apples to apples ACT math test scores Males 1970 - 21.1 1989 - 18.3 females 1970 - 18.8 1989 - 16.1 apples to apples SAT verbal test scores ALL 1952 - 476 ALL 1995 - 428 After World War II, the United States had the #1 high school graduation rate in the world. Today, we have dropped to # 22 among 27 industrialized nations. (OECD, 2012) Those are facts that describe what everyone should know, that education has gone downhill since the 50's and is reflected daily in society. Now as to Charter schools, all you are doing is taking a group from the top half of the average HS and grouping them together away from the folks that populate your run of the mill city HS of today. The numbers/studies prove 1) that grad rates were much higher in the past and 2) all the kids were better educated in the past, all of them. Now go back and compare the top 15% of HS grads in 1960 to your Charter school grads of today for test scores and college attendance. Another way of looking at it, the charter school environment is probably equivalent to your decent average HS of the 1950's/60's. I can do it with my own HS, the largest in the 2nd largest city in New England, when I graduated at least 75% of my classmates went to college, real colleges, the guy I grew up with pulled strings to get his children into another town's school system to avoid the HS we graduated from. Anecdotal but accurate.
You can't equivocate the need for rules of the road with mandating something as deeply personal as an approach to education. You're literally talking about shaping people as per the preferences of whomever happens to have seized the machine over a period of time. That's anything but freedom. And nothing but freedom has ever been shown to work. (Why so down on people, VB? Isn't it clear that people tend to do whatever they're incentivized to do? Do away with freebies and you dramatically reduce so much of what you seem to despise in today's culture.) I don't think I've complained about the money wasted by DoE or any other federal agency, though it is a massive issue. What I've said is that DoE, along with its less accountable cousin, the UFT, have altered school culture for the worse. They've instilled an ideology that leads to what you seem to object to (see Progressive Educations tenets. Nothing good can come of that, no way a free people fall for it, no way they keep opting for it once results start to come it.) The best results by what standards, though? (These are the students that went on to author and participate in many of the horrors of the late '60s and '70s, the New Left, today's Progressives, and those in charge of education and many other aspects of the nation, isn't it?) And I'm not sure what you mean by "rigid". I hope you don't equivocate arguing against centralization of education with some sort of hippie colony approach to schooling kids. The overwhelming majority of parents would chose great schools that accomplish a lot more than we see the best schools achieving today. (See Marva Collins' kids in Chicago. Her first school couldn't draw from a worse environment. Look at her unimaginable results. And there are even better school programs out there.) Take care, VB.
guess what happened when the government instituted the standardize "no child left behind" policy? scores dropped even more. thanks for proving my point..
I think we all agree now that things have gone south, away from a very rigid, highly disciplined format to a very PC, liberal mess made that way by DoE and Teachers unions, which you guys term centralization. Well I have already said I want to minimize the teachers role, because I believe most are not up to the job and I want the govt. hacks out of it also. A new uniform approach with the best minds creating 1 best textbook and course layout. (btw those 50's students put us on the moon) and for the 2nd amendment part of this thread I would like to add this wisdom; [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndETIVIsSHs]Archie Bunker on Guns vs. VD - YouTube[/ame]
