Couple of things
- I don't know Mac Rawson, and I'm sure he's a good guy who I may very well vote for if he does run for office, but is it just me or does anyone else get the feeling the interview went something like this:
Blake Aued: Who are some possible candidates to take on Sen. Hudgens? We've heard Jim Ponsoldt and John Scoggins. Have you heard those names?
Mac Rawson: I'm thinking of running.
Blake Aued: Oh ...
Mac Rawson: Yeah, I'm running. Put that in there. That I may run. Or am running.
Blake Aued: Anyone else?
Mac Rawson: I'm the frontrunner.
Now, I want to beat Ralph Hudgens as much as the next Athens-Clarke County Democrat, but is advertising how bad we want to beat him and practically begging for an opponent to show up the best campaign strategy? When the Republican spokesperson only has to say 'The Democrats are mad about everything ... that's kind of their permanent state' and come out looking better, something's gone wrong in our approach to this.
- Perhaps if the state and federal levels actually put up the appropriate supplementary funding for education, we wouldn't be talking about property taxes. This, as we all know, is how today's GOP wins elections - promise the moon and cut your taxes ... and, as we all know, it ain't working out too well either.
- It finalized the destruction of my bracket, but George Mason reaching the Final Four is pretty cool. Even more amazing is the fact the Patriots didn't sub anyone from the 10 minute mark of the second half. Of course, this did leave us with the weakest Final Four in recent memory (two SEC teams and a squad from the Colonial Athletic Association?).
- 'Stop embarassing the nursing profession?' Next, is Mr. Nicolaus going to accuse of her siding with the terrorists?
- I'll be honest - I've got no idea what the ABH editorial is about, but I'm intrigued by the headline.
- Paul is all over Sunday's Living section, and the ole musee gets some nice recognition.
- Be sure to go to Cedar Shoals at 7 p.m. tonight for a meeting of Partners for a Prosperous Athens. The group's leaders penned a nice forum on Sunday, and I hope you can make it. I'm gonna try.
Blake Aued: Who are some possible candidates to take on Sen. Hudgens? We've heard Jim Ponsoldt and John Scoggins. Have you heard those names?
Mac Rawson: I'm thinking of running.
Blake Aued: Oh ...
Mac Rawson: Yeah, I'm running. Put that in there. That I may run. Or am running.
Blake Aued: Anyone else?
Mac Rawson: I'm the frontrunner.
Now, I want to beat Ralph Hudgens as much as the next Athens-Clarke County Democrat, but is advertising how bad we want to beat him and practically begging for an opponent to show up the best campaign strategy? When the Republican spokesperson only has to say 'The Democrats are mad about everything ... that's kind of their permanent state' and come out looking better, something's gone wrong in our approach to this.
- Perhaps if the state and federal levels actually put up the appropriate supplementary funding for education, we wouldn't be talking about property taxes. This, as we all know, is how today's GOP wins elections - promise the moon and cut your taxes ... and, as we all know, it ain't working out too well either.
- It finalized the destruction of my bracket, but George Mason reaching the Final Four is pretty cool. Even more amazing is the fact the Patriots didn't sub anyone from the 10 minute mark of the second half. Of course, this did leave us with the weakest Final Four in recent memory (two SEC teams and a squad from the Colonial Athletic Association?).
- 'Stop embarassing the nursing profession?' Next, is Mr. Nicolaus going to accuse of her siding with the terrorists?
- I'll be honest - I've got no idea what the ABH editorial is about, but I'm intrigued by the headline.
- Paul is all over Sunday's Living section, and the ole musee gets some nice recognition.
- Be sure to go to Cedar Shoals at 7 p.m. tonight for a meeting of Partners for a Prosperous Athens. The group's leaders penned a nice forum on Sunday, and I hope you can make it. I'm gonna try.
posted by Jmac at 6:46 AM
8 Comments:
"Perhaps if the state and federal levels actually put up the appropriate supplementary funding for education, we wouldn't be talking about property taxes. This, as we all know, is how today's GOP wins elections - promise the moon and cut your taxes ... and, as we all know, it ain't working out too well either."
