[mike777]

 Cthulhu D, on 2012-September-12, 23:04, said:

The problems are socio-economic caused by the legacy of racism, the rigid class structure in America and the denial by politicians of all stripes of point 1 and 2.

The upshot is that black kids are more likely to need help than white kids - but it's because black kids are more likely to be from poor backgrounds.

your posts seem to say the same thing.

In chicago...black kids get less money..alot less money than white kids.

just show this please.
--


and please show that more money will solve the problem.

--


too be honest reread your posts your basic position is that black kids are victims.

[dwar0123]

 mike777, on 2012-September-12, 23:56, said:

too be honest reread your posts you basic position is that black kids are victims.

I don't think he needs to reread his post to know that.

[mike777]

 dwar0123, on 2012-September-13, 00:01, said:

I don't think he needs to reread his post to know that.

ok black kids in chicago are victims that is your main point?

[Cthulhu D]

 mike777, on 2012-September-13, 00:03, said:

ok black kids in chicago are victims that is your main point?

Victims is the wrong word. It just turns out that while everyone is equal in America, whites are more equal than blacks. Having richer parents gives you such a host of advantages - just as one tiny example, access to dental care makes a big difference - that it's the primary driver of educational outcomes.

Demonstrating that this is racial takes two seconds:

http://www.epi.org/p...figure6_600.gif

I'm sure you could find more recent data for 2008-2012 if you wish, I only had 2 seconds. That is not a small gap.

Ultimately the adults are probably lost to you, not sure you can solve it, but to fix it for the kids.. well, that's going to require a massive effort. There are no easy solutions, but it's certainly a problem.

[dwar0123]

 mike777, on 2012-September-13, 00:03, said:

ok black kids in chicago are victims that is your main point?

Main point?

Well I don't speak for cthulhu, BUT, if I were making this point, it certainly wouldn't be my main point.

Curious, do you disagree that poverty has a negative impact on educational success?

[mike777]

ok so your main point is for decades and decades and decades poor students are victims in Chicago..


And you want what?


Please quote

[mike777]

Do you guys actually know teachers who live in Chicago, I do, and if so quote that they live in the city.

Please tell us they want more taxes

mY guess is you guys are talking out of your .....

[dwar0123]

 mike777, on 2012-September-13, 00:41, said:

ok so a point is for decades and decades and decades poor students are at a substantial disadvantage everywhere.

fyp

[Cthulhu D]

Also:

A) This is bad

B) We should probably do something about it.

[mike777]

 Cthulhu D, on 2012-September-13, 01:06, said:

Also:

A) This is bad

B) We should probably do something about it.

again you assume Chicago sits on its ass and does nothing for decades?

all of your posts are insults.


Yet you dont tell us what to do.

mY guess is you have no idea what our Union has done over the decades/

I note you say nothing...nothing.

----------------


I am a union man

[phil_20686]

Ok, a few general comments:

(1) The point is that its not racial, after you control for socio economic class and marital status of the parents*. But some sub-cultures have much higher levels of family break down and poverty, which may themselves be at least partly interrelated. (e.g. poverty => crime => jail => divorce). In the UK our worst performers by ethnicity are afro-carribeans, but it turns out, they have almost identical achievement compared with a group of white children selected to match their parental stauts and economic status.

(2) Education will continue to get more expensive for the same reason that opera tickets get more expensive. Its called Baumol's cost disease. Since a graduate working in a car factory can produce many more cars per worker than in the past, you would expect their wages to have risen (and they have), and since a teacher is an educated worker who could certainly have a similar job in a car factory, you must pay them equally. Hence wages in a society tend to rise together largely independent of which industries are experiencing productivity increases. In the car factory increasing productivity decreased the number of workers, to compensate for rising wages, but in education there has been almost no productivity increases - we requirethe same number of teachers per student as we did in 1800.

(3) More money helps most things, if it is intelligently administered. It appears that unions have been extremely effective at channelling rising budgets into worker pay, at the expense of what we might call the `infrastructure' of education.

