[ale] Palladium/MS: ideas for retaliation - WAY, WAY, WAY OT now!!!

[Byron A Jeff]

I'm making the mistake of wandering into this very dangerous territory...

> 
> > From: James P. Kinney III [mailto:jkinney at localnetsolutions.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 9:56 PM
> >
> > [ Initial discussion deleted for brevity...]

> > The kid who is _not_ educated today has a great chance
> > of becoming the asshole who burglarizes your home, or
> > shoots you for the $50 you just pulled from the ATM.
> 
> Lets see - I wonder where these 'assholes' are coming from now?  You guessed
> it - *PUBLIC SCHOOLS*.

Actually that's not entirely true. A closer assertion would be public school
dropouts.

> 
> > I would gladly pay double my tax rate on my home to better
> > fund the education system of Dekalb  county. I absolutely
> > seethe at the discussions from people who want to cut
> > taxes and in the next breath bitch and moan about "how
> > hard it is to get good help these days".
> 
> Sorry, Jim, you are making the same mistake many other make.  Think about it.
> If throwing money or raising taxes were the answer to the problem, everyone
> would be Einsteins.  The simple fact is, the more government controls our
> schools, the *worse* they have gotten.  And the more taxes are raised and
> spent on schools, the *worse* they have gotten.  The *answer*, my friend, is
> to go back to what works.  *Private*, *community* schools.

In short taking an already skewed system and skew it even further.

I'll take my crack at solving the problems of public schools at the end. I
want to tackle the issues presented here now.

> 
> Home-schooled children *consistently* score higher on all of the government
> tests, and consistently win national spelling bees, etc.  And I guarantee you,
> a child who is home-schooled costs the mother/father paying for it *much* less
> than they would if they had gone to the public fool system.

Home schoolers are so skewed that they shouldn't even be in the discussion.
For starters:

* Homeschoolers have parents that have the ability to teach their kids.
* Homeschoolers have parents who have the means so that at least one parent
  can stay home to teach the kids.
* Homeshoolers have unheard of teacher/pupil ratios.
* Homeschoolers' teachers (their parents) have motivational techniques that 
  are unavilable to regular teachers.
* Homeschoolers' teachers have a vested interest in their students.
* Homeschoolers can have skewed focus that ordinary classes cannot afford.
  i.e. "We're going to spend the next 6 months learning how to spell every
  word in the dictionary so you can win the National Spelling Bee."

I'd be sorely disappointed with homeschoolers if they didn't have far superior
academic performance than other kids.


> 
> > I would gladly suffer a tripling of my property taxes
> > if it was used to hire people who had a college degree
> > in something other than education to replace those who
> > took the easy route and majored in education.
> 
> Since I am in complete agreement with the supreme Court of the United States,
> and believe that the taking from one to give to another is nonetheless
> *theft*, regardless if it is called 'taxation', I cannot disagree with this
> more.

The solution to the taxation issue is paradoxical and would require the
Wisdom of Solomon to accomplish. In short there's no fair way to do it, and
in fact for it to be fair, it must be unfair (Now how's that for DoubleSpeak!)

But I wouldn't want to have my taxes raised unless I got some guarantees that
there was going to be significant improvment. That's doubtful on a good day.

> 
> The only people who should have to pay for schools/teachers should be the
> people who use them.  Anything else is communistic in nature (one of the ten
> planks of communism is *mandatory*, free, public education (controlled by the
> government) for all children.  Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like what we have
> now, with the exception that we still have private schools and are still
> 'allowed' to home-school our children, as if the government had the powe to
> *deny* this Right.

I'm not even sure where to start here. The parable "Stone Soup" comes to mind.
It's possible to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts
if everyone contributes something to the mix.

The bottom line is that everyone has to contribute to the infrastructure in 
order to create a society we can all live in. And sometimes that means paying
for facilities that you don't get direct 'quid pro quo' use of.


> 
> > As I have had the distinct pleasure of teaching education
> > majors who were working on a masters degree, I know now
> > the decrepit state of affairs of the education system in
> > this country.
> 
> I agree - but it is *because* of government controls and the 'publicly funded'
> nature of them now.

Not exactly. It's really the bureaucratic infrastructure that is inevitably
created when a publicly funded monopoly comes into being. The bureaucracy
creates an environment that assures its self sustenance, its primary mission
be damned.

