That's a big "if." Compared to much of the world, even the poor and criminal element here are helped out enormously, and yet most of them do not become winners. Haven't you heard of the cycle of poverty?
The issue isn't about whether others should have it. It's that most industries in this country are world-competitive and function well without the tenure "feature." Our education system is the most expensive in the world yet performs poorly, and tenure is identified as one of the things preventing us from canning bad teachers.
So regardless of whether others have it or should have it, it's legitimate to question whether teachers should have it. It's not doing society much good, and as state employees there must be a component of the public interest in their job and benefits.
If you are against "tenure" you oppose the following: the right to bargain, contracts, due process, and property rights.
Haha... what? Okay here's my brilliant rebuttal. If you are for "tenure" then you oppose the following: the right to bargain, contracts, due process, and property rights. Makes just as much sense!
For one thing, I couldn't largely predict student achievement and success by looking at income.
Yes you can actually. Student achievement and income are strongly correlated. Not all of that is become of the meritocracy of America, but if we assume that in a meritocracy smart people will earn higher incomes, and that smart people also will have academic success, then you can look at income and generally predict student achievement.
The right recognized is 'equal protection', not about 'equal outcomes', so from the start the premise seems shaky.
Perhaps the argument is that the students with the tenured teachers aren't being given the same protections as students with non-tenured teachers.
A better approach may be disparate impact, i.e. the teacher dismissal process leads to a disparate impact to a protected group
That's hilariously sad, the juxtaposition of equal protection with something that is by definition unequal protection (some groups are protected, some are not). It's hard to believe, actually, when you see these principles next to each other with their contradictions blazing.
I haven't read the book and the excerpt on the site doesn't explain.. what is so harmful about standardized testing that makes it sensible to REFUSE to give it? It'll take, what, one day of the school year to give the test. Big whoop. Even if the teacher didn't want to devote class time to "teaching the test" that doesn't mean he has a moral right to refuse to give the test.
And adding to this, the 90% of the teachers that are competent and conscientious really would LOVE to have the remaining 10% shown to the door. They really would, as those 10% are a drag on the rest of the faculty.
So do it already. New union contract: tenure can be revoked by an anonymous jury of peers. Aren't union contracts subject to input and ultimately approval by the members? (I mean, that Boeing/machinists deal has been in the news a lot, and it sounds like the members vote on contract changes.) If it really were 90% of teachers who would LOVE this ability, it should be a piece of cake to propose this rule and have it accepted.
My honest guess would be maybe 5% of teachers would love the ability to fire the worst 10% of teachers. The rest are comfortable with the status quo of tenure and probably believe things like "If they paid us more, there would be more good teachers like me, certainly within a generation, and tenure for bad teachers would be a non-issue."
My parents threatened to pull me and send me to the local state college just to take calculus if it wasn't going to be offered locally.
Out of curiosity, why didn't you take this route? My school offered the same thing when I ran out of math classes to take and my parents and I jumped all over that opportunity. The school paid for the classes and I ended up taking math and computer science there instead of the high school during my junior and senior years.
The difference can lead to a serious disparity in the quality of instruction.
That's not a very strong statement, and I'm guessing the reason it's not stronger is there's no evidence for it. Probably one of the reasons for that is there's no way to measure "quality of instruction" objectively.
Personally when I think of quality of instruction, I think of it in terms of the impact it has on the students. And that means the measure of what's high quality varies with every student (or group of similar students). It's entirely possible that the best math teacher in the world for one group of students is entirely useless as a math teacher for another group of students. It's entirely possible for a low-paid, high-discipline teacher is more effective for one group of students than the super math teacher.
The vast majority of my time on the Xbone so far has been in the Amazon Instant Video app. It turns out that the Kinect is (or rather, could be) a great tool for occasional user input. The irritating thing about using the controller in this scenario is that it turns off after some period of inactivity (which is still long enough that your battery drains pretty quickly). So if you want to pause, or move on the next episode, you have to turn on the controller and let it sync wirelessly with the console, which takes a good 5 seconds.
