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Some States Dropping GED Tests Due To Price Spikes
First time accepted submitter murkwood7 writes with news about states looking for an alternative to GED tests because of cost constraints. "Several dozen states are looking for an alternative to the GED high school equivalency test because of concerns that a new version coming out next year is more costly and will no longer be offered in a pencil and paper format.
The responsibility for issuing high school equivalency certificates or diplomas rests with states, and they've relied on the General Education Development exam since soon after the test was created to help returning World War II veterans.
But now 40 states and the District of Columbia are participating in a working group that's considering what's available besides the GED, and two test makers are hawking new exams."
...does this mean that I'll finally be able to take the damn thing online?! I've been meaning to take it for years (I was homeschooled) but I've never been able to find time around my job to go to the classes.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
FTA: "you've got to learn how to type, use the computer, plus your GED. That's three things instead of just trying to focus all on your GED test." Oh no, this pour soul has to learn how to type?
We need a college ged or some kind badges system.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-11/news/ct-oped-0311-page-20120311_1_college-costs-rise-kayla-heard-college-attendance
The cost of college is killing us and having loans that are very hard to get rid of just lets colleges drive prices up.
In operation since shortly after WWII wrapped up, and now Pearson steps in and the price spikes... Allow me a moment to collect myself after such an earth-shattering surprise. Does anybody know what moment of insanity and/or oversight in foundational structure allowed Pearson to get in on the action in the first place?
Huh? You don't have to take classes. Homeschoolers usually don't need the GED anyway.
State administrators must come up with an equivalent equivalency test.
Or it means that you couldn't keep going to school because you had to support your family or that your family had issues that you had to escape (see, crime, poverty). One of my very good friends dropped out of high school, got his GED, attended college, and graduated with degrees in both electrical engineering and computer engineering. He also maintained a 3.9 GPA (only one class ever gave him less than a 4.0). Now, he's a very smart guy, mind you, but it just goes to show that not everyone out there getting a GED is meth-snorting, glue-sniffing trash. Try having a little compassion.
The usual reason given for privatizing is the old canard "the private corporations can do this at a much lower cost".
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The real reason for privatizing is to help funnel public funds into the hands of the corporations run by the buddies of whomsoever happens to be in power at the moment, democrat or republican.
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The idea of saving money helps sell privatization, but it never takes into account: -- cost over-runs
-- no incentive to keep costs down
-- no incentive to make availability or usability easy
-- no incentive to use formats or techniques that would allow easy migration of data or processes onto other platforms in case this doesn't work out (i.e. companies have a perverse incentive to make themselves indispensable)
-- low-ball bids make you think the cost is going to be lower, but the political pal always makes sure that the corporation gets a cost plus profit contract, rather than a fixed cost contract. It's a scam, this push to privatize is not helping anything.
Just skip the test. Unless you are trying to get a job with the government, no one bothers to check. If a test is that important, why not just use the SAT or ACT and require a lower score?
There has been a war on exposure of school systems that are inadequate in training young people. Many mayors and governors fought tooth and nail to avoid any kind of standardized testing or releasing of results. The GED is one great reference standard. If certain high schools fail to have large percentages of their kids doing well on the GED it is a warning that the school is not adequate. Mayors know that if new industry or business is to be attracted that a poor school system will drive away any prospects. Kids have been fed nonsense for decades about how wonderful their school is but in reality many of them were being graduated from awful schools.
This game extends into the ruin of colleges as well. One criteria for judging the quality of a college is the average GED score of the new crop of freshmen who took the test as high school seniors. Make note that small, private colleges rarely use the better accrediting services but hire only a service that focuses on other small colleges. The last thing they want is to be known as providing a lesser value education than a state school. And the game goes on. Few students are aware that individual departments within a college may not be accredited even though the college or university as a whole is accredited. When the graduate goes job hunting he may be in for a very rude shock as some employers will not consider him a graduate at all. You could be a highly, specialized, engineer with no acceptable diplomas at all.
It's not common sense he needs. It's a big cluebat across the side of his head that he needs.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The thing about people who don't have GEDs is that they can always go and get one, whereas you will always be a retarded asshole.
I hate to be the one to point this out, a high school diploma or GED are not needed.
I dont have a GED or an HS diploma, I dropped out of high school in 9th grade and went directly into college. It is not needed to get into many of the colleges, all you have to do is petition the dean to allow you entry. In my case it amounted to writing a letter and spending an hour speaking with the dean.
I did a year of college and left for a job paying 60k a year (20 years ago)
Now, I make 6 figures. I did online courses to obtain my degree 5 years ago and they never even asked if I had a high school diploma. I simply sent them my earlier college transcripts and started classes.
Agreed, which is a darn shame. GED classes were so much easier to understand when I took them than the High-school classes were.
It was the best experience of my School-going life. No bullying, no teachers hitting me up for drugs, just folks there to learn. 4-5 kids my age, and 2-3 adults sitting the practice curriculum. One teacher, less than 10 people.
I really hope the GED test/guidebook makers go public with their stuff (It's illegal to sell or publicize GED texts, iirc), I want an official study-book from that year so badly I can taste it. It was so simply laid out, with such clear instructions and examples.
The only issue is if they give a test, and by passing hand you a degree, they call them diploma mills.
> "the private corporations can do this at a much lower cost".
> The idea of saving money helps sell privatization, but it never takes into account:
That this only works when there is competition.
Creating a private monopoly just grantees that rents will go to the private hands.
Here's an interesting idea. What if a cash-strapped school district started giving the test to all their better students in 9th or 10th grade, so as to not have to teach them for two or three years? How hard would it be to get a quarter of the high school students to pass it a few years early?
I don't think this would be a great policy in most cases, though I'll admit that I considered taking the GED to get out of high school a year early. It could be a good option for some kids.
You're right, not all GED writers are trash. There's just obviously so much of them who ARE trash that there's little sense issuing the tests to them, otherwise they'd find the money. A few "meth snorters" spoil the bunch as they say.
The usual reason given for privatizing is the old canard "the private corporations can do this at a much lower cost"
And it's nearly always true... when there is competition.
When there's no competition, when a single private corporation is set up as a government-mandated monopoly, the result is always going to be very bad. You can make it less bad by adding a government regulatory body to provide oversight, but the result will still be less efficient than if there were true competition.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
... so we should have schools that pay Lebron James half a billion dollars and use the cheapest labor money can find? You really think these two markets have the same values and should be treated as interchangeable for case studies?
Privatization
- Less bloat.
- Kickbacks to Congresscritters from companies.
Government-Provided
- More bloat.
- Kickbacks to Congresscritters from unions.
- More voters directly attached to tit of government.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Except that there isn't more bloat. There is bloat, and thus people assume it's "more" bloat, but when things really are privatized the bloat grows out of control. It takes different forms, sometimes as advertising or profit-margins, sometimes as other things, but if it's taking money and not a part of the results that are being paid for, it's bloat.
As to kickbacks, unions haven't been giving major kickbacks in quite a while. It was a problem, and then they got crushed by government intervention, which put corporations into the same positions and the kickbacks grew. As with the bloat, it seemed bad, but when it changed to privatization it got worse.
Some dumb fucks of kids grow out of it, to become smart and productive adults. Others become Slashdot AC trolls.
I suggest you read Adam Smith's commentary on the value of publicly funded education in "The Wealth of Nations." After noting the higher "efficiencies" of privatizing education, Adam Smith still concludes that a more broadly educated public through public education (even at the expense of wasting a bit more money on less-motivated students) is ultimately for the public good. Of course, more modern free-marketeers who don't give a fuck about the public good (only maximizing profits) come to different conclusions.
