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Any student caught cheating should have their name announced/posted in a prominent location so all of their classmates know who the cheaters are.

We're not allowed to do that. Federal law dictates that a student's "educational records" are private, and cannot be shared without written consent from the student. See

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html

The US already leads the world (as in, top 2-3 countries) on public spending per capita, in both education and healthcare. Source of the first, source on the second. Money isn't the problem, it's the state of the system overall, that is the problem.

Tuitions went up enormously when the law was changed to allow loans not forgiven by bankruptcy.

Here's a chart of historical tuitions (inflation-adjusted). The change in student loan bankruptcy law was in 2005.

• From 1994-95 to 2004-05, the average tuition rose from $13,069 to $17,030. An increase of 30.3%, or an annual average of 2.68%.
• From 2004-05 to 2014-15, the average tuition rose from $17,030 to $21,728. An increase ot 27.6%, or an annual average of 2.47%.
• Even if you remove the transition years (2004-05 and 2005-06), the increase was 2.34% per year before 2005, 1.93% per year after 2005.

So contrary to your claim, the rate at which tuitions were climbing actually slowed down after it was made virtually impossible to discharge student loan debt via bankruptcy.

It was the widespread availability of loans and grants, starting way back after WWII with the GI Bill, which led to high tuitions. The schools simply sopped up that extra money by increasing their tuition. The change to bankruptcy law, while a cute theory, had nothing to do with it, according to numerical evidence.

This is a great book about understanding the scientific method. It has allowed me to invent many things over the years. Here are some starter links:
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED3938...
http://scientificmethod.com/b_...
https://books.google.com/books...

To get a real feel for the sudden growth since 2000, note that the first two data points span a couple of decades. The rest of the points are year by year:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

The article says an 812% increase since 1978. They could have easily cut down the start point to the year 2000 and still produced a startling, and more meaningful result.

It is true that costs are up, but not as much as advertised. This chart shows that in the last 40 years, tuition, fees, room, and board totals have roughly doubled, accounting for inflation. That's not insignificant, but it also doesn't explain the explosion of student loans.

Today, it's more fashionable to get student loans, and less fashionable to work one's way through college. It's also more fashionable to demand an education at "big name" schools, which are very expensive. Smaller, high-quality schools such as University of Houston are much less pricey.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d...

Short version: In constant dollars, tuition has doubled since your bottle collecting days.

In America, about 20% of public schools require uniforms. This is an increase from around 12% in the 1999-2000 school year. Uniforms are more common in low income areas where classroom control and gangs are bigger problems.

Among those laws was the 1979 Department of Education Organization Act that established that entity.

Yep. As I said: a mission creep. Government looking, what else it can do...

The rules are simple. If (what seems like) a problem:

• does not endanger the nation's very survival;
• can be solved by private entities — commercial or charitable;

then the government must not touch it.

For the government to violate this principle is tyranny — taxpayer's money is confiscated to pay for things, he would not have paid for voluntarily.

And, like all other tyrannies, it is also inefficient. Your own example of public education is an ongoing disaster: per-pupil costs of public schools have quadrupled since the 1960-ies (inflation-adjusted), but 70% of the 8th-graders still can not be said to be "proficient" in reading.

Space-exploration is fascinating — leave it to Musk, Bezos, and Branson. They spend their own monies on it...

"The law was written with the assumption that we properly fund education in a country where we've been cutting that funding for 40 years."

That claim is so totally absurd that I'm not even going to ask you to cite whatever bullshit source you used as a basis for that statement.

In constant dollar terms, total spending on education in the USA (fed + state + local) has increased from $356 billion in 1976 to over $938 billion in 2016.

http://www.usgovernmentspendin...

Another source with line charts in nominal $$$ shows the same trend:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/...

The US federal budget for prisons is less than $10 billion while the budget for entitlements is 2.33 trillion, basically prisons are rounding error in the kind of thing that they'd like to cut.

But hey, you pulled some numbers out of your backside - totally convincing!

Except it wasn't about those numbers in the way you portray it.

The point being made, was that the gun-rights activists would choose to cut 1 million from welfare, but gladly endorse 100 million in prisons. Not to make any real point of scale. And this is born out in the analysis of Trumperton's budget. Look at his spending priorities.

These are the people who vote for 3-strikes laws, who vote for 10-20-life. Who scream for marijuana criminalization. Who freaked out over civil-unions so badly they guaranteed same-sex marriage.

But anyway, looking at the numbers, the federal government has about 10% of the nation's prisoners, so you're ignoring the other 90%.

but hey, look at the spending increases, look what we're getting

You do realize that those are Evangelical/social conservatives, not pro-business/small government conservatives, right? They don't even overlap that much.

Too bad for the ones who made the choice of their tent-mates then.

Hyperbolic fear-mongering at its most absurd. "Less government intrusion" is literally a cornerstone of their political philosophy, but in your mind that makes them fascists.

Nope, it makes them HYPOCRITES. Was that hard for you to grasp?

That you fail to grasp it, well, that's part of the hypocrisy. You'll never deal with it.

USA health costs per person is about $8000 whereas that bastion of capitalist competition, Sweden, is $4000 (you can check it out if you know how to use this thing called the internet).

Citation needed. The US does not have "Single Payer" halthcare — yet. Nor do we have a properly free market for it either — things were pretty bad and then became even worse with Obamacare.