Enter the Kinect.. now you can say "xbox pause" and it pauses. "Xbox play" resumes. "Xbox stop... yes... episode 6" goes to the next episode.
In theory.
The problem is, seemingly at random, one of the commands won't work. It opens up the xbox voice control screen which has some generic commands. It might say something like "Play is not available from here" or something. After many minutes of frustrating experimentation, it turns out that sometimes you have to say "select" before giving the same command that may have worked 2 minutes ago. So it's like, "xbox pause" then a few minutes later "xbox play... xbox.. xbox select.. play." That's dumb.
The other problem is the app needs to be intelligently designed for voice control. Amazon Instant Video is NOT one of these apps. The voice commands map pretty directly to the controller commands, but of course the controller is much faster than the voice recognition. A good example of where that's annoying is rewinding and fast forwarding. "Xbox rewind" starts rewinding.. at 2x speed. So if you want to skip back 30 seconds, it'll take 15 seconds to do so. That's no good. So you can say "faster" which increases the speed. Of course, it takes the xbox a second to recognize the command. If you're rewinding 10 minutes, you end up saying "faster [pause] faster [pause] faster [pause]." It's obscene sounding and it takes forever. Then you let it go for a few more seconds... and "play!" But the voice control just timed out, so it's still rewinding. "Xbox play!" and a second later it starts, but you rewound a few minutes too far. And it's too much of a bother to fast forward.
But that's mostly the app's fault, not the Kinect's.
I'm not sure what schools you were looking at, but the education budget for North Carolina is very different from the picture you paint. Out of $8.2 billion, about $3 billion goes directly to teacher salaries. $750 million goes to resources for students with "special needs" and $250 million to "at risk" students. Another $500 million to teacher assistants and $300 million to instructional support. $400 million to transportation, $400 million to vocational education. Those are the biggest items in the budget. For administration, $230 million goes to school building administration and $90 million to central administration. Clearly not even close to a majority of the budget.
I wonder what you're counting as administration? If it's "everything but teacher salaries" then you're right but that's a low bar. Teachers need buildings to teach in and textbooks to use and stuff.
What's wrong with fixing Avogadro's number at something like 6.022 * 10^23 instead of defining it as the number of atoms of blah in blah, then saying a kilogram is 1/12 of the mass of Avogadro's number of Carbon 12 atoms. I'm sure that's been floated.. is the problem the arbitrariness of the number?
If the nits that you wish to pick are that you said he WOULD embrace capitalism rather than he IS a capitalist, then you're arguing semantics that don't exist. This whole discussion has become pointless.
You're contradicting yourself. If my argument is based on semantics that don't exist, then the discussion is not pointless because my argument is incorrect and you have the opportunity to point that out.
That being said, there is an important semantic difference between "would" and "did". "Would" is present tense, conditional. It describes a hypothetical situation taking place in the present. "Did" is past tense, indicative. It describes what someone, well, DID in the past.
The fact that you don't pick up on semantic differences doesn't mean they don't exist, it means you don't read very carefully and jump in without understanding what you're replying to.
No, I didn't. This is a lie. Or perhaps I'm assuming too much and you are simply failing at logical reasoning.
Or the third possibility, you don't understand the implications of what you yourself wrote. That seems to happen a lot with you. Go back and read it again. What I said was accurate. You claimed Jesus weighed in on capitalism vs communism, and that you could back it up with quotes from the Bible, which you then attempted to do.
Therefore, if I'm arguing against your claim that Jesus would embrace capitalism, I'm obviously saying that Jesus was a communist or at least made clear his support for some other economic system.
No, and clearly I never believed that because I did not criticize your quotes on the grounds that they failed to show Jesus was pro-communist or pro-something-else. You argued against my claim he would embrace capitalism, and you should have shown some evidence that he was anti-capitalist. IF you recall (which you obviously don't, so scroll up), I criticized your quotes for not being anti-capitalist. Since your quotes did not show that Jesus was not a capitalist (they did not speak to capitalism or any other economic system, you may as well have quoted Jesus discussing the sunset one night), you failed to defend your argument. You ended your post with "Doesn't sound like much of a capitalist to me..." and I started my reply with "None of your quotes were anti-capitalist." So where did you come up with this bullshit argument that I think you think Jesus was a raging communist?
