Our education system could get a boost by copying Finland

You mean having a restrictive immigration policy? Because one of the main reasons the educational averages are higher in Finland are a lack of poor minorities.

Sweden has an educational system just as good as Finland. The difference? A significant segment of the population is now ethnically non-swedish.

 

It is too late for America to be homogeneous, there are too many poor minority kids with their hands out.

Short of finding a way to deport them before 2020 when they become the majority, they will vote for socialist policies from their homeland's in south and central america that redistribute money from the richer schools to the poorer schools..

 

Is it just me or does the following sound like Obama? Shakespeare said it long ago when he described the Right Wing political movement so very well -

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing."

 

Why would it, all those kids would have their vouchers im sure teachers would rather work and be paid than not.

 

We could have better schools if money was delt out evenly instead of by districks.

 

If you really believed that will be the case, then tell me why the schools in south and central america are so bad. I think the schools in america will become more like what the schools already are in the countries where all these immigrants are coming from. Do you think that's a far fetched theory?

 

As I mentioned before, part of the reason private schools do so well is that they can restrict the students they allow in. A private school has no incentive to take or keep students who are unable to perform well. Pretend that all schools in an area, save one, reject students who aren't performing well. The one other school takes them all, and maybe business is booming. However, say 75% of the kids at that school are C- or worse students. Don't you think there will be outrage from voters about why their tax money is going to that school, since it's performing so poorly? There will probably be regulations about private schools having to meet certain performance metrics in order to be eligible to take vouchers. And conservatives can say they're against such regulations if they want, but I seriously doubt they'd be okay with tax money going to the school with all of the C- and worse students.

 

I have faith in free market economics. They won't be shut out. But they also won't get three times the service for the same price as everyone else.

 

It would get a better boost by copying the United States...from the 1930's.

Schools in the 1930's were governed by the states, not Washington.

Schools in the 1930's didn't have goonions.

Schools in the 1930's taught reading, writing, math, HISTORY, and blue collar trades.

Schools in the 1930's expelled trouble makers.

Schools in the 1930's rejected socialism, communism, and fascism.

Schools in the 1930's DID NOT hand out condoms or birth control. Such topics were something for the parents to deal with.

Schools in the 1930's DID NOT teach moral equivalency, they taught, by example, right from wrong. This task was primarily the parents' job. When schools started teaching values in their values-neutral curriculum, they had already been hijacked by the socialists and naturally got everything ass-backwards.

Schools in the 1930's taught that success in competition was to be desired, hence competitions had what were strangely called "winners" and, even stranger, most people were "losers". The inmates of today's socialist indoctrination institutions are all "winners", which means they're all losers, and big-time losers at that. Don't believe the Mayor? Every single student "graduating" from a public school this year is saddled with over $100,000 in debt, simply because the previous generations of socialists stole their money and spent it.

Did the Mayor mention that schools of the 1930's taught thrift and savings as virtues?

Yeah, the US would do well to ignore Finland and just go back to what worked.

 

The grades wont matter, as it is every child get education. Every child would get a voucher regardless of grades. Id make the schools private with all the staff sharing the profits, the better the results the school gets the more they can demand so parents would have to chip some in if they wanted that school. Teachers in the lower paying schools would have incentive to achieve and be recruited in to higher paying school. The more efficient the more better performing the school, the better results for teachers and students.

 

That's because you're tyring to make the poster look like a racist, and your strawman argument fails miserably.

People who cannot meet a "base-level" of intelligence are the deeply autistic, the severely retarded, the brain damages, and the DemocRAT.

No point in wasting money educating any of those, they're only good for manual labor, dishwashers, etc, if that. The Mayor wouldn't trust a DemocRAT to wash his toilets, they might steal the little silvery handle.

Also, they shouldn't be "warehoused". People can't be educated are their parent's problem, not the taxpayers'.

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All the staff sharing the profits, eh? So the lazy incompetent teacher can keep on mooching, like they do today?

 

How long do you think the other staff would tolerate that for when it directly effects their pay?

 

I didn't say the grades would matter in terms of whether kids get vouchers for school. I'm saying it will matter with regard to which schools will be allowed to take those vouchers. Try this scenario: Schools X, Y, and Z. The GPA across the student bodies for the schools are X-3.4, Y-3.1, Z-1.8. The percentage of voucher students at each school is X-25%, Y-35%, Z-95%. So the school getting the most vouchers also has the worst GPA across the student body. I guarantee that people will be outraged that so many of their tax dollars are going to a school that is performing so poorly. Don't you think there will be cries for regulations to make schools show good performance in order to be able to receive vouchers? This is basically happening now with for-profit universities. They're losing eligibility for student loans because their performance is so bad. Don't you think that will happen with private schools, too?

 

When the best US colleges were private, the world was beating a path to come to them. Since the gubby hands of the socialists have taken over both the colleges and the government, the world is turning away from US colleges.

That in part might be because back when the schools were private, people could afford them, and now that they're government subsidized, they're outrageously expensive.

Of course.

Socialism always leads to scarcity.
Thus public schools can do what only private schools do by design, here in the US: prepare kids for college. Make our entire school system preparatory, and we'll have better educated and financially contributing members of our society.

Hello?

MOST high school graduates go to college these days.

Okey, they go to take pointless "education" or "sociology" courses because they're too stupid and don't belong in college (and where to the Education Majors, the stupidest of the stupid, go....?) , but they're there. College is, after all, where they go to party on someone else's dime.

You took logic in a public school, didn't you?

Just as nobody was ever promised "equality of outcome", they're not promised "equality of opportunity", either. The children of the top 10% have something their less fortunate classmates don't have...access to their parents' contact list.

Can't recall the answer to this, can you tell us who told you life was going to be fair?

