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School Super Asks Governor To Make His School District a Prison
quipalicious writes "A Michigan school super asks the state governor to make his school district a prison, highlighting the various rights and privileges that prisoners get and public schooling students don't."
The old "these guys sit around all day watching cable TV" crap is also a tired old myth. AFAIK, no mainstream prison system in the country offers prisoners cable TV (some will allow a prisoner to purchase a small TV for their cell on their own dime and watch whatever over-the-air broadcasts they can get). And, far from sitting around, all juvenile prisoners in the U.S. go to school every day (just like their non-prison counterparts) and most adult prisoners have some sort of job (either in the prison or, for lower risk offenders, outside). So the idea that these guys in prisons are on some sort of vacation is just ridiculous.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually, looking more closely, that's not true - my mental approximation of inflation was off by a long way. In the UK, state schools receive around $8700 per pupil and the fees for the school where I went are now a shade over $15000. My mother taught at a state school, and the funding was really tight (it's increased by about 85%, ignoring inflation, since then, about 50% factoring in inflation). So $7000 per pupil is probably below the minimum I would expect. My mother was having to teach classes of over 40 pupils, with one textbook between two and a lot of them so old that they were falling apart. With $7000, maybe they could afford a few new textbooks, but class sizes would still be too large.
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The numbers have been dropping since the mid-90's (as I said, about 12-15 years after the "get tough on crime" stuff began in the early 80's), From the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP):
Here is the data from 1996 to 2000, showing a 15% drop in total juvenile arrests between 1996 and 2000.
Here is the data from 1998-2008, showing a 16% drop in total juvenile arrests between 1998 and 2008.
And, you're right, correlation is not causation. But SOMETHING is clearly changed. Juveniles born after the early 80's are much less likely to become juvenile delinquents than juveniles born before that period.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The most powerful group opposing vouchers is the NEA. Not only is the National Education Association the largest union in the USA, it's also the most powerful and most politically well-connected. They say "jump", the politicians ask "how high" and are careful to ask that nicely.
I don't think that--- BWAAA HA HA HA HA HA... HA... Ha ha. Heh.
Sorry, but I thought you were-- BWAAAAAHAHAHA.
You're serious? Really? The NEA? A union that is legally barred from striking or even officially existing in most states? A union that is non-mandatory in all states? A union that vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind (aka: No Child Gets Ahead, No Rich Child Left Behind, or perhaps No Statistic Left Behind) and had it rammed down their throat despite the fact that even an intro to statistics or a moderate amount of common sense shows it to be patently stupid? They're so powerful that they couldn't even stop a piece of legislation that was designed to reduce the quality of education in public schools? They're so powerful that they couldn't stop a state governor from ripping rights away from teachers that were given to them to protect them from abuse by the government and the public.
The NEA is one of the weakest unions in the nation.
Vouchers would make private schools more accessible to more upper-middle-class families
You missed a couple words.
Whenever unfettered competition is allowed, the state schools do poorly both academically and in terms of expense.
I wonder why that is? How many private schools accept students who don't speak English? Around here, its pretty much none. Even the charter and magnet schools turn them away. How many of them take kids who are emotionally or mentally handicapped? Yeah, those kids get turned away, too. How about kids who need special accommodations? Sorry, charter/magnet/private schools aren't really set up to handle those. And so, public schools get all of these kids and then tools jump up from the crowd and complain that public schools spend more and have lower scores. Great. Nice to see that you don't understand statistics, either.
Vouchers and "unfettered competition" is a mechanism used to stratify schools and ensure that children of upper-class parents get the best schooling, while everyone else is supplied with a sub-standard version. More often than not, it walks hand-in-hand with racism as lots of politicians and ordinary parents would much rather send their child to a school without so many "brown" kids. Educational stratification is really nothing more than the classist/racist vehicle of the 2000's. When you equalize across racial and socioeconomic classes, then remove all special needs kids, you find that private schools don't do any better job of teaching than public schools. In many cases, they do worse, as they're more likely to be chained by religious dogma or inflating grades based on the desire to retain paying customers. ...of course, those things aren't reported in testing statistics... because its illegal to separate them out.... unless you're a private school, then you can admit the dumb rich kid, claim he's in a special program and not report his abyssmal scores in your marketing report.
You need to wake up to the reality. The teachers in the district that I live in are legally barred from striking. They are barred from collective bargaining. The do not have "tenure". In their first three years they can be fired for no reason other than "We don't want you anymore". Past that, it only takes some form of documented failure, where that failure can simply be a verbal report by a supervisor. They don't have three months of vacation. They have eight weeks of mandatory furlough. They've had their salaries frozen for three years now (despite the fact that the average person's salary continues to rise) and have zero recourse to complain about it. They have more and more of their time was
Interestingly, the criticism section of the Wikipedia page on the impact of legalized abortion on crime mentions that after adjusting for several valid criticisms the research indicates that the phasing out of lead-based gasoline additives may have had a larger effect than legalized abortion.
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