(4) I don't know about the US, but in the UK, changes in how teacher pensions are calculated/administered, as led a non trivial amount of the increases into topping up the pension pots.

(5) We should really do better at education. Its not rocket science. Just copy any of the wildly successful education systems in the world. Sweden, South Korea, etc.

(6) Having said that, culture is very important, and persistent failure over a generation has led, in some places, to a generation of parents that do not respect and encourage education in the way that one would hope. It is hard for children to develop good habits without good examples and support. Education system takes generations to fully reform, as poor standards propagate to the parents, and end up holding back the education of their own children.

[billw55]

 phil_20686, on 2012-September-13, 05:58, said:

(3) More money helps most things, if it is intelligently administered. It appears that unions have been extremely effective at channelling rising budgets into worker pay, at the expense of what we might call the `infrastructure' of education.

This is problem #1 in my opinion. Especially in Illinois, where government is famous for irresponsibility, incompetence, and corruption. And this is also why citizens are so resistant to tax increases, even for causes they believe in. Personally, I would vote for a tax increase for education, including on myself, if I believed it would be spent responsibly, or even on education at all.

 phil_20686, on 2012-September-13, 05:58, said:

(5) We should really do better at education. Its not rocket science. Just copy any of the wildly successful education systems in the world. Sweden, South Korea, etc.

No way. See link in post 28. Even if this data from NEA is somewhat biased, there is no avoiding the fact that our urban schools are challenged by high poverty rates. Average performance over a whole nation, with much less poverty overall than our inner cities, simply cannot be compared.

[kenberg]

Mike,

I grew up in St. Paul. Sort of Chicago, North Branch. Just as the St. Paul Saints were a farm team for the (Brooklyn) Dodgers, our hoods were rated by the strength of their Chi connections. Let me see what I can say.

I mentioned that my wife and I were "drafted" (meaning that except for a generous expense allowance we didn't get paid) to work on the state minimum competency exams. The teachers I met, and there were many, were very good. I would be pleased to have my child in the class of any one of them. I also mentioned a middle school teacher (white, for those who are keeping score on such matters) who really liked the idea that students could be graded on effort in mathematics because she had no idea how to get the answer herself. Both exist, and you can guess where the weaker teachers end up. There is a lot of bogus certification out there.Teachers are required to take graduate courses to keep up their knowledge. Some of these courses are very good, our next door neighbor selects then carefully and gets a lot out of them. Some are a joke except no one is laughing. I can tell you from direct experience that there are people out there teaching algebra who do not know algebra. This matters, no many how many courses you have taken in how to teach algebra. Students, and not only the top students, sense when the person in charge doesn't have a clue.

So this has to be addressed.


Next, we have to reverse the trend that students have no responsibility for their own learning and their own lives. A defiant fifteen year old can foil the best efforts of a teacher. On this I speak from very direct experience. My high school Spanish teacher was very good, in Spanish I I learned a lot. In Spanish II I learned very little. She wasn't different in my sophomore year, I was. What's his name from Harvard [Ah, Moynihan, I recall] became famous for saying that we have defined deviancy downward. We have also defined adolescence upward (in terms of age). I skipped a lot of classes in college. My error, no one thought that anyone other than me was to blame for this. Now we fret. We (I speak of college now) give "attendance quizzes" to reward students for coming to class. We have online homework and give students points for doing their homework. At a meeting one time a physics prof, highly regarded both as a physicist and an instructor, expressed his teaching philosophy as "We throw the crap out there and tell them to learn it". I heartily agree. Of course he didn't mean it exactly, and I don't agree exactly, but the student needs to understand that it is his responsibility to learn.


Finally, I really don't like this minimum requirement stuff. The minimum is, well, really minimum. At the upper end it doesn't matter. My granddaughter, now in college, passed the high school minimum in math in the seventh grade. For these kids the minimum requirements are just something that takes a day to get out of the way. But there are a lot of kids who are in the middle and could do a lot better than minimum, but the teachers are so busy trying to get save their jobs by getting the weakest through the minimum that they have no time for anything else.