"the corporation gets a cost plus profit contract,"
Why would a corporation do it for just cost? They are in business for profit.
Yes, you never read about over bloated private companies here on Slashdot... It is easier for private companies to shed bloat (Hey, you. You don't work here any more, get the fuck out.) vs. government, mostly because government jobs generality require management to show cause to fire someone (Joe Jackoff is bad at his job and here is the documentation to prove it). Of course both never seem to fire the useless middle mangers when its time to drop the ax.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
-- Derek Bok
(If you think the corporations are going to provide better education at a lower cost, you are just starting to try ignorance: on short term, serves the corporations even better)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Think about it, it takes 30-40 hours of prep to pass the GED test. But it takes 3,000-4,000 hours of time to graduate from regular high school. If you could really compress high-school by 100x then everybody should just get a GED and skip those four years of waste.
Obviously it doesn't work that way. Getting a GED has barely, if any, effect on long-term outcomes. As in, if you dropped out of high school you are probably just as screwed regardless of if you get a GED or not.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
USA is bankrupt, what 'public education' can you possibly be talking about?
What public education can you be talking about when you have destroyed the manufacturing sector by inflation, regulations and taxes? There is no need for education if you have no manufacturing.
There is no amount of 'public good' that can be created by government intervention.
You can't handle the truth.
"There is no need for education if you have no manufacturing."
You forgot the /s tag, buddy.
Like CLEP?
There is no need for education if you have no manufacturing.
Your ideas about what people need strike me as bizarre.
And so what? Imagine that a person is a horrible, 2bit no-account lazy bum who dropped out of school because he wanted to smoke pot.
Well, people can change! Such a person shouldn't be held back because of what he did in high school. We all sucked in some ways in high school.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Everyone knows that governments are not subject to the same flaws that corporations are. Government workers really care about us, not about money. They love us and want what is best for us, because government is magic.
The sad reality is that your arguments apply more to governments than to corporations. Corporations can be bad, but unless the government forces us to choose a particular corporation, we have much more direct power over corporations. Nearly all government regulation today is done by unelected bureaucrats, not elected officials. When corporations do something bad, at least there is another organization above them to punish them. Good luck changing ANYTHING in government, unless the change you want is more rules that nobody could possibly remember, let alone follow.
After noting the higher "efficiencies" of privatizing education, Adam Smith still concludes that a more broadly educated public through public education (even at the expense of wasting a bit more money on less-motivated students) is ultimately for the public good.
The current school system in the US is a bloated government monopoly, indifferent to competing models of schooling. You pay for it through taxes whether you send your kids to public school, private school, or if you homeschool them (or even if you don't have kids at all). There are alternatives to public school in the US, but the government doesn't care. They get their money, even if you shell out for private school or quit your job to homeschool.
At the minimum, parents should receive vouchers equivalent in value to what the local public school system pays per pupil, vouchers that could be redeemed at private schools, or used for homeschooling expenses. This would put real pressure on crappy public schools to reform themselves or face starvation, unlike the misguided "No Child Left Behind Act".
I agree with you and with Adam Smith. Publicly funded education in public schools (not via vouchers), with its more open (viewable) school board system that lets you see how the decisions are arrived at and is accountable to the public in more direct ways, is a much better approach than privatization via vouchers or privatized charter schools. That's just my opinion from within the sausage grinder, since I'm currently a junior in the school system right now!
The usual reason given for privatizing is the old canard "the private corporations can do this at a much lower cost".
That's one of the reasons. The other is that, since the government has extraordinary powers (the ability to arbitrarily take what it wants from its citizens, imprison them, execute them), any tasks that do not require those extraordinary powers should not be performed by the government, in order to reduce the ability to abuse those powers.
Most of the problems you iterate only come about if you privatize a monopoly (indispensibility, keeping costs down, etc); monopolies are going to be problematic, regardless of whether they're private or public.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Smith was also dealing with a world in which there was mass illiteracy. Advocating the public provision of a sixth-grade education is very different from saying that we should push every single student, regardless of intellectual abilities and interests, to go to college.
Few people are too stupid to learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. Once you start hitting real science and math, typically in junior high/middle school, people start to fall by the wayside. At that point, we are engaged in the provision of free babysitting, not education, in an increasingly large portion of the population. This is counterproductive, because it simultaneously prevents students who don't want to be there from being able to go out and earn a living and subjects those who do want to be there to their antics.
Would I like to live in a well-educated society? Yes, of course I would. But my world - and the world of most Slashdotters - is not the world of most people. Most people aren't capable of getting a college degree from even the crappiest of schools, and the idiotic idea that every person should spend their first twenty-two years on earth in pursuit of a bachelor's degree is holding us back as a society. We spend far too much money on education, for far too little return. The fact that Adam Smith saw some low-hanging fruit to pick doesn't mean that the marginal dollar spent on education is always a net positive.
The advantage in the private sector is not that companies are inherently more efficient than governments. It's that inefficient companies tend to go out of business.
Even with competition you run into the age old problem that private companies optimize for factors that aren't efficient for government.
For a private company, firing 100 people can be a massive efficiency boost. For the government, 100 unemployed people easily ends up costing more than just employing 100 people as it has to deal with the long term consequences.
Efficiency for the government is using less imported and natural resources. Meanwhile, private companies will easily spend more on imported and natural resources as long as it means that it can employ less people.
Technically you need extremely little. The population can get by without water treatment, modern medicine, proper waste disposal or more than one kidney. They'll merely suffer greatly. Just because something isn't needed doesn't mean it isn't good to have. By definition need is the minimum requirement.
Smith's specific discussion in "Wealth of Nations" concerned university level education, not sixth grade, though the same general class of arguments apply at basically every level (the more educated the populace, to whatever level they are capable of rising to though perhaps not paying for on the private market, the better overall for society).
Depends on the school district honestly, we ended up pulling my two boys for home schooling because the local public school is WASP central and if you aren't WASP you might as well be a nigger at a Klan rally for how well you'll be treated. with one Catholic and the other gay? Yeah that place was a shithole for them. The last straw was when an English teacher dedicated her whole damned class for giving a lecture on "Idolaters and Sodomites", yes we SHOULD have sued that place out of existence but my sister was fighting a losing battle with cancer and honestly we just couldn't take any more fucking stress so we told them to go to hell and pulled them out.
So with all the articles on bullying and how even the teachers have been busted encouraging the shit you'd think folks wouldn't paint the GED with such a broad brush, there are a hell of a lot of people who quit public school NOT because they don't want to learn but because the school is a hellhole and the parents can't afford to move. I know I wouldn't wish our school district on a non WASP if they were my worst enemy, its bad enough the black folks all self segregate so their kids don't have to go to "McWhitey" as they call it because all non WASPs are treated like dirt there.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, the point is not what you said. Contracts can be for a fixed amount ( fixed-price contract) where the company has to make a good faith bid on what it will cost them, and they include their profit in their bid cost. If they perform the job with a lower cost, they get higher profit. If the job ultimately costs more, they have to eat the extra cost and perform the contract at the specified cost. :>)
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A "cost plus profit contract bid" allows the company to say "I am guessing that the job will cost X and you will pay me X + I am including a profit of P% of X along with that cost, but if the job ends up costing X+Y dollars, then you shall pay me (X+Y) + P% of (X+Y) as this contract says you shall pay me "cost + profit".
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Fixed-cost puts more burden on the company to perform and do it efficiently and well. Cost-plus means that the company does not have as much incentive to keep the costs down as much as possible. (usually up to some fixed limit, according to wikipedia). Note, information is from wikipedia and San Diego Union Tribune articles. Please note IANACA / IAAHSK : I am not a contract attorney, i am a high-school kid.