Yeah, life's a (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) and all that, and competition is the name of the game. Unlike the UK, people in the US have social mobility, and that can only be denied by True Believers.

 

What incentive will there be for high-performing schools to take poor-performing students? This happens at the college level already with poor-performing college students going to for-profit universities. Granted, that's partially because they get recruited aggressively, but also because no real college will take them. And at the same time, as I mentioned in the post to Jackster, those for-profit universities are losing eligibility for student loans because they suck. There's your free-market example (admittedly not identical). Why do you think this won't happen at the elementary, junior high, and high school level?

 

No i dont, every student no matter their grades gets a voucher, they then go off and find a suitable school. No child is denied an education now no matter how bad their grades, so no child misses out on the voucher. Its not about saving money so much, its about getting better results, getting more motivated teachers who are rewarded like a private industry would while also holding them accountable.

 

Quite some time, actually, since they won't be fired. Any scheme that entails "100% employee ownership" is going to wind up including tenure. Socialism doesn't work on the small scale, eit
The teachers should work for wages, just like everyone else, and the school administrators should determine who the flops are and fire them, thereby maximizing the profits for the school's stockholders.

Schools should be accredited by an independent accreditation board, probably administered by the several states individually, since the Federal government is constitutionally prohibited from funding or regulating education. Schools that lose their accreditation not only lose all their students, but should be required to refund tuition to all students deemed to have been harmed by the loss of accreditation. Accreditation is not a matter of how many students get passed, but of how well the school teaches. An electrical engineering college was in danger of losing it's accreditation and the faculty (*)(*)(*)(*) bricks to make sure that didn't happen.

 

I don't think you're following. Private schools can reject any student they want for any reason. So if you effectively let teachers run the school, and they have a financial incentive for the entire school to do well, why would they accept students who are unlikely to perform well?

 

Here's the problem with vouchers:

The issuing authority assumes control of the schools accepting them.

Believe it or not, the United States has had a functioning school voucher system in place since the 1960's. And over the course of the decades the tentacles of the United States government has been groping in US colleges to the point where they can no longer teach, merely indoctrinate.

 

You mean businesses might choose who it is they do business with, like a five-star restaurant putting out a "no shoes, no high school diploma" sign?

What's wrong with that?

The people who want to learn, and can learn, will go to school with like minded students, the students who can't learn can rub elbows with those who refuse to learn, and all three groups benefit.

 

If no school has any reason to take on the risk of a potentially poorly performing student, then there will be kids left without any education. Crime rates are higher among those who do not have high school diplomas. What do you think the likelihood is for someone to commit a crime when they have no education at all?

 

Citation needed.

Do you know why? It's not just because they're instantly better at teaching, it's because they're allowed to pick and choose who they take. For many, there are entrance exams, meaning that you can't get in if you're not already educationally inclined. Never mind that there's also a strong correlation between wealth and giving a damn about your education. I wonder how good they'd be if they had to take everyone?

Why not? You say you have faith in the free market, but provide no reason why this would work. I hate to break it to you, but the free market is exceptionally bad at catering to those in the "don't have (*)(*)(*)(*)" category, and this has been a known quantity since... um... The early 1900s.

How long do you think it would take for teachers to re-unionize? Teacher's unions are too powerful now in some aspects, but to be against unionization is to oppose the most fundamental tenant of labor - that workers should have the ability to share their malcontent with their employers.

And they don't teach history any more? I'm with you, that schools should go back to teaching more blue collar trades, but implying that schools no longer teach reading, writing, math, or history is ridiculous.

Because the best way to deal with troublemakers is to put them back out on the streets, rather than dealing with their problems. And because the crime rate isn't high enough.

They still do...

In the 30s, there wasn't such a thing as the internet, and mass media was heavily censored. Kids stood a good chance of not being hypersexualized by the time they hit high school. The fact is that leaving condoms and birth control to the parents has exactly nothing to do with a good education, and the only result measured from schools that do that today is a higher teen pregnancy rate.

Nope! Because there have been numerous studies into the subject, and it turns out that this is one of the things the Finnish school system gets absolutely right. Competition does one thing well in a school environment: it distracts kids from actually learning.

Or, you know, you could take off the pink glasses and stop acting like things like corporal punishment, a complete absence of sex education, even stronger competition, and segregation are good things. Oh, that's right, you didn't mention that one. Schools in the 30s were segregated. Should we go back to that?

Well over half of the people with PhD's voted for Obama in the previous election. Obviously, they're also idiots, despite having PhDs, because hey - "The Mayor" says so.

Well, they become the taxpayer's problem when they can't get a job and have to turn to either general welfare or crime just to survive. This is part of the importance of a public school system.

Lazy and incompetent are hard words to qualify when talking about teachers. NCLB does seem to reward success among the teachers, but success is incredibly subjective, and the difficulty of teaching children changes drastically from subject to subject, year to year, and student to student. There's a reason why teachers almost universally reject NCLB, and it has nothing to do with them being lazy and everything to do with how it forces them to teach in ways that don't work in order to match up with this idea that we need to constantly be testing them to make sure they're really doing their jobs. What a surprise, the results are entirely negative.

 

Hearing people discuss the tenants of goonionism is precisely why teachers should not be allowed to goonionize.

Sharing the misery is not a tenet of goonionism, thuggery is.

 

Why don't you stop pretending that all private schools are identical to Sidwell Friends?

There will ALWAYS be a slot open somewhere for your little darling, but it might cost you more and you might have to drive a little to get him there every morning. But if you look, you'll be able to find someplace for him, the free market would guarantee that.

 

Could one not make the same argument about immigration and national education systems? Countries that can restrict the students they have to educate in their public school systems will much better