But in primary education the market is cornered by the monopoly called Department of Education. And, according to their own figures (see, how citations are done with thing called "HTML"?), since 1950-ies the per-pupil costs of public school education quadrupled : from $3k to $13k (inflation-adjusted). Has the quality gone up? No, most unlikely — only 30% of the nation's 8th-graders, for example, are deemed "proficient" in reading .

you can check it out if you know how to use this thing called the internet

I do not. You make a claim, you cite supporting evidence.

So is your argument that Women should not be able to choose their degree program and should be forced into STEM?

In 1977, the median income for a 30-year-old man was about $10,000, or $41,500 adjusted for inflation [1]. Today, the median income for a 30-year-old man is about $35,000 [1]. The median home sale price in 1977 was about $49,000, or $203,000 inflation-adjusted [2]. The median home sale price today is about $325,000 [2]. In 1977, a 4-year college degree at an in-state, public institution cost less than $4,000, or about $16,000 inflation-adjusted for tuition and fees [3]. Today, that's $38,600.

These are only a few rough indicators, but the point is this: a millennial or gen-xer today makes 84% in real terms of what his counterpart did in 1977; his education costs more than twice as much and has gone from something he could pay for completely with a summer job to more than a full year's salary; the house he's looking at has gone from 4 years' salary to nearly 10 years', and a 20% down payment has gone from about 3 months' salary to about two years'.

These, for example, are reasons that millennials have it tougher than previous generations.

[1] https://cps.ipums.org/cps/
[2] https://www.census.gov/const/u...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d...
[4] http://www.collegedata.com/cs/...

Quick question: Doesn't this violate the government regulations regarding destruction of records?

https://www.justice.gov/usam/c...
and:
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen...

After all, if Trump’s tweets are now presidential records (and, by law, they are), wouldn't these also be included under those rules?

"Federal records may not be destroyed-except in accordance with the procedures described in Chapter 33 of Title 44, United States Code. These procedures allow for records destruction only under the authority of a records disposition schedule approved by the Archivist of the United States. NARA issues a General Records Schedule (GRS) that gives record descriptions of records that are common to most Federal agencies and authorizes record disposals for temporary records."

Yes, yes, I know, "But Hillary Hillary Hillary....", right, I get it, but if her doing it was illegal (and I think it was), how can this be legal?

Honestly, from what I see the problem is societal. The whole society in the US disdains engineers and scientists and instead focuses on performers and athletes. It's not important to study "maths", and it's much better to study "people skills". If you live here you might not notice this, like a fish doesn't notice water.

In the US the most popular BS degrees are: business, healthcare, social studies, psychology, education (source: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/... ). Engineering is on the distant 8-th place, number of math graduates has actually decreased since 70-s ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d... ).

It hits you like a punch in the face if you visit China or (to lesser degree now) Japan. They actually show state-sponsored motivational ads on TVs with engineers building rockets, dams and automobiles! And the whole attitude towards humanities (history, language, literature) is different - it's seen as an occupation for truly interested people rather than a checkbox "higher education" item on job applications.

I've studied the US public schools (to see if I ever want to educate my children here) and its... adequate. If you live in a good location then the public schools offer enough flexibility for motivated students to succeed. But the problem is that the parents are not really motivated themselves and this rubs off on their children.

Honestly, from what I see the problem is societal. The whole society in the US disdains engineers and scientists and instead focuses on performers and athletes. It's not important to study "maths", and it's much better to study "people skills". If you live here you might not notice this, like a fish doesn't notice water.

In the US the most popular BS degrees are: business, healthcare, social studies, psychology, education (source: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/... ). Engineering is on the distant 8-th place, number of math graduates has actually decreased since 70-s ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d... ).

It hits you like a punch in the face if you visit China or (to lesser degree now) Japan. They actually show state-sponsored motivational ads on TVs with engineers building rockets, dams and automobiles! And the whole attitude towards humanities (history, language, literature) is different - it's seen as an occupation for truly interested people rather than a checkbox "higher education" item on job applications.

I've studied the US public schools (to see if I ever want to educate my children here) and its... adequate. If you live in a good location then the public schools offer enough flexibility for motivated students to succeed. But the problem is that the parents are not really motivated themselves and this rubs off on their children.

I'm going to ignore everything you said except for the one question that I care about: evidence on the effect of anti-discrimination laws. On that you made the bizarre claim

You have already cited the evidence yourself, you just refuse to see it.

Obviously you didn't read the links I cited or you would never have said that. (Even the graph you linked to yourself shows the opposite of what you claimed it shows: that the gap between black and white students has narrowed dramatically.) Therefore I'll simply quote the relevant portion from one of those links to save you the trouble of having to click on it. This is the section about racial barriers. It also has sections on gender, disability, and age.

Dropout rate of African American students (age 16 to 24) declined from 20.5 percent in 1976 to 13.0 percent in 1996. [Dropout Rates in the United States: 1996, table A23, page 58.]

High school graduation rates among African Americans have increased substantially in the past 20 years and drawn much closer to the high school graduation rate of whites. [Bureau of the Census, Educational Attainment in the United States: March 1997 (unpublished), table A-2, page A-9.]

In 1990, 66.2 percent of African Americans age 25 and over had completed high school. In 1997, 74.9 percent of African Americans age 25 and over had completed high school. [Ibid.]