As I've said repeatedly, you're not going to win the argument by quoting the Bible. Jesus did not discuss economics in the Bible as far as I know. It's not there. Your idea of quoting Jesus to answer my question was frankly ignorant and showed that you were incapable of discussing the meat of my post (whether capitalism has helped more poor people than other economic systems, which was about 75% of the text I posted, versus ONE LINE at the end about Jesus as a conclusion) so instead you latched onto a perceived weakness (that I'm a rabid Christian) which turned out to be false.
If I say I don't believe in the Christian God nor their religious dogma, does that automatically make me an atheist? Does it make me a Muslim? Can you use my statement to show I support any particular religion?
If you don't believe in the Christian God nor their religious dogma, it automatically makes you something other than Christian. I can state that definitively. Could be atheist, could be Muslim, could be something else. If you claim there's a document that answers the question of whether you embrace Christianity or not, then I would expect to find a statement in it that is either anti-Christian or pro-something-else. If there is no such statement, then your answer was a non-answer and you shouldn't have said it.
You're claiming those aren't your words? Or, do you mean that I challenged your comment so that makes me responsible for the conversation? Interesting view either way.
What black culture would that be? Ghetto ganstas? Somali muslims? Bill Cosby Show?
No idea. Getting into the details like that would have probably sounded too racist even for NPR.
Race and culture are related like ice cream and drowning: there's a third variable
If people treat people of a certain race a certain way, then those people of a certain race have common experiences that distinguish them from other races. That starts influencing culture. When stereotypes exist and people feel compelled to fulfill those stereotypes, that starts influencing culture.
Race and culture may not be related genetically, but genetics isn't the only cause and effect relationship you can look at.
You spent several posts trying to defend your assumed support of Jesus for capitalism. And now you suddenly claim you never said he was a capitalist?
Yes! I never said he was a capitalist, or that anything in the Bible would support capitalism. And if you read the posts I responded to (before you entered the conversation) maybe you'd understand. I was replying to someone who said the extreme capitalism that Ayn Rand espoused is incompatible with traditional Christianity. The blog post that the person gave as support of that view said, among other things, that the treatment of the poor in particular was one point where Ayn Rand's capitalism was overtly incompatible with Christianity. My view is that capitalism, even the extreme kind, is not incompatible with Christianity, and I gave the example of capitalism fulfilling the traditional Christian duty to help the poor.
You said he would embrace capitalism instead of communist bullshit. I posted some quotes and said he doesn't sound like much of a capitalist.
No, in your little recap you're forgetting your first post in response to me where you said "Assuming you believe the New Testament of the Bible represents the words, or at least the intent, of Jesus, you can just see what Jesus had to say."
Important not to forget that first post because..
However, it is simple to look at the thread above and see that you actually said: What Would Jesus Do? Impose communist bullshit and make half the world starve... or embrace capitalism... I didn't make any claims to Jesus's support for any economic system, that was you, remember?
In that first post, you in fact DID claim that his support for an economic system existed and was supported by text in the Bible. You did not name the economic system in your claim, though the implication was that he was anti-capitalist (otherwise you wouldn't have disagreed with me). You further implied the support was clear and easy to understand without nuanced interpretation (you used the words "just see").
When called on it, you attempted to produce quotes that support your claim, but they did not. Your quotes did not speak to ANY economic system and did not answer my question of Jesus's theoretical modern support of capitalism vs communism in the slightest.
I'm not "hung up" on Jesus and the Bible. You took the conversation there
Ridiculous. You do realize the thread was going on before you jumped in? The person I replied to said that Ayn Rand's capitalism is incompatible with traditional Christianity. He was replying to someone who said he disagreed with Ayn Rand's atheism but appreciated her views on capitalism. That's what took the conversation to the point about whether capitalism and Christianity are incompatible.
