Stand and Deliver Teacher Jaime Escalante Dies

DesScorp writes "Jaime Escalante, the math teacher portrayed in the hit '80s movie Stand and Deliver, has died of cancer at age 79. Escalante is legendary for creating the advanced math 'pipeline' program at Garfield High in East Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s, an area populated mostly by poorer Hispanic families. Escalante's students eventually outpaced even richer schools in advanced placement tests for calculus. Escalante refused to accept excuses from his students or community about why they couldn't succeed, and demanded a standard of excellence from them, defying the notion that poor Hispanic kids just weren't capable of advanced work. While Escalante became a celebrity because of the hit movie about his efforts, jealousy from other teachers ... as well as red tape from teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy, resulted in Escalante and his hand-picked teachers leaving Garfield. Since his departure, Garfield has never replicated Escalante's success with math students, and Reason Magazine reported on the shameful way in which others tore down what Escalante and his teachers worked so hard to build."

Comments

Rest in peace.

[gambit3]

I'm going to cry. Really.
I had the blessing to meet Mr. Escalante just a few months ago, before he was diagnosed with cancer. What a wonderful, wonderful man.

They should name schools after people like him.

Re:Rest in peace.

[Moryath]

They should name schools after people like him.

Sure, whatever. Name whatever you want.

What they REALLY should do is stop dumbing down the curriculum and "passing" ever-crappier performance, and follow the methods he used (no more excuses, no more "but it's hard why should I learn" bullcrap). Set the bar high and the kids will reach for it, set the bar low and kids will nap.

Re:Rest in peace.

[cduffy]

I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.

When you don't have those special people because they were driven out without good cause... then yes, it's scandal.

Re:Rest in peace.

[Lunix Nutcase]

Or instead of wasting time and resources on trivial things like naming and renaming schools (does the name of the school really mean anything?) they should instead be working to foster more teachers like Escalante.

Re:Rest in peace.

[causality]

I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.

I think this gentleman and John Taylor Gatto have a lot in common. The "special" thing about Gatto is his ability to see a spade and call it a spade instead of getting lost in all of the justifications and excuses. This one-line summary in no way does justice to either of the above-linked works, but Gatto went to some of the poorest inner-city schools in some of the worst neighborhoods and found that the children there were eager and very able learners once you stopped treating them like idiots. You'd think the school systems would appreciate anyone who can demonstrate that, but they didn't.

So I think your analogy to the Chicago Bulls doesn't really work. The Bulls experienced a particularly outstanding individual but presumably, all the other players would have wanted to attain that level of talent. The school systems are experiencing problems that are institutional and profoundly anti-educational. I don't believe the problem with schools is funding or ability. I think the problem is that they are not really interested in improving their methods or looking too closely at their results.

Re:Rest in peace.

[DrgnDancer]

I can't speak for the magazine in general, but this article seemed fairly balanced. It did leave some blame on the doorstep of the teacher's union, but pretty clearly laid the lion's share on the school's administration. It also (having been written in the beginning of the decade) expressed concern about the (then anticipated) No Child Left Behind act. That was a conservative darling at the time of the writing. Most of the facts are undeniable anyway. He build a huge and successful program, he was driven out by perceived lack of support from the administration and union, and the program fell apart after he left.

As someone who generally supports both unions and government services, even I have to admit that neither encourage excellence. They are both very good things in many ways, and both serve useful functions in bringing the most good to the most people, but neither is designed to accommodate the exceptional well. Like so many things in our society, public schools and teacher's unions fall into the "terrible idea, but better than the alternative" category. This case simply demonstrates the lacks of both structures particularly well, because of the particularly exception nature of the people involved.

Re:Rest in peace.

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, well professionalism is a little tough when you're dying of cancer and can't afford the treatment. The actors from the movie and his former students had to pool together to help him out.

All the high and mighty ideals go out the window when push comes to shove and you're broke.

Re:Rest in peace.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem is that they are not really interested in improving their methods or looking too closely at their results.

You are assuming that their methods of gauging success are the same as yours. Public school curriculum is not designed to produce educated people, it is to produce workers.

Re:Rest in peace.

[raddan]

But it's more than that. You can't just set the bar arbitrarily high and hope that your kids will reach it. Many (most?) of them won't.

Why? Because education is cumulative. The difference between the 8th grade and the 7th grade is supposed to be that the 8th grade students learn more advanced materials based on their learning in the 7th grade. In practice, it doesn't work that way, because curricula are myopic, because teachers don't care/only care about their fiefdom, because students lack any motivation, etc, etc, etc.