Overall student participation in advanced placement (AP) classes has increased dramatically since 1982, rising from 140,000 to 400,000 in 1997 high school graduates. Especially impressive is the growth in participation of minority students. In 1997, the percent of AP candidates who were minority students was 29 percent, compared to 11 percent in 1982. [Secretary Richard Riley: Second Annual State of American Education Address, February 1, 1995; and News from the College Board, August 26, 1997, page 7.]

Student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has increased in science, math, and reading, recovering most of the ground lost in the 1970s. The gap in performance between white and African American students has narrowed substantially since the 1970s. [NAEP 1996 Trends in Academic Progress, pages V, XIV, and XV.]

Minority participation on the Scholastic Assessment Test (formerly the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT) has increased. In 1998, minority students were 33 percent of all graduating seniors who took the SAT, compared to 23 percent in 1988. [News from the College Board, September 20, 1988, and September 1, 1998.]

Math and verbal SAT scores increased across almost all race/ethnic groups from 1987 to 1998. For example, the average SAT score of Asian American students increased 19 points on the verbal section and 21 points on the mathematics section. The average score for American Indian students increased 9 points on the verbal section and 20 points on the mathematics section. The average score for African American students increased 6 points on the verbal section and 15 points on the mathematics section. All of these increases exceeded those achieved by white students. [News from The College Board, August 26, 1997; and 1998 College-Bound Seniors, National Report.]

Total minority enrollment at colleges and universities increased 61 percent between fall 1986 and fall 1996. [Enrollment in Higher Education: Fall 1986 Through Fall 1994, table 2, page 5; and unpublished data.]

Since 1990, the number of Latino students enrolled in higher education increased by 47 percent; the number of African American students increased by 20 percent; and the number of American Indian students increased by 30 percent. [Ibid.]

"Is there another economic explanation that could account for the difference between then and now?"

Of course. As government subsidies for higher education (Pell grants, subsidized and readily available student loans) increase, so too do tuitions. They'd be stupid not to suck up all that easy money. It's not simple supply and demand, as it's not anywhere close to a free market.

Just wait (probably until after the next administration) until "free" college becomes the norm, people with student loans are expected even less to keep their commitment to pay them off, and we go even further down the path toward a lack of any personal responsibility. For a reality check, see what the government says in headlines - "Grants and scholarships are free money." Obviously written by someone with a liberal arts degree and no understanding of economics, or the true costs associated with "free." If higher ed is "free", expect even more degreed programs in underwater basket weaving.

I truly feel sorry for millennials - things are going to be hard. People voted themselves a dole long ago (accelerating around the 2nd Roosevelt), and it was the following generation which got the benefit - with the bill left to generations beyond them. And that's continuing. It sucks to be you, but thanks for funding the bankrupt Social Security system for me, which was robbed to pay for other welfare programs, leaving a big paper IOU.

The sad state of affairs is that millenials deserve it. Instead of waking up to reality and becoming fiscally responsible, what I see is younger generations expecting even more government subsidies, creating an even larger problem to kick down the road. You and your children will reap what you sow.

Big education gets paid either way...

They sure do. The Department of Education's budget (the appropriation budget is the relevant one) has grown more than six times its budget since 1980. From $14 billion in 1980 ($41 billion in 2016 dollars) to $87 billion in 2016. Those numbers exclude the ridiculous $98 billion that was added by the Recovery Act in 2009, but, in fairness, the budget for that year dropped by $30 billion (so a net gain of $68 billion).

So, yes, Big Education keeps on growing. Clearly the solution here is to keep giving it more money because we have to think of the children. "Educating" idiotic children into becoming idiotic teachers that now perpetuate the problem. All of the people that I am ware of from my graduating year that went on to become teachers were among the worst students.

I don't think college is primarily to blame...

It definitely depends on the college. If it is consistently growing, then it is most likely a major part of the blame. It's the schools that are not significantly growing that are able to maintain standards. The ones that grow have to recruit less-and-less appropriate students and faculty.

After all, looking back at primary and secondary education, they are trying to push Common Core onto the youth's of America with an inspiring, albeit scary vigor. It is people at the top that have established these new and bizarre constructs as the "standards" that will bring those poor kids into the future. Good luck to those with absent-minded parents.

I have been saying consistently that these laws are wrong

You've been asserting that they're wrong, and I've been asking you to justify that they're wrong, and you've been stubbornly refusing to do that in any objective way. Instead you just keep falling back on yet more unjustified assertions. Here was your first attempt:

I want to live in a peaceful, prosperous society in which everybody has equal rights and that doesn't degenerate into tyranny.

So I asked you for evidence that anti-discrimination laws make society less peaceful, or less prosperous, or causes them to degenerate into tyranny. I've asked you this repeatedly. You've repeatedly declined to offer any. You seem to take it for granted that they do, yet you're totally unable to point to concrete evidence to back up the claim. These are not questions for philosophical debate. They're factual questions to be answered through data. Do anti-discrimination laws increase the level of violence, decrease the level of prosperity, etc.? Any claims that aren't based on concrete data are worthless.

Then you tried to equate anti-discrimination laws with Nazism, thus demonstrating that you've never heard of Godwin's Law. But when I pointed out this was ridiculous, you responded with an even wilder absurdity:

Second, we're not talking about "anyone", we're talking about the same movement, the progressive movement. The progressive movement has consistently advocated categorizing people by race and make racial distinctions in government policies for more than a century.