You are the one who took the conversation to the actual text of the Bible and what Jesus supposedly said about capitalism -- which turned out to be totally unfounded, because the quotes had nothing to do with capitalism or any other economic system, as I suspected initially.
Wow. Denmark is your example of a more capitalist society? Denmark has the highest total tax pressure in the world. It has the smallest private sector in Europe and supports one of the biggest public sectors.
Yup. Granted.
It is generally considered one of the most socialist nations today
Do you know what defines socialism? Public ownership of the means of production. Do you know what the means of production are? Let me quote Wikipedia for you:
In economics and sociology, the means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production; that is, the "means of production" includes capital assets used to produce wealth, such as machinery, tools and factories, including both infrastructural capital and natural capital.
They don't even have to drop multiple choice tests -- the solution is to stop giving teachers the test in advance.
I have no problem with someone "teaching the test" when all they know is that the test is "5th grade mathematics." It's a problem when they know that question 5 on the test is "What is 25% of 60?"
What do you mean by "their school system beat almost every other country?" GP is talking about the high-achieving students doing even better, but most global tests are looking at averages. So you are not addressing his point at all unless you are talking about tests which focus on the top level students.
Not only that, but in my state, the portion of funding per student for school construction and building maintenance does NOT transfer to the charter. This means public schools get "free" buildings (the cost does not come out of the student portion of the state funding) whereas charter schools have to find their own way to pay for the building, or take it out of the student portion of their funding.
Certainly not a level playing field, yet charter schools still produce superior results.
Entirely separate? Just yesterday on NPR they interviewed a white woman who had adopted black children. Believe it or not, she espoused the idea of a "black identity" that she wanted her kids to have solely due to the color of their skin. She hired a black woman to be their mentor and instill black culture in them so that they wouldn't feel isolated from other blacks. She didn't want them to grow up being "too white."
While race and culture and separate things, they are closely related.
That's insane. If you take all the bad students, and look at the proportion whose parents are millionaires, it's pretty close to 0.
Most bad students are poor and have uninterested, uninvolved parents.
Giving teachers more authority to punish and reward students is a great idea and would almost single-handedly solve the major problems in education, though it should be limited to students whose parents are not involved.
What is the parent doesn't have a great education themselves and aren't able to help their child academically (and only motivationally)?
Motivation is the best thing parents can provide. You wouldn't believe the resources available even in inner city schools to kids who show up and try.
The students who are struggling are the ones who need the best resources/teaching/etc.
You're absolutely right if you are defining struggling as "trying really hard in order to succeed."
You're absolutely incorrect if you are defining struggling as "doing bad in school, period." Plenty of those students are failing classes because they don't care, don't show up, cause problems to get attention, etc. Those students do not need the best resources and teachers. It would be wasted on them.
The standardized tests used for end-of-grade performance set the bar very low, and it's really the pass rates that are compared, not the absolute scores. Passing means a student got a 60% or so on an easy test. So it's pretty much measuring "is this student at least a little engaged in the education process" -- most kids who show up regularly and make a slight effort will pass unless they have severe learning problems.
Even though it sounds like a horrible measure of a school performance with respect to a single student, I think it's an excellent measure of how "nice" a school is. If your child is smart, he will thrive in a school with a high pass rate because it means he's not surrounded by juvenile delinquents.
It was a real polio vaccination program, and the covert operation caught the #1 terrorist (of whom Pakistan claims they had no knowledge, of course).
You'd think the so-called "mainstream Muslims" (remember how they tell us only 0.0001% of Muslims are terrorists or support terrorists, terrorism is against Islam, etc) would be happy about both things. Nope!
Slashdot Mirror
That's a big "if." Compared to much of the world, even the poor and criminal element here are helped out enormously, and yet most of them do not become winners. Haven't you heard of the cycle of poverty?
