“Under-resourced” schools
All of a sudden I see the phrase nearly everywhere: “under-resourced schools.” I get a number of magazines from the varied colleges I attended, and I skim them over now and then and even sometimes read an article or two in them. And suddenly—at least it seems as though it’s sudden—I see article after article about how the university is intent on serving students from under-resourced schools.
Special remedial programs for them. Increases in numbers admitted. Reading these magazines, one would get the impression that these colleges exist to serve this particular group and this group only.
So, what does it mean? Is it a cover for racial preferences? Or does it include even poor whites in Appalachia? And what are the “resources” these schools don’t have? Money? Or something else?
Actually, it’s a term that’s been kicking around in the educational world for quite some time. I’ve seen articles from 2012 that refer to it, and I have little doubt it goes back quite a bit further (for example, see this from 2009). Here’s a definition from that last link:
Under-resourced students have limited access to external resources, such as support systems, mentors, and money. Their lack of supports makes daily demands—like childcare, transportation, one or more jobs—develop into crises that, time and again, derail their education. Amazingly resilient, these individuals often act first to solve problems and preserve personal connections with others rather than sacrifice relationships for the sake of achievement, as their middle-class counterparts would expect.
An interesting admixture of truth and utter PCBS (an acronym I just coined; please figure it out for yourself). The truth is that plenty of students have limited access to support systems, mentors, and/or money. Note that “or” that I added, and that “money” is only one of the resources that can be scarce, and probably not the only important one.
Plenty of rich kids, with well-funded school systems, feel adrift and unsupported as well as unmentored. I certainly did (although actually my school system was about average in the funding department, neither wealthy nor poverty-striken). Despite being a good student, I got very little mentoring and very little assistance in making decisions about education that affected the rest of my life.
I made some pretty poor ones, I might add, although they looked good on paper.
Not only that, but in that quote above, although some “under-resourced” students are indeed “amazingly resilient,” many (most?) are not, and that’s the problem. I wasn’t particularly resilient, either—at least, not as resilient as I would have liked to have been—although money was never the issue. And despite being what the author would call a “middle-class counterpart” of these “under-resourced students,” I constantly and consistently, for decades, “preserved personal connections with others rather than sacrificing relationships for the sake of achievement.”
I hate those sorts of class-based generalizations and simplifications, but that’s the province of the left and of the leftist educators that have basically taken over the educational system.
One of the biggest determinants of all of academic achievement is the family and neighborhood atmosphere. A recent essay I found through an online search acknowledges that right up-front:
The one resource that trumps all others when it comes to a student’s education is adults in their life who care about them and value education themselves. No matter how much the teachers and staff at a school care about a student, the fact is that the student spends the majority of their time outside of the school, with their families and in their neighborhoods.
Another part of this thrust to deal with an influx of students from “under-resourced” schools or environments is this sort of thing. The article describes a special physics course at Stanford, an elite university:
In an attempt to increase diversity within its physics department, Stanford University has created a modified physics course for “underrepresented” physics majors. Its purpose, according to the university, is to help retain nontraditional or “minority” students interested in physics. However well-intentioned this may be, implying that racial minorities need different coursework is, frankly, racist and regressive.
The initiative was created in response to a 2016 survey that revealed Stanford’s physics department to be one of the “least diverse” departments within the institution. As a result, the physics department felt that a greater focus on “education equity” in the department’s course work could remedy the diversity gap.
Stanford has added two other new physics courses as well, both focusing entirely on “diversity” and “inclusion” within the discipline. Students will learn about “issues of diversity and culture in physics” by applying concepts such as “critical race theory.” They’re also taught “what it is like to be a female professor” or “a faculty member raised first-generation/low income.”
While nonminority students are welcome to take the new classes, it’s clearly implied that these extra measures are meant for minorities by the university’s news release about making physics inclusive.
Reading some of the links, it’s hard to determine whether this represents a dumbing down of the actual basic physics coursework—which would be very alarming indeed—or just the introduction of information meant to tell minorities (or whoever the under-resourced might be) that they are welcome in physics if they are interested and can do the work. I have no quarrel with the latter.
My point, however, is that college has become a relentless and unremitting focus on race and class, and everything is related to those two things in a reductionist theory of achievement. This is standard leftist stuff, which is of course no accident, since the left has taken over virtually the entire educational world.
The dogma, shared by almost all leftists, about the solution to failing schools or underperforming minorities (invariably black or latino, never Asian) being more spending, can be easily refuted by reference to the infamous Kansas City school experiment of several decades ago, which spent hundreds of millions to no effect, and the more recent gift, accomplishing absolutely nothing, of one hundred million dollars to the woeful schools of Newark by the King of Facebook. Unfortunately, most progressives are impervious to arguments based on facts, evidence, reason , or logic.
I read a piece recently that had an interesting take of the topic of the Quora article. Some India-American wunderkind turned hot-shot economist did a highly detailed socio-economic study of several well delineated communities.
The question he wanted to answer was what kind of communities create very successful young adults. He didn’t find many answers, but the surprising connection or correlation he did find was that kids who socialize in groups that tend to mostly have attentive fathers did much better. The surprising part was that it didn’t matter if a kid’s father was around or attentive, if most of his/her friends had them.
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The PCBS part sounds like yet another effort for public employees to get their snouts ever deeper into the public trough. I recall that ages ago, some of our elementary schools decided that students would no longer have to demonstrate need in order to receive free school lunches.
Free lunches for everyone! It shouldn’t cost that much, right? Except that the Feds use the free school lunch numbers as a measure of need, and a wide variety of other free money distributions are based on it.
The alum offices of the universities I attended keep sending me letters asking for money, which I inevitable throw in the trash.
All you have to do is visit one of these major universities, and you’ll immediately notice their aggressive building programs which constantly expand their campuses, read information on the massive increase in very well-paid university administrators, and the kind of money being paid to full professors these days, the size of many university endowments, and you’ll realize that these institutions do not need any more money, especially given the heavily indoctrinated, virtually illiterate and innumerate dunces they are quite often turning out these days.