So you just equated all progressives with Nazis. Double Godwin! But aside from that, you've just completely rewritten history. Laws have made distinctions based on race for far more than a century. That isn't something the progressive movement invented, it's one of the main evils the progressive movement fought against. Discrimination existed on a massive scale through large parts of the U.S. That's what the Civil Rights Act tried to eliminate. And contrary to your claim that "anti-discrimination laws don't work", it was actually very effective.

But no. Enforcing anti-discrimination laws involves checking to see if people are discriminating. And to check, you need to collect data. And collecting data about race is evil! Therefore, those laws are evil, and we should go back to the pre-Nazi era when black people were forbidden to live in white neighborhoods, attend white schools, use the same restrooms as white people, or sit in the front of the bus. They had so much more freedom back then, before those evil progressives started sending them off to concentration camps.

"The most critical learning resources that teachers need are often exercise books, pen and paper, but incentives built into the process steer educators to request and receive Google hardware, rather than humble classroom staples,"

The U.S. is near the top in education spending per student among OECD countries (change Perspectives to "primary to non-tertiary" to eliminate college costs). Only Austria, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg spend more. If a U.S. teacher doesn't have enough money for "humble classroom staples" like exercise books, and pen and paper, it is not Google's fault.

About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.

I'm convinced the administrators massage the numbers to cover their tracks in the official budgets. You can see a side-effect of this in the published stats. According to ED, the salaries of teachers, student support, and instructional staff is $4271, $388, and $291 per student respectively - total $4950. The benefits these teachers resceive is $1596, $142, and $102 per student - $1840 total.

The student to teacher ratio has been about 16:1 since 2000. So according to these ED stats, the average teacher salary is $80,000/yr, and benefits just under $30k/yr. Yet ED lists the average teacher salary as just $56,383. These numbers don't match up, not by a long shot. My hunch is administrators have shifted some of their salaries into the teacher salary figures to hide just how big a slice of the pie they're taking.

I suspect what's going on is a scam of epic proportions. Every time the education budget is cut, instead of applying the cuts to the least important programs and staff like any good business, the administrators apply the cuts to the most essential items like exercise books, pen and paper. They tell the teachers there's not enough money in the budget, and the teachers go into a frenzy telling the public we're not spending enough on education. When the education budget is increased, the administrators spend a few dollars per student to restore the textbooks, pen and paper, and siphon off most of the increase for themselves. How else can you explain teachers not having money for exercise books, pen and paper, when we spend more on education per student than all but 4 other countries on Earth?

Anyhow, Google is donating money - giving it for free. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah it would've been great if the donation didn't have restrictions on how the money was to be used. But from the school's perspective, a donation with restrictions is still better than no donation at all.

"The most critical learning resources that teachers need are often exercise books, pen and paper, but incentives built into the process steer educators to request and receive Google hardware, rather than humble classroom staples,"

The U.S. is near the top in education spending per student among OECD countries (change Perspectives to "primary to non-tertiary" to eliminate college costs). Only Austria, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg spend more. If a U.S. teacher doesn't have enough money for "humble classroom staples" like exercise books, and pen and paper, it is not Google's fault.

About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.

I'm convinced the administrators massage the numbers to cover their tracks in the official budgets. You can see a side-effect of this in the published stats. According to ED, the salaries of teachers, student support, and instructional staff is $4271, $388, and $291 per student respectively - total $4950. The benefits these teachers resceive is $1596, $142, and $102 per student - $1840 total.

The student to teacher ratio has been about 16:1 since 2000. So according to these ED stats, the average teacher salary is $80,000/yr, and benefits just under $30k/yr. Yet ED lists the average teacher salary as just $56,383. These numbers don't match up, not by a long shot. My hunch is administrators have shifted some of their salaries into the teacher salary figures to hide just how big a slice of the pie they're taking.

I suspect what's going on is a scam of epic proportions. Every time the education budget is cut, instead of applying the cuts to the least important programs and staff like any good business, the administrators apply the cuts to the most essential items like exercise books, pen and paper. They tell the teachers there's not enough money in the budget, and the teachers go into a frenzy telling the public we're not spending enough on education. When the education budget is increased, the administrators spend a few dollars per student to restore the textbooks, pen and paper, and siphon off most of the increase for themselves. How else can you explain teachers not having money for exercise books, pen and paper, when we spend more on education per student than all but 4 other countries on Earth?

Anyhow, Google is donating money - giving it for free. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah it would've been great if the donation didn't have restrictions on how the money was to be used. But from the school's perspective, a donation with restrictions is still better than no donation at all.

"The most critical learning resources that teachers need are often exercise books, pen and paper, but incentives built into the process steer educators to request and receive Google hardware, rather than humble classroom staples,"

The U.S. is near the top in education spending per student among OECD countries (change Perspectives to "primary to non-tertiary" to eliminate college costs). Only Austria, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg spend more. If a U.S. teacher doesn't have enough money for "humble classroom staples" like exercise books, and pen and paper, it is not Google's fault.

About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.

I'm convinced the administrators massage the numbers to cover their tracks in the official budgets. You can see a side-effect of this in the published stats. According to ED, the salaries of teachers, student support, and instructional staff is $4271, $388, and $291 per student respectively - total $4950. The benefits these teachers resceive is $1596, $142, and $102 per student - $1840 total.

The student to teacher ratio has been about 16:1 since 2000. So according to these ED stats, the average teacher salary is $80,000/yr, and benefits just under $30k/yr. Yet ED lists the average teacher salary as just $56,383. These numbers don't match up, not by a long shot. My hunch is administrators have shifted some of their salaries into the teacher salary figures to hide just how big a slice of the pie they're taking.