So: Teachers have to know what they are talking about. They don't have to be geniuses or anything near it, but some of them need to be gone. Kids have to be given more responsibility for their own learning. And we should stop focusing so heavily on the minimum.

[phil_20686]

 mike777, on 2012-September-13, 01:14, said:

I am a union man

[rant]
This kind of thing really pisses me off. No need to evaluate whether the unions are in the right in a specific instance. Just a blank check of support. Just like tribal voters for political parties who don't seem to care when their representatives have gone bat-sh** insane, because they are good little ****** voters.

FFS whenever someone has made some kind of political entity a part of their identity, its a pretty good reason to believe their sanity has left the building. Political entities are so fluid that you have no real idea what they are signing up for. Pisses me off.
[\end rant]

[phil_20686]

 billw55, on 2012-September-13, 06:28, said:

No way. See link in post 28. Even if this data from NEA is somewhat biased, there is no avoiding the fact that our urban schools are challenged by high poverty rates. Average performance over a whole nation, with much less poverty overall than our inner cities, simply cannot be compared.

Then the world is a crap place, since you do not have to look very far to learn that

Quote

In 2011, the National Institute for Literacy estimated that 47 percent of adults in Detroit, Michigan are "functionally illiterate," meaning they have trouble with reading, speaking, writing and computational skills.^[6] According to findings by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, half of that illiterate population has obtained a high school diploma.^[7] The Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) feels that the problem lies with the city's failure to effectively enforce school attendance.

The detroit federation of teachers thinks that 47% of adults in detroit are `functionally illiterate'. Ill just let that sink in for a while.

I did one year's teaching* at a university, where I found that the level of mathematical literacy was abysmal. And I taught physics, at a reasonable university. I think anyone who doesn't think our education system is seriously deficient is bonkers. And these were three-A students! A third of all pupils in the UK fail to get five C's in gcse. And getting a C in gcse is not by any means a gold standard. In my school, which was not selected on ability, there were no D's at all. That means, that every single student, even those with serious dyslexia, got at least 9 C grades. I cannot reconcile these facts except by inferring that a huge quantity of British schools are deficient.

* strictly speaking I only did marking and a few seminars. Then I gave it up because it was too depressing.

[billw55]

 phil_20686, on 2012-September-13, 06:59, said:

Then the world is a crap place, since you do not have to look very far to learn that



The detroit federation of teachers thinks that 47% of adults in detroit are `functionally illiterate'. Ill just let that sink in for a while.

I did one year's teaching* at a university, where I found that the level of mathematical literacy was abysmal. And I taught physics, at a reasonable university. I think anyone who doesn't think our education system is seriously deficient is bonkers. And these were three-A students! A third of all pupils in the UK fail to get five C's in gcse. And getting a C in gcse is not by any means a gold standard. In my school, which was not selected on ability, there were no D's at all. That means, that every single student, even those with serious dyslexia, got at least 9 C grades. I cannot reconcile these facts except by inferring that a huge quantity of British schools are deficient.

* strictly speaking I only did marking and a few seminars. Then I gave it up because it was too depressing.

I don't think that our system is not deficient. (Meaning USA in general and Illinois/Chicago in particular). In some ways it is.

But I do think that no system will be able to match results with another system that serves a student population with a fraction of the poverty level. Can we do better? Yes. Can we do anything? No. Not everything is possible.

Also, agree strongly with Ken about students having a responsibility to learn. When they don't care to or outright fight against (due to their life environment and/or upbringing), there is much less that a teacher can do.

[phil_20686]

 billw55, on 2012-September-13, 07:29, said:

But I do think that no system will be able to match results with another system that serves a student population with a fraction of the poverty level. Can we do better? Yes. Can we do anything? No. Not everything is possible.

The US, among non-tiny nations, has the highest per capita income in the world. If you have too much poverty, to the extent that it is interfering with educating people into being reasonably productive members of society, then do something meaningful about it.

I mean seriously, you have high relative poverty because you have chosen a set of policies that lead to high levels of poverty, compared with European countries.

Moreover its not at all clear which is cause and effect: there are very few educated people living in poverty.