More and more is being spent on less and less and, meanwhile, the pyramid–to ultimately house who knows what–keeps getting bigger and bigger, and higher and higher.
I wonder when they’re going to put the traditional cap made of solid gold on it?
This is standard leftist stuff, which is of course no accident, since the left has taken over virtually the entire educational world.
And except for a few stubborn principled contrarians, such as Camille Paglia, Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson, no professors resisted even if they had tenure.
Any academic who wishes to argue from his or her exalted authority as a Ph.D teaching at a university is out of luck with me. The disastrous loss of respect for academia is on academics and their cowardice.
I think the median school in the US is probably over resourced. Administrators are always buying new curricula, changing systems, or installing new technology. If they spent the money on improving wages, maybe less teachers will burnout in the first five years. I think England has just said new teachers will be given a pay rise of £6,000. In my experience primary schools in England have a TA in every classroom. In the US it’s more like a TA shared in each grade.
You shouldn’t just throw people at a problem. But this is one of those cases where the US probably isn’t throwing enough people at the problem. Of course every state is different, but as a military brat I’ve lived in lots. The research is pretty clear on this last time I checked. But with the Milgram stuff coming out it’s good to remember that we shouldn’t believe something just because there’s been a study.
I don’t recall what share of the UK population receives a degree compared to the US. I think around 50% start uni in the Uk. I think around 37% of Americans attain a BA or higher. If there is a big disparity, we need o give that disparity serious thought. The New Statesmen had a cover piece on the University Con two or three weeks ago, claiming standards have fallen. The whole issue reminds me of Snow’s The Two Cultures.
I left home at 18 and went from Chicago to Los Angeles. I had a scholarship and $500 to live on. It was 1956 so it was not as bad as it would be today with those number. The only7 decent place I could find to live near campus and I could afford was a fraternity house, which used to be the cheapest places to live. It came with a built in cheap social life.
I had a little too much social life and lost my scholarship when I got a C in Calculus. I dropped out and went to work. I took night classes, then went into the military, went back with GI Bill and a student loan that had just become available.
I applied to medical school got in and had a scholarship after the first semester.
I consider “White Privilege” to be homework.
Mike K: I’ve seen “white privilege” defined as having no one else to blame.
There’s something to that. Nothing steps up your game like realizing it all comes down to you.
Congrats on taking charge of your life.
One of the biggest determinants of all of academic achievement is the family and neighborhood atmosphere.
That probably ties into children of academics becoming academics, children of people who work at national research institutions going to work for national research institutions, and so on. Society is stratifying along the lines of professions. I think it is a natural tendency that gets shaken up now in then by big wars or national crisis. WWII was one such event, I don’t think we have had another since. The election of Trump seems to have shaken things up a bit, but I don’t know that it will persist, it is hard to disturb things that seem so much part of society. The continuing failure of the public schools and academia will probably have a bigger impact in the long term, and not necessarily all for the good if they cannot be replaced with something better.
neo quotes, “Under-resourced students have limited access to external resources, such as support systems, mentors, and money.”
How ever did Lincoln obtain an education? Reading as he did by firelight in a one room log cabin? It all boils down to the cultural expectations. In a dysfunctional culture, a few of the most talented may escape and excel but the vast majority are trapped within the dysfunctional culture within which they exist.
Under resourced = send more money. Fuget about it.
Notice that there is never discussion of increasing the rigor of the curriculum and raising standards at all levels starting in kindergarten. If my memory is correct, an SAT exam from 1965 would drastically lower the scores of today’s students.
Well, Neo, you challenged us and only one person rose to the challenge.
So I will hazard a guess: PCBS stands for Politically Correct Bull Sh*t.
Somehow, many among today’s younger generations have gotten the notion that “Life should be fair” and, thus, when life isn’t, they “feel” that they have been cheated, have been put upon–they could just cry; things are “unfair,” and just plain rotten.
To judge by reactions and statements, many among them form a far less realistic and tough crew than those created in past generations–past cohorts which were raised in far less safe environments and far less opulent conditions–and an unknown number of today’s aptly labeled “snowflakes” have retreated into their little corners, their “safe spaces,” clutching their support blankets and animals.
It’s pretty pathetic, and a diagnostic indicator that our society today is far from as robust and healthy as it was, and should be, and our “educational system” has a lot to do with this, and to account for.
Great. Stanford is going to produce more Cory Bookers by putting ‘critical race theory’ into pseudo-physics.
Great societies/countries die from within, and ours is fast becoming moribund.
The philosopher-historian John Lukacs (I’m in his 4th book now) describes the American Century (sic) as 1914 to 1989, with good reason.
I think “under-resourced” is going to be an exceedingly flexible term, sometimes meaning a bad neighborhood, sometimes meaning money, sometimes meaning single-parent family, etc. Fixing it will be like whack-a-mole.
While I think many people should be getting some sort of education or training after high school, only about 15% of the population should be in liberal-arts or hard-science college as we are familiar with the term. 25% max. One of the reasons students are not doing well is that they shouldn’t be there to begin with. I do like the idea of college being for older students. Children should of course learn to be independent and take risks, but on what basis are we sure that 18 is the correct age to do that? It’s mostly an accident.
F:
Bingo.
We need to radically change the way education is financed. Pouring money in at the top and expecting educators to use it wisely is the ultimate in wishful thinking.
We should create an educational endowment for each student, with the money paid out only when that student achieves a specified annual level. Students should be customers for educational services and be treated accordingly.
Getting the free market involved in a meaningful way will bring dramatic improvement in outcomes and cost.
Public school systems are turning out poorly educated graduates, and leaving dropouts to fend for themselves.
With all funding as an endowment at the individual student level, the money stays in the student account until each level is met. Poor students become much more valuable to educators who can catch them up. Bringing a 16 year old up from sixth grade level to tenth would pay four years of payments to the successful educator.