There are many of us that have never used drugs that have taken the GED exam, myself included. During high school both my father, and my younger sister died. And my mother decided that I moving to follow my grandparents was a good idea, and my credits transferred for half what they were worth at the previous school. so as a junior I credit wise I looked like a freshman. (since half credits were rounded down) I had never used any drugs that were not prescribed to me or came over the counter. (and no I did not modify those) my GPA did suffer due to everything I was going through, but even then I was never a straight A student. So, I took the GED exam which at that time was weighted so that only 25% of high school graduates could pass it. I passed it on my first try
I was stuck in a dead end job for many years, but I'm finally back in school. Currently have completed an EE minor, am one class away from a math minor as well, and I am working on completing my senior year for a CS major..
Who are you to say what someone else needs? Especially, if you don't know their life. The details I placed in this post are just a fraction of the stories and difficulties I have faced. If you think you know him well enough to state "It's a big cluebat across the side of his head that he needs." then maybe he knows you well enough to state the same, or possibly worse.
Do you need a GED to stack topsoil bags at Home Depot or lay roofing tiles? Do you need a GED to mash the chicken shaped button on the cash register.
Wow my word processor added a bunch of I's
Perhaps you should, oh, read something about School districts before going on your little rant? The simple fact is, by far, schools are run at the local level by voter appointed school boards who are in significant control over just how well your local school system functions, be it how much they tax, who they tax, and just how efficiently they use that money in educating students. If your local school system is a bloated mess, odds are good it's in large part your own fault.
Or, you know, parents could become more involved in *important* aspects of schooling? Instead of focusing on whether or not God is in the classroom, why not push for more of all religions being taught? If little Timmy comes home and gets an A, why not quiz Timmy and see if he really deserved it? And if he gets a C+, why not do the same? Or do you really thing the problem is that Timmy's teacher needs to fear for their job daily or cutting their salary would magically fix things? Would you fearing for your job daily or cutting your salary make you a better worker?
No, I'd say a large part of the problem is that (a) parents abstractly demand a lot of teachers but are generally unqualified to even know if the teachers are doing a good job or not, (b) this stems not from the fact that parents *can't* know these things but many simply refuse to put the effort into it because schooling is treated as a secondary or tertiary thing in their child's life--after all, if it takes so much effort to know those things, then obviously you aren't using them in your own daily life, so it can't be that important, so why relearn it temporarily for your kid's sake--, and (c) parents aren't politically involved enough in ways that matter. Sure, it's easy to get upset that your school is rated badly one year. It's much harder to commit to finding and voting for good people to sit on the school board--especially if that means parents are the ones. It's much harder to actually figure out what's important and what's not when it comes to learning.
But money, oh yea, it's easy enough to (a) demand money and buy into the top rated schools--damn the obvious point that top rated schools are, optimistically, top rated because the students want to succeed (a fact quite missing from little Timmy or you)--or (b) to pay off your own home schooling--which at least will get you involved in schooling but then you're doing even more work than just being well civic minded while still probably providing a disservice to your children when you're not quite enough of an expert in many areas to do a good job of covering plenty of subjects (although presuming you put in the effort, your child will likely eventually learn to be motivated enough and learn on their own which sort of solves that issue).
Of course point (b) sort of hints at another important point. Teach your kids to be motivated to learn, period. That, really, solves most of your problems. You might still want to complain about how much of a "waste" your local school system is, money wise, but then pretending that schools facing starvation will magically solve the pressing issue of parent apathy is just outright delusional and speaks more of a general greed on your part.
Or, maybe it's the "principal" of the thing? Yea, that's the ticket...
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Looking at this from outside the US: it looks really strange to privatize high school final exam. What could be the benefit? You have public schools with teachers on payroll, why not pick randomly 100 of them each year, ask them to write a test, then randomly pick what is your exam.
The last straw was when an English teacher dedicated her whole damned class for giving a lecture on "Idolaters and Sodomites"
Wait, WHAT? It's sadly common to be persecuted for being gay in high school, but you say a public school teacher taught a class excoriating one of your children as an idolater for being Catholic? I'm not doubting you, but this just sounds a little too over the top to be true in my experience. Were there really no other Catholics in the entire school who were offended by this? Catholics are - even if not locally - a nationally pretty well connected bunch politically and I can't imagine something like this not being a cause for raising a stink at a state diocese level and a big political hullabaloo that would cost the offenders their jobs.
Where was this? When was this? You should at least be able to disclose that in the interest of making sure no Slashdotters ever make the mistake of moving there.
"95% of all Slashdot
Congratulations on having been an exceptionally bright and ambitious kid. However, your advice is approximately as useful to the 99.9% of humanity who don't share your particular combination of brilliance, cojones, and luck as saying "high school isn't needed; just win the lottery instead."
Well, privatization makes sense when there can actually be competition. It also makes sense if you lack an economy of scale that a private company could offer.
However, if you privatize something that you already have economy of scale on and give an exclusive contract to a single company, well, yes, you're going to get clobbered.
If the state police is running its own paper mill to create ticket pads for its officers then buying the paper from whoever is cheapest that month makes sense. On the other hand, privatizing the police force itself doesn't make sense - you're already employing tens of thousands of people with all the support structures in place. There really isn't any sensible way to privatize that without an exclusive contract. Now, privatizing bounty hunting and such would make more sense - you can just publish a name and a bounty and give the money to whoever drags the guy in.
I'm all for outsourcing or privatizing when it makes sense. The problem is that it is usually just done as a matter of fashion, or management laziness, or often in the case of the government (and sometimes industry as well), corruption.
We need a college ged or some kind badges system ... The cost of college is killing us
Agreed on the four-year college/university front, but community college is still pretty inexpensive. If you're applying for jobs where community college is not good enough (i.e. they want a university degree), then no "college GED" or equivalent would ever be enough for them. That's because they are using which college you went to as a lazy substitute for figuring out how smart you are, or at least viewing your four-year university degree as some form of proof that you can function for some period of time away from your parents without washing out, landing in rehab or otherwise proving yourself a potential job liability.
"95% of all Slashdot
Are you trying to explain why you're using "need" to only refer to things with economic benefits? Because that's what I thought was bizarre. There are lots of things we need besides those that can be bought: love, meaning to one's life, agency, creativity, etc.
If you only mean need for the sake of the greater good of the economy, independent of the individual's free choice to determine what he or she needs from life to make it meaningful, then please make yourself clear and say so. Similarly, if by education you mean public, institutionalized, vocational education, then it only makes sense to clarify that as well. Otherwise I don't know how you expect to change the minds of those with a differing viewpoint, never mind those who don't share your ideology.
(As a side note, are you hoping to encourage humanities majors to agree with you? If you call their studies worthless, it's easy for that to sound like a personal insult, which isn't going to convince many people at all! Who are you writing this for, anyway?)
Wow did you ever take your GED you moronic idiot? My highschool kicked me out of school be ause y mother and I no longer had proof of residency when we wee evicted from our one bedroom apartment when I was 15 years old. Thank god for the GED otherwise I would not have been able to get a highschool diploma. Once I got my GED, I started community college, transferred to UCLA and went on to UCLA law school. My mother was not on crack nor am I dumb not did she homeschool me. We were just poor. So get a brain idiot.
We need a college ged or some kind badges system ... The cost of college is killing us
Agreed on the four-year college/university front, but community college is still pretty inexpensive. If you're applying for jobs where community college is not good enough (i.e. they want a university degree), then no "college GED" or equivalent would ever be enough for them. That's because they are using which college you went to as a lazy substitute for figuring out how smart you are, or at least viewing your four-year university degree as some form of proof that you can function for some period of time away from your parents without washing out, landing in rehab or otherwise proving yourself a potential job liability.