Escalante saw all of this and said: OK, let's fix this. Let's start the program early (cumulative). Let's tell kids that this is their way out/their ticket to self-actualization (motivation). Let's make sure the right teachers are on the job (handpicked teachers who care).

Throwing a kid into a calculus class to challenge him when all he's done is geometry is a surefire way to turn a kid off. This happened to me: they threw me into AP physics because I did well in other classes, but I had yet to take precalc, trig, or calculus. That experience turned me off to physics for a long time. I barely scraped by with a D, and I was one of the motivated ones (I won the high school science fair that year, for building a circuit that 'amplified' signals using stochastic resonance). Guess how motivated I was after that failure.

Re:Rest in peace.

[Cytotoxic]

That's a nice sentiment. Too bad it is just empty rhetoric. Where the rubber meets the road, the President killed the highly successful voucher program in Washington DC - actions defensible only as a chit tossed to the public teachers unions. And that's action he took before the referenced editorial was written. Unfortunately, this has been his M.O. - using the language of the right but governing from the left. It is actually a very effective rhetorical technique for a politician to use. Claiming that the NYT is taking on the unions because they toed the White House rhetorical line is not really that strong of an argument.

I can't pretend that I know Jaime Escalante's career or opinions in detail - although his opinions on bilingual education and other union-opposed ideas are documented in the referenced article. A little googling shows that he "thought the union was going to focus on how to improve our skills. But they're more interested in politics than kids." In an article memorializing his career and legacy, it is sad to hold up a milquetoast administration cheerleading piece as an example of "taking on the unions", when the speech in question is really a cover piece designed to deflect attention from the real actions being taken, both great and small, that are bulwarks to the teachers unions.

To hell with those who won't better themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

To hell with those people who won't voluntarily better themselves.

If you don't continually strive to do better on your own, then that's your problem and you should be shunned by everyone who can take a little bit of initiative and learn things on their own.

Like this incident shows, the issue in this case, and many others, isn't about the people being stupid. It's about them just not caring enough about themselves to improve their situation.

Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

To hell with them? No, to hell with social Darwinism.

Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves.

[TheLink]

Escalante's example is nearly opposite of what you're proposing. It's about someone caring enough about OTHERs and improving their situation dramatically.

You on the other hand are barking up the "people should just help themselves" tree.

Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves.

[Locke2005]

People tend to live up to other people's expectations. Teachers don't expect Black and Hispanic students to do well. Yes, ultimately people are responsible for their own success or failure, but it doesn't help when you've got teachers telling young kids "It doesn't matter if you do your homework or not -- we'll promote you anyway" (and yes, my ethnic daughter was actually told this by her teacher -- the same teacher that threatened to sue me for complaining she wasn't doing her job.)

Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves.

[Locke2005]

You can't force people to learn. Escalante's gift was his power to inspire others to improve their own education. He didn't do the work for them -- he just convinced them that he believed they could do it, and that it was worthwhile. Let's not kid ourselves; these kids worked their asses off to pass the Calculus AP exam. They couldn't have been so successful if it wasn't the most important thing in their lives at that time. The ability to make people believe in a better future through hard work -- that seems to be a element that is sadly lacking in the current Republican talking points.

Public schools

[megamerican]

It's no wonder he got lots of resistance against his peers, administration and teachers union. Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.

"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." - John D. Rockefeller

Re:Public schools

[spun]

Obviously, the answer to the problem of owning class people gaming the system in their favor is to do away with all government oversight of the owning class, and sell the government to them wholesale. Because, if we had an unregulated free market, all the little mom and pop operations would rise up against their corporate masters and we would immediately have a free and fair market in everything. Obviously, the government is not protecting the little guy from the owning class, they are keeping the little guy down for the owning class.

But wait, if all that is true, why is it the owning class telling us this? Why are the rich leading the charge to get rid of government regulations? Are they trying to use reverse psychology on us or something?

Re:Public schools

[edittard]

"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." - John D. Rockefeller

He's still calling the shots, is he? Plutocrats are bad enough, but zombie plutocrats is just going too far.