I suspect what's going on is a scam of epic proportions. Every time the education budget is cut, instead of applying the cuts to the least important programs and staff like any good business, the administrators apply the cuts to the most essential items like exercise books, pen and paper. They tell the teachers there's not enough money in the budget, and the teachers go into a frenzy telling the public we're not spending enough on education. When the education budget is increased, the administrators spend a few dollars per student to restore the textbooks, pen and paper, and siphon off most of the increase for themselves. How else can you explain teachers not having money for exercise books, pen and paper, when we spend more on education per student than all but 4 other countries on Earth?

Anyhow, Google is donating money - giving it for free. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah it would've been great if the donation didn't have restrictions on how the money was to be used. But from the school's perspective, a donation with restrictions is still better than no donation at all.

Since you don't use the police ...

Domestic law-enforcement is a tiny fraction of tax expenditures. So tiny, bringing it up is a misnomer. Even public schools cost more ($620 billion ) than police in the US (under $200 billion) — and parents still need to add hundreds of dollars on top of it. Which about matches the 640 billion spent collectively on Medicare.

But schools aren't the highest expenditure either — welfare spending exceeds $1 trillion every year (that's just the Federal government spending, BTW), for example, which is 10 times the spending on police by both Federal and local governments.

Military, the usual lighting rod of Leftists, is expensive too, but those expenditures (along with law enforcement) are explicitly in the government's care according to the Constitution. Nothing else is...

To even bring up "police" in any tax-discussion is dishonest. One can always tell a Statist by it.

But the US started from a much higher level. US literacy rates for example has 10% illiterate at 1900, while the Russian literacy rate at 1917 is 45% in 1917. That's not a small difference.

It's actually hard to underestimate the general level of poverty, lack of education, and general state of affairs for the Russian population in Tsarist Russia. The US started off much better off so you'd expect it to come out ahead.

If true, then the school principals and techies in the affected school-districts should be fired.

Whoever approved the bills for payments didn't do their job. They should've asked the question: why is my school billed at a higher rate, than I'm paying at home?

The term you want is accountants, because they're the ones who handle the money side of things.

School principals, while they do handle some finances are likely concerned for the school, and IT services are most often district-wide, so not a school-based problem.

And I wouldn't expect any accountant to relate the price for a whole school district's telecom to their home price, those are not related. It'd be better to compare to other school districts.

But they didn't, because it is not their money and their captive "customers" have no other choice anyway... No wonder, the per-pupil costs of public schools quadrupled since 1960-ies — with no improvement in quality to show for it...

If you're concerned about the due diligence of your local school system, go right ahead, but those costs are often quite misleading. For example, one expensive factor is the provision of services to the disabled, who in prior years would be an expense on another part of society.

Instead of charging the lowest available price, "AT&T charged the school districts prices for telephone service that were magnitudes higher than many other customers in Florida," the FCC said.

If true, then the school principals and techies in the affected school-districts should be fired.

Whoever approved the bills for payments didn't do their job. They should've asked the question: why is my school billed at a higher rate, than I'm paying at home? But they didn't, because it is not their money and their captive "customers" have no other choice anyway... No wonder, the per-pupil costs of public schools quadrupled since 1960-ies — with no improvement in quality to show for it...

That said, $170K seems like small potatoes. It is the sort of money, AT&T may choose to pay (without admitting guilt) just to save money on lawyers. FCC may have a case, or they may be engaged in malicious prosecution — chances are good, we'll never know.

abolishing everything = idiotic

Why? What does the NSA actually do that makes the least difference to you on a daily basis... Other than waste your taxpayer dollars to strip you of any pretense of privacy, of course?

Even the Department of Education - Don't mistake them for having anything to do with actual "education": the Department does not: establish schools and colleges; develop curricula; set requirements for enrollment and graduation; determine state education standards; or develop or implement testing to measure whether states are meeting their education standards. They do little more than enforce discriminatory racial quotas by deciding who to throw our tax dollars at.

That is very, very broken logic and shows the sickness that lies in the government.

You are very right. It is a sickness, and it shows, how outright tyranny can sip in, when the government is allowed to do as much as it currently is in the Western world.

We had the early warnings — things, the government could not force you to do straight, it forced you to do by attaching strings to the tax-based wealth-redistribution:

• States were forced to lower speed-limits and otherwise alter their own laws on pain of losing Federal highway funds. What a way to sidestep the 10th Amendment!
• Male students applying for financial aid were forced to register with Selective Service.
• Retirees applying for Social Security where forced to also switch to Medicaire — decades before the infamous "If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance" lie.

The ultimate manifestation of this would be 100% taxation with the government kindly allowing you to pay less in exchange for obedience.

Can also take the approach into criminal justice system — saving billions in law enforcement costs — by making it illegal to live above, say, 20 years of age. The government would, of course, grant annual waivers to the well-behaved — those, who "maintain eligibility"... Scaremongering? You bet — but this idea is the same in principle with the current one: tax everyone, but spend the taxes only on the obedient.

I tried to digest the PIACC data. What a hot mess. Here's one page that initially seemed promising:

Overall Results — Millennials

This covers 2012. I had to look elsewhere for descriptive text around the performance levels (Description of PIAAC literacy discrete achievement levels).

