Posted on 02/22/2008 9:45:22 AM PST by bs9021
Man Bites Dog
by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 22, 2008
Believe it or not, in the Dominion state, a Democratic governor is trying to cut education spending while Republicans in the state assembly fight those cuts. “In response to Governor Kaine’s proposal to address the $2 billion budget shortfall between fiscal years 2008 and 2010 by eliminating over $220 million in dedicated General Fund support for local school divisions, House Republican members of the conference committee on the state budget expressed deep concern over the negative impact on the Governor’s proposed cuts,” read a Valentine’s Day press release from Virginia State Delegate Jeff Frederick.
“The Governor’s cuts to education would mean over $12 million less funding going to the Prince William County school system,” said Frederick, a Republican. “With our local communities struggling to deal with budgets relying on property taxes, it is ill-advised and the Commonwealth can ill-afford to pull the carpet out from under our schools.”....
One would think that a putative conservative would want to identify with tax-paying parents rather than government-subsidized school officials. Thus, he might want to question not how the schools should be funded but whether such subsidies either from the state’s or the county’s taxpayers are worth it.
“In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts,” Ian Shapira reported in The Washington Post on February 19. “Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra.”
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
The author doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The House budget managed to not cut funding for public ed (as the Governor proposed) and did so without raising taxes (which the Governor supported) and raiding the Rainy Day Fund (which the Governor also supported).
What the House budget doesn’t do is fund millions of dollars for new projects (which the Governor proposed).
Not to mention Virginia is the Old Dominion.
And a Commonwealth. Not a state.
So “Accuracy in Academia” isn’t....
Apparently not.
I thought Gov Eyebrows cut school construction funding not operations. Did I get that wrong? I have not been paying as much attention this year since I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of my Dad’s death.
IMHO, cutting construction funding while leaving operating budgets intact is perfectly legitimate to do in tough economic times.
It’s a little hard to take someone seriously when he can’t get the details right....
The NEA and its allies continue their attacks on children. Centuries of experience in teaching children are thrown to the wind in favor of crap like the above which continues to leave generation after generation of young adults struggling to overcome the damage done to them by these idiotic teaching theories that are never test in laboratories before they are inflicted on children. If this was ever done with a drug the practitioners would go to jail. But these are professors of teachers “Art” and therefore not to be questioned.
All the modern scientific work on how the brain learns proves that the old adage “Repetition is the mother of all learning” is exactly correct. The neural pathways are built and strengthened by repeating a task. This “more creative ways” is fine after basic skills are mastered and not before. More gifted students can learn creative methods on their own and can be encouraged when they do. The average student is harmed by these methods.
So despite the fact that these teaching techniques are an obvious failure and the students continue to fail the NEA and the like continue to pursue these methods, harm students and the country and squander taxpayer dollars.
These students are the ones who will be our future doctors, engineers, scientists. Frightening, isn’t it?
I think you are correct. And you’re right that’s a little better than cutting operations budgets. But the way I understand it, he was also trying to fund his new Pre-K initiative.
Yes, he is still pushing that stupid pre-K program. That much I have paid attention to.
Somewhere, somehow, money exchanged hands on this piece of crap program.
This isn't an NEA issue, unfortunately it's worse - it's an issue of people choosing textbooks who believe the hype of the salespeople instead of going to experts.
Even if one thought about going to an expert on math education, where would you find one and how would you recognize one if they were pointed out to you.
From what I have read about education theory in the last fifteen years the field is full of charlatans, posers and con artist.
Whole Language and New Math are just two examples of what I mean.
For math, one goes to the faculty at Mason or VA Tech.
Whole Language is in the past for VA, at least as long as UVA is providing funding and coordinating Federal grants.
If a school wants to evaluate a book on the cheap, they ask the faculty who have recently obtained masters from those programs. What a county or district should NOT do, is ignore the input from their teachers and rely on book distributors and sellers for information about what the school needs.
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