Re:Public schools

[Paul Fernhout]

Be careful not to make a classical mistake of confusing the intentions of the parts (teachers, who I agree mostly mean well and want to help kids grow), with the intentions of the whole system (to dumb kids down so they fit into a 19th century militaristic industrial society, like NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto writes about).
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
    Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
    A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
"""

Re:Public schools

[HiThere]

But *WHY* are the teachers useless? It's not because the don't care. People entering the teaching profession care more than most, and many who are retiring still care. It's not because they're stupid. I've known and know many teachers.

Hint: The teachers that I know who are the best teachers have never gone to a University Dept. of Education. Most of them are legally forbidden to teach in a public school. Most of them would be unwilling to even try to operate in that kind of an environment.

(I'm leaving out the administration. I don't know enough about it. All I know about it is that every good teacher I've known either worked around it or despised it.)

That said, "best teacher" comes in lots of different modalities. The best music teacher I know refers to another teacher as the best music teacher that she knows "for those who are already well trained at the basics of music, and want to study the piano". Neither of them handle large groups well. One of them can handle boys better than the other. Etc.

When I went to school the two best teachers that I had taught only a few students in the class, and essentially babysat the others. (Even that was distracting.) Other teachers gave generalized instruction to the entire class, which left half the class bored and the other half confused.

Part of the problem was that class sizes were far too large. 30 is unreasonable for primary, and most secondary instruction. A study I once say claimed that in the high school years there was a definite break in the amount of learning that occurred between class sizes of 16 and 19. (With the students in the class with 16 students learning a lot more.) Could be. I suspect that it varies a lot with class composition AND subject. Many college classes seem to do quite well with 20 or more students, at least as long as there are smaller sections. (But I'm not convinced that a class size of 300 is ever better than a video. Perhaps the video should be shown during the section meetings? And stopped and re-run with detailed explanations from the TA whenever things got confusing to someone.)

Note, by the way, that college professors have almost never gotten a degree from the dept. of Education. Some are very bad teachers, but more of them are good teachers than is common among the earlier grades.

Re:Truly

[idontgno]

Technically, Mexico and Bolivia are both American.

And as we all know, "technically correct" is the best kind.

Shining Example

[Jaysyn]

This is a shining example of how politics are ruining America's youth.

Re:Truly

[DoofusOfDeath]

Technically, Mexico and Bolivia are both American.

But Mexico is not Bolivia. That was my only point.

Why I still think we need vouchers

[5pp000]

From TFA:

Gradillas has an explanation for the decline of A.P. calculus at Garfield: Escalante and Villavicencio were not allowed to run the program they had created on their own terms. In his phrase, the teachers no longer "owned" their program. He's speaking metaphorically, but there's something to be said for taking him literally.

In the real world, those who provide a service can usually find a way to get it to those who want it, even if their current employer disapproves. If someone feels that he can build a better mousetrap than his employer wants to make, he can find a way to make it, market it, and perhaps put his former boss out of business. Public school teachers lack that option.

There are very few ways to compete for education dollars without being part of the government school system. If that system is inflexible, sooner or later even excellent programs will run into obstacles.

I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!

In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[nweaver]

Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education: subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools. If voucher programs exclude religious schools, there would be no schools to send the children to.

Also, vouchers don't cover the whole cost: Mr Escalante couldn't do what he did in a private school as, even with vouchers, the students couldn't afford to attend.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[sean_nestor]

I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!

In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.

Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.

As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral - schools that are not only sub-par, but lacking funding and interaction with a diverse body of students, since all the brightest have made it into the "nice" schools.

When you consider that some students are going to be shafted big time by this arrangement, you may see why some (not just on the left) don't like the voucher system. Education after 18 is no longer compulsory, so good luck compensating for those all-important developmental years of education.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[MindlessAutomata]

It's ultimately about controlling the ideas that youth are exposed to. Sure, children may be sent to some pretty wrong-headed schools with these vouchers... but the parents, and eventually the child, presumably are taxpayers.

It's all about social control. The left is concerned (rightfully) about children being taught anti-evolution, racist, religious bullshit, but it's more than that. It's about instilling social, democratic values into youth. The right tends to feel that vouchers/homeschooling are a good way to shaping youth, the left, as always prefers to "socialize" (in the "society") sense of the word and wants to build a "community" and by extension obedience to community standards and norms, even if they have to force community's down people's throat like the right wants to force religion on other people.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[5pp000]

Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.

As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral

This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[istartedi]

I've never understood why the left

Union, unions, UNIONS! vs. Blacks!