Yes some people can see the proof that you can function for some period of time away from your parents without washing out, landing in rehab or otherwise proving yourself a potential job liability. But that idea misses the fact that most community college are only 2 years, That tech schools get lumped into not an university degree and that in some classes in an university don't give all the skills needed to do a job while a tech school can in less time.
But how do you have competition when you need a standard test? Either the companies have to agree to a flat specification for said test, in which case you need a regulatory body anyway, or they're selling the same product, in which case they can't improve their products. Making it government-run looks like the right thing to do in this case, even though it has its own inefficiencies, because there just can't be a functional market.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
we need to have more trades / apprenticeship and stop pushing college for all / tech the test.
Not all people can learn in a college setting and we should not dumb down to college to have them pass we should push the people who do better in more on hands trade / tech school / apprenticeship setting.
Yes, therwise your employment application will not ask for the name of your high school and whether you graduated or not. Nowadays, even dishwashing jobs require a high school diploma or GED.
New Economic Perspectives
A lot of people bypass high school because they are too smart for it, or because the parents want an environment that are bullying-free, gunmen-free, and suicide risk-free.
You want to learn team work and meet friends? There are amateur clubs out there for almost every single sport. You don't have to go to high school to learn how to communicate and meet friends.
New Economic Perspectives
We spend far too much money on education, for far too little return. The fact that Adam Smith saw some low-hanging fruit to pick doesn't mean that the marginal dollar spent on education is always a net positive.
A) The alternative is worse.
B) Education spending is complicated by social factors that take place outside the school.
I'll never understand the people who seem to think that if the government rolls back spending, things will stay the way they are or get better.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If you are applying for Federal student aid to go to college, you NEED a high school diploma or GED certificate.
Before 2012 you can get financial aid by passing the ability-to-benefit (ATB) test. Now that option is gone. ATB test, which test only English and Math skills, are very popular among the adult immigrant population who are getting a technical degree or similar. Now they will have to pass GED which means learning social science and civics among others that they will probably NEVER use.
New Economic Perspectives
Require and need are different things
The test is computerized, but it is still proctored. You need to schedule the exam in a testing center, and show up at the appointment time with a valid ID.
If GED test can be taken online, I bet you there will be attempts in test taker impersonation.
New Economic Perspectives
You know the material and got a degree. Everyone is happy. What is the problem?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I started working at a young age. Since I have been gainfully employed without a diploma or GED for all but a few months (total) of that time, it has never been a priority to shell out money in order to sit in classes for several days. I'd like to just take the equivalency test online, but for some idiotic reason it's not offered.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
Where I live currently, they require several ass-in-seat days. Could be tests, could be classes, I'm not sure, offhand.
That assumes that the state you were homeschooled in graduates you, which in NYS at the time, was only if who you were being taught by was an accredited "education professional", as defined by them. My mother was a former primary education teacher, so I got better from her tutelage than I ever would've gotten from the state public system (just comparing what I learned to what my friends came out of the system knowing... or rather, not knowing).
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
If you don't have a diploma by age eighteen in the U.S. it means that either your parents were batshit-insane religious fundamentalists who insisted that being socialized was too evil for you
There are plenty of ways for home schooled kids to socialize if they want to, and I doubt locking people in a building where they receive an extremely poor education along with others their own age is that great of a way to have someone socialize to begin with. Also, you don't need to be religious to home school your kids, and even people who do graduate from our horrible public schools can be (and often probably are) dumb and unmotivated. Not having a degree doesn't mean you're dumb or unmotivated; it could even show that you care a little about your education, or that your parents did (in the case of homeschooling and self-education).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I would chalk it up to educational methodology and the one-size-fits-all pedagogy that we seem to practice when it comes to education. People have unique skills, and people learn differently.
There are some things that come easily to me, without expending any significant effort (math, language, music) but there are things that I have to struggle with (e.g. visual arts).
Those things I am good at, I learn pretty much on my own. Take math, for instance. I can very easily pick up even sophisticated topics (e.g. topological manifolds) by picking up a book and immersing myself for a few weekends. Ditto for music -- I can usually translate my musical knowledge to any musical instrument once I've established the scale and technique. I may not be very good at it (not without practice, anyway), but I will make music.
But those things that aren't my strong suit? I need a lot of practice and the freedom (not to mention time) to make the connections on my own.
Foreign languages is another one of those -- I grew up in a tri-lingual household, and I can usually pick up languages pretty easily. But I find it easier to pick it up by immersion than by reading a book or going through a course. Letting me spend two weeks immersed in a language will be significantly more productive than subjecting me to a traditional class on languages for two months.
So, in my opinion, most people perform poorly because the educational system is designed for scale and issuing rubber-stamps -- not real education. If our goal is to genuinely educate the masses, we would have an educational system that's catered to people's strengths and learning capabilities.
When I went to college, a HS diploma or equivelent was required. There was no allowance for "or by petition" except for getting into community college.
I did online courses to obtain my degree 5 years ago and they never even asked if I had a high school diploma. I simply sent them my earlier college transcripts and started classes.
I have a friend or two with a degree from UPhoenix. They will take anyone with a pulse. They meet the minimum standards for eligibility of federal financial aid, and not much else.
When I went back for a masters, I had to pay a 20 year old parking ticket. I didn't even know I had one, could have been a relative coming to my graduation. But I was required to provide proof of a B.S. to get into my M.S. degree program. And the order of the confirmation letter was $20, and the cost of any "ourstanding" fees - the parking ticket. They did ask for H.S diploma as well. but holding a B.S. suffices as proof of competency. The admissions person was sloppy, and when I went in once, I saw that they accepted people with a 25% GMAT. She laughed when I asked if my 90+% GMAT was sufficient (percentages given as percentile scores, not raw), which I asked before seeing the levels that were accepted.
Learn to love Alaska
Sure, when a customer asks how many bags will be needed to fill a 5'X8' garden to a depth of 4 inches, it might be useful for them to have some sort of answer. When a customer decides to split the bill between his buddies at the register, it comes in handy. Or in roofing, when Tuco tries to sell them 8 grams of weed, is that a better deal than Nancy who is selling it for less by the quarter oz?
You screw up a buy, and your gonna get some unfortunately placed roof nails.
Entertaining. You complain about the OP's rant, then proceed to go on your own tirade.
If I decide that a solid religious education is important for my children, there is no reason why the money I pay in taxes should go towards the public school system in my school district. That money should be going to the private school where I send my kids, but I would be prepared to split that with the public school system for services that are shared between the public and private schools. (Example: the private school where I send my kids uses the same textbooks as the public school system, and uses a nurse that is employed by the public school system.)
You don't get to complain me educating my kids in a private (religious) environment, unless you somehow think the 1st Amendment is magically invalid.
Good parents already do this, regardless of where the kids are going to school. This has nothing to do with what the OP said. Why bring it up?
I know what the budget is for the private school I send my kids to. The teachers are compensated fairly well. (The PTO generally advocates for teacher raises, as a matter of fact.)
What they DON'T spend money on are facilities boondoggles.
Additionally, the difference between the private school teachers and the public school teachers is quality. My kids have yet to have a bad teacher at their private school. Based on what I have seen, I am expecting them to have zero bad teachers through the day they graduate. In comparison, I was a product of one of the best public school systems in the country, and I can name three bad teachers I had that should have been fired years before I got there.
I will grant you that it is difficult to compute performance for teachers, but there needs to be a way, even if imperfect, before we can even start to have a discussion about teacher salaries. The complaint about the employment disaster that are the teacher's unions is completely valid.
