Posted on 01/01/2008 8:56:59 AM PST by Cincinnatus.45-70
The colonisation by the middle classes of the best state schools has led to a dramatic widening of the gap in educational performance between rich and poor children in the past year, new figures indicate. [Snip]
The figures underscore the massive influence of parental background on school success.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Funny you should say that. The school I work at is trying to get parents more involved, not less. Every parent I talk to, I ask to read to their kids. Anything at all, in English or Spanish (those being the two languages spoken at my school). Not one of the teachers I’ve talked to in the past ten years have wanted to keep the parents uninvolved. Where do you live, and why aren’t YOU teaching there?
I did like some of the comments. One was:
I am surprised that nobody has remarked on the cleverness of this government in producing large numbers of uneducated, unemployable children with no ambition in life but to get pregnant early and to draw state benefits. These are tomorrow's voters and you need to have an uneducated underclass to vote Labour in order to stay in power.Alan, Cobham,
So, what is Alan's Free Republic name?
Perhaps when they allow teachers the right of self-defense, more people would be interested in teaching.
I home-school. One point here is that an unmotivated student with unmotivated parents will likely fail, regardless of how much is spent on his education, while a motivated student with motivated parents will likely succeed, regardless of how little is spent on his education. This is upsetting to the educational bureaucracy
It’s always of interest the degree of denial of the concept of inherent ability. Differences are always blamed on lack of opportunity or resources, and the idea that some people are just plain more capable is never considered. Someone once said that you could give each member of a group of people identical resources and you’d come back a year later to find that some members of the group now had far more than the others due to their ability and industry. I believe that phenomenon is at work at all times. No matter how you try to level the playing field, some people are going to end up on top.
Must be partially due to the lower middle class and working class native British quitting the UK in ever increasing numbers as their neighborhoods are flooded with immigrants. It makes no economic sense for many a young family in the UK to stay on in the UK to raise their kids, their Pound Sterling will buy them a much better lifestyle, with much better opportunities abroad, and the natural churn of society in the UK, (often stated that within 10 generations the direct descendants of Kings can be paupers, and vice versa) is breaking down as the country is flooded with historically unprecedented levels of immigration.
I suspect you work at a US government school, where the central State apparatus has not yet completely taken charge from the local school board, voters, and parents. By contrast, the UK schools are entirely creations of the State apparatus. As such they are free to conduct whatever socialist experiments the educators and central government seize upon as fashionable.
What better way to eliminate economic class differences than to remove the students from the home to a central “school” environment, where the rich parents can’t interfere? (Sarcasm off)
While gov't schools and religious schools are institutions of the state, is home-school not?
A cultural anti-intellectual tradition (not necessarily ethnic , btw) is a strong barrier toward upward mobility among the poor and the unskilled.
Here’s a link to a great article on home schools:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/10672001.html
The author says, “Why does homeschooling work? In a word, family support.”
He also points out that 12.5% of National Spelling Bee finalists were home-schooled in 2007, 13.5% in 2006, and that the National Georgraphic Bee champions in 2003 and 2005 were home-schooled. This is compared with total home schooled students being only 3% of all elementary and secondary students.
Clearly, something right is going on here (or, wrong, if you are British).
The tentacles of Darwin reach everywhere.
It was a more specific question.
The Democrats and other socialists would no doubt like to pass legislation which requires that a certain percentage of all students score 500 or better on each part of the SAT’s. They haven’t learned a thing from the collapse of the Soviet Union, where socialists thought they could determine in advance how many shoes, loaves of bread, and housing units should be produced in a given year.
How about new federal legislation that requires 25% of all people “of color” to receive a score of 550 on the math SAT (et cetera, ad nauseum)? Clinton, Obama and the rest of the Moron Party would love it. Probably some “Republicans” would too.
Sorry, I didn’t read your question close enough. Surely, there are states where the government school unions and State apparatus have intervened in home-schooling, doing their best to control it. We need to resist this mightily and roll back government control.
While home-schooling avoids some of the institutional environment it can’t avoid all, especially when it comes to meeting graduation requirements. The difference is where home-school can go beyond gov’t school such as history and classical languages. But, the product ends up in college and in the world and that is the state, so the student has to be prepared, unions and apparatus or not.
Only in some areas. I live in Oklahoma, which has more school districts than Texas. There may be some moonbat areas here, but even the most liberal teachers I have talked to are strongly for 2nd Amendment Rights, something that is one of my touchstones. I spent nearly 5 years in a local multicultural highschool, and had the kids I worked with convinced that attacking me would get them seriously injured or killed, and I would end up owning their house and car, at least. I told them that I was retired Air Force, and that I didn’t fight for fun.
We spend about 8K a year on students, average. Many of the schools in my district are 80% or more free or reduced-price lunch. Ninety percent of the school I work at is Hispanic, and every parent I’ve talked with wants their child to do well in school. Often they tell me that they don’t read or speak English. I tell them it doesn’t matter, as the skills their child needs to learn work in both languages. I also name books and poems that I like in Spanish that their child would profit from reading or hearing read to them, and that ANY reading they do will help. Newspapers, magazines, even box labels.
I strongly feel that one can complain, or one can do something about the problem.
Oh, btw, my kids are homeschooled, too. I live in the district I work in, and if it weren’t for transportation problems, mine would be going to the local schools, but I’m not trusting the district to get my kids safely to and from school on their bus system. It is the only thing about the district that really drives me mad.
It isn't hard to get parents interested in motivating their kids when the parents work their butts off for low pay because they don't have a good education. I send a lot of books home with the kids so they have something to read. In fact, I shop thrift-stores to make sure I have a lot of books to send home. It helps. That is one advantage "rich" households have over the poor. More stuff for the kids to look at and interact with. I've been poor.
colonisation by the middle classes of the best state schools
Did anyone else note the odd use of the word “colonisation”? It seems to me a loaded political word in the context of educational influence? How does one colonize a good school? Send a gunboat? Put chains on the teachers?
How odd.
And yet the article offers another explanation. It isnt the Rich that are changing the status quo....
An additional explanation of the sudden widening of the gap this year may be the influx of immigrants who do not have English as a first language, he suggested.
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