Table 1 excludes a row for the United States, but includes asterisks for whether each value for "Significantly different (p < .05) from United States". (If there was a Level 6 it would be this: ability to glean primary information from texts where conflicting information fills all the tables.)

Not once is the question of language addressed. Here is what I presume: "Subjects are tested in their official language of choice." How hard was that to blurt out? And what about subjects whose preschool home environment was "none of the above"?

This is all gussied up to mobilise action as a future employment catastrophe, yet it's not at all clear that future America has any desire to employ the bottom 20% of its millennial generation. Their contribution to America's employment landscape might be effectively zilch.

By now I'm firmly of the opinion that these numbers have been sifted, folded, and mutilated to sell something. What might that be? Then I look up and see this URL has the domain name ets.org. Bingo!

Still, it's hard to believe how much of the millennial generation in Canada falls below level 3. 40% in the 2012 survey. (I trust this number more because we don't have the Spanish problem—not yet an official language in America, so probably not tested).

Then I look at the requirements for level 3 and see that this is well above merely "getting the news". Level 2 is more than sufficient for reading the first two paragraphs of what generally qualifies as journalism these days. Level 3 requires elementary synthesis from two or more sources at the same time. Ah yes, I can see how the mayfly generation might struggle with this.

You can tell from any election cycle that half the population can't successfully meld two quantitative ideas (e.g. spend more here, spend less there). I recall a recent John Oliver-esque clip where Americans on the street professed to want "smaller government" but then you go through a list of entitlement programs and one by one the answer is "don't you dare cut that one!" Many of these people appear adequately employed. Small government. Mmmmm, donut! Program cuts. Ugh, no donut!

Sorry, rationality, Americans are just not that into you.

Here's the requirements for level 5:

At this level, tasks may require the respondent to search for and integrate information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Application and evaluation of logical and conceptual models of ideas may be required to accomplish tasks. Evaluating reliability of evidentiary sources and selecting key information is frequently a requirement. Tasks often require respondents to be aware of subtle, rhetorical cues and to make high-level inferences or use specialized background knowledge.

Did spotting ets.org in the source text URL immediately set off a blinking radiation hazard light. Full marks.

Still no mention of the language question. Time to pull out the big guns. Use the FAQ Luke. (After all, why on earth would language status be up-front information in a survey on reading proficiency?)

Frequently Asked Questions

6. Why does PIAAC assess literacy only in English?

PIAAC assesses adults in the official language or languages of each participating country. Based on a 1988 congressional mandate and the 1991 Nati

I tried to digest the PIACC data. What a hot mess. Here's one page that initially seemed promising:

Overall Results — Millennials

This covers 2012. I had to look elsewhere for descriptive text around the performance levels (Description of PIAAC literacy discrete achievement levels).

Table 1 excludes a row for the United States, but includes asterisks for whether each value for "Significantly different (p < .05) from United States". (If there was a Level 6 it would be this: ability to glean primary information from texts where conflicting information fills all the tables.)

Not once is the question of language addressed. Here is what I presume: "Subjects are tested in their official language of choice." How hard was that to blurt out? And what about subjects whose preschool home environment was "none of the above"?

This is all gussied up to mobilise action as a future employment catastrophe, yet it's not at all clear that future America has any desire to employ the bottom 20% of its millennial generation. Their contribution to America's employment landscape might be effectively zilch.

By now I'm firmly of the opinion that these numbers have been sifted, folded, and mutilated to sell something. What might that be? Then I look up and see this URL has the domain name ets.org. Bingo!

Still, it's hard to believe how much of the millennial generation in Canada falls below level 3. 40% in the 2012 survey. (I trust this number more because we don't have the Spanish problem—not yet an official language in America, so probably not tested).

Then I look at the requirements for level 3 and see that this is well above merely "getting the news". Level 2 is more than sufficient for reading the first two paragraphs of what generally qualifies as journalism these days. Level 3 requires elementary synthesis from two or more sources at the same time. Ah yes, I can see how the mayfly generation might struggle with this.

You can tell from any election cycle that half the population can't successfully meld two quantitative ideas (e.g. spend more here, spend less there). I recall a recent John Oliver-esque clip where Americans on the street professed to want "smaller government" but then you go through a list of entitlement programs and one by one the answer is "don't you dare cut that one!" Many of these people appear adequately employed. Small government. Mmmmm, donut! Program cuts. Ugh, no donut!

Sorry, rationality, Americans are just not that into you.

Here's the requirements for level 5:

At this level, tasks may require the respondent to search for and integrate information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Application and evaluation of logical and conceptual models of ideas may be required to accomplish tasks. Evaluating reliability of evidentiary sources and selecting key information is frequently a requirement. Tasks often require respondents to be aware of subtle, rhetorical cues and to make high-level inferences or use specialized background knowledge.

Did spotting ets.org in the source text URL immediately set off a blinking radiation hazard light. Full marks.

Still no mention of the language question. Time to pull out the big guns. Use the FAQ Luke. (After all, why on earth would language status be up-front information in a survey on reading proficiency?)