Yes, it's one of the issues that tears at the fabric of two core Democratic Party groups. I've seen polls [citation needed] where the majority of Blacks support vouchers. Many of their communities are strongly religious, and that tends to be part of the reason for the support. Unions, OTOH, know that many of those small, diverse, competing schools won't sign a contract.

So far, Union money beats Black desire in the Democratic Party.

Said before, and said again, no real progress in the USA until we break the shackles of entrenched special interests on both the Left and the Right.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[DesScorp]

Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education

You seem terrified that a parent might send their kids to a church-affiliated school "with tax dollars"... when most parents are contributing to those tax dollars. As long as the school is accredited, so what? Some of the finest schools in the country are church-affiliated, especially Catholic schools. I'm not Catholic myself, but between an inter-city public school and a Catholic school in the same area, I'd damn sure take the Catholic school.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[5pp000]

Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.

The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?

You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[Bakkster]

Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education: subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.

The easy solution to that problem: the voucher can only pay for the non-religious portion of any classes. So if the student takes 6 classes with 2 being religious (theology, and I'll even give you science) and 4 being secular (music, math, literature, history), then the voucher can't cover more than 66% of the cost of tuition.

Any opposition to that based purely on the school rules and code of conduct being based on the attendee's religion is just as silly and petty as those who oppose public schools purely because their code of conduct is purely secular, if not more-so. The primary reason to send children to parochial schools is for the code of conduct and atmosphere, rather than to replace pointless secular elective classes with (arguably equally pointless) religious studies. Of course, this doesn't always happen (there ends up being drug use and teen sex at parochial schools as well), but it seems a reasonable desire.

It's also disingenuous to imply that the only private schools worth sending children to are parochial. They may be the most common, but they aren't the only ones. Vouchers would also encourage more of them, particularly since a well-run secular private-school could be free, while using the rule above would mean parochial schools would still cost money.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[AK Marc]

You assume mobility. Only if those that take vouchers are required to take all applicants will that work, and only then if busing is free (and vouchers are accepted as payment in full).

All the vouchers I've seen proposed so far do not cover the whole cost of private school, and as such, would make the schools inaccessible to the poor. They will be stuck in their failed school, while those with the means to leave will.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[schon]

And yet the schools in the rest of the developed world, which (pretty much universally) have better-educated students, seem to have bypassed these problems.

I wonder why that is?

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[Kijori]

This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!

Well, over time, no, there isn't. But in the short term the limit is effectively what we have now; under the private academy scheme in the UK (where I live and therefore what I'm familiar with) the average cost of an "academy" - a privately financed school - was £35m (~$53m), with an average lead time of 4 years from planning to creation, not including finding the teachers and staff you need to operate it. You can't just conjure a new school, so if you consign a school to failure you also consign all its students to a bad education, either because they have to stay in a school that is being phased out or because they are crammed into over-sized classes at a school that hasn't got the capacity to accomodate them.

The problem with school vouchers is that the choice is a fallacy. We've had similar schemes tried over here - parents would get to send their children to whichever school they wanted, sick people would be treated at whichever hospital they wanted and so on. The problem, though, is that not everyone can go to the best schools or the best hospitals; they only have a limited number of places. Where I grew up - Coventry - the best school was a place called Finham; Finham was big and well-funded and in the nicer part of town, and so everyone wanted to send their kids there. Could every child go to Finham? No, of course not, the school wasn't big enough, and so the kids just went to the schools near them, just like always.
There's no way around this. In another post you point to homeschooling, but having homeschooling as your solution is the ultimate in discrimination: you can only be homeschooled if one of your parents can afford to stay at home, meaning that, as an option, it's available only to the well-off. It's also a complete abandonment of social mobility: if your parents are poorly educated then you will be, too, because they're your teachers, and they can't teach you English and maths and science and everything else on the curriculum if they dropped out of school at 13. And that's to say nothing of the fact that even the best home schooling lacks an awful lot of the resources available to well-funded actual school: no science labs, no CAD/CAM, no library, no gym, no media centre, no darkroom, and so on - again, the availability of these outside the school system is determined by wealth.

Vouchers are a solution for a world that doesn't exist, where poor schools can be closed without consequences for the students who go there and new schools can be created overnight. You don't need to send all your students to the best schools - that just means making the best schools worse. You need to make the bad schools into good schools, but unfortunately there's no gimmick that does that.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[hondo77]

Explain to me how this is a "leftist extremist" point of view.