Instead of being unmanageable problems, under-performing young adults would have mentors who really involved themselves and who had serious financial stakes in their student success rates.
Unpaid funds should stay in each student account indefinitely, allowing people who finally get their act together as adults to obtain an education.
Physics courses were some of the most difficult and challenging courses I ever took. More advanced courses are almost 100% math. It’s no coincidence that the father of physics (Newton) was also the father of calculus, a course designed to weed out under qualified freshmen engineering students, at least where I went to school.
I can’t imagine a physics course focused on inclusion and diversity.
In line with my last post above, here is the President of Wesleyan University arguing that “safe spaces” i.e. shielding yourself from unwelcome ideas that you believe might shatter your world-view and psyche, somehow “promotes intellectual diversity.”
See https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/09/07/wesleyan-university-president-insists-safe-spaces-promote-intellectual-diversity/
I’ve written here before about the idea that those on the Left/Communists whose recommendation of Communism as an alternative political system was rebuffed by the people here in the U.S.—those tough and realistic survivors of the Depression, a “tough crowd”—in the decades just before, during, and after WWII, set about changing not only the look— the front end—of their message, but also the composition of the “audience,” in order to make it more receptive to their repackaged message.
That is why the troops of the Gramscian long march singled out our Educational Establishment as one of their first targets, and their takeover and “fundamental transformation” of that Establishment and how and what it teaches and doesn’t has been an enormous success in changing the character of a good portion of today’s audience.
Thus, we now have many supposed “graduates” who can—in comparison to the graduates of several decades ago and earlier—barely read and write—who can, no doubt, recite the latest received Leftist propaganda—but who have little real and fact-based knowledge of actual American or world history, or training in and knowledge of rhetoric, political philosophy, geography, or languages ancient or modern and who, moreover, lack the necessary analytical tools, and knowledge of many other subjects that used to comprise a traditional “Liberal Education.”
In short, due to the deliberate choice of our Leftist education establishment, far too many of today’s graduates come out of our high schools and universities lacking the essential knowledge base and analytical skills—the tool kit—that our Founders thought was absolutely essential for their roles as citizens of these United States.
Thus, has a new, far less tough and realistic–see “snowflakes,” and far more under-informed and credulous “audience”—lacking in absolutely essential knowledge and analytical skills—been created.
It is the members of this “audience” which will vote, who will make the decisions which will direct this country forward into the future, and this is a highly dismal and disturbing prospect.
I’m praying that there are enough people left in that audience who have not been the victims of today’s educational establishment, who have “resisted” Leftist propaganda in their own ways, and who do have their heads screwed on straight, so that they will again reject Communism, however it may be disguised.
Date night with my wife last night, so late to this party. Once again from the vantage point of my recent retirement from a New England, private, college, I can firmly say that students from “under-resourced” schools is just a code for race based admissions. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Inclusivity” in STEM fields is moving forward, often with the help of well-intention, but naive STEM faculty who are being manipulated, and shamed, by the more radical humanities faculty. The college has had in place an NSF funded program just like the Stanford physics only for all the STEM, called “Science Leaders” which gives academic, and FINANCIAL support to minority STEM students who were recruited at high school. I always wondered at the effect on non-minority STEM students who are now labeled as “non-leaders of science”. And I never saw a “Science Leader” student from Appalachia.
All of this is virtue signaling which avoids the real solution to getting a student who is willing and able to do the work in a STEM major but comes in very unprepared due to their very inadequate high school. That solution is to finance an extra year of college prep so that student can enter the freshman physics course and have a chance at succeeding. That’s an effective, but very expensive solution for a college.
Concerning school funding, funding schools via local property taxes is just a bad idea. For one thing, it means that schools around military bases almost always are crap. The best government run school system is run by the DoD. You take the same students and put them in DoD schools overseas and they do well — better than any other public school students. Put them into failing schools stateside funded by a crappy mechanism and they don’t preform. DoD actually pays a top up subsidy to local school districts for every military dependent they take. It still makes very little difference.
One of the best educational reforms this country could undertake would be to expand the Department of Defense Education Activity to include all major stateside bases. In some cases, I think it is actually probably criminal how local school districts waste their military dependent subsidies.
The ratio of total expenditure on public primary and secondary schooling to gross domestic product has been as follows:
1929-30: 0.0238
1939-40: 0.0237
1949-50: 0.0203
1959-60: 0.0293
1969-70: 0.0388
1979-80: 0.0348
1989-90: 0.0365
1999-00: 0.0382
2009-10: 0.0413
2014-15: 0.0363
The share of the population which is school age (between the 5th and the 18th birthday) varies from one point in time to the next. The following is a synthetic ratio which seeks to measure social propensity to spend on educational services. It’s constructed as follows: [e / (1-e)] / [y / (1-y)], where ‘e’ is the ratio of educational expenditure to gross domestic product and ‘y’ is the share of the population between their 5th and 18th birthdays. The value of this ratio is as follows:
1929-30: 0.0704
1939-40: 0.0827
1949-50: 0.0797
1959-60: 0.0945
1969-70: 0.1158
1979-80: 0.1377
1989-90: 0.1683
1999-00: 0.1704
2009-10: 0.2020
2104-15: 0.1837
IOW, except for the early Obama years (when the numerator was enhanced by porkulus spending and the denominator diminished by a 5% implosion of domestic product consequent to the financial crisis), our propensity to puke money into primary and secondary schooling is as high as its ever been.
There might be spot problems in allocations between schools and between programs. The fault for that lies largely with your state education department and your local superintendent of schools (who produces a budget for the board of hacks to rubber stamp).
Sometimes it seems as if about 1/2 of the verbiage in our public discussion consists of op-ed pieces written by Democratic Party clients selling the idea that they should claim an ever increasing share of other people’s incomes.
@ physicsguy – I suspected that, but it is good to see you confirm it.