Frequently Asked Questions

6. Why does PIAAC assess literacy only in English?

PIAAC assesses adults in the official language or languages of each participating country. Based on a 1988 congressional mandate and the 1991 Nati

"Literacy rates have been rather high for well over a century in the US, particularly for white americans. Literacy in the 1950s was well above 90%. The percentage of the population that couldn't read a newspaper in the US hasn't been over 10% since before 1910." This is incorrect and does not include functionally illiterate. https://www.google.com/search?... How many people are illiterate in the US? According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read. The U.S. Illiteracy Rate Hasn't Changed In 10 Years www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html What percent of American adults are functionally illiterate? Over 60% of adults in the US prison system read at or below the fourth grade level. 85% of US juvenile inmates are functionally illiterate. 43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy lived below the poverty line, as opposed to 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy. Functional illiteracy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy Search for: What percent of American adults are functionally illiterate? What is the definition of illiteracy? What is the average reading level of adults in the US? The 15% figure for full literacy, equivalent to a university undergraduate level, is consistent with the notion that the "average" American reads at a 7th or 8th grade level which is also consistent with recommendations, guidelines, and norms of readability for medication directions, product information, and popular ... Literacy in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

We never had good news before so what is the difference?

Sure we have. We've also had crappy news before. It's trivial to point out examples of news done well over the last 100 years. It's even easier to point of examples of it being done badly.

Sure back in the 1950-1990 we had our "trusted" news on TV. However they tried to cover a Whole days of activity around the world in 1 hour. The first half covering Local and State News, the second half World and National News. So much of the coverage didn't spend more than a few minutes on the topic.

That's was the state of affairs basically until around the the late 1980s to early 1990s for television news. The first big change was CNN and the 24 hour news cycle. The second was the internet (specifically the web) in the 1990s.

The News Papers had much more depth to them. However during newspapers popularity there was a much lower literacy rate, so a good portion of the population couldn't fully read them, and just read what they could. So the headlines. Which is much shorter than a Twitter post.

Literacy rates have been rather high for well over a century in the US, particularly for white americans. Literacy in the 1950s was well above 90%. The percentage of the population that couldn't read a newspaper in the US hasn't been over 10% since before 1910.

While it may because of more polarization, but it is also because people are getting exposed to different ideas thus need to make their decisions from more data.

The evidence seems to show people doing exactly the opposite. People are now able to seek out niche news sources that support their already existing world view and disregarding contrary view points regardless of their validity.

The Media liked JFK, so his indiscretions were ignored. The Media didn't like Nixon so he was kicked out of office.

Must be nice to have such a simplistic world view. Nixon getting kicked out of office had a LOT more to it than whether "The Media" liked him or not. Saying something like that is the sort of idiotic sound bite we get from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. Sounds good to people who want it to be true even though it's complete nonsense in reality.

But where is the empirical evidence that these methods actually work?

BTW there is an attempt by the US Department of Education to try to collect evidence-based educational best practices in the What Works Clearinghousa.

Quality of education has not spiraled down. the NAEP "the nations report card" results show that we have basically the same or increased math and reading test scores relative to 1971.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo...

Though TFA talks about a national competition, last year the American team has won the international Math Olympiad. For the first time in 21 years too.

Maybe, Bush's hated ideas of accountability for schools and teachers weren't entirely bad? Neah, can't be...

True, but if your goal is to change where the money goes, that isn't the place to start... :)

The per-pupil costs of public schools has quadrupled since the 1960-ies (inflation-adjusted), while the education quality remains the target of well-deserved mockery.

What competing service-provider could possibly afford to quadruple their prices without any observable improvement in quality?

The solution is to end the monopoly of the public school system (and the teachers' unions, that control their staff)...

For ages and generations an artist (writer, composer, singer, dancer, painter, what have you) had to be either independently wealthy or have a rich sponsor to create.

Cheap replication (coupled with strong copyrights and intellectual property laws) have helped, but it still requires a strong business acumen in addition to artistic talent for an artist to prosper.

If, indeed, computers and robots take up more of the drudgery in the next industrial revolution, the creative jobs may proliferate... And I don't mean simply people majoring in Arts, who then "sell out" to earn more — the actual artists. People, who want to be musicians today, but are (mediocre) programmers instead, because music does not pay... Maybe, it will?

Supposedly, AIs will be able to create art too, but I suspect, people will eventually treat such creations — deservingly or not — the way art-reproductions are treated today.

(To spoil the impression this post may have created in your mind, I'll point out, that this all may happen just as the people pushed to STEM by government enter the workforce...)

You could have, you know, asked for citations?

Speed Variance and Its Influence on Accidents. - Citation that variations in speed kill more than speed itself, that highway speeds tend to have more to do with design of the highway and not posted limit, and that as you move the speed limit signs away from the design speed, variance in driving speed and accident rates go up.

Montana: No Speed Limit Safety Paradox Montana highways at safest without speed limits

Is Every Speed Limit Too Low? - again notes that changing the speed limits doesn't actually change the median speed people drive on the road.

This thing?

Doesn't say anything about males and Caucasians being exempt or discrimination rules not apply to them.

If I got the wrong documents can you supply a link to the correct ones?

Where are you getting your data? Here's what I found. It doesn't seem to support your analysis.

Criminal Justice outcomes are also widely accepted as being worse for non-whites, as well as health outcomes. Granted, much of this is due to poverty which you can pretend is not related to race, despite boatloads of evidence to the contrary.

What some cursory evidence does seem to indicate is that the gap between outcomes for different races is narrowing, slowly. This is probably what your really noticing.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your just ignorant, not racist.

In US schools are funded from property taxation, except for low income areas which, logically, cannot afford their schools and get funded from the state or federal funds.

