Lots of this is due - directly or indirectly - to federal mandates:
I've heard this claim a lot and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. I'm skeptical but I'll believe it if the facts support it. How much of this is affirmative action and how much of it is for workplace safety? (When I studied chemistry we had asbestos everywhere.)
When Christie Whitman was governor of New Jersey, she said that she wanted to cut the costs of public schools by getting rid of administrators. It turned out that administrators included school librarians.
Nothing in that link shows that 50% of the population doesn't pay any tax at all -- if you include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare as "taxes."
Nothing in that link contradicts my statement (and the NYT's statement).
The reason that the bottom 50% have been paying less taxes over 20 years is that they've been making less money over 20 years (as the top 50% make more).
At one time we had intelligent conservatives who actually listened to the other side's argument and admitted it when they were wrong. We even had principled Republicans who were more concerned with the good of their country than making a buck.
Oh, and don't forget - right now, America puts virtually the entire tax burden on the upper middle classes, and the rest on the middle class. About 1/2 the population doesn't pay any taxes at all
That Republican lie again. About 1/2 the population doesn't pay any taxes "at all" if you define payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare to be "not taxes" (and ignore sales taxes, real estate taxes, and other local taxes that pay for schools, etc.)
Editorial The New Resentment of the Poor Published: August 30, 2011
The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.
First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.
There is absolutely no danger in using stem cell to treat a fatal disease. So what if your stem cell injection may cause cancer in 2 years if your current disease will cause death in 6 months?
There is a danger of using untested treatments to treat a fatal disease. Your current disease might cause death in 2 years, while your stem cell injection might cause death in 6 months -- or 24 hours.
Patients who are close to death should be allowed to opt into almost any treatment that has a plausible chance of success (unlike therapies which are proven frauds, like homeopathy, etc.)
Legally, the patient can opt into anything he wants, including proven frauds. The providers have certain restrictions in this country, but in this case, they're doing it in countries with weaker regulatory systems.
But the important issue here is whether this stem cell therapy is a fraud like homeopathy.
If you define a fraud as a medical treatment that is promoted and sold to patients without a track record of safe and effective treatment, then it is a fraud.
who said people who are brain dead has no rights? is that somewhere in our legal system?
Legally, people who are brain dead are dead. They can never be brought back to life. They have, or don't have, the rights of a dead body. You can pull the plug on their ventilator, and they'll stop breathing, but they won't die, because they're already dead.
in Israel, murdering an Arab civilian is considered an atrocity, in the West Bank, murdering a Jewish civilian is considered an accomplishment.
"Is considered"? By whom? There are a lot of settlers who still celebrate at Baruch Goldstein's tomb. And Ezelden Al-Ayesh, the Gaza doctor, refused to call for violence against the Jews even after his daughters were killed.
Boycott, divestiture and sanctions can mean a lot of things. One distinction is inside or outside the settelements.
I personally would never buy any product made in the settlements. I think the settlers are occupying land illegally (and that's what Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry in 1967, wrote in a memo at that time). At least some of the settlers are criminals, who celebrate Baruch Goldstein.
I read the Goldstone report, and the B'Tselem reports that preceded it, and I don't even feel right buying products from a country that does that.
The Jews in this country, and I think the Israeli government, were enthusiastic about boycotting the Soviet Union until they let Soviet Jews emigrate. They were enthusiastic about boycotting Switzerland until they got compensation for WWII.
So why shouldn't we use the same methods to get the same freedom for Palestinians?
I don't feel comfortable about boycotting Israeli academics. However, I'm even less comfortable about the Israeli policies restricting the freedom to travel of Palestinian students and academics (from Gaza to the West Bank, for example).
Consistent policies, anyone? Stop killing grandmothers holding white flags with their 4-year-old and 7-year old children, stop killing Ezzelden Al-Ayesh's daughters, treat the Palestinians the way you want to be treated, and I'd be happy to see an end to BDS.
