Posted on 01/09/2007 8:12:11 AM PST by shrinkermd
...This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen...
...One reason for the prominence of the underpaid-teacher belief is that people often fail to account for the relatively low number of hours that teachers work. It seems obvious, but it is easily forgotten: teachers work only about nine months per year. During the summer they can either work at other jobs or use the time off...
The most recent data available indicate that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, adding up to 1,314 hours per year. Americans in normal 9-to-5 professions who take two weeks of vacation and another ten paid holidays per year put in 1,928 working hours. Doing the math, this means the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65,440.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Interesting. Somewhat related -- I was at an open forum on our local public schools, and a teacher explained that student began using calculators in third grade.
I stood up and explained that I thought this was not good, and that mastering basic math facts was essential, and that a calculator was going to undermine that. The teacher smiled and shook her head and said that I didn't understand the math curriculum.
So, another person stood up and agreed with me and said that calculators were a crutch and she opposed them. The teacher indulgently shook her head and said that this view was not commonly accepted.
A third person stood up and requested that the school re-examine it's policy on calculator use in the lower grades. The teacher threw up her hands and said "Look, we've beaten this calculator thing to death -- we need to move on!"
The reason I ask about the classical school is because a friend of mine and I are very much impressed with Veritas Academy, Doug Wilson's Logos School, and other schools of the same mold. We are currently homeschooling our older children using Veritas's Omnibus curriculum. We may one day wind up founding a Christian classical school.
No I didn't say that.
I have a friend who teaches drama at a public high school. She confirmed to me that there are many more SpecEd kids. She said they are automatically placed into her play production classes...even kids who cannot speak! She has to somehow find roles for these kids in the school plays. She said it's a huge challenge for everyone and lowers the standards enormously.
I know the concept of public schools in thos country weren't sold to parents in 1880 on the basis of good citizenship.
No one in his right mind would invest $50k blindly, unless that person has been habituated to following orders, or is going to school on his parents' dime. Only someone who's spent his entire life in school, never having made a significant life decision, would ever be that foolish. But most children spend their lives in tax-subsidized daycare, never having made a significant life-decision, which explains why so many make such foolish decisions.
Without scientists and engineers, our economy will be grinding to a halt.
It will?
Do we serve "the economy" or does "the economy" serve us?
Should "the economy" be the ultimate arbiter of a child's vocation? Who says so? By what authority? And if the economy should not be the ultimate arbiter of a chld's vocation in life, who should be?
I heard this mantra back when I was graduating high school in'80. Back then Japan was going to take over the world. Anyway, I know plenty of unemployed or underemployed engineers. Regardless, people are free to seek employment as they see fit. "Society" has no right to channel students into particular professions. The primary responsibility for determining one's vocation rests with the individual and his relationship with God.
We are graduating less and less engineers every year (but have plenty of Women's Studies majors!).
Which is pretty funny. But when it comes down to it, a Women's Studies major is only slightly less useful than any other college degree. Historically, college graduates have gone on to lead productive lives, despite years of schooling.
With less patents and inventions and innovations in our technological sectors,...
Are there less?
...Japan and China will be taking over our business.
Even if this were true, who cares? I don't want to work in an electronics manufacturing plant, do you? And it wouldn't matter to me as an employee if the auto manufacturing plant in Tennessee was owned by Ford or Toyota.
Japan, with half our population, has graduated double the number of engineers in recent years than we have.
There may be some relationship between the number of graduating scientists and engineers, but it's a loose one at best.
Seriously, why should I care? Are they going to take the lead in MP3 players? The only societal reason for concern regards national defense, and the gov't can always offer financial rewards to those who deliver the goods.
Interestingly, even in the sciences, degrees don't correspond with productivity. Neither Jobs, Gates or Dell graduated from college. They were too smart to waste their time there.
So all students need to get the big picture view of their choices, not just to blindly follow their hearts, as in some liberal theory.
To your own self, don't be true. I guess Shakespeare was wrong.
How many students can "follow their vocation in life", as you say?
Everyone. But this begs the question as to what is everyone's vocation. Drumroll please... Everyone's vocation is to become a saint. The purpose of life is to know, love and serve God in this life so that we can be happy forever with him in the next. A true education will help us to learn how to know, love and serve God in this world.
Our secondary vocation is to either serve as a religious or as a mother or father.
Our third most important vocation is to serve as a friend to others.
Our fourth most important vocation is to find employment. But even this vocation must be centered on God. A person must humbly seek to determine his God-given gifts and talents, and how he can best apply them in life for the benefit of himself, his family, and society.
So you can see that modern schooling only attempts to serve the fourth most important vocation in life. But modern schooling fails even here, because the methodology of modern schooling (compulsion, lack of respect for the individual, lack of individual responsibility, etc.) serves to alienate students from themselves. Hence the teenage angst, societal alienation and self-loathing that is almost universally experienced by those children confined in gov't schools.
Confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, no privacy. That's what school is really about, Charlie Brown.
The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher
The Underground History of American Education
What is their vocation? How many know exactly what it is they want to do when they're in high school?
They can't determine even their "fourth vocation" because they've been alienated from themselves.
Life in the U.S. is full of choices and opportunities.
This is an argument for the broad classical Christian Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) over modern specialization.
I think you have tunnel vision and expect students to have it as well.
Life is a lifelong process, which is why students should learn broad thinking and communication skills (the Trivium) over specialized and compartmentalized subjects (the modern method).
And most do - because of school counselors and teachers having it as well. Their time in the real world and knowledge of our economy and how the various majors and resulting jobs interplay in it is been limited.
Get them out of school and get them working. Work tends to focus the mind.
This is how they're trained. They're supposed to tell the parent that he's the only one objecting. No one told this teacher that this method only works in one-on-one situations.
The quote came from here, but unknown his source. I stumbled across it preparing a response in a local paper after being flamed by lefties when I dared say our schools are 'dumbed-down socialist indoctrination centers.':
A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF COLLECTIVISM
by
Eric Samuelson
Attorney At Law
(October 1997)
email: jeneric@concentric.net
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