all age we begin to exert more control over our own environments and we begin to listen to our own instincts. The children are born to their parents and so inherit behavioral characteristics of their parents. These children shuck off what they've learned and live their lives by what feels natural to them. Heritability increases with age. Every gain made by children coming out of these enriched learning environments DOESN'T STICK.