the new mathFollow

/golfclap

I think Nobby is broken.

Let me get this straight.

People complain that the Education system isnt teaching the children what it needs to be teaching them. In an effort to fix this the Government says ok Schools since you wont do it on your own we are going to set standerds and entice you to meet these standards by withholding monies from you if you dont meet them. In order to make sure you are meeting the standards we will have the children take a standardized test.

So instead of teaching the children what they need to know to pass these tests and get the knowledge that they need the school system is duping the system by teaching the children how to short cut to the right answer.

And this is the Fed's fault and not the School System's fault? Interesting logic.

I agree with your point that the schools shouldnt be teaching the children this way but let's place the blame where it belongs.

Rounding and estimating is tough enough for a third grader to learn. For example 2.1x3.2 is esier for a third grader to solve rounded to 2x3. Rounding is used everyday in highschool. Right now I have 3 classes that require some sort of rounding and estimating. They are Pre Cal, AP Chemistry, and Physics. With out being able to round the number pie, it would be impossible to put it on a piece of paper. Besides pie there are many other numbers that are non-ending and non-repeating. By the time your 3rd graders get to higher levels in math they will be happy that they can round and estimate.

I dissagree with having only private schools. This would cause problems. They would be much more expensive and they would compete for the students. There would some students who would only go to a certain school to play sports. Or private schools would give out free rides for those who are going to play sports, which is illegal. A school did that in my area and for 4 years they are disqualified for all championship titles.

Why would they be more expensive? You are aware that private schools typically outperform public schools by significant amounts, and do so for a fraction of the cost, right? Even if we assume that cost savings is due to being able to select which students they take, and in a fully privatized system we'd have to account for managing "problem students", I simply don't see a valid argument to suggest that it would cost us more per student under a privatized system then we spend today on our public schools.

I'd love to hear some kind of support for that statement because it flies in the face of every statistic I've seen or heard about. There's a reason government contracts work out to private enterprise. It's because when properly incented, private enterprise can consistently put out a better product at a lower price then a purely government process can.




Which would be a problem if an only if the parents did not have a choice as to which school their children could attend and/or the government was directly responsible for the quality of the education being recieved.

I think you're not getting the scope of the change I'm advocating. I'm saying that the government should simply provide funds for education via vouchers, but not be involved in any way in determining what students learn. If the parents of a child want to send that child to a "sports focused" school, that's their choice. With the voucher comes a disclaimer that it's 100% their fault if they choose their school poorly. The government holds no responsibilty for the quality of the education the parents choose for their child.

By the same token, if parents want to send their kid to an art school, they can. If they want to send their kid to a science school. They can. The parents get to decide what sort of education their child will recieve. I'm betting most will want a "standard" education, so most schools will try to meet that. The point is that when you marry money/demand and competition, private industry will rise to fill the demand. What parents are demanding is a good education for their children. Right now, most are pretty much stuck with the public school nearest them. Period. They can ask for changes. They can demand changes. But odds are, they aren't going to get it because they aren't the ones holding the purse strings. The federal government is.

Privatize the end of the process, and the schools will have a vested interest in satisfying the demands of parents. If the parents don't like something, the school will change it. You've got the best of both worlds. Education that everyone can afford, and the power of the funding in the hands of those most directly invested, involved, and knowledable about the specific needs/desires of each student.

Yeah. Some people will choose poorly. But at least those parents who *don't* choose poorly are allowed to make a good choice for their children. Right now, they are forced to accept the "lowest common denominator" solution that government hands them. You may make a poor choice as a parent, but at least it's *your* choice and your mistake to make and your child that's affected. As opposed to a poor choice made by politicians that affects the same children and from which there is no escape. That's our current system, and it's incredibly bad.


It's not a perfect solution, I'll admit. There's certainly a number of issues that would have to be ironed out. However, I think the first thing we really need to move away from is the idea that the government should be determining by fiat from on high the exact curriculum that students should be learning. Government standards are wrong as often as they are right, and ultimately (as is pointed out in this thread) often result in "teaching to the test", which doesn't serve any purpose. We've institutionalized the standardization to a point where it's totally removed from the original purpose of education: To educate.

Edited, Thu Feb 2 20:32:41 2006 by gbaji

You need to study some Ancient Egyptian mathamatics.

You'd dig it the most

Edited, Thu Feb 2 20:37:59 2006 by Kelvyquayo

Not all private business are publicly traded. Most are not and do not have to report earnings to wall street or anyone else (EDIT: ok, they still have to report to the IRS). Publicly traded companies are a lot different than your average, every-day business, they are just the ones you hear about the most.

Edited, Thu Feb 2 20:50:19 2006 by klyia

Teaching them to estimate is a big skill to have for problem solving.

I solve basic math problems in my head, really quick, I estimate.


That's not to say, however, that I'm all over the results learning that NCLB dictates.

See, I really like the idea of a private school system except theres (imo) an even better middle ground:

Charter schools are privately owned schools which normally have some sort of open enrollment, are (depending on state laws) publicly funded and are required to meet the state and federal standards but have free reign within and above those perimeters and also have a LOT more leeway with the way a class is defined. A rodeo class might fill the slot for PE and a "Japanese Cultures" class might cover your foreign language. Some could even go as far as to incorporate math into a "Applied math: through art" for an art school and still get all the required math for a standard geometry (even trig / calc) taught while allowing the children to focus on their main area of study.

The thing that makes these better is that they put out a better "product" just like the private schools but are still required to meet at least a certain base curriculum so that you don't miss key classes.

Some of the groups out there include:

http://www.charterschoolsusa.com/
http://www.leonagroup.com/
http://www.academiesofexcellence.net/
And many more all over the country.