Following up on my previous comment, Algebra II is about the cutoff for the abstract thinking necessary for “real” college. Students who aren’t that good at math but have good verbal abstraction can fight their way through it. If they can’t, they should be looking at other ways of educating themselves – art school, music school, theater school, dance school, or other profession-specific training.
I don’t know how it was at other schools or what it’s like now, but at William and Mary in the 1970s, smart kids who weren’t good at math were relieved to make it through Calculus I and II.
Concerning school funding, funding schools via local property taxes is just a bad idea. For one thing, it means that schools around military bases almost always are crap.
??? Aside from the unsourced contentions in this statement about school quality and the relationship between expenditure and quality, it should be noted that only a single digit share of the population of the US live in districts with any base housing, much less a quantum sufficient to damage the tax base.
Whether you make use of property taxes, sales taxes, or income taxes to finance your schools, the funds to finance them are derived from households’ personal income streams. The mode of taxation has implication for the distribution of burdens among different population segments within the district, but that’s it.
A general solution to problems with local school finance is revenue sharing. In this case, the state legislature makes an appropriation for unrestricted grants to local school districts. The value of the appropriation is at the discretion of the legislature. The distribution between districts is according to a set of formulae which have as arguments the total population of a given school district, the youth population of a given school district, and the per capita personal income of a given school district as arguments. The state distributes funds with a bias toward impecunious school districts. The grant functions as a riser on which impecunious districts can stand. The rest of each school budget is financed out of local taxes. I’ve run some back-of-the-envelope simulations with New York data, and it appears you could correct for the effect of inter-local variation in per capita personal income with a state grant program accounting for about 20% of all school spending.
As for the tax base, a possible solution is as follows:
(1) Locate the function of assessment in county government or in multi-county authorities.
(2) Assess town properties every couple of years, and countryside properties every six years or so.
(3) Assess town properties according to estimated sale price. In regard to rural property, divvy up the property into segments and produce a resale value for each segment, with the assessment for the whole a synthetic value. The segments would be the residence (building footprints, driveways, leech fields, well-head, and connecting territory), woodlands, cultivable land, land suitable for pasture, and trash land. Woodlands would be given a conventional value of $0 and the value of farmland and pasture would be determined by local leaseholds.
(4) Assess all property except for public thoroughfares.
(5) Have each authority levy on all parties within its jurisdiction the same rate on assessed valuation, bar those parties holding property in slums (about which more anon).
(6) Require all parties satisfy their obligation to the municipal government, the county government, the school district, and miscellaneous special district authorities.
a. Public agencies thus make payments in lieu of taxes. The general services bureau of each government would keep an inventory of all properties the government holds and direct corporation counsel to challenge assessments in front of independent arbitrators. Governments which had mutual obligations (as municipalities and school districts commonly would) would net-out their obligations and transfer funds. State governments would concede to localities a qualified franchise to extract payments when the state owns property in their jurisdiction. The federal government already has a Payment-in-Lieu-of-Taxes program to compensate localities which have a great deal of federal land. You could elaborate on it.
b. Philanthropies could take out a line of credit to pay their local authorities and then apply for full re-imbursement from the state treasury. You could adjourn the finicky controversies over ‘taking property off the tax rolls’. They could contest their assessments as needed or the state attorney general could do so on their behalf.
c. Slum zones and transitional zones could be defined decennially with Census data, with property holders given a two-year grace period to adjust to any boundary changes. A municipality or school district encompassing slum property or transitional property would have to adopt a tripartite set of levy rates: x% on the normal property, 0.5 x on transitional property, and 0% on slum property. Such authorities would have a qualified franchise to levy a general sales tax to make up for the lost property tax revenue. (NB, municipalities and school districts with a large inventory of slum property under this system would already have abnormally large state subsidies).
Art Deco, your ratio doesn’t take into account the increasing share of non native English speakers.
As for your critique. I don’t care about citing statistics. Look them up. Not my job to spoon feed you. Fact is the Department of Defense Education Activity runs some of the best schools in the world. Fact is most military dependents stateside get zoned into disgraceful schools. Anyone who has ever served knows that.
As for your reply. The thing that hurts property values isn’t base housing. The thing that hurts property values is the base itself. Secondly, all your discussion seems premised on the idea of all taxes being derived from within a district…
If my complaint is that funding via property tax disadvantages poorer locales, how does restricting your analysis to the level of locales refute anything I’m saying. You’ve set it up wrong.
Art Deco, your ratio doesn’t take into account the increasing share of non native English speakers.
There was a contextually large immigrant population in 1929. That aside, as of now, about 13 million people over the age of 5 live in homes classified by the Census Bureau as ‘Limited English-Speaking Households’. About 2.6 million living in these homes are school age, of whom about 200,000 are classified as monolingual anglophones. That leaves you with a residue of 2.4 million youngsters, out of a youth population of > 54 million, or about 4.4% of the total. This is certainly a driver of expense, but I doubt it explains why that ratio has increased by a factor of 1.6x since 1970.
Art Deco, not trying to explain why costs are going up. Not an argument Ai have any interest in. More Non native English teachers is about falling standards. I don’t advocate more money. I just think it would be a good idea for primary schools in the US to have more TAs and less cutting edge curricula, consultants, and technology.
I think we’re just sort of talking about different aspects of the same issue. It’s interesting that cost has gone up, but I’m not trying to comment on that. I’m interested in student performance. Why do these kids in DoD score so high? Why when they are in local schools stateside do the scores differ so markedly? The kids aren’t the same, but they’re pretty much the same type of kids.
Fact is most military dependents stateside get zoned into disgraceful schools.
I doubt many military dependents attend slum schools.
As for the remainder, some schools are better than others, but systemic assessments published as long ago as 1966 have suggested that at expenditure levels which are modal in the United States, student performance is fairly insensitive to additional increments of expenditure. No clue what you mean by a ‘disgraceful’ school, but the smart money says problems not derived from guild ideology are a function of local culture. Jerry Jesness when he wrote for Education Week had some mordantly funny stories about his years teaching on Indian reservations and his years as a teacher in Texas.