Actually, my guess is there is a correlation between parents who can afford to send their kids to these top-rated schools and the interest (and importance) they place on their children's education that results in those schools staying top-rated, rather than students intrinsically wanting to succeed. (That quality seems to be rare on its own; we only need to look at the poorest-performing school districts to observe that.)
Both optimistic and naive. Read up on how textbooks are selected by school boards sometime. My children's textbooks are demonstrably worse in some ways than the textbooks I grew up with. Decisions between school boards and teacher's unions quite frequently made by people with significant conflicts of interest, and rarely made public.
Conceptually it sounds nice, but in practice, the process has been corrupted over the past 100 years.
I won't name the name of the school as I sometimes do work for another school in the area and if shit was to start up again it could cost me some work and might cost the assistant principle his job and I actually felt sorry for him, he was a nice guy, wasn't his fault he wasn't allowed to fire her because she had tenure. All I will say is its in AR right smack dab in the middle of the bible belt and talking to others whose kids ended up there later? well lets just say the local private schools just LOVE the bigoted bullshit those old bats there pull because they have waiting lists for openings because of them. We are talking old time holy roller bigots there man.
And I love how I get modded down for pointing out there are legitimate reasons for not going to a school, I mean hasn't anybody even read the headlines lately? about how those scumbags raped a girl and then posted pics and taunted her and neither the cops nor school would do shit? Hell I'm living in the same state where a member of a school board said you should be able to kill queers, and I graduated with straight As in HS and I never actually attended a single class thanks to being able to do math and english so one of the coaches set me up in my own classroom so i could teach jocks for 4 years how to cheat their way through the test required to play football!
Frankly one of those 20/20 style shows really ought to pick a half a dozen small town schools and investigate to see what its really like, you'll find bigotry, apathy, teachers letting bullies do anything they want, honestly the public schools in the small towns really do suck. I wouldn't wish my HS on my worst enemy, I really wouldn't.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You talking smack about femtobyte?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I prefer to say that I see his potential.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Exactly.
floor spring, glass door lock, shower hinge
davestar666, I'm posting to remind you to never touch ExploHD's phone, ever.
there are a hell of a lot of people who quit public school NOT because they don't want to learn but because the school is a hellhole and the parents can't afford to move.
I grew up in a mid-sized city that had been steadily losing its factory's from the 60's to the 80's, so child population was crashing in the 80's and every few years they would close a school down, always one of the better schools because busing student out of the inner city was cost prohibitive. They closed the local middle school the year I entered 6th grade and the school they were going to bus me to was a complete shithole, so my parents decided they would drive me every day to one of the other middle schools.. they chose the one with the fewest broken windows during summer recess (really.)
There were only 2 high schools left when I entered 9th grade, the shitty one and the really shitty one. During my freshmen year there was a drive-by shooting moments before school started, one kid getting the double-tap (he was the target.) They caught the guys that did the drive-by like a week later, and they were from a gang in a city 30 miles away.
I dropped out 2 weeks later. I had to wait until my class graduated before I could take the GED.
"His name was James Damore."
It wouldn't shock me.. I once had a social studies teacher who spent a lot of his time either trying to convince us that the teacher's union is always right or that my province should split from Canada and join with Washington, Oregon and California to form a new country called "Cascadia". Throw in a Chemistry teacher who had problems with anyone not an atheist or vegetarian, a health teacher who blamed men for everything wrong in this world and I got the idea very quickly that teachers often have the view that their position gives them the right to shove their own views down the throats of the students.
The only time I have ever seen a teacher take any heat for anything that came out of their mouths was a substitute teacher who went off on a rant about how South Africa was better off under apartheid because "blacks can't run things". We never saw him again. Quite frankly, teachers can say and do what they want so long as they don't trash talk anyone for being female or not white.
Only issues here is.
1. Compulsarise.
2. Caimpagn and off shore account donarise.
3. Privatise
4. Profitise.
Seriously WTF?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The simple approach is to just lie and report that you have a GED or high school diploma. Most restaurants will not verify that is true anyway.
You don't need a GED to be able to answer any of those things...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Lots of home schooled kids commit suicide. School acts as general socialization, rather than hyper-focus socialization where you become part of an elite class of chess players and don't know how to communicate with people who lead lives doing things that actually engage the brain, like playing Go.
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Catholic school is superior to regular school. Love those slightly slutty 18 year olds in college.
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No one is a "dumb fuck" merely because they drop out of school. Public schools in the US are, I believe, absolutely abysmal. It is possible to drop out and self-educate or be home schooled, and frankly, I think either of those things are better choices for individuals who even slightly care about their education.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Sounds like Heber Springs school district. They don't even like black dogs in Heber...
School acts as general socialization
Locking a kid up in a building with poor education standards with others their own age (some of whom are bullies) isn't a very good way to have someone socialize, in my opinion. That said, there are many options available to kids who are homeschooling if they want to socialize with other people.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
After noting the higher "efficiencies" of privatizing education, Adam Smith still concludes that a more broadly educated public through public education (even at the expense of wasting a bit more money on less-motivated students) is ultimately for the public good.
The current school system in the US is a bloated government monopoly, indifferent to competing models of schooling. You pay for it through taxes whether you send your kids to public school, private school, or if you homeschool them (or even if you don't have kids at all). There are alternatives to public school in the US, but the government doesn't care. They get their money, even if you shell out for private school or quit your job to homeschool.
At the minimum, parents should receive vouchers equivalent in value to what the local public school system pays per pupil, vouchers that could be redeemed at private schools, or used for homeschooling expenses. This would put real pressure on crappy public schools to reform themselves or face starvation, unlike the misguided "No Child Left Behind Act".
Because private university works so well right? Very inexpensive and available to everyone who qualifies without going into massive debt. Yes, extending that down to grade school level is an excellent idea !!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
"You pay for it through taxes whether you send your kids to public school, private school, or if you homeschool them (or even if you don't have kids at all)."
Because education of all children, regardless of method and regardless of whether you personally have any children, is so clearly of benefit to broader society and pays such HUGE dividends that leaving public schools to "starve" of funds would be a very dangerous experiment for a country to attempt. You think kids "fall through the cracks" now? Wait til you draw away half the public school funding to stupid vouchers that the taxpayer *still* pays for regardless of whether or not they have kids. And in reality, private schools would try to offer the cheapest education they could get away with and pocket as much profit as possible from their operations. That's how a business works. I don't see how that would necessarily be better than simply trying to improve public schools in the first place by getting involved in the education system as parents and concerned citizens.
No, you'll still likely have to go into a testing center and take it there (otherwise there is no way to ensure you're not cheating). Going computer on standardized tests does make it harder to cheat though (as it eliminates the problem of teachers and proctors going in and erasing incorrect answers that has become all too common in many schools).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
If you don't have a diploma by age eighteen in the U.S. it means that either your parents were batshit-insane religious fundamentalists who insisted that being socialized was too evil for you, or you were a dumb and/or unmotivated piece of meth-snorting glue-sniffing trash.
Well, who needs a diploma when your career plans are to become a hog-caller, carnie, or drug dealer?
To be honest I'm all for letting kids drop out if they like (or take the GED or whatever). When I went to high school, 90% of every teacher's time was wasted dealing with disciplinary problems from kids who clearly had no business being there and didn't want to be. They sucked up time that could have been spent on the kids with a real future, and usually made life hell for the smarter kids too. Why should college bound-kids have to go to school with kids whose life ambition is to "become a trucker, like The Bandit," anyway?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Didn't you read GPP's post? Competition! Free market! Invisible hand! Everything will be better if we get the government out of the way and let the network of innovative job-creating entrepeneurs optimize the educational testing paradigm for maximal stakeholder impact!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's not common sense he needs. It's a big cluebat across the side of his head that he needs.