School funding per pupil is 4 times what it was in the 1960s. FOUR TIMES. Even if we assume the poor districts increased by a smaller portion, and the rich districts by a large portion, how wide a skew could it possibly be? There's a lot more poor people than rich ones. Even if we assume poor districts only doubled, and rich ones octupled, that still means that spending on poor pupils STILL DOUBLED.

So where's the results? 35th place in math and 27th place in science. Something changed between the 1960s and today, but it sure isn't a lack of funding that's causing it.

Median cost of 4-year college education in 2012-2013 was $35074. http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/d...
This is a five year payback period. http://economix.blogs.nytimes....
This is the lowest it has been for many decades. Guess what else costs more today? Bread.

In that story, the many differences between the federal and private workforces are discussed. One striking difference is the abundance of part time workers (low wages, no benefits) in the private sector.

Even if the federal salaries and benefits are generous when compared to private industry, does that mean they are out of line?

Absolutely, yes. I don't believe most federal jobs are notably more valuable or useful (some have considerable negative value due to the harm they cause to US society).

Everywhere there is evidence of the shrinking middle class dating back to 1970. Does that come about because workers are paid fairly (and those at the top more so)?

It came about because of labor competition with the developing world. It's amazing how many people forget this.

Pensions have disappeared in the private sectorâ"possibly with good reason as most companies are not in a position to make such guaranteesâ"does that mean government pensions should as well?

Oh yes. This is a very strong indication to eliminate public pensions.

Regarding $400 vs $800 million fighter jets, such cost inflation is not the fault of government alone (poor oversight), but also of the private companies contracted to do the work. There is plenty of blame for everyone, why just focus on the government?

Because government is the sole involved party with the money and the responsibility to control that spending.

And how useful is private education?

Here's a government report on the topic:

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsrep...

TL;DR: In some subjects, the private schools "significantly" outperformed public schools, but overall they're only slightly better.

The EPB launched Chattanoogaâ(TM)s project in 2010 and built the network almost entirely with taxpayer funds

Oh, you mean like when the American taxpayers funded rural electrification, Rural Telecommunications, and built an interstate highway systems to parts of rural America?

Next up, please tell us how those projects were complete failures probably due to people like you not giving a crap about them rural people.

EPBâ(TM)s electric customers financed a hefty $160 million loan, while federal taxpayers paid for the other $111 million as part of the 2009 stimulus bill.

So, can you prove that any rate increases have been caused by this network that has directly impacted the electric customers? Because, if not, your argument is full of bullshit.

And what I find so absolutely incredible is your unbelievable contempt for your fellow Americans. I can't remember a time when conservatives hated everybody but themselves as much as you typify.

"The government" didn't do anything good. Tax payers all across the country paid $111 million dollars so that the good people of Chattanooga could have a new fiber network"

Yes, we did. We also paid a few billion dollars so that the people of New Orleans could put their city back in shape, helped out the people of New Jersey when they needed it after Sandy decimated them, and we probably paid money to connect you to the electrical grid back when it didn't make financial sense for private business to invest the money - but most of us aren't whining about helping out our fellow Americans - we tend to love our country. You should try it some time.

And electricity rate payers have to pay for the other $160 million dollars whether they want Internet or not, effectively a highly regressive tax, mostly paid by lower income households, in order to subsidize nerds who want fiber.

Let's see the citation or is it difficult for you to find a credible citation for you talking out your ass? And while you're at it, make sure this citation delivers more than opinions. I want to see exactly how much the electric ratepayers of Chattanooga have paid for this service - in hard numbers.

If we roll this out nationally, it amounts forcing everybody in the US to pay an average of $2000 in order to get Internet service that is faster than what they need, and more expensive than what they have.

Only $2,000 - so that amounts to a little more than two years of my current rate. And investment would give me gigabit speeds? And since that covers the entire capital investment, we can fully expect our monthly cost to drop substantially as the only real costs associated with this network would be transit (near zero cost) as well as maintenance (which on a brand new network should be also close to zero for the first couple of years.) And that sounds like a bad deal to you? No wonder why no one's listening to you! You have no clue about how to manage money and you come here to rant about this? Are you insane in addition to inept?

Realistically, most people need about 10-20 Mbps, and they can get that for less than $40 in most places.

Yes, and I have it on good authority that we only need 640K of RAM memory too.

As to that crap about 10-20 Mbps for less than $40 in most places, feel free to link to these magical places. And remember, you said MOST places - now prove it.

If Google Fiber were actually commercially successful, it would mean that the city of Chattanooga wasted $300 million in subsidies in order to deliver a more expensive Internet service than Google manages to deliver without subsidies.

I s

Called Income Based Repayment. https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/r... However it only applies to some kinds of loans made in the pasr ten years. Some politicians want it to be retroactive and universal.

No. They specifically cited the only fields of science where women have significant representation, while ignoring all the other fields where they're an extreme minority.

There are only two fields of science where women are an "extreme minority": engineering and computer science. There is math, where they are in a minority, but not really "extreme minority". There are many more fields where women are a significant majority, as it happens...like, by far most fields of study. And there are many large fields of study where men are the "extreme minority", and more extremely in the minority than the women are facing in engineering and science.

Source:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/di...

Jonathan Kozol is an idiot. We spend more on education than any other country. More Money isn't the answer. Innovation and Competition (Something public schools are not allowed to have) are. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us... http://nces.ed.gov/programs/co... http://www.ppic.org/main/publi....