More Non native English teachers is about falling standards.
Now it’s teachers you’re talking about? Hispanic, Oriental, and East Indian teachers are a great deal more common than they were 30 years ago (13% of the total v. < 4%). I suppose they could be lower quality than the previous generation of teachers, but they did have to pass certification examinations and what not. I can't imagine their language deficits are an appreciable problem given the crippling effects of guild ideology on service delivery, but who knows. I suppose someone might have studied the question, but teacher-training faculty are notorious for producing inept work.
Art, slum schools, no. Worst preforming school in district, yes. I’d be willing to bet it. Pick five bases. We can look up the test scores of the primary school they are zoned for and compare them to their districts. I’m pretty sure Nellis AFB is zoned for the worst preforming elementary schools. Same is true for Eglin. Not sure for the Naval Air Station Key West, but we all go to the same primary school down there.
I spent twenty plus years as a military brat. My mother spent fifteen years as a military brat. If you don’t want to think this is a thing, fine. But I definitely think it is. Do I have data? Not a lot, but the data does exist. If you really want to try and refute the claim, just pick five bases or come up with some criteria. Then I will look up the school’s ratings. If five isn’t enough, specify some other number. If haven’t had this fight in six years or so, but I have done this before. Doesn’t matter if the school district is Dem or GOP, north or south.
Art, I’m not talking about non native English teachers. If you have a non native English speaker in your class, that takes a lot of work. They take a lot of time. That means the teacher has less time for other students. It means the teacher is more likely to burn out if they are new. I do this for a living. I’ve taught in American international schools, British schools, Chinese schools. If a kid doesn’t speak the language, they take quite a bit more teacher time or they fail.
I’m not sure there is much point continuing this convo. I think we’re just approaching the topic from different perspectives, with different concerns.
As Neo ended it, ” the left has taken over virtually the entire educational world.”
Nothing more needs to be said.
This fact is simply one sign of America’s doom, the end of an era and our ongoing slump into the equivalent of every other grubby country in the world. The UN is filled with them. Britain is dying; formerly religious Ireland has amended its constitution to allow abortion on demand; Notre Dame is for tourists, not worship; western Europe is Eurabia. China is an unstoppable monster of a country.
America is no longer exceptional; it is ordinary, simply ordinary. We suffer this consequence of not protecting the precious flame of Liberty granted us by our brave and remarkable Founders. We failed our duty. We became cowards, nebbishes, dullards, suckers, fools.
We can do little more than to try to save our individual souls, individually.
I’d be willing to bet it. Pick five bases. We can look up the test scores of the primary school they are zoned for and compare them to their districts.
The test scores are an indication of student performance. They are aught but a very fuzzy indicator of value-added by school employees. The teachers may be satisfactory pedagogues, just faced with a difficult clientele. That’s one reason we need tracking, so that every school has accelerated and decelerated programs (even though the distribution of students in them may vary from district to district) and incorrigibles are escorted off the premises and turned over to the sheriff’s department. The purveyors of guild ideology have a horror of tracking.
If you really want to try and refute the claim, just pick five bases or come up with some criteria.
Your original complaint was that we needed to do away with local finance of primary and secondary education because of problems faced by military families. You know, at any one time, 99% of the population isn’t living in a military family and there are more surgical ways to address the problem you’re discussing. No need to use a cannot to kill a cat.
Art, I’m not talking about non native English teachers. If you have a non native English speaker in your class, that takes a lot of work.
I’ve already addressed your point. Or it was your point until it wasn’t and now it is again.
This fact is simply one sign of America’s doom, the end of an era and our ongoing slump into the equivalent of every other grubby country in the world.
You need to get a grip.
I’m certain that the vast majority of schools ARE under-resourced — in Republicans as teachers & professors.
The reasons the schools are failing so badly is because they’ve been discriminating, for decades, against hiring Republicans. And now there are very very few open Reps. in colleges or, and this is sad, in K-12.
The Reps should be talking about this more honestly. This is also what is leading to excess polarization, and demonization.
And to PCBS – a fine term I understood immediately and even think mor of us should use more often in other conversations. Especially when the Dems are talking BS, like “Trump is Hitler”, etc.
1 comment with edit; followed by two comments without.
More Non native English teachers is about falling standards.
When I was in 2nd or third grade, two boys from Argentina arrived. They spoke not a word of English. Their father had been a non-Peronist army officer and had to flee. The nuns teaching did not speak a word of Spanish. By the end of the school year, both boys were fluent in English without an accent.
Ron Unz got a ballot proposition passed about 20 years ago in CA banning ESL teaching. That law has been evaded ever since, leading to a generation of unskilled laborers.
Dex on September 7, 2019 at 6:59 pm said:
…
You shouldn’t just throw people at a problem. But this is one of those cases where the US probably isn’t throwing enough of the right kind of people at the problem.
* * *
I make that edit because it has been my observation (in my schools, my kids’, and my grandkids’) that the competence of school teachers at all levels, including college, has been declining, sometimes precipitately.
If you throw smart, properly educated, highly motivated people at the problem, then allow them to teach instead of jumping through administrative hoops, the students will be just fine.
And we are throwingway more than enough admin-type people at the problem.
Ain’t gonna change, Aesop.
In this life, sometimes, late in the 4th quarter, one has to admit to one’s self that defeat is at hand. Yes, we can narrow the score deficit, but it will still be a loss. In this case, a loss with the most profound consequences, many of them yet unforeseen.
Tom Grey:
Edit wants to keep us all guessing.
Now you see edit, now you don’t.
Cicero on September 8, 2019 at 4:01 pm said:
Ain’t gonna change, Aesop.
* * *
No argument, unless something changes more radically than I expect.
You notice I didn’t say we could (a) find enought of those teachers (I forgot to add the implicit “not infected with marxism and PCBS); and (b) allow them to teach.