The issue isn't about whether others should have it. It's that most industries in this country are world-competitive and function well without the tenure "feature." Our education system is the most expensive in the world yet performs poorly, and tenure is identified as one of the things preventing us from canning bad teachers.
So regardless of whether others have it or should have it, it's legitimate to question whether teachers should have it. It's not doing society much good, and as state employees there must be a component of the public interest in their job and benefits.
If you are against "tenure" you oppose the following: the right to bargain, contracts, due process, and property rights.
Haha... what? Okay here's my brilliant rebuttal. If you are for "tenure" then you oppose the following: the right to bargain, contracts, due process, and property rights. Makes just as much sense!
For one thing, I couldn't largely predict student achievement and success by looking at income.
Yes you can actually. Student achievement and income are strongly correlated. Not all of that is become of the meritocracy of America, but if we assume that in a meritocracy smart people will earn higher incomes, and that smart people also will have academic success, then you can look at income and generally predict student achievement.
The right recognized is 'equal protection', not about 'equal outcomes', so from the start the premise seems shaky.
Perhaps the argument is that the students with the tenured teachers aren't being given the same protections as students with non-tenured teachers.
A better approach may be disparate impact, i.e. the teacher dismissal process leads to a disparate impact to a protected group
That's hilariously sad, the juxtaposition of equal protection with something that is by definition unequal protection (some groups are protected, some are not). It's hard to believe, actually, when you see these principles next to each other with their contradictions blazing.
I haven't read the book and the excerpt on the site doesn't explain.. what is so harmful about standardized testing that makes it sensible to REFUSE to give it? It'll take, what, one day of the school year to give the test. Big whoop. Even if the teacher didn't want to devote class time to "teaching the test" that doesn't mean he has a moral right to refuse to give the test.
And adding to this, the 90% of the teachers that are competent and conscientious really would LOVE to have the remaining 10% shown to the door. They really would, as those 10% are a drag on the rest of the faculty.
So do it already. New union contract: tenure can be revoked by an anonymous jury of peers. Aren't union contracts subject to input and ultimately approval by the members? (I mean, that Boeing/machinists deal has been in the news a lot, and it sounds like the members vote on contract changes.) If it really were 90% of teachers who would LOVE this ability, it should be a piece of cake to propose this rule and have it accepted.
My honest guess would be maybe 5% of teachers would love the ability to fire the worst 10% of teachers. The rest are comfortable with the status quo of tenure and probably believe things like "If they paid us more, there would be more good teachers like me, certainly within a generation, and tenure for bad teachers would be a non-issue."
My parents threatened to pull me and send me to the local state college just to take calculus if it wasn't going to be offered locally.
Out of curiosity, why didn't you take this route? My school offered the same thing when I ran out of math classes to take and my parents and I jumped all over that opportunity. The school paid for the classes and I ended up taking math and computer science there instead of the high school during my junior and senior years.
The difference can lead to a serious disparity in the quality of instruction.
That's not a very strong statement, and I'm guessing the reason it's not stronger is there's no evidence for it. Probably one of the reasons for that is there's no way to measure "quality of instruction" objectively.
Personally when I think of quality of instruction, I think of it in terms of the impact it has on the students. And that means the measure of what's high quality varies with every student (or group of similar students). It's entirely possible that the best math teacher in the world for one group of students is entirely useless as a math teacher for another group of students. It's entirely possible for a low-paid, high-discipline teacher is more effective for one group of students than the super math teacher.
The vast majority of my time on the Xbone so far has been in the Amazon Instant Video app. It turns out that the Kinect is (or rather, could be) a great tool for occasional user input. The irritating thing about using the controller in this scenario is that it turns off after some period of inactivity (which is still long enough that your battery drains pretty quickly). So if you want to pause, or move on the next episode, you have to turn on the controller and let it sync wirelessly with the console, which takes a good 5 seconds.
Enter the Kinect.. now you can say "xbox pause" and it pauses. "Xbox play" resumes. "Xbox stop... yes... episode 6" goes to the next episode.
In theory.