Schools do not need lots of money to educate children well. We have to get this through our heads. We can cut property taxes, and educate better than we currently are. Money is not the problem.
Of course, since we aren't serious about actually educating our children (rhetorical overkill), none of the stupid little changes we make are really going to help. Which means that things will continue to get worse, property taxes or no. But if we cut property taxes and things get worse, then big government liberals will blame the problem on the tax cut. "We need to fund our schools properly!" they'll say. And the whole cycle will begin again.
hmmm...if you've got some idea about how to attract and retain teachers without paying them then you should be POTUS!
smaller class sizes are a very good step but that's going to mean that we have to commit the money (or whatever alternative you have to paying salaries and benefits) to having more classrooms and more teachers.
it is (and has been for a while) absolutely true that every time the fed and state governments cut taxes and crow about it, local governments get their asses kicked for trying to make up for the lost revenues.
to quote an old bumper sticker:
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
Fact is, we're going to pay for education one way or another - either by funding it and raising up better citizens or failing to fund it and shifting the costs to jails, police, indigent health care, lost economic opportunities due to lack of competitiveness, etc. If I have to give a dollar to something, I'd rather give it to raising people up to contribute their own dollar than to warehousing them.
Tell me where I'm wrong, please.
I am a hard-core libertarian on education, and believe that school and state should be entirely separate. Just to lay my cards on the table.
This doesn't mean I don't think we can have a helpful conversation about it, though. But you should know that I am skeptical of the entire system of government-run education, no matter how "well" it is funded. For the sake of compromise and working together, though, I am more than happy to talk about school choice, etc. (as opposed to just screaming "No public schools!" over and over again), and to talk in the abstract about what can make our schools better (even if they stay government-run).
"Fact is, we're going to pay for education one way or another - either by funding it and raising up better citizens or failing to fund it and shifting the costs to jails, police, indigent health care, lost economic opportunities due to lack of competitiveness, etc. If I have to give a dollar to something, I'd rather give it to raising people up to contribute their own dollar than to warehousing them."
Anonymous (??), we both agree that there is a problem here. We disagree on the solution. You (anonymous) think we need more money, more teachers, more more more. I think we need to simply do it better than we have been doing it, and this does not necessarily have anything to do with money at all.
Competition in general will help. De-regulation of mandated school curricula will help. De-certification of teachers will help. Forget whether they have goen through some (state-approved) education program, and whether they have passed some (state-run) test. Let people get to teaching. If they're good, give them more money. If they suck, give them less money (or fire them). You say you want to draw good teachers into the schools, but what we're doing right now is offering unionized, guaranteed pay scales to everyone. It's easy money, no matter what results you produce. (I don't mean that teachers don't work hard, at least at first; just that their salaries are not particularly tied to genuine results.)
The idea that we can only have good government schools if we pay (all) the teachers REALLY well (teachers are already paid pretty darn well, per national averages, especially when one considers they don't work in the summers!) is simply false. Teachers get paid a lot less at many private schools, and yet the kids outperform their gov't-educated peers. Most private schools are NOT silver spoon reservoirs with "Excelsior" in the name. Most are parochial Catholic schools, fairly small church-run evangelical schools, etc. The school I taught at in Lexington, KY paid teachers 80% of whatever the local public school teachers got. (I started at 20k in the fall of 2000). Tuition was just over 4k a year (as opposed to the 9k+/yr that KY government pays per student). The kids did much better. (Of course, this is often attributed to the fact that we only pick bright kids to begin with, while the public schools have to take everybody, but this really isn't so.)