Snow on Pine on September 8, 2019 at 7:06 am said:
In line with my last post above, here is the President of Wesleyan University arguing that “safe spaces” i.e. shielding yourself from unwelcome ideas that you believe might shatter your world-view and psyche, somehow “promotes intellectual diversity.”
* * *
I got an email recently from the Scouts BSA with a poll about my saisfaction with the program, because I’m a Cub Den leader (and have been off and on for 30 years). Most of the questions were mundane admin stuff (Do you have the materials you need? Is your council helping enough? etc.).
One of the questions asked whether our scouts were “diverse” enough.
I replied that they all had distinct personalities and liked to do different activities.
I don’t think that is what they were after.
Art Deco, I am allowed to have more than one point. I think, if you look at my first few posts, it is clear I am talking about a few different things. First, schools are over resourced. Second, schools don’t have the right sort of staff. Third, funding schools by local property tax is just asking for trouble. Fourth, we know how to run good schools — just do what the DoD education activity schools do.
The wording of your post sort insinuates that I’ve shifted goal posts. I haven’t. We’re just sort of been talking past each other. Maybe a typo or two on my part has contributed to that.
I absolutely agree with Aesop. You have a lot of admin that don’t add value. You also can have TAs and specialists that don’t add value. I don’t think they have to be particularly bright. Yeah, you want bright teachers. TAs should also be bright. But I don’t think they have to have a university degree.
My sister just started teaching. She’s working in a rough school. All the teachers in her grade, including her cohort leader, are either first year or second year teachers. That just strikes me as a huge red flag. Good state primary schools in England tend to try to take just one or two new teachers for an entire school.
As for non native English speakers. Little kids can learn at a fast clip, especially if they have individual support. It is still very hard. It doesn’t just happen by osmosis like some people seem to think. Maybe for a very small number. My wife just had to take on an American girl in her second grade Chinese classroom. It was very hard on pretty much everyone concerned. The girl only had English and Science classes in English. The rest of her lessons were in Chinese.
I think the reason people want ESL teaching banned is they worry about lower expectations. Having high expectations of a student and holding him accountable to those expectations is bigly important. Not allowing for ESL means the classroom teacher is stuck treating these students like any other instance of differentiated instruction — which isn’t easy and in a lot of classrooms lacking to begin with. Which reminds me.
By regulation my sister can only spend twenty minutes a day teaching material that is below grade level, which is insane. I don’t really understand how you can effectively differentiate if that’s the policy. It sort of makes it illegal to teach the low ability group effectively.
In closing, looking at how DoD schools preform and how bases stateside are zoned for schools, I think the system stateside is broken. Democrats like to scream about fighting racism. That’s just bullshit. Just look at how they zone the kids on base housing, who are predominately minorities. They almost always get zoned into one of the worst schools in the district. An easy fix is to just expand the DoD schools stateside. I don’t think local school districts should be allowed to take military dependent subsidies and deliver such appalling service.
Was at the Creighton University campus this PM. Students studying. No race and class stuff. Too much to learn!
The wording of your post sort insinuates that I’ve shifted goal posts. I haven’t.
I’m not insinuating. It’s right there in cold print. First you referred to students, then to teachers, then two students again (denying you said anything about teachers).
Third, funding schools by local property tax is just asking for trouble.
You’ve never delineated why you fancy this is so or what your alternative is. (Nor bothered to answer points made by others in this thread about school finance).
Art Deco, what I take issue with is your use of numbers that don’t really mean anything. Do your numbers account for increased pension costs? Inflation? I don’t think so. Do your numbers account for changing demographics? I doubt it. How much of that money goes to school security? You’ve no idea.
I don’t think I ever denied talking about teachers. I think you either have misread what I have written or a typo has led you astray. To clarify, I never intended to talk about the language abilities of teachers as a factor impacting standards or performance. If that is your interpretation of something I have said, or an understanding that arose because of a typo, then either you have misunderstood the point, or I owe you an apology.
As to local property taxes funding schools, it’s stupid. How can you ensure any chance at equality of opportunity if some students get stuck in poorly funded schools because of low property values? You can’t. No one else really funds schools that way.
I don’t offer a funding solution because it wasn’t my focus until you jumped in. You seem to care about it quite a bit. I don’t find it at all interesting. Is it a disgraceful way to fund education? Absolutely. Does it have an impact of results? Yes. But there are other factors that impact results more.
“One of the biggest determinants of all of academic achievement is the family and neighborhood atmosphere.”
That’s pretty much the major finding of the Coleman Report back in ’66. They went for desegregation instead which had the, possibly planned impact, of removing thousands of black teachers and administrators from their jobs and putting Black kids in the hands of White “educators”. And desegregation may have impacted the “under-resource” schools based directly on race (actually not that large) it didn’t alter “under-resource” by economic classification.
As to the Stanford Physics special classes, are they being offered for free or is this more debt for minority students? In any case, those topics are unlikely to improve the student’s understanding of Physics.
“Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital”
–Thomas Sowell
The new American scientist: “I has fizziks degree!”
They went for desegregation instead which had the, possibly planned impact, of removing thousands of black teachers and administrators from their jobs and putting Black kids in the hands of White “educators”.
Just where did you have systematic dismissals of black teachers and administrators?
Art Deco, what I take issue with is your use of numbers that don’t really mean anything.
No, they mean something. What they mean is inconvenient to you.
Do your numbers account for increased pension costs? Inflation? I don’t think so. Do your numbers account for changing demographics? I doubt it. How much of that money goes to school security? You’ve no idea.
None of that’s been under discussion. It’s also irrelevant to how financing is distributed between state revenue and local revenue and the utility incorporated into various schemes of distributing burdens between local residents.
I don’t think I ever denied talking about teachers. I think you either have misread what I have written or a typo has led you astray. To clarify, I never intended to talk about the language abilities of teachers as a factor impacting standards or performance. If that is your interpretation of something I have said, or an understanding that arose because of a typo, then either you have misunderstood the point, or I owe you an apology.
You said, “More Non native English teachers is about falling standards.” I’m not misunderstanding your words, you are.