No, people who were trolled by obvious troll need the cluebat.
Oh, get out of here with your socialist nonsense. Government should be run exactly like a business. Granted, a business that tries to reduce revenue to the lowest possible level and has a board of directors that constantly talks about how terrible business is and how business never does anything which can possibly increase revenue in the future ... but other than that, exactly like a business. Yeah.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Who are you to say what someone else needs? Especially, if you don't know their life. The details I placed in this post are just a fraction of the stories and difficulties I have faced. If you think you know him well enough to state "It's a big cluebat across the side of his head that he needs." then maybe he knows you well enough to state the same, or possibly worse.
Wow, you totally missed out on learning reading comprehension, though. The person you replied to was ragging on the AC who insulted the OP.
High school diplomas are almost as worthless as college degrees these days due to the plunging standards in schools. People will just lie and say they have a high school diploma 90% of the time anyway, and no one ever checks up on them. With "no child left behind" they should already have gotten the diploma just for reaching age 18 anyway since that's all schools require of students anymore.
Teacher salary, desk, administration. I think the national average is $7K per pupil per year (times four years).
If you get to complain about your tax money supporting a public school system, I get to complain about my tax money supporting an institution that has no prohibition from discriminating on race, gender, religious affiliation, and so forth. You wave around the first amendment when it's convenient for you, but you forget that it's intended to keep the government from promoting a particular religion, which it would be doing if it funded a private school that includes participation in a particular religion as part of its curriculum. You can't have it both ways. If you want to send your kid to Catholic school because you think the quality of education or spiritual instruction is superior, have fun. Don't make me support a religion through my tax money. Bad enough that they're tax-exempt.
Are you implying that people who can't afford to send their kids to school are less likely to value their child's education? How dare they be poor!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I think you need to examine just how true that statement really is. Consider for a moment that in the "natural" state young people would be probably following their parents around learning to hunt, gather, build, etc. The relationship of adolescents to adults would probably be very very different than your typical American high-school with a ration of 30:1.
In a usual high-school setting the students don't do much socializing with the adults either, rather the functional inter operate with them in a narrowly defined system of rules.
In a high school you have adolescents primarily socializing not with mature members of our society but with their equally immature peers. By and large instead of getting their social ques from adults they are getting them from each other; and in the context of a rather contrived situation to boot. What other part of your post high school life are you going to find yourself locked in a building with everyone being your exact age, and doing the exact same 'job' again?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I dropped out of high school in 1983. I was being heavily harassed for being openly gay. I could take it no longer.
I took my GED and passed it easily on the first try. Then I worked my ass off, largely financed my own education, and eventually got a PhD from one of the Ivy League universities. Now I have a successful career.
If the option of the GED hadn't been there for me, I would have been at a dead end.
Yeah, but the other 70% do.
Have gnu, will travel.
I passed my GED a few months before my class graduated so I could get the hell out of my small town and into the warm and loving arms of the Air Force. (See, you don't have to be smart to pass the GED.)
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I don't see how that's a benefit here. If we hand over education to the private sector, and the company running your school district goes bankrupt, yay free market, but where do your kids go to school while another company extorts massive tax breaks out of your town to take over the schools?
We have a similar problem in our town. The water company is privately owned. They run the company about as well as a bunch of howler monkeys on acid; when there was a boil order for a couple weeks in 2009, the company's response was to send a manager to the state regulator's chosen testing facility with samples so loaded with bleach that they couldn't measure the concentration, instead of actually fixing the problem. (That manager is facing criminal charges at the moment, and is likely going to jail.) But it's not like we can let them go bankrupt; a town needs a water supply. They've even had the balls to demand a near-doubling of our (already highest in the region) water rates, because they started building a new water treatment plant without securing financing first. Same principle applies; your children need an education. Once a company has a monopoly, they have no incentive to perform efficiently, or to even perform at all. Soon, your children would be instructed by telepresence from someone in Mumbai who they can pay one-tenth of what a newly hired, actually qualified teacher can make. Sure, the education is about as high-quality as offshore tech support, but hey! Free market!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
How exactly, as a consumer, do you punish a corporation acting badly? Example: Car dealership rips you off. You go to the manufacturer, who says "Sorry, can't help, they're a private business." You complain to the dealership's parent organization, who hangs up on you. Short of filing a lawsuit (hey, look at that, government intervention), what do you do? You get fucked. Another example: BP. 1) Destroy an entire ecosystem that millions of people make their living from. 2) Wring your hands and look concerned. Pay a pittance (relatively speaking) in fines, while admitting no wrongdoing. 3).. 4) PROFIT. Still another: Bank of America and their contemporaries. Knowingly wrote thousands of shit-quality mortgages, but ultimately got to decide FOR THEMSELVES who was wronged by the practice.
There's something we do every couple of years or so called "an election". You have far more say over who runs your local government than some faceless corporation hiding behind the corporate veil and a handful of shell companies.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
we are at war.
Nah. After all where do you think Democratic voters come from? They can't all be illegal Mexicans.
The manufacturing sector was destroyed by taxes and regulation? Not by free trade agreements or skyrocketing executive compensation not tied to metrics that truly measure the health of the corporations under their care?
We wouldn't need regulation if we weren't constantly putting psychopaths at the helm.
I tested out because I was bored with High School.
Or you can just waste 2 extra years in some place you hate.
Don't worry... they will hire highly qualified contractors to make the test.
Probably the same consultants they pay $100k+ to change the name of courses like changing typing to keyboarding.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
high school isn't needed; just win the lottery instead.
That's a great false dilemma, but it isn't true. Those preaching universal schooling are ignorant to think that most will grow up to be doctors or computer scientists.
Who's going to make your Quarter Pounder, an Art History Major? Do you need to go to high school to be a mechanic, a plumber, or a contract worker?
I'd rather support trade schools or apprenticeships in lieu of high school: it might just make us a better society by not wasting everyone's time & money.
I dropped out of high school, didn't go to get my GED until around 10 years after that, didn't open text book or study tool/aid 1 took the test and passed first go. Just go take it, it's very easy.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
That quarter pounder would look a lot more appealing if it was.
Nowadays, even dishwashing jobs require a high school diploma or GED.
I don't have a source, since I heard it from a FOAF (friend of a friend), but I heard McDonalds is asking for college grads for some entry-level jobs now!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Let's set aside the fact that your response of "you don't need education because you're too stupid" is a complete non sequitur to the above argument about "you don't need education because you're already too damn smart," and focus on your point.
Some day, I'd like to live in a democracy, which means that *everyone* has the job of citizenship. That means every burger flipper should absolutely know way more about history, art, literature, mathematics, science, music, agriculture, and philosophy than they need to be a good wage slave who says "yes mastuh, would you like fries with that?". So long as burger flippers are necessary, I'd like to progress towards a world where they're *treated* as necessary (and are empowered by education to claim that victory). You remind me of the people who insisted that teaching slaves to read should be illegal, because it would be nothing but trouble. I want a world with more of that kind of trouble.
Maybe not, but it does involve them with their peer group. The way to solve the bullying problem is to teach kids to fight back; but adults are old and stupid and go "oh no, no, you want to cower in the corner and show people that flexing their muscles and punching people gets them power, and all they need to do is scare you into not tattling or make sure you're not known to them well enough to tattle!" Then they tell people not to beat their kids. So you have kid who gets sent home to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not study and goes "LOL STUPID SUSPENSION" and comes back and kicks your ass for telling the teacher he kicked your ass the first time.
Fell down some stairs, sir.
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Well, yes. But it's not exactly a bad thing.
Teenagers don't agree with adults because, basically, adults are wrong and teenagers are able to recognize that. Adults are wrong about everything. Look out your window once in a while. The problem is teenagers (and folks in general) don't know what exactly *is* wrong, they just know the people around them are old and stupid.
These are the people that grew up realizing that prohibition is wrong, while the adults were saying "NEVER DRINK ALCOHOL! NEVER DRINK ALCOHOL! NEVER DRINK ALCOHOL!" In school we didn't get the "Don't drink too much, don't drive when drunk" talk; we got "Drunk driving kills people and ALCOHOL CAUSES CANCER, DON'T DRINK ALCOHOL, IT WILL BRAIN DAMAGE YOU!" We got that talk, a lot. Result? Teenargers realize these people are stupid, somehow. Then, they go and do equally stupid shit like steal beer and guzzle tons of it off the keg. Underage drinking isn't a bad thing... if we're talking like a beer once in a while, at dinner, or something. A normal beer, not 12% shit that's really good but really fucking high in alcohol. It happens to be illegal because, well, the people in charge are stupid; the underage drinkers of course are also stupid and guzzle tons of liquor until they puke or die of alcohol poisoning.
I'm currently living in a cubicle, which is roughly high school. Everyone's about 20s-30s, about the same maturity level (I think the slightly older ones are less mature on average, but in general it's pretty flat), and doing roughly the same job. We're diversified now, but in high school we had the same thing--everyone got together and some people laid floors, some people ran framing, some people ran electric and HVAC--the HVAC and the electric folks were completely separate skillsets from the general construction kids, too. Then they'd stick them up on blocks and have them hauled away and planted somewhere, complete prefab houses. Shit the average 10th grader gets done in about 2 months.
Americans are too concerned with "mental development." Is this good for baby? Will this make baby smart? In every other country, they all have different parenting techniques; but the one constant is they all just bring the baby with them. The child goes with the parents, that is development. In America, development is boy scouts, summer reading programs, piano class, forcing higher math on a 6 year old, increased art education, science programs, "educational television", etc. So silly. What do you intend to accomplish by having kids socialize not with their peers and future social group and coworkers and bosses, but with adults who will be retired later?
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ditto, GED recipient myself and it didnt even come up when I was admitted to dental school.
But though the common people cannot, in any civilised society, be so well instructed as people of some rank and fortune, the most essential parts of education, however, to read, write, and account, can be acquired at so early a period of life that the greater part even of those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations have time to acquire them before they can be employed in those occupations. For a very small expense the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.
Does that sound like a university education to you? Or just an elementary one? BTW, he advocates that university professors be paid directly by their students.
Do you see cost over-runs, no incentives to keep costs down, no incentive to make availability or improve usability, no incentives for all the other stuff in the shoes market?
Yes.
Now imagine that employers screen your resume by the type of shoe that you're wearing even if the shoes aren't relevant to the job. Wear the wrong shoes and your resume goes in the garbage, so you have an incentive to wear the more expensive ones that employers like. The manufacturers will then have an incentive to produce ever pricier shoes that people will buy in order to better their chances in the job market.
Schools should be private of-course, just like shoes should be private and there should be no taxes going towards schools just like there are no taxes going towards shoes.
Because fuck the children of poor families who can't afford a private school, right? They'll never amount to anything anyway, so they don't deserve even a basic education. They can slave away at part time jobs for minimum wave and sleep in a box in an alleyway.
You're an elitist douchebag who thinks that familial wealth somehow equates to the potential value of a person.
Maybe not, but it does involve them with their peer group.
So does getting them involved with homeschooling groups and such, or them simply finding friends like a normal person might.
Now, there are ways to deal with bullies that might work, but my point was that I do not believe the school environment itself (not even going into everything else) often has a positive impact on an individual's education.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Maybe not, but it does involve them with their peer group. The way to solve the bullying problem is to teach kids to fight back;
...wrote the person who knows absolutely jack shit about problems of violence in inner-city schools, or chooses to remain willfully obtuse about how this sort of response often culminates in someone getting shot.
In other words, you're a blithering idiot. Don't ever procreate.
Of course, more modern free-marketeers who don't give a fuck about the public good (only maximizing profits) come to different conclusions.
Actually, modern "free-marketeers" believe that there should be both public and private schools and that they should compete with each other to deliver the best education at the least cost. There are various and sundry issues with this model, but I'd appreciate a link to any economist, respected or otherwise, who argues that the public education system should be completely abolished.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Do you need a GED to stack topsoil bags at Home Depot or lay roofing tiles? Do you need a GED to mash the chicken shaped button on the cash register.
Probably. If you can't read where to put the topsoil bags, then you'll put them in the wrong place.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
"In America, development is boy scouts, summer reading programs, piano class, forcing higher math on a 6 year old, increased art education, science programs, "educational television", etc. So silly."
I have to say, it works very well on majority of East Asian countries.
New Economic Perspectives
Of course. I didn't complain that the OP was ranting. I pointed out specific points where he/she failed to really address the issues at hand.
Um, why? Do I get to not fund the military if I don't like it or not fund medicare because old people can just fend for themselves? No. Why would it be any different with public schooling? Now, that you have the power to do such is possibly true--again the whole point of school boards and what not. But then you'd have to convince a lot of people that it's a good idea to let you and lots of other people--all the non-parents come to mind--to cash out of the system and raise the tax rates for everyone still in the public system. Yea, good luck with that.
Sure I do. That's precisely what that good old 1st Amendment is all about. I have an inherent right to complain, just as you do. The government can't censor either one of us. Beyond that, me complaining doesn't censor you in any way except to prove the folly of your words and then to let people *chose* to ignore you.
Oh, because the OP was complaining about *the* current school system and *a* government monopoly. From that, I really don't think the OP was a good, involved parent. Hence, I brought up what a good parent should do. Bad parents lob vague complaints instead, presuming that little Timmy should get A's and C's are a sign of the school system being bad. Quite the contrary, it could well be a sign the school system is bad if Timmy is getting A's and good if he's getting C's.
So, what "facilities boondoggles" do you speak of? Because that's such a vague complaint, it's really impossible to even know what you're talking about. Since you make it clear that teachers compensated fairly well isn't per se an issue, I'd really like to hear exactly what and where the waste is.
Right. So, what does your private school do? What aspec
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Very cool! I had a child and had to leave HS with a GED my senior year. I'm currently working on my PhD in CS. :) I plan to have my little GED card framed so it can hang with the PhD when I'm done.
"or at least viewing your four-year university degree as some form of proof that you can function for some period of time away from your parents without washing out, landing in rehab or otherwise proving yourself a potential job liability."
That doesn't worth the extra $ or student loan debt that it created.
Having your parents as a dependent on your own tax return, and have them to live in your basement (rather than the other way around) is good enough indicator of your maturity. That prepares you for having kids later on.
New Economic Perspectives
Lots of home schooled kids commit suicide.
Lots of school schooled kids do too -- and I would need a citation to some study before I would lend credence to the ridiculous assertion that home schooled kids kill themselves ate a higher rate per capita than school schooled kids, especially the ones who are bullied. It flies in the face of logic.
And school is a terrible place to learn about socialization, what with the cliques, bullying, authoritarian staff, etc. Kids suck as socialization, you want kids who suck at socializing to teach your kids to socialize? Kids are horrible little monsters when you leave them alone with other kids.
The fact that governments spend money does not mean that governments create wealth - at best they can create the conditions that make wealth-creation possible. They take money away from people who actually do create wealth and spend it to do all sorts of things - some of them are extremely beneficial (like basic policing), some are neutral, and some are incredibly harmful (like the Farm Bill). As long as they're spending money on things in the first category, it's useful. When they do stuff in the last one, they're actively harming the citizens by wasting money.
A) The alternative is worse.
Not proven. In fact, why don't you look at what the Feds say? We've roughly doubled our education spending per pupil in the last forty years in public elementary and secondary schools. Is it your contention that we've doubled the quality of results?
Why on earth would you give the whole district over to one company? That would be idiocy. The entire point of charter schools is to introduce competition and let parents choose where to send their kids.
I already pay for a set of schools that I never used, that my sister never used, that my wife and her brother never used, and that none of our children will ever use, because they're terrible. Does the fact that they're provided by the government somehow make them better?
I live in Baltimore City. Your problems are lol.
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No, in East Asian countries they don't function like that. They have school, which works well; they don't have parents "oh we have to ENGAGE the child, it must be made to DEVELOP!" The child is not in school, the child is helping with the cooking or some other shit, or playing with other children. Here in America it's "there must be extracurriculars, there must be educational games and television, we must buy our children toys that stimulate them!" A whole lot of "pile in everything that looks good" instead of having an actual, viable system.
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There are a plenty of solutions for education, Offering online education is an easy solution that could help adolescents receive a high school diploma and it also helps them prepare for the possibility of pursuing higher education online. Many employers look at online degrees with really good reviews and if any of you are interested in looking at them I would recommend visiting GetMyDegreeASAP.com You guy will find plenty of articles that will help you make your decision for an online education a faster one!
Well, you might not start out that way, you could have multiple vendors providing competing services. But the inevitable consolidation that would happen would leave you with one company owning all of them. Then you're pretty screwed, aren't you. Even if there were no consolidation, you can bet your ass that there would be a rapid race for the bottom in terms of who can provide the service the cheapest, quality be damned.
Oh, and your taxes are paying for things you don't personally use? Cry me a fucking river. I've never needed the fire department, should I be pissed that I'm paying for that?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Holy shit...you went there I take it? Lets just say you are pretty damned close and leave it at that and yes there is a LOT of fucking racism and just general bigotry where I'm talking about which would only be a couple of hours from Heber Springs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What classes?
If you have the knowledge you just go take the tests, I completed all of them in a short day.
I know, right? Inflation is so bad that when I go to the supermarket to buy my weekly supply of palladium I can only afford about a third of what I could a few years ago. Granted, if you measure dollar's value in something stupid like gold you'll see a 30% increase in purchasing power in less than two years, but what kind of idiot would do that?
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Roads, rivers, sidewalks, oceans, air space, outer space, and the earth's mantle should also be private. Let the free market decide what it should cost for access rights to walk across town, sail overseas, or fly to the moon.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Thanks. I just hope he doesn't own an iPhone, because I'm worry that he might swap phones without telling me...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Even if there were no consolidation, you can bet your ass that there would be a rapid race for the bottom in terms of who can provide the service the cheapest, quality be damned.
If parents choose the schools, this doesn't happen. See: the private school market. There are a wide variety of options at numerous price points.
I've never needed the fire department, should I be pissed that I'm paying for that?
If you can't see the difference between services used by very few and services used by nearly everyone, you must be a public school grad.
Very few? The public schools? What the hell are you talking about? There seem to be hordes of children around when I drop off my kid at school.
If you want to talk about a service very few use, well, how many people have house fires? Or medical emergencies? Not many, and a shitload fewer than those who send their kids to school.
And as far as private schools go, it's not like they have to compete at the moment; their exclusivity puts them in a different class. But, if all the schools are private, for-profit entities, you can count on the race to the bottom happening eventually.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
If you want to talk about a service very few use, well, how many people have house fires? Or medical emergencies? Not many, and a shitload fewer than those who send their kids to school.
That was your argument, not mine. Don't blame me if it sucks.
if all the schools are private, for-profit entities, you can count on the race to the bottom happening eventually
Yes, because they're all trying to go out of business. Do you espouse incredibly fucking idiotic ideas for fun or for profit?
For-profit entities compete by doing two things: increasing revenue and/or lowering expenses. Increasing revenue is hard in a market where the customer base is finite; it's easier to cut corners. It's only a matter of time before those cut corners lower the quality of the education offered. For-profit schools are not in the business of providing quality education, they are in the business of making money. It's not if you can do it better than the other guy, it's if you can do it cheaper.
Also, this is interesting: Charter schools aren't the free market miracle cures you seem to think they are. tl;dr: Charter schools game the system to make it look like they perform better than public schools, by dropping or turning away poorly performing students. Separation of church and state is also just theory. No fiscal responsibility, either; they don't have to tell you what they're spending your tax money on.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
First response, you proposed the incredibly idiotic idea of handing over your entire school district to one company. I suggested that was inimical to the whole idea of charter schools.
Second response, you tried to tell me that schools were like fire services, used by very few people. I suggested you were a fucking idiot if you actually believed that.
Third and fourth responses, you tried to tell me that private schools are engaged in a race to the bottom. Are you high on crack?
Ignoring the ad hominem for the moment.. What happens when none of the charter schools in your district will accept your child as a student, because they have a learning disability, or are autistic, or they're a poor student? The first two consume more resources than the average student, the third will drag down whatever metrics are used to measure the performance of a school. Are those students just supposed to not get an education?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Do all UCLA grads write so well?
I don't see what's wrong with an unknown person doing the test, under unknown conditions, with reference material and even other people to help. Not at all.
Yes, there's definitely idiocy involved somewhere...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Reading that made my ears hurt.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So now it's not that monopolies will develop because your school board are idiots, nor that private schools are engaged in a race to the bottom (how you can come up with such confused ideas is beyond me - when private schools suck, the parents take their kids out). Now it's all about the tiny handful of students who are either learning-disabled or uneducable? You've moved the goalposts so many times they're no longer in the arena, and you are clearly engaged in mala fides argumentation.
The answer is that you fund a specific school for such children, just like modern alternative schools. That took me all of ten seconds to think up. Was that so hard?
So now you're saying we're going to dictate to a private company who they can and cannot do business with? Doesn't sound too free-market to me.
The trad
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
No idea how that happened.
The reason it looks like I'm skipping around is that there are so many problems with using private for-profit companies to provide critical town services. Who would decide whose children have to attend the "alternative" school? You're taking school choice away from these parents because it's more difficult to educate those children. Also, how can you force a private company to set up a school to for those kids? Such a school is sure to lose money, unless you're prepared to spend more to educate them, which seems unfair to the other children in the town, as well as putting the other businesses at a competitive disadvantage. How much do you propose regulating this market? At what point do the advantages of a free market go away, if you're going to dictate to a private company who they have to accept as a student?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
We do this every day. Private businesses are required not to discriminate based on race, sex, ethnicity, or disabled status.
Sorry, I thought you wanted to have a serious discussion. I didn't realize you owned a straw man factory. Have a nice day.
And that means that it never happens, right? And "poor academic performers" are not one of those protected classes, so it's perfectly legal to turn them away.
So, you fund an alternative school for the kids that the other schools turn away. Who's going to run it? How do you force a private company to open a location that is almost certain to lose money?
Also, what happens when nobody wants to open a school in your town, because they don't think they can make a profit?
I just don't see how going to for-profit companies to do this isn't trading one set of problems for another.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
So these challenges don't exist? Do you have solutions?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Most people are not capable of doing much more than memorizing equations and procedures, so understanding the abstract logic required to understand mathematics is beyond them. Art and music? Just a waste of time.
Maybe if the test wasn't geared towards rote memorization, it wouldn't be such a problem. The hardest and most worthwhile questions can't be answered merely because you have a book (or the Internet) on hand, and that is what most of our tests are lacking.