Smaller class sizes are, in many cases, over-rated. (I dont' know how committed you are to this being a good step to take, so I'll spare you any dense argumentation. For now. :-) )
I agree with your main sentiment, anon. I'd rather my dollars go to actually helping kids learn how to make real contributions to society, too. So why aren't we doing that now? Oh right, the "funding" again. We still aren't giving enough. So how much will be enough? 20k/kid? 30k/kid? Can you ballpark this up front, or is it just one of those things where we have to keep pumping it in, and eventually the machine will spit out well-educated kids who know how to think?
Competition in general will help. De-regulation of mandated school curricula will help. De-certification of teachers will help. Forget whether they have goen through some (state-approved) education program, and whether they have passed some (state-run) test. Let people get to teaching. If they're good, give them more money. If they suck, give them less money (or fire them).
The thing is, much of this has been implemented or proposed, but it doesn't necessarily work - particularly with regard to the myth of competition boosting student achievement. One of the caveats of No Child Left Behind is giving school districts the ability to bring in private enterprises, through a bid process, to come manage failing schools. Augusta, for example, took advantage of this solution (I want to say with Glenn Hills, but can't be sure), and the scores and performances actually decreased (as well as administrative management).
Attempting to prescribe a free-market economic solution to educating children isn't feasible for a wide variety of reasons ranging from the economic disadvantages of the poor to the isolation and poverty in rural areas and inner-city communities.
Plus I don't see how de-regulating school curriculum will help, aside from potentially lowering expectations for our students. If schools start to offer less-than-advanced versions of math or science to their student populations, then we're going to have generations which 'excel' at weaker academics, putting us even further behind in the education race.
And, again, to some extent deregulation is underway. Several schools - both public and private - offer differing course selections (the Classic City Learning Center is one example of this) which are targeted to the student populations they serve (in the case of the CCLC, it's students who are at-risk for dropping out or require more flexibility in their class schedules.
Now while I do agree with you that school districts need more flexibility in handling teachers who don't perform well - and by that I mean are honestly 'bad' teachers based on a variety of factors not solely limited to class performance - it's important to understand the numerous factors which go into what makes a 'good' teacher which you appear to be discounting.
Rather than go after teachers, I suggest we do a better job identifying students who have learning disabilities or behavior disorders or are merely 'bad apples' and come up with the appropriate procedures to deal with them rather than say 'Teacher X should get a pay cut because only 57 percent passed.' Did 43 percent fail because 18 percent were disruptive students? Did they fail because half of that number had severe to moderate learning disorders? There are way too many caveats that come with properly educating children than merely laying all of the blame at the feet of the teachers.
I'll chime in on what jmac is saying: Private schools can attract good teachers at lower pay AND have better "outcomes" because they get to CONTROL the "raw materials".
That's it in a nutshell. When yo get to cherry-pick who can be in your classes, it's always going to be a better situation.
Now, fast-forward this to xon's idea of having an all-private school education system without the "burden" of government oversight and we have the libretarian nirvana of "good kids go to school; bad kids go to jail" (of course, we must then figure out how we'll privatize all the jails because we don't want our kids going to government-run jails, either).
JMac,
Far be it from me to lay "all" of the blame on teachers. Parents, and yes students, get blame, too. I'm not the one who favors blanket solutions and stanardizations, remember? I'm the libertarian on this issue! :-)
When I mentioned de-regulating curricula, I wasn't referring to the overall standards of what subjects/classes are actually taught, but to the materials that are used for teaching it. The books (usually what I think of when I think of "curriculum," though I don't do dictionaries...), the teaching methods, the kinds of tests, etc. I'm not saying we should stop teaching Algebra because the kids aren't doing well in Algebra. I'm saying we should open up the ways we teach Algebra to those who know how to do it.
The fact that "some company" took over "some school" somewhere (Glen Hills in Augusta, or wherever) and didn't make things better is no problem at all for the free market view. The free market doesn't guarantee that every restaurant will succeed; in fact just the opposite. Some people "know" they have a great idea for a restaraunt. They go to the bank and get a huge small business loan, they advertise, they pay competitive salaries to the help right off the bat, because they just know it's going to work. And then it doesn't work. Oh well. Someone else comes along with a better idea.