As to local property taxes funding schools, it’s stupid. How can you ensure any chance at equality of opportunity if some students get stuck in poorly funded schools because of low property values? You can’t. No one else really funds schools that way.
Your question has been addressed multiple times in this thread from two different angles.
I don’t offer a funding solution because it wasn’t my focus until you jumped in.
For crying out loud, make up your mind.
When i retired from the Navy i thought i would go into teaching. So i discovered some ugly facts. You have to teach for social justice. If you resist you dont get the teaching credential. What is more, you have to believe in it. At least in Kali. And the wannabe gulag operators running the unions will figure out if you
.. Are just going through the motions. Sorry. My dog crashed my laptop. Literally. Romeo was cuddling with me on the sofa. Then he jumped off and his back leg caught
..tbe power cord. Until i finish shopping for a new computer all I have is my tablet.i really need a keyboard.
Re DoDDS schools: it seems to me that the primary reason that DoDDS schools are successful is that parents have to make sure that their children/teens behave. If the student does not behave, (drugs, fighting, etc.) the parent can be booted from the military. I can only imagine what impact this type of enforced behavior would have on dysfunctional schools here.
I think it is also important to note that DoDDs are economically heterogeneous: enrollment comes from all ranks – private to general- and also includes tuition paying wealthy/diplomatic families. No ghetto-ization, and the learning environment is completely and positively different from most of our public schools. I don’t know how this could be recreated outside of the military, however, except in private/charter/magnet schools, which have their own idiosyncrasies.
…thd power cord and it all crashed to the ground. That did the computer no good. While i am shopping i have to use my tablet.
Kate, you may be interested to know that the reason the armed forces service member was held to account was the armed forces had no jurisdiction over dependants. And if you were stationed over seas the locals would happily prosecute you if you committed a crime off base.
..tbe power cord. Until i finish shopping for a new computer all I have is my tablet.i really need a keyboard. No i am not angry. He didnt do it on purpose. And my Romeo is 14. He can pretty much do what he likes.
In caxe you dont believe me search on the terms city journal the ed schools greastest and worst humbug by Sol Stern, it is a crime what schools are doing to kids.
Kate, i didnt like it. I was once in on the prosecution of what once a 1st Class Petty Officer who had a wife who kept writing bad checks to the naval exchange. We reduced him in rank from first class to third class. We pracfically begged him to take that check account away from her. We thought he was a good guy.
Our bad.S
Steve57:
I suppose the dog ate your homework as well.
No. I did my homrwork. Ask Sister Clara Ann, the nun who nearly beat me to death if i got lazy.
There is a new kitten at my house. One day last week I was at my computer and she was sitting on my lap. I was half-aware that she was reaching under the keyboard shelf and messing with the cord. Suddenly I couldn’t type anymore, nor would the computer respond to keyboard commands of any kind. She had bitten the cord in two. I guess the insulation is pleasantly chewy.
Now I have a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Unfortunately i dont know if Romeo will last as long as Becky. She was my Springer Spaniel. She lived to 17. Romeo is 14.
I am sure i come across as a jerk. I would use a worse word.
While nonminority students are welcome to take the new classes, it’s clearly implied that these extra measures are meant for minorities by the university’s news release about making physics inclusive.
If these schools REALLY give a crap what they need to do is put this kind of remedial stuff down in the K-12 schooling zone, and have it be a leg up to get into their elite programs — do well in it, show promise, get a recommendation from one of the instructors… and you get a special uptick in the admissions effort. Get the students to prove that they are willing to put in the effort before college to get ahead.
There is already too much prejudices and pet theories amongst the physics professors. They think they are rational and objective merely because they have STEM backing them, heh. What human hubris once more.
The contradictions in geoscience and stellar science, are too numerous to count.
OBloodyHell on September 9, 2019 at 3:37 pm said:
…
If these schools REALLY give a crap what they need to do is put this kind of remedial stuff down in the K-12 schooling zone, and have it be a leg up to get into their elite programs — do well in it, show promise, get a recommendation from one of the instructors… and you get a special uptick in the admissions effort. Get the students to prove that they are willing to put in the effort before college to get ahead.
* * *
This is what should have been done 60 years ago or more, certainly before or concurrent with “affirmative action” or whatever label it wore at the beginning.
Don’t lower standards; lift people.
Plenty of black & hispanic kids could have done the work if they had received the challenge and support to do so. Private scholarships & schools from the people who were “helping them” by forcing colleges to take unprepared students for diversity reasons would have been much more appropriate and efficacious.
But that wouldn’t have increased the power of the bureaucrats, or votes for Democrats.
“I think the median school in the US is probably over resourced.”–Dex
I agree. If only all states could match how Utah schools are “resourced” then their students might have a chance of matching the performance of Utah’s. Of course, that means that how California, New York, and Washington, D.C. (to pick three convenient examples) schools are “resourced” would have to be slashed by 60 to 75 percent.
“DoD actually pays a top up subsidy to local school districts for every military dependent they take.”–Dex
What you dub a “top up subsidy”, Dex, is a federal payment in lieu of the taxes for funding local schools that the base would pay were it not a federal installation but privately owned. That isn’t what most people think of as a “subsidy”. Most people consider it the federal government’s fair share.
Probably preaching to the choir, and far too often but,
The Founders believed, and wrote, that America could only survive, be a success, if its citizens were an “educated, moral, and industrious people.”
How does one become educated, moral, and industrious?
Well, hopefully you learn from what your parents teach you, from their example, and the example of all the people around you; your larger family and community.
You learn from what you are taught in church.
You learn from what you are taught in school.
You learn from what you read, see, and what you experience.
And, in general, up until, say–the early 1960s–it used to be that the “Iron Triangle” of family, church, and school maintained, taught, and reinforced each others message, which was a fairly unified and consistent one.
But once alternative means of communication arrived on the scene—the movies, then radio, then TV, and, then, the Internet—the tight focus and message of the Iron Triangle was increasingly disrupted, interfered with, and increasingly contradicted by messages coming from these new sources of information and ideas.