> 
> > I would vigorously support a $1-$5 per ticket additional
> > surcharge on sporting events tickets and movie tickets
> > if the money was sent directly to the ticket purchasers
> > school district of choice. Far too many kids (and parents)
> > count on that athletic program or that beauty contest for
> > their future.
> 
> I have no problem with this, because I can avoid the tax by doing something
> more productive with my time.

Funding is a completely separate issue. I disagree with the particular one
above because of both its complexity, and its skewing to folks who enjoy
a particular activity.

> 
> > In this country, we pay the lowest percentage of our per
> > capita income to taxes than any other industrialized country.
> 
> So?? Just because other peopl live as slaves in their countries, are you
> saying that we should too??

For the most part I agree that saying that we give less, so we can give more
is specious.

> 
> > We have the worst rated K-12 school system of any industrialized
> > country.
> 
> Yes - and we had the *best* schools before the federal government took them
> over.  They started going downhill when they became publicly funded, but
> really started free-falling in 1962(?) when the feds took them over.
> 
> <snip> lots of examples of why we should return to privately funded and
> controlled (by the people actually using them) schools.

All this would do it take the vast classism gulf that already exists and make
it as wide as the ocean. Anyone born of well off, educated parents will become
educated and well off. Anyone who's not is SOL because poor uneducated parents
do not have the wherewithal to educate their children into the upper class.

It'll be the caste/feudal system at its absolute worst.

Public funding isn't the problem. It's a part of the solution. It's not the
funds, but its application that needs to be modified. School systems need to
operate on exactly the same system we want to see out of its students: a
meritocracy.

If I were the US Education Czar this is how I'd set it up:

1) I would go with Charles' community based schools with a couple of 
   modifications. First and foremost they would be publicly funded. Secondly
   they would all have to accept at least 75 percent random populations and
   continue to accept high levels of random populations, cut across gender,
   race, and economic lines in order to continue to receive public funding.

2) Allow schools to start in the formative pre-K stages. The Dept of education
   recognizes this to some degree with their Head Start programs. But it needs
   to be extended down to age 18 months to 2 years. This is when kids language
   and cognitive engines really turn on full steam.

3) Rigorously test the students at each and every grade level starting with 
   pre-K (say age 3). Have forced retention of any child from kindergarten
   on if they cannot demonstrate basic skills at that grade level. This will
   kill the primary destructor of public school academics: social promotion.
   Be sure to inform parents that there is no appeal process: the child fails
   the test, the child stays in that grade another year. End of discussion.

4) And the final critical component: churn. Existing school systems become
   institutions that stagnate. For a true meritocracy the system must implement
   Darwinism at its finest. The criteria for both schools and individual
   teachers is simple: get your random student population (outlined in point 1
   above) to perform at above average levels. Schools and teachers that 
   accomplish this continue to live another school year. Schools and teachers
   that do not are summarily dismissed, their certifications revolked. Divy
   out the closed schools, certified teachers, and students to the winning
   systems. The competition and lack of monopoly will create the strongest
   system for teaching random populations of students, which in the end is
   the real objective.

5) Obviously this "school eats school" concept will create an excellent 800 
   pound gorilla of a system. But complacency cannot be allowed. To keep churn
   ongoing, the maximum capacity of the best system needs to be capped and
   some segment of the total student population participate in developmental
   school systems that compete with each other and compete with the winner.
   In an ideal situation there would be an oligopoly of systems each striving
   to get better and to take away student share from its competetors.

Now some ancillary topics:

1) Private schools: no problem. There are those who will not want to play and
that's their right. However they get no public funding of any sort. No
equalization, no subsidized lunch. Nothing. And I'm sure that there will be
some pockets of schools that will be grateful not to have to play.

2) Funding. It'll need more. To get real players for the tournament there's
going to have to be some profit at the end. Also to keep things fair private
money has to be kept out of the system. It's easy to win when you're playing
from a private stash. Only non monetary parental help allowed.

3) Poor performing students. Now this is the sticky one. The testing procedure
has to try to determine those who can't and those who won't perform. Many of
the students who perform poorly now as simply not motivated to try. This is
another Solomonlike problem to tackle. The only way to motivate them is to
restrict their rights, which isn't right to do.

BAJ

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