If the "private company" (I don't know the details) that is running Glenn Hills (or wherever) is doing a crappy job, then they should lose their funding/contract. And somebody else should come in who can do a better job. This is my whole point!
Saying we don't want to privatize schools because of all the poor kids who won't get a good education is like saying that we don't want to let the D.A. go after the mafia becuase there will be corruption in the D.A.'s office. Hello, we're talking about the mafia! There's corruption NOW. Poor kids are getting screwed now; thousands are not being educated (in any honest sense of the term) now. So why can't we try something different? Because of all the poor kids who will supposedly get screwed?
I agree that it is somewhat complicated what makes a 'good' teacher. But, basically, it can be based on results. But by 'results' I don't just mean some standardized test scores, so much as a whole other variety of qualities which education used to be about but which kids today simply do not learn.
I'm not being quite as simplistic as you folks might think. But this is a blog commenting system, so thre's only so much I can say with each blow-by-blow.
Gotta go. More later?
"Saying we don't want to privatize schools because of all the poor kids who won't get a good education is like saying..."
I don't know about the "poor kids" so much but those with behavioral problems and lack of parental involvement and support would not get any education at all if the private sector took over schools. Business is business - it is cheaper to deliver easy services and expensive to deliver harder services and businesses must charge accordingly or there's no reason to be in business. Since dealing with "problem" children is harder and more costly but those children's families will almost never be able to pay the extra for those services, well, there won't be anybody who is willing to go into that business. Would you? Hell, no!
A school for rich kids who are about 90% well-behaved will be vastly more profitable. And, don't even think that you'll be able to stay in business if you try to mix those populations - no chance!
So, there's the rub. Everytime some brainiac tries to tell us all how schools should be operated like businesses, all they do is convince us that they know nothing whatsoever about either business or education.
"Business is business - it is cheaper to deliver easy services and expensive to deliver harder services and businesses must charge accordingly or there's no reason to be in business. Since dealing with "problem" children is harder and more costly but those children's families will almost never be able to pay the extra for those services, well, there won't be anybody who is willing to go into that business. Would you? Hell, no!"
This isn't quite right. Part of the "entrepeneurial spirit" is finding ways to deliver products and services to people at far less cost than was thought possible before. When Ford first started making cars, everyone thought it would just be a luxury for the rich. And at first it was.
Of course, what we do right now is "give" everyone a "quality" education for "free", so long as we are willing to fudge big-time on the meanings of all three of those words in quotes. If it's expensive for businesses to provide schoolin' for 'problem' children, then it's expensive for government to do so. Why is it a good idea for the gov't, then? Right, because the gov't is using other people's money, not it's own. So compassionate.
In all seriousness, your argument (anon) makes it sound like the only private schools ever created are for "rich kids" who are 90% well-behaved. But, again, this is the 'Excelsior' myth, and it is indeed a myth. Vast numbers of students at parochial and evangelical-run private schools, for instance, are not from wealthy families. And there are behavior problems there, too.
Private investors will often invest in riskier projects, more expensive projects, etc., because they think there is a genuine need there and they think they can (eventually) see their risk rewarded with profits. The idea that businesses only play it safe is absurd.
In all honesty, though, I'll bet we can all agree on something here. If parents don't give a rip about their kids being properly educated, then there's not a whole lot that any school, public or private, can do. Right now, we've got a lot of kids in this country whose parents, sadly, don't care much about education. It's probably true that if all schools were privatized then these kids wouldn't go to school at all (their parents certainly don't care enough about it to be willing to pay money out of pocket). But, of course, this wouldn't really be so different than what is already happening. Thugs at "free" school, or thugs at home.
Post a Comment
<< Home