Not a thread about this one: Common Core (no?)Follow

Two weeks ago anecdotes weren't reliable. This week they are. I wonder what the difference is.

I'm married to an education expert.

Still doesn't make me an education expert.

Wow. Delusion much?



Way to move the goalposts off the damn field there Smash. I said (quite clearly I thought) that California did not have any specific home school laws. In the absence of such laws, they must still be educated in an approved manner. Which, in California, means designating your home a "private school". Which places parents who home school in California under the same requirements as a private school. Which, given I'm sure you're somewhat familiar with private schools, means they take standardized tests. Just like kids attending the local Catholic schools do. WTF? Reading is really not your strong suit, is it?



And again you miss the forest for the trees. All states require children to receive an education via some list of approved methods. If homeschooling isn't on the list, that doesn't mean that you can homeschool and not have any educational requirements at all. It means that your "homeschool" is actually treated as some other form of education that already exists. So finding states that don't have specific homeschooling requirements doesn't mean what you seem to want to think it means.



Because you're moving the goalposts. I linked to a page which quoted the Virginia statue regarding evaluation of home schooled students. You're playing word games (as usual). Why can't you just be honest here? You made a series of claims about home schooling. Those claims are false. Are we done yet? Or are you even going to attempt to support your claims?

All you've done is tap dance around the issue and play word games. The question is whether or not homeschooling provides a sufficient education to public school. The answer is "yes". Again, are we done now?



Blah blah blah. What the heck do you think any of that means? Want to know what it doesn't prove? This:





That you'll work really hard to avoid actually supporting a claim you made? Yeah. I think we all do.




And yet, you seem so sure it's a terrible way to education children. Why is that? You just made it up? You have some personal vendetta?



When even the teachers unions decide that it's not a cause worth attacking, one might wonder why you take every opportunity to do so. I mean, they actually have a vested interest in squelching the practice, given that it directly reduces their money and power. What's your interest in all of this?

Because you're moving the goalposts.

Hahahhahahah, Oh, YOU. Adorable.

"Homeschooled kids take tests"
"Who said anything about tests, I said they have to follow laws"
"Who said anything about laws, I said you haven't proven anything"
"Who said anything about proof, what's your agenda?"
"YOU ARE MOVING THE GOALPOSTS!"

I know I ask you this a lot, but, seriously, don't you ever tire of being so wrong all the time?

Teachers might. Teachers unions? Absolutely not. The unions use overcrowding as a lever to pressure public school districts to hire more teachers. More teachers means more $$ for the union. Removing 3% of students from public schools has a direct negative effect on union revenue. Teacher unions absolutely have a vested interests in placing as many obstacles as possible in the way of parents contemplating home schooling as an alternative to public schools.

Are you disagreeing with anything I wrote?

The School Unions are slyly outlawing abortions and limiting access to birth control, then they're legitimately raping women. All these babies eventually make their way to school to over-crowd classrooms. Then the unions have leverage...to, um, garner more taxpayer money to create more classrooms.

Seems reasonable.

I asked the two hundred fifty-six union people I'm friends/related with and they all agreed with me, 100%.

It's like I didn't just make a point of differentiating the motivations of teachers and teachers unions.

You get that smaller classrooms *also* means "more teachers", which means more money for the unions, right?



Sure, but the reasons for that aren't what you might think. It's about how we distribute our hiring dollars in the public school system. Between 1950 and today, the number of students in public schools has doubled. The number of teachers has increased by 2.5 times. The number of administrators has increased by 7 times. So choices to hire more administrators rather than more teachers is part of the problem, but the other part is how we distribute teachers. Clearly, we should have smaller classroom sizes today based solely on the ratio of students to teachers. But we don't. And a large part of this is that we've placed much more emphasis on specialized education. So we have some teachers literally teaching one student (or a small number of students) because of the needs of that student (or students). We hire people who only coach rather than also teach other subjects (or they teach just one subject, or just PE in addition to coaching). We have a wider assortment of class options and electives (not necessarily a bad thing), but the downside is that there are fewer teachers left to teach the core subjects. So we have 40 students in every English, Math, History, and Science class, but 15 students taking the AV class, and 20 in Drama, and 12 taking Dance. Etc.

We've made these choices. And I'm not even saying they are bad choices. But tossing out a broad comment about how teachers shouldn't be teaching 40 kids in a class isn't terribly helpful unless you're also going to recommend some course of action we should take to fix that problem. And if your answer is "hire more teachers", then I think it's fair and relevant to point out that it's not how many teachers we hire, but what we hire them to do that is the problem. Oh, and that the unions soak up more and more cash per student taught as a result of all of this.

Maybe eliminate the unions and take all the cash they're draining from the system and use it to hire more teachers? Nah! That's crazy.


Or heck! Let's figure out why it takes 2.5 times as many administrators per teacher to teach our kids today than it did 60 years ago. That might be a great start, don't you think?

Edited, Sep 16th 2014 5:01pm by gbaji

Lot more AP classes though. Which is pretty much just devaluing GPAs, but what can you do, right?

I'm just tossing out ideas about where the extra teachers are going. Point being that on a pure teacher to student ratio, class sizes should be about 30% smaller today than they were 60 years ago. So those teachers are doing *something* other than teaching the bulk of the students in the "average class". Whether that's specialized instruction, fewer classes taught per teacher, or maybe even a broadening of the definition of "teacher", something has changed to explain this.

And the ratio of administrators to students is pretty much pure bloat and probably a much better direction to go if we're looking at figuring out how to more efficiently use our education dollars. Of course, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, they're all members of the union too. But I'm sure that's totally unrelated.

"We hire people who only coach rather than also teach other subjects (or they teach just one subject, or just PE in addition to coaching)." Gbajji

At least here in California, this is not true. Non- teaching coaches are not counted as teachers, and receive a stipend. In San Diego only 26% of coaches who actually teach teach PE, and that is true on my campus as only 2 do so.

Your point about Administrator's, however, is true on my Campus. We have 7 administrators at a HS of 2900 students, and I know at least 2 of them do absolutely nothing except roam the campus. ( Not scientific or statistic based, just my observation )

And the ratio of administrators to students is pretty much pure bloat and probably a much better direction to go if we're looking at figuring out how to more efficiently use our education dollars. Of course, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, they're all members of the union too. But I'm sure that's totally unrelated.

Actually, they frequently aren't. Varies wildly based on the union. Around here, the "administrators" are mostly IT folks, and they are *definitely* just extra bloat. Should outsource that **** to Bangalore. Now the janitors, they do something that actually requires a skill set.

Nexa is a member of our state teacher's union, incidentally. I believe since I know her that makes me an education policy expert.