As a result of circumstance, and the Gramscian “Long March” that once tight knit, very effective Iron Triangle has been disrupted, swept away, “transformed,” and none of the members of the old, traditional Iron Triangle are what they once were, nor are their messages.
To pick on education, looking back, when I was going through K-12 in the 1950s and 1960s, my teachers were almost uniformly competent, were apolitical, and focused solely on educating me, and although not explicit, part of that education was an ethical and moral one—Judeo-Christian values permeated things, and just “sunk in,” and part of the values that were taught were the “Protestant work ethic”—practical things you needed to do—you showed up on time, presented yourself well, tried to pay attention to what you were doing, you worked hard, put in an honest day’s work, and tried to do a good job.
In this process of education you were hopefully “socialized,” transformed from an undisciplined little savage into what they hoped would be a moral, productive, and patriotic member of society; a citizen able to get along with his fellow men and women, stay out of trouble, get and hold down a job, work hard, be responsible, and raise a family to keep this system running.
Sure it was “indoctrination,” but, from my perspective, it was the right indoctrination, one which strove to produce those “educated, moral, and industrious” citizens—citizens who loved our country—the citizens who our Founders said were absolutely necessary if our our country was to survive and thrive.
Of course, all that ethical and moral teaching–and the teaching of practical things that came along with it–that flowed from the Judeo-Christian value system, was pretty much banished as well when Religion was banished from our public schools.
In general, are today’s schools doing anywhere near as good a job of turning out “educated, moral, and industrious” citizens?
The evidence seen all around us seems to say, in far too many instances—No.
Yet, I see constant calls from “educators” for more and more money, more and fancier facilities, and more and higher pay for teachers.
Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.
“Yet, I see constant calls from “educators” for more and more money, more and fancier facilities, and more and higher pay for teachers.
Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.” – Snow
Your analysis is spot-on (and get off my lawn!!).
An analogy suggested by the above: educators are like people stoving holes in the bottom of a boat and then asking people to buy them more bailing cans.
AesopFan–Yeah, at my “advanced” age, I suppose that I am now that iconic, cranky old geezer who yells at the lousy little “punk” kids, “get off my lawn.” Not if I were in Chicago though, ’cause I don’t wanna get “capped.”
I know that the tradition of the older generation bemoaning the sins and fecklessness of the younger generations–and how they’re going to hell–dates in literature all the way back to the hieroglyphic writings the earliest Ancient Egyptians.
Hey, its “traditional.”
But, also, a serious analysis, with real consequences for the United States, for our future generations and, indeed–given our current influence and power–for the rest of the World.
AesopFan–Forgot to cue Topol to do his big “Tradition” number from “Fiddler on the Roof,” sorry.
Perhaps relevant here, “Prosperity breeds Idiots,”
See https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/09/prosperity-breeds-idiots
I agree. If only all states could match how Utah schools are “resourced” then their students might have a chance of matching the performance of Utah’s. Of course, that means that how California, New York, and Washington, D.C. (to pick three convenient examples) schools are “resourced” would have to be slashed by 60 to 75 percent.
Per the Digest of Education Statistics and the Census Bureau, expenditure per youth (‘youth’ meaning a person between their 5th and 18th birthday without regard to enrollment) was as follows during the 2014-15 academic year:
District of Columbia: $32004
Alaska: $22325
New York: $20050
Wyoming: $19468
Connecticut: $19360
New Jersey: $18901
Vermont: $18593
Massachusetts: $16062
Rhode Island: $15526
North Dakota: $14810
Illinois: $14281
Pennsylvania: $14227
New Hampshire: $14219
Maryland: $14217
Delaware: $13859
Maine: $13536
Minnesota: $13267
Nebraska: $12994
West Virginia: $12628
Iowa: $12353
Kansas: $12111
Ohio: $11859
Wisconsin: $11824
Washington: $11811
Virginia: $11590
Hawaii: $11565
California: $11386
Michigan: $11371
Texas: $11335
Louisiana: $11147
South Carolina: $11086
Montana: $11056
Oregon: $10888
Colorado: $10734
Arkansas: $10652
Missouri: $10537
New Mexico: $10507
Georgia: $10185
Kentucky: $10049
South Dakota: $9976
Indiana: $9850
Florida: $9450
Alabama: $9330
Oklahoma: $9248
Tennessee: $8801
Nevada: $8800
North Carolina: $8353
Mississippi: $8209
Arizona: $8181
Utah: $8040
Idaho: $7147
Puerto Rico: $5538
Ain’t that a kick in the head?
Art Deco—During my time living in the Washington D.C. metro area some time ago there were only a few exposes, in the Washington Post, and on local TV, of the notoriously bad D.C. schools and, as well, of the then President of the Washington, D.C. Teacher’s Union, and what these few stories reported was pretty uniformly bad.
Despite, as you’ve listed, the highest cost per student in the nation, many, perhaps a large percentage of the public schools in D.C.—whose students performed dismally—featured horrific conditions—dangerous schools with a lot of truancy and violence, deteriorating plants with failing heating systems, peeling paint, things falling from deteriorating ceilings, bathrooms the didn’t work, basic learning tools—textbooks, paper, chalk, and pencils—scarce, and stories about crooked contractors who had an in at city hall profiting off supplying things like substandard food to school cafeterias.
And, yet, they kept asking for more money to pour down the rat hole to “improve” things.
Meanwhile, at about this same time, there were news reports about the head of the Washington, D.C. Teacher’s Union who, with the help of a couple of co-conspirators, had managed to embezzle somewhere around $5 million in union dues, so that she and they could live, very, very large–expensive houses, cars, jewelry, clothes, pricey food and drink, fancy restaurants, cosmetic surgery, vacations, artwork, and, most bizarrely, to pay for this Teacher’s union President’s large collection of, no doubt expensive, but outlandish and unnatural looking wigs.