[billw55]

 phil_20686, on 2012-September-13, 07:38, said:

The US, among non-tiny nations, has the highest per capita income in the world. If you have too much poverty, to the extent that it is interfering with educating people into being reasonably productive members of society, then do something meaningful about it.

I mean seriously, you have high relative poverty because you have chosen a set of policies that lead to high levels of poverty, compared with European countries.

Moreover its not at all clear which is cause and effect: there are very few educated people living in poverty.

You made a post containing nothing that I disagree with. How can this be?

[dwar0123]

 phil_20686, on 2012-September-13, 06:41, said:

[rant]
This kind of thing really pisses me off. No need to evaluate whether the unions are in the right in a specific instance. Just a blank check of support. Just like tribal voters for political parties who don't seem to care when their representatives have gone bat-sh** insane, because they are good little ****** voters.

FFS whenever someone has made some kind of political entity a part of their identity, its a pretty good reason to believe their sanity has left the building. Political entities are so fluid that you have no real idea what they are signing up for. Pisses me off.
[\end rant]

[offtopic]
I was raised a conservative republican and identified as a republican right up until the time it became clear we were invading Iraq after 9/11. I still get physically sick thinking about the amount of insane crap I was hearing from what was then my own party. My opinion of the republican party has managed to continue to nose dive, part of that is likely due to me drinking the left's koolaid, but there are many profoundly intellectually dishonest people speaking with authority for the right.

I know you lean right but I wonder if you feel the same about the USA right or if you view both sides as equally absurd.
[/offtopic]

[phil_20686]

 dwar0123, on 2012-September-13, 09:36, said:

[offtopic]
I know you lean right but I wonder if you feel the same about the USA right or if you view both sides as equally absurd.
[/offtopic]

This is a very complicated question. I am not ideologically "pro small government" or "pro large government", I believe that governments should try to do the things that governments can do well, and avoid trying to do things they do badly:

I think governments can do the following things well:
(1) National defence and foreign policy
(2) Providing universal education.
(3) A single payer Health service.
(4) Creating a functional legal system that constrains the ability of money to buy influence.
(5) Constructing transport infrastructure.

The problem is, then you see half cocked ideas like the ACA. I mean, universal healthcare is a noble aim, but why on earth are you keeping the insurance industry involved. You should have thrown them under the bus in order to cut down on bureaucracy.

Most of all, I am opposed to the incompetent execution of good ideas. And that is what I see every day from government. I am more familiar with the UK, but lets consider a few things that I regard as massive incompetency by the US government over the past few years:

(1) The ACA. While a national health service has my unqualified support, I think that the current law will likely enrich the insurance companies at the expense of the consumer, and without any significant increases in patient care. I predict it will be much more expensive than is anticipated when insurance companies use the mandate as an excuse to raise premiums, even among the low paid.

(2) The FOMC. It is a little known fact that Obama has filled six of the seven seats on the Federal reserve board, as well as a number of seats on the FOMC. Not one of his appointments has ever voted for monetary stimulus. WTF. How can you fight for fiscal stimulus while appointing board members who are voting against monetary stimulus. This is a cock up of almighty proportions.

(3) Infrastructure: The US has allowed its transport infrastructure to reach an appalling level of disrepair. This should have been fixed in bits and pieces over the last decade. As a large country with lots of land, you have an ideal situation (like,say France) to build a world class rail and road network which would significantly reduce the cost of travel for the next several decades. Why haven't you done it already!!!

(4) The debt ceiling debate. I mean, wtf, I saw senators on tv who didnt know what the debt ceiling even was. Or what the consequences of raising it even were. It was completely bizarre. I generally hold a low opinion of British politicians, but they are leagues more savvy than your average US senator. I imagine I could hold a productive conversation with at least half of the front benches of British politics.

(5) The fact that American bank regulators still allow shops and banks to charge debit card fees, even though using debi cards has zero marginal cost. But checks are free, even though they do have a significant cost. Bring on the cashless society.

I could go on with this list. I know this board knows plenty of ridiculous stuff republicans have done/said, so I started off with three issues that the democrats are wholly or partly responsible for.