The problem is, seemingly at random, one of the commands won't work. It opens up the xbox voice control screen which has some generic commands. It might say something like "Play is not available from here" or something. After many minutes of frustrating experimentation, it turns out that sometimes you have to say "select" before giving the same command that may have worked 2 minutes ago. So it's like, "xbox pause" then a few minutes later "xbox play... xbox.. xbox select.. play." That's dumb.
The other problem is the app needs to be intelligently designed for voice control. Amazon Instant Video is NOT one of these apps. The voice commands map pretty directly to the controller commands, but of course the controller is much faster than the voice recognition. A good example of where that's annoying is rewinding and fast forwarding. "Xbox rewind" starts rewinding.. at 2x speed. So if you want to skip back 30 seconds, it'll take 15 seconds to do so. That's no good. So you can say "faster" which increases the speed. Of course, it takes the xbox a second to recognize the command. If you're rewinding 10 minutes, you end up saying "faster [pause] faster [pause] faster [pause]." It's obscene sounding and it takes forever. Then you let it go for a few more seconds... and "play!" But the voice control just timed out, so it's still rewinding. "Xbox play!" and a second later it starts, but you rewound a few minutes too far. And it's too much of a bother to fast forward.
But that's mostly the app's fault, not the Kinect's.
I'm not sure what schools you were looking at, but the education budget for North Carolina is very different from the picture you paint. Out of $8.2 billion, about $3 billion goes directly to teacher salaries. $750 million goes to resources for students with "special needs" and $250 million to "at risk" students. Another $500 million to teacher assistants and $300 million to instructional support. $400 million to transportation, $400 million to vocational education. Those are the biggest items in the budget. For administration, $230 million goes to school building administration and $90 million to central administration. Clearly not even close to a majority of the budget.
I wonder what you're counting as administration? If it's "everything but teacher salaries" then you're right but that's a low bar. Teachers need buildings to teach in and textbooks to use and stuff.
http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/doc...
What's wrong with fixing Avogadro's number at something like 6.022 * 10^23 instead of defining it as the number of atoms of blah in blah, then saying a kilogram is 1/12 of the mass of Avogadro's number of Carbon 12 atoms. I'm sure that's been floated.. is the problem the arbitrariness of the number?
If the nits that you wish to pick are that you said he WOULD embrace capitalism rather than he IS a capitalist, then you're arguing semantics that don't exist. This whole discussion has become pointless.
You're contradicting yourself. If my argument is based on semantics that don't exist, then the discussion is not pointless because my argument is incorrect and you have the opportunity to point that out.
That being said, there is an important semantic difference between "would" and "did". "Would" is present tense, conditional. It describes a hypothetical situation taking place in the present. "Did" is past tense, indicative. It describes what someone, well, DID in the past.
The fact that you don't pick up on semantic differences doesn't mean they don't exist, it means you don't read very carefully and jump in without understanding what you're replying to.
No, I didn't. This is a lie. Or perhaps I'm assuming too much and you are simply failing at logical reasoning.
Or the third possibility, you don't understand the implications of what you yourself wrote. That seems to happen a lot with you. Go back and read it again. What I said was accurate. You claimed Jesus weighed in on capitalism vs communism, and that you could back it up with quotes from the Bible, which you then attempted to do.
Therefore, if I'm arguing against your claim that Jesus would embrace capitalism, I'm obviously saying that Jesus was a communist or at least made clear his support for some other economic system.
No, and clearly I never believed that because I did not criticize your quotes on the grounds that they failed to show Jesus was pro-communist or pro-something-else. You argued against my claim he would embrace capitalism, and you should have shown some evidence that he was anti-capitalist. IF you recall (which you obviously don't, so scroll up), I criticized your quotes for not being anti-capitalist. Since your quotes did not show that Jesus was not a capitalist (they did not speak to capitalism or any other economic system, you may as well have quoted Jesus discussing the sunset one night), you failed to defend your argument. You ended your post with "Doesn't sound like much of a capitalist to me..." and I started my reply with "None of your quotes were anti-capitalist." So where did you come up with this bullshit argument that I think you think Jesus was a raging communist?