It's simple: the poster is not an ideologue. He/she holds mostly leftist views but finds some views on the other side of the fence not so bad. It's a benefit of having an open mind.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[Hythlodaeus]

Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork.

That sounds like a problem it itself, not a problem with vouchers per se.

Re:Why I still think we need vouchers

[dfenstrate]

If you can identify a mechanism in homeschooling which prevents Mr. Smith from telling his child that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old, I'd be glad to entertain the idea in a more serious light. But until then, public school is the lesser of two evils.

If totalitarian thought control is your goal, then yes, public school is the lesser of two evils.
However, the poor kid who has only been taught about the biblical story of creation is the exception, not the norm.

The norm is that home schooled students significantly outperform public school students in many areas of study.

Better results matter.
You seem to be concerned primarily with ensuring that everyone only thinks state-approved thoughts (correct or not), and are apparently willing to sacrifice all the better results home schools generally deliver in a vain attempt to stamp out the occasional outlier.

"Racial Makeup"

[DesScorp]

Why would anyone be surprised? Look at the racial makeup of California. Except for a few pockets of whites in Northern California, the state is almost overrun with Blacks and Mexicans.

While I know the poster was trolling, his comments are in stark contrast to Escalante's own work: anyone, regardless of skin color or income, can better themselves if they're willing to work hard enough and dedicate themselves in the long run. Escalante proved it, and he proved it with student AP calculus scores eventually outpacing even the very rich schools like Beverly Hills. It's shameful that some of his own fellow teachers thought he was being "cruel" to Hispanic kids by expecting excellence, and that he was risking their "self-esteem". Well, those teachers chased him off, and now I wonder how high the esteem of those students is now that they're no longer reaching the academic heights that Escalante took them to?

Wait... What?!

[RobotRunAmok]

subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.

The parents of the kids in parochial school pay twice: once for their own kids' tuition, once again for their neighbors' kids via the school and property taxes. The typical voucher plan doesn't "force a taxpayer to pay for religious education," it allows a taxpayer to pay for what he actually uses.

Meanwhile, if all the kids who were in parochial school were to leave parochial school and enter the public system (into which their parents had already paid their share) that public system would collapse. Even with the "extra money" coming in from the parents of the kids who are not educated publicly, the public system is on the verge of financial, educational, and architectural collapse. You should thank God (erm, sorry) every day that the "religious kids" are not in the public system; the public system couldn't handle it.

Re:Wait... What?!

[AK Marc]

The parents of the kids in parochial school pay twice: once for their own kids' tuition, once again for their neighbors' kids via the school and property taxes. The typical voucher plan doesn't "force a taxpayer to pay for religious education," it allows a taxpayer to pay for what he actually uses.

If you thought that, then you'd be petitioning for childless people to be exempt from property tax. Public schools spread the burden across all. Their status as a parent or not is irrelevant, so they don't "pay twice" for the same thing. They pay once for educating everyone, before and after they have children, and the point is that an educated populous is productive. Regardless of whether they have kids, that's the goal of that. Second, once they do have kids, they have the choice of enrolling them for free into the institutions set up that they vote on. If they are so bad, why aren't they voting in better people? Why aren't they involved in the decision process? Instead, they want to take their ball and go home.

But the problem is that the voucher systems I've seen are all designed not to help children, but to provide tax cuts for the rich and harm anyone in public schools (while not improving private schools at all). If you've seen one that doesn't do this, please enlighten me.

Vouchers should be made available. And any school that takes a voucher should be required to take vouchers for payment-in-full and be required to take all applicants. But that'll never happen because the people against vouchers won't see what good they can do when done right (because they can do lots of harm when done wrong) and those that want them don't want to help the kids, but they want a tax break and to harm the public schools.

Re:Wait... What?!

[c_jonescc]

If you thought that, then you'd be petitioning for childless people to be exempt from property tax. Public schools spread the burden across all. Their status as a parent or not is irrelevant, so they don't "pay twice" for the same thing. They pay once for educating everyone, before and after they have children, and the point is that an educated populous is productive.

Exactly. I find it far more rational to stop thinking about "my" taxes. I'm not purchasing individual goods with taxes. Whether I drive a car or not has little impact on the need for roads, as an example. There are certain needs we have as a society (I would include public education in that), and that is what "our" taxes are for. It stops being "your" money when you make your contribution to those social necessities via taxation.