I've gone to lectures, and talked to a lot of them. I've heard that there are dumb oncologists, but I've never met one.
Oncologists are pretty smart. They *already* know the medical literature cold. There aren't that many high-quality clinical studies on a major cancer -- say, breast cancer -- and an oncologist who treats breast cancer will know them all. They may not have *read* them all, because they've heard the results of the studies when they were first reported at medical meetings. But they know them, and they understand the biological mechanisms of cancer as well as anybody knows.
And oncologists *already* use computers in those applications where it's useful. They have electronic medical records in at least the major hospitals. (Some doctors complain that EMRs make it too easy to fill up a medical record with irrelevant information that nobody has time to get through. The old paper records forced doctors to get to the point and concentrate on relevant information.)
Oncologists aren't ashamed to search Google when they hit a dead end.
Peter Norvig wrote some great algorithms for Google, and they can do some wonderful things -- translate languages, finish your search request, and other amazing things.
Norvig was lucky. The kind of problems that doctors face haven't fallen to clever algorithms yet.
2 points:
(1) The best way to manage medical information is in a doctor's head. If computers can help, that's great, but don't get overconfident.
(2) You'll never know if a particular computer application works in medicine until somebody does a well-designed randomized controlled trial to find out -- the old scientific method. The results of computers in medicine are mixed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If your life is important, use the scientific method.
As I understand it, the main thing that distinguishes a hearing aid from a simple amplifier is that the hearing aid doesn't amplify sound when it's too loud -- so that it wouldn't amplify background noise. For a hunter's aid, it wouldn't amplify the sound of a gunshot.
The second thing that a hearing aid does is amplify sound selectively at the frequencies you need. So if your hearing is tapering off at the high end of the hearing range, the hearing aid should amplify just the high end and not the middle range. The cheap hearing aids, including the ones sold at hunting shops, don't do that. They're set for a generic hearing loss profile, which would work for many people, but not everyone.
Radio Shack was selling one of the cheap amplifiers for about $30, then marked it down to $20. I was going to buy one, just to play with, but I saw reviews by customers and by audiologists that the ones in the under-$500 price range weren't too good, even the disposable $50 Songbird. They weren't much better than using nothing at all, and people who bought them usually wound up not using them.
I'd like to see better reviews.
Given Moore's law, we should have $20 hearing aids today that are as good as the $3,000 hearing aids of 10 years ago.
We should have $20 hearing aids that are good enough for 90% of the hearing aid population.
We should be able to program them ourselves through our own computer.
I feel sorry for the audiologists. They went to school for so long, learning how to fit hearing aids, it was a good business, and now their main profit center may be reduced to a niche business.
But that's what the internet is doing to all of us.
That's the point of a programmable hearing aid (if I'm using the word right). The amplification can be matched to your deficit in hearing. It's like a mixer in a sound studio. As best as I could figure out, the $14 hearing aids aren't programmable, but the $100 ones are.
Interesting, the $14 Axon hearing aid gives the specs, but I can't find the specs for the other ones.
I think the main difference between the Axon and the $100 MDHearingAid.com. is that MDHearingAid.com is programmable to match the frequencies of your hearing loss, and Axon isn't programmable.
Or is Axon just assembling the same components more cheaply?
I'd love to take one of those $14 hearing Axon aids to a professor of audiology for an evaluation, as the Chicago Tribune did.
Now hear this When it comes time to crank the volume on everyday banter, there are hearing aids that won't break the bank March 09, 2011 By Barbara Mahany Chicago Tribune
In 2007, when the iPhone came on the market, Cherukuri saw reports showing that the phone's components cost an average of $130 to $140. "I started thinking that if you can make a fantastic phone for under $200, I could make a hearing aid that's pretty good for about the same price," he said.
Unfortunately it's 2 years old, and the ratings are behind a paywall (CR doesn't take ads, and they've got to pay the bills somehow).
Also unfortunately they only tested hearing aids selling for $1,800 to $6,800 per pair.
They said there's about a 100% markup, so there's room to negotiate.
What I was really looking for, and what I couldn't find, was an article from an audiology journal which rated the low-priced hearing aids. They said that there were $500 hearing aids that were quite adequate for most people.
Can anybody who follows this research help me out with some cites?
But the Republicans are responsible for the movement to destroy teachers' unions, fire teachers on the basis of invalid tests, and privatize the school system.
Yeah but what does that have to do with kids respecting teachers? Sorry I guess I misunderstood your original post if those were meant to be unrelated points.
I think there's some spillover from the Republican anti-teacher movement. They encourage parents to disrespect teachers, and that sometimes affects the attitude of their kids. I just read a story in Science about how conservatives (which is to say Republicans) are attacking science teachers and specifically geology teachers over their teaching of global warming. Some state laws require "balance" in teaching the "controversy". There are lawsuits against teachers.
The reason public schools are reluctant to kick kids out is that somebody is asking the question, "What happens to them after we kick them out?"
I'm more cynical about their motivations.
Well, *somebody* has to worry about what's going to happen to those kids if they get kicked out of school. This country now has a conveyor belt into jail, where it costs at least $30,000 a year per prisoner. That's $1 million over 30 years. It's a lot cheaper to use well-known methods to improve their behavior than to jail them for the rest of their life (putting aside the damage to society they'll do).
I've yet to see any plan saying that test scores would be the only thing used to determine who is a "good" or "bad" teacher.
No Child Left Behind does require that teachers be fired under certain circumstances. Here's an example from in New York City of an intermediate school teacher whose principal thinks she's a good teacher, and wants to keep her, whose students are getting good grades and admissions to the best competitive high schools. Yet the teacher has to be fired because she did badly on a test that nobody can figure out. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07winerip.html
The test concluded that she was in the 7th percentile from the bottom of teaching ability, so the principal couldn't keepher. But the confidence interval of the test was between 0 and the 52nd percentile. So it's meaningless. If you know what a confidence interval is, you'll understand that.
Another example of firing teachers on the basis of test scores was Michelle Rhee in the DC school district. USA Today had a series of stories on that. Rhee was firing lots of teachers based on student test scores, and giving bonuses to teachers whose students were doing well on test scores. But it turned out that there was widespread cheating on the tests. Furthermore, when Rhee heard about these accusations, she hired a firm to look into the cheating who merely asked the school officials whether there was cheating and reported back to Rhee that they said there wasn't. You can find the whole story on Rhee in her Wikipedia entry.
There is no evidence that US workers, particularly US teachers, are more likely to do nothing if they can get away with it. There is no evidence that a significant number of teachers have exploited the union system to earn over $100,000 a year even though they're incompetent. You're just making that up. I challenge you to provide a link to evidence.
There's lots of good data on teaching and education in the US, what makes students and teachers effective. The best writing I've seen is by Diane Ravitch, who was secretary of education in the GHW Bush and the Clinton administration. She uses the scientific method and follows the data. She started out believing some of the things you said, but the data made her decide that she was wrong. She said that the major factor that was associated with school performance was family income. She said that unions aren't the problem, and the anti-union movement is doing lots of harm.
So that tells you how to make student performance worse -- lower their family income. And that's what the anti-union movement is doing.
We would expect kids with disciplinary problems to disrespect teachers. The Republicans aren't responsible for that.
But the Republicans are responsible for the movement to destroy teachers' unions, fire teachers on the basis of invalid tests, and privatize the school system.
The reason public schools are reluctant to kick kids out is that somebody is asking the question, "What happens to them after we kick them out?"
The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?
Good questions. The first thing that visitors notice in those schools is that teachers are highly respected.
The Republicans right now are demonizing teachers, with calls for the end of unions, calls for pay cuts, high-stakes testing where they blame teachers for the results and fire the lower 10% (like Jack Welch at GE), vouchers, charter schools and privatization.
Finland has strