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Texas Narrowly Rejects Allowing Academics To Fact-Check Public School Textbooks (csmonitor.com)
jriding writes with news that in a 8-7 vote the Texas State Board of Education rejected a plan to create a group of state university professors to fact-check textbooks approved for the state's 5.2 million public-school students. The CS Monitor reports: "The Board of Education approves textbooks in the nation's second-largest state and stood by its vetting process — despite a Houston-area mother recently complaining that a world geography book used by her son's ninth grade class referred to African slaves as 'workers.' The publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, apologized and moved to make immediate edits."
1. This isn't a school problem. It is a school board problem.
2. Where I live, the public schools are better than many of the private alternatives. I know at least 3 children (including my next door neighbor's child) who left public schools for affordable private alternatives and returned 3 or 4 years later. These children ended up way behind the students who stayed in public schools.
If you can afford the top tier private schools, your child will do fine. But, most families cannot afford the equivalent of college tuition for 12 years.
Its not simple.
The 'facts' are not always truth, and the reviewers have their own bias. Here is a great example, the War of 1812. In the US they teach how England was the belligerent and that it was a war between the US and England, defending the US from England. In Canada, they teach that the US was the aggressor. In other parts of the world they teach that the US sided with Napoleon and include the war as part of the Napoleonic wars. Which is truth?
She's a Texas governor Abbot's crony who's in charge of Board of Education. Keep in mind she isn't qualified to run any education system and doesn't believe in it. She homeschooled her own children and sent them to private schools.
So Obama isn't qualified to lead because he sends his kids to private school?
A worker is a person who does work. What do you think slaves did in the fields - play charades? Sing? No, they did work. Hard work. You're the one inventing that workers have to be paid. If you work for a week and your boss is an asshole and doesn't pay you, does that mean you're a slave? No. Is an intern who does work for free considered a slave? No.
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or at least I did. My economics course in High School was a propaganda platform for capitalism. There was no discussion of other competing systems, even in a bad light. Nor was there any criticism of capitalism whatsoever. Looking back it's more than a little disturbing. I was very clearly being indoctrinated into a certain way of thinking. We can argue whether it was the right or wrong way to think, but it's still indoctrination, and I was still being encouraged to accept something on 100% faith in what was supposed to be a place of learning...
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He pointed out taking the dollars with the child to pay for an alternative school, something many places do ready.
This is fought tooth and nail by big teacher union big government types to like to spout memes like hey you selfish jerk with privilege...! >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
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Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property.
Slave labor is still labor. They're still workers, and they still need to get paid. The difference is we pay them what we want, not what they want; sometimes we don't pay them enough, and they starve, and it's expensive.
That's something a lot of people miss: there's all kinds of novels written in worlds where they reference some backwards nation or evil corporation using slave labor and thus having infinite resources because it's free. Problem is you have to feed your slaves or they die; you have to give them medical care or they don't produce as good a rate of return; and somebody has to make that shit. Slaves are farming food? That's great. You can take, say, 90% of it, and the other 10% is their pay because they need to not die or you'll need to spend 60 times their monthly budget on a new slave to replace them. Think about how useless an 8 year old is as a worker; do you want to sink all that slave labor into building a new slave, 8 or 10 or 14 years before it's even useful? Maybe you can get a better deal paying sailors for 10 months of their time sailing to another country, abducting people, and sailing back with their catch.
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
What it was was inefficient, expensive, and nationally embarrassing. It was so embarrassing we instituted a compromise in the Union whereby half of all states would be slave states for some 50 years, after which the Federal Government was allowed to legislate slavery away. Then we got in a war with ourselves about the whole thing. The end of slavery was put on the horizon, and then we took it by force when we got there because that's what we agreed on.
People want to write revisionist history. Some folks want to downplay the facts; others want to play them up until we're looking back on gloating, horned demons. The truth is somewhere in the middle--but not right in the middle, like the "fair and balanced" advocates want you to believe. Averaging the wrong views doesn't get you the right view; it's usually off-center.
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"2. Charter school only takes in "good" students (e.g. not kids with low grades or with difficulties that would require extra assistance)."
Not in my area. There's a lottery.
"3. Students with "difficulties" are left in the public schools who have less money to help them."
The problem with the public schools is they don't remove the "difficult" students any more and put them in a separate location where focus can be put on them while the "non difficult" students can be taught more successfully and cheaper.
"4. Charter schools get better test scores than public schools. (Since they get to pick and choose not only what students they take but what test results they publish.)"
See my response to 2. Also, most parents to opt to put their children in charter schools is because they are actively involved with their children's scholastic achievements and actively involved in helping their child succeed. The problem is that THEIR children suffer because of parents who treat public schools as "day care" that gives them 2 or sometimes 3 meals a day -- even when school is closed over summer in some locations. I think they have higher scores more because of the parents than "picking and choosing".
How about we allow public schools to kick out problem kids and force them in to a few schools set aside for the trouble makers? For the amount of money we've dropped in to public schools in the last 30 years we could go to 50-60 kids per class in the regular schools and probably 1-on-1 at the schools for "bad kids".