As I've said repeatedly, you're not going to win the argument by quoting the Bible. Jesus did not discuss economics in the Bible as far as I know. It's not there. Your idea of quoting Jesus to answer my question was frankly ignorant and showed that you were incapable of discussing the meat of my post (whether capitalism has helped more poor people than other economic systems, which was about 75% of the text I posted, versus ONE LINE at the end about Jesus as a conclusion) so instead you latched onto a perceived weakness (that I'm a rabid Christian) which turned out to be false.
If I say I don't believe in the Christian God nor their religious dogma, does that automatically make me an atheist? Does it make me a Muslim? Can you use my statement to show I support any particular religion?
If you don't believe in the Christian God nor their religious dogma, it automatically makes you something other than Christian. I can state that definitively. Could be atheist, could be Muslim, could be something else. If you claim there's a document that answers the question of whether you embrace Christianity or not, then I would expect to find a statement in it that is either anti-Christian or pro-something-else. If there is no such statement, then your answer was a non-answer and you shouldn't have said it.
You're claiming those aren't your words? Or, do you mean that I challenged your comment so that makes me responsible for the conversation? Interesting view either way.
I've t
What black culture would that be? Ghetto ganstas? Somali muslims? Bill Cosby Show?
No idea. Getting into the details like that would have probably sounded too racist even for NPR.
Race and culture are related like ice cream and drowning: there's a third variable
If people treat people of a certain race a certain way, then those people of a certain race have common experiences that distinguish them from other races. That starts influencing culture. When stereotypes exist and people feel compelled to fulfill those stereotypes, that starts influencing culture.
Race and culture may not be related genetically, but genetics isn't the only cause and effect relationship you can look at.
You spent several posts trying to defend your assumed support of Jesus for capitalism. And now you suddenly claim you never said he was a capitalist?
Yes! I never said he was a capitalist, or that anything in the Bible would support capitalism. And if you read the posts I responded to (before you entered the conversation) maybe you'd understand. I was replying to someone who said the extreme capitalism that Ayn Rand espoused is incompatible with traditional Christianity. The blog post that the person gave as support of that view said, among other things, that the treatment of the poor in particular was one point where Ayn Rand's capitalism was overtly incompatible with Christianity. My view is that capitalism, even the extreme kind, is not incompatible with Christianity, and I gave the example of capitalism fulfilling the traditional Christian duty to help the poor.
You said he would embrace capitalism instead of communist bullshit. I posted some quotes and said he doesn't sound like much of a capitalist.
No, in your little recap you're forgetting your first post in response to me where you said "Assuming you believe the New Testament of the Bible represents the words, or at least the intent, of Jesus, you can just see what Jesus had to say."
Important not to forget that first post because..
However, it is simple to look at the thread above and see that you actually said: What Would Jesus Do? Impose communist bullshit and make half the world starve... or embrace capitalism... I didn't make any claims to Jesus's support for any economic system, that was you, remember?
In that first post, you in fact DID claim that his support for an economic system existed and was supported by text in the Bible. You did not name the economic system in your claim, though the implication was that he was anti-capitalist (otherwise you wouldn't have disagreed with me). You further implied the support was clear and easy to understand without nuanced interpretation (you used the words "just see").
When called on it, you attempted to produce quotes that support your claim, but they did not. Your quotes did not speak to ANY economic system and did not answer my question of Jesus's theoretical modern support of capitalism vs communism in the slightest.
I'm not "hung up" on Jesus and the Bible. You took the conversation there
Ridiculous. You do realize the thread was going on before you jumped in? The person I replied to said that Ayn Rand's capitalism is incompatible with traditional Christianity. He was replying to someone who said he disagreed with Ayn Rand's atheism but appreciated her views on capitalism. That's what took the conversation to the point about whether capitalism and Christianity are incompatible.