Edit: btw AngstyCoder - that's how I've been doing math since I was taught what it was. It just goes some much faster in my head. Funny though, because I do it in parts like that I had a real hard time (and actually don't remember anymore) learning that whole longform "carry the one" BS. Instead, even with decimal places you can just break it up. In my Chem classes in high school the teacher would use a calculator but using my head I could normally find it quicker and go out further XD.

Edited, Thu Feb 2 21:39:23 2006 by Pandorra

Yeah. Shadow's specific issue is kinda silly as well (shocker! I know...). There's absolutely nothing wrong with teaching kids how to estimate math results. And, as several people have pointed out, it's actually a pretty valuable skill. It's certainly useful for "eyeballing" a math result in your head, which will increase the odds of catching the most common math mistakes (things like missing a decimal point for example).


However, the broader issue he brought up is valid. There is a tendancy today to "teach to the test" in our public schools. My best friend is a public high school teacher and his take on it is that this is largely due to the absolutely *ridiculous* amount of standards and tests that kids have to go through in public schools to verify that the students are being taught the correct curriculum.

You can blame Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program (which is apparently what Shadow's trying to do), but that's just one more straw showing us the inherent problems with our entire approach to public education. Ultimately, the needs for standardization testing is eventually required whenever you create curriculum requirements. Doubly so when it's public funds involved. While you *can* blame the guy at the end of the line who imposed the most recent rounds of standards testing, that's an incredibly simplistic (and in my view, wrong) way of looking at the problem.


Ultimately, the problem lies in the very nature of government funding for programs. Government, unlike private industry, has no "bottom line". Thus, there is no natural check within the system to prevent waste spending. The only way to ensure that money is being spent properly is via regulation of the program itself. In the case of education, that means standards testing. If we spend X amount of money for a curriculum program, at some point we have to verify that the money we spent is actually resulting in the kids learning what we spent the money for them to learn. This "test the results" process seems very logical, and is better then not testing at all in this case, but in the long run, it's far from the ideal way to do this. And the issue of teaching to the test is only one of the problems that arises.


IMO, the best way to ensure that all children have access to education *and* do so in the most inexpensive and efficient manner possible is to leverage the power of privatization. If a school has a real "bottom line" to worry about, they'll come up with ways to do things efficiently. If we can additionally ensure competition between those schools, then we no longer need to worry that the money is being mismanaged (since those that do will not get many buyers down the line). The system naturally ensures that waste will be minimized. Thus, this frees us up to remove many if not all of the regulations and standardization we currently apply to our public schools, since we don't need to worry about a school simply taking the money and not teaching the curriculum. Since it's the parents who get to decide whether the curriculum being taught at a particular school is satisfactory and not a set of government standards, this makes the education system much more flexible and able to even met special needs with a minimum of waste.

Again. There's lots of variations that can be applied here. However, I really do find it amusing that shadow makes a big deal about how horrible the current system is, when most of it was built by the very people that he supports politically.

Ok. I can buy that for a dollar.

But I guess my issue here (and yeah, I'm going to toss some of that Conservative vs Liberal stuff in here. shocker!) is that we all *know* that the current education system has huge problems. Not only is it grossly expensive, it also fails to do what it's supposed to do despite the ridiculous amount we spend on it. Clearly, something needs to change.

And when we boil down the issue, we end up with Conservatives offering a solution and Liberals opposing it. Now, I'm all for a good disagreement, and there's certainly plenty of it with this issue, but for the most part the arguments against school vouchers boil down to "they might be just as bad as the current system".

Um... Maybe this is overly simplistic, but if you have system A which you *know* has a specific set of problems, and system B which might at worse have many of the same problems as system A, why not try system B and see if it works better?


At the very least, come up with a system C or something. But so far, no one really has. The only alternatives to school vouchers I've seen or heard in the last couple decades has essentially been *more* regulation, *more* standards testing, and *more* of the exact same type of funding and monolithic control systems that are arguably the very root of the problem with the school system in the first place.


I'm going to put my tin foil hat on for a second and present the "Conspiracy Theorists Guide to why Liberals Oppose School Vouchers":

1. School vouchers would allow students currently attending public schools due to lack of money to attend a private religious school. This would result in more kids being exposed to religion, which is opposed by the primarily secular focus of the Liberal ideology.

2. School vouchers would disintigrate the monolithic public school system, which despite being the biggest problem in education is desired by Liberals because it gives them one federally mandated method with which to control what every child in american learns while growing up. Insert theories about mind control and brainwashing here if you wish.

3. School vouchers would damage/destroy the current very cozy arrangement between public school employees, the unions that represent them, and the campaign donations those unions hand out to the Democrat party's candidates each year. Currently, in most states (might even be all states, not sure), if you are employed as a public school teacher, you *must* be a member of the teacher's union. Teacher's unions almost unilaterally support the Democrat party via campaign funding and political action groups (I've never heard of one that didn't at least). They are arguably the most powerful and politically active unions in the country right now. I'm not even sure how this can be legal, but for some reason everyone looks the other way. This alone makes anything Abramoff has done look like a minor leaguer. Culture of corruption indeed...

4. School vouchers might just succeed! And if they do, they'd give credence to other privatization ideas that Conservatives put forth and might weaken the Liberal position on other issues. As long as we never try the vouchers and see if they work, Liberals can continue to spin rhetoric about all the horrible problems with them. If they do work, they'll lose that ability because (in theory anyway) the truth of their operation would be a known quanity instead of a subject of speculation.


But you'd have to be a raving lunatic to think any of those ideas have weight...