nytimes.com
Charter schools do much worse--only 10% of charter school students meet this "college ready" standard.
-First off, she would be required to get a college degree and a state certification in retail management. She wouldn't necessarily be paid any better, however.
-A large minority of her customers would never actually buy anything, but mostly just nap in the store, harass and occasionally assault employees and customers, deface and damage the store.
-Many of her customers would never have seen DVD players or computers and so most of her customer time is spent trying to explain basic concepts like what a television is.
-Anything short of actual assault would not be enough to remove a customer from the store, though he/she might be required to sit in the store office for a few minutes.
-She would be required to review hundreds of pages of paperwork each week on her own time.
-She would be expected to maintain a profitable store that also improved the community and made her customers better people.
Why do we tolerate conditions at our schools that we'd never tolerate in any other employer? (Other than prisons, I guess)
- The customers are given personal gift cards to purchase products, yet few are motivated in doing so, so they just let them expire. These cards are not valid at any other store, though, and similarly cannot be used for any other merchandise than the store offers, even if the store's products aren't very good.
Good point!
Certainly some schools prepare their students better than others with skills and experience applicable to the types of careers they're likely to enter upon graduation, but I still feel that too-high a percentage of colleges in this country leave graduates with a mountain of debt and questionably-marketable real-world skills.
It's a difficult challenge ... to educate the masses with employable skills in an subject that these people hopefully hold some amount of interest or passion for ... but the benefits to the individuals and the nation's work-force of achieving that goal are immeasurable.
It is so sad when a 64% graduation rate is seen as proof that policies are working.
We need to stop thinking about academic education and vocational education as separate. We need to stop thinking, 'clever kids to the universities, the rest to apprenticeships if they're lucky.' This is a bad meme.
We do not need to 'repair' the distinction between academia and the trades, we do not need to put them on an equal footing, we do not need to stop treating less-academic kids as less important than more academic ones.
We need to recognise the distinction for what it is, a myth, a cognitive dissonance, and destroy it.
We need everyone to have both aesthetic skills and dextrous skills. We need everyone to be comfortable with interpersonal skills as much as they are with technical, or manual skills. We need that dreaded[1] term, a holistic approach.
Most of all we need to stop educating our children in factories using the logic, language and paradigms of industrial manufacturing. We need to educate our children to be happy and adaptive human beings. The employability part will follow from that, we don't need to worry about it directly.
[1] Damn you hippies, for ruining our perfectly good words.
At some point, the American public started believing that the cost of something purchased with public funds was directly proportional to the value it gave. So it was like "New aircraft carrier? That thing costs 2 Billion dollars! Must be really valuable to national security"
But the amount of money you pay for something and the good that it provides -- especially in systems that are immune to the retooling and re-engineering effects of recessions -- are completely independent of each other.
Especially with the U.S. budget crisis coming, maybe this issue will open some eyes, but I doubt it.
2) I don't know if the money spend has actually increased. My state, Florida, used to use lottery profits to complement state spending, then used it to supplement state spending cuts.
Luckily, I graduated before the bubble popped (the surplus years) because so much of the state and county budget was based around building fees, property taxes, title transfers, etc.
Looks like they were spending money just to spend it. What did they demand from the students? parents? teachers? Were disruptive students (what I consider the biggest problem) isolated and punished for bad behavior? Were the parents required to review the child's work, meet the teachers, provide a proper meal? Were the teachers asked to give feedback, meet goals, try new techniques?
The main thing the report wants to speak about is the Imperial federal judge (typical for a CATO report) while the real problem lied in the way the district was run. Shitty management doesn't get better with more money. Money just makes it worse.
I took a HR/labor management course in college. The professor summed up labor negotiations like this: "You get the union you deserve." If management views the union as an adversary, the union becomes an adversary. If management takes every opportunity to break the union, the union takes every opportunity to further entrench itself.
The best way to make a union a partner in improving education is to actually engage them in improving education. Instead we seem to mostly get political grandstanding and trolling.
I was fortunate to be part of one that had a mostly symbiotic working relationship with our administration (we weren't even officially a "union", just a "student association"). As a result we negotiated using "soft power" rather than things like strikes; e.g. made sure the administration was aware that having happy grad students promoting the school was critical to their own success (in recruiting students, say, since we voluntarily ran the prospective-student visit weekend, and gave them candid information on what life at the university was like).
One of the important aspects was that there were people we could negotiate with who: 1) at least sort of cared and were willing to talk to the student association; and 2) actually had the power to agree to things.
The worst examples are where you have a fairly bureaucratic UAW-affiliate grad-student union negotiating with a faceless-bureaucracy administration, where neither side sees the other as part of the same team in any way, and it's not even clear who on either side has any authority to speak for anyone or make concessions.
"My response: Exactly."
There was also a followup: http://shankerblog.org/?p=980
It's easy to do things in those monocultures. Heck, look at the "scandanavian" states in the US - they work even better.
The US as a whole, for better or worse, is far more diverse. (And segregated.)
Nearly all the people in NY are in areas of high cost of living and, thus, are relatively well paid. That should also make them relatively competent and relatively good as parents with relatively accomplished children.
In Manhattan, the cost of living, etc. are higher.
In contrast, I went to a public high school in the South; nearly everyone graduated; and 97% of the graduates went to college. I did well in math and science, but English literature didn't make much sense to me, and somehow the way French was taught I just didn't 'get it' (my father and brother were both quite good at French but somehow didn't help me). My SAT total was over 1400; still, except for math and science, high school was not so easy for me; my high school was not really easy; in some of the courses, a lot of the students did better than I did.
I did well enough in college, especially in math and science. I went to a relatively good college, and there the girls in the humanities classes were much better than I was; my only retaliation was to totally blow them away in math and science, which was easy to do.
So, not doing so well in a public high school in the South, I was plenty successful in college.
So, I don't 'get it': If my public high school in the South did so well, then why are NY and Manhattan having so many problems? Where are they missing it?
At one point, here in NYS 70 miles north of Wall Street, my wife and I were considering having children and wondered about the quality of the schools, so she called a local high school and asked to visit. She was brilliant, Valedictorian, PBK, 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow Wilson, and research university Ph.D. In college once she wanted to take a history course, didn't need the credit, so wanted just to audit. The prof asked audits also to take the tests, so she did. It was a lecture hall course with 300 students. At the end the prof told her that she should have taken the course for credit since she got the highest grade in the class. Brilliant. So, with her credentials, she got a good reception for a visit. She sat in on a senior class in history and concluded that it would have been challenging for her.
I'm not 'getting it': Where are these really bad schools in NY?
Just what is it about college the students can't do?
I've taught undergraduates at Indiana University, Georgetown University, and Ohio State; except for one 'special' collection of students at Georgetown, the students were from good enough down to not so bad. Just what is it about NYS students that are much less good?
What is all the screaming about in NY? Just trying to get more money for the teachers?
Maybe we need to see the some distributions of SAT and CEEB scores for some representative samples of students from Manhattan, the rest of NYS, and some other states.