You are the one who took the conversation to the actual text of the Bible and what Jesus supposedly said about capitalism -- which turned out to be totally unfounded, because the quotes had nothing to do with capitalism or any other economic system, as I suspected initially.
Wow. Denmark is your example of a more capitalist society? Denmark has the highest total tax pressure in the world. It has the smallest private sector in Europe and supports one of the biggest public sectors.
Yup. Granted.
It is generally considered one of the most socialist nations today
Do you know what defines socialism? Public ownership of the means of production. Do you know what the means of production are? Let me quote Wikipedia for you:
In economics and sociology, the means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production; that is, the "means of production" includes capital assets used to produce wealth, such as machinery, tools and factories, including both infrastructural capital and natural capital.
Now let me ask you, in Denmark, do you think mo
They don't even have to drop multiple choice tests -- the solution is to stop giving teachers the test in advance.
I have no problem with someone "teaching the test" when all they know is that the test is "5th grade mathematics." It's a problem when they know that question 5 on the test is "What is 25% of 60?"
I've always thought that would be a good system. Adding rewards for the smart kids would be good too, perhaps paying them for their tutoring services.
The biggest problem is, and would continue to be, kids who aren't just dumb but badly behaved.
What do you mean by "their school system beat almost every other country?" GP is talking about the high-achieving students doing even better, but most global tests are looking at averages. So you are not addressing his point at all unless you are talking about tests which focus on the top level students.
Not only that, but in my state, the portion of funding per student for school construction and building maintenance does NOT transfer to the charter. This means public schools get "free" buildings (the cost does not come out of the student portion of the state funding) whereas charter schools have to find their own way to pay for the building, or take it out of the student portion of their funding.
Certainly not a level playing field, yet charter schools still produce superior results.
Entirely separate? Just yesterday on NPR they interviewed a white woman who had adopted black children. Believe it or not, she espoused the idea of a "black identity" that she wanted her kids to have solely due to the color of their skin. She hired a black woman to be their mentor and instill black culture in them so that they wouldn't feel isolated from other blacks. She didn't want them to grow up being "too white."
While race and culture and separate things, they are closely related.
That's insane. If you take all the bad students, and look at the proportion whose parents are millionaires, it's pretty close to 0.
Most bad students are poor and have uninterested, uninvolved parents.
Giving teachers more authority to punish and reward students is a great idea and would almost single-handedly solve the major problems in education, though it should be limited to students whose parents are not involved.
What is the parent doesn't have a great education themselves and aren't able to help their child academically (and only motivationally)?
Motivation is the best thing parents can provide. You wouldn't believe the resources available even in inner city schools to kids who show up and try.
The students who are struggling are the ones who need the best resources/teaching/etc.
You're absolutely right if you are defining struggling as "trying really hard in order to succeed."
You're absolutely incorrect if you are defining struggling as "doing bad in school, period." Plenty of those students are failing classes because they don't care, don't show up, cause problems to get attention, etc. Those students do not need the best resources and teachers. It would be wasted on them.
The standardized tests used for end-of-grade performance set the bar very low, and it's really the pass rates that are compared, not the absolute scores. Passing means a student got a 60% or so on an easy test. So it's pretty much measuring "is this student at least a little engaged in the education process" -- most kids who show up regularly and make a slight effort will pass unless they have severe learning problems.
Even though it sounds like a horrible measure of a school performance with respect to a single student, I think it's an excellent measure of how "nice" a school is. If your child is smart, he will thrive in a school with a high pass rate because it means he's not surrounded by juvenile delinquents.
Criticizes a religion, you mean.
It was a real polio vaccination program, and the covert operation caught the #1 terrorist (of whom Pakistan claims they had no knowledge, of course).
You'd think the so-called "mainstream Muslims" (remember how they tell us only 0.0001% of Muslims are terrorists or support terrorists, terrorism is against Islam, etc) would be happy about both things. Nope!
I grew tomatoes in a container one summer. Worst tomatoes ever. I don't know what I did wrong. Ended up letting the squirrels eat them.
I guess I should try again because everybody says they are better.