You're free to argue that there is waste in our system, or that tax money goes to things that are not contributive to societal living, or that the tax law is imbalanced in some way, but none of that changes the fact that the tax money is not yours to be used solely on the parts of group living that you feel you take advantage of.

Re:Wait... What?!

[AK Marc]

Now, onto your false assertions. The widespread belief that schools are paid for via property tax is false not only in my state but in many. Income and sales taxes account for the majority of funding for schools, and a majority portion of the remainder is from the federal government - which is not collecting property tax (yet). Funding from property tax is a small portion of school system funding. Thus, your assertion that it is "shared equally" is false on the face. Thus, it really is the "rich" paying for it.

Non sequitur. I never claimed that they were distributed equally. In fact, even if just property tax, it would be progressive because rich use more land than the poor. So "equally" was stated by no one, and if I did use such wording it was to indicate that the burden was shared by all, not held to the same dollar amount.

The manner in which the funding is obtained is also irrelevant. The majority of property tax in some places goes to schools, and Texas claims that half of all school funding is "local" but I don't know if that would include federal grants given directly to local schools.

But none of that contradicts what I said. Please quote my assertion that's false which you addressed.

We don't want to harm the public schools, and they don't need any help in that department anyway. It is hypocritical (and possibly mean-spirited) to say that those who want to pay for their kids' education are just trying to have more money but those who want their kids' education to paid for by other people are somehow virtuous.

Again, a non sequitur. I explicitly stated that the act of "public education" is irrelevant to how a person educates their children or even whether they have any children at all. "Public education" is what you are being taxed for, not paying for the right to send your own children to public school.

Your argument is like saying that welfare is broken because the only ones who can afford to pay in are the people who aren't using it. The act of paying in and the act of using the service are unrelated (well, not necessarily for unemployment and SS, but for most all other services it's true). How can I say this to say it so that you understand my point? It was declared that having an educated populous was important, and as such, education is provided for free. That's irrelevant to what you do with your own children. One is a public need and the other is a private need. You don't petition to get your police taxes refunded because you bought a gun for yourself, or try to get a refund on the fire department taxes because you didn't have a fire that year. It's simply not done as a "you pay this in taxes, you get this benefit directly back." Not for schools. Not for the police. Not for the fire department. Not for welfare.

You've seen very few actual proposals on vouchers. I've never seen one that could be classified as a tax break for the rich. Why? All the proposals I've seen are a flat per-child amount, not tied to income at all.

Right. And none of them covered the price of the public education, not to mention the much higher price of a private education. So someone who is offered a voucher would still have to come up with money. For the private school I attended, the proposed vouchers for Texas would have covered less than 25% of the cost. And the private schools would have had the same autonimy as before, so they would do as they have done, take who was already enrolled and only fill the small (about 5%) drop out rate (drop out of the school, like moving and such, not actual drop out as in never finishing). So the only people who'd be able to use them would be the people going there already, and they were overwhelmingly rich.

It wasn't a "if you make more, you get more" scheme. But if you looked at who would actually be using the vouchers and the effect on their finances, it was a tax rebate for the rich.

Thus, we would have a "regressive" tax cut in the sen

Re:Truly

[Maximum Prophet]

The flip side, is that the students that didn't want to be there, weren't. I remember many kids in High School that disrupted class because they didn't want to be there.

Re:Truly

[nelsonal]

What about shortening names. Mexico is technically the United Mexican States, but the name is almost always shortened to Mexico. The US is the only country on either continent with America in it's name. Following the rules of every other country on earth is to drop adjectives or nous like republic or statesand the remaining word is your short name. For almost all these nations the people are given a term that derives from that word.

Re:Truly

[HeckRuler]

Probably by sheer stubbornness with a modicum of authority. There's a big lesson in Highschool about getting the system to do what you want. Turns out most of the time, the people whose job it is to say no will say yes if you're stubborn enough and have at least some plausible argument.

Re:Truly

[zegota]

This is why weighting AP grades is awful. At least 25% of the people in my AP classes were there solely because it offered a 5.0 for an A and a 4.0 for a B. It even got worse, when the kids who took all the AP classes ended up having a GPA above 4.0 -- meaning any non-AP class they took would actually *lower* their GPA, regardless of what grade they got. So yes -- open door policy, but you shouldn't provide an incentive for people who don't want to learn to take the class.

Re:Truly

[mosb1000]

Now, apparently, his techniques have been abandoned.

Indeed, they were much too effective in facilitating actual learning to be useful in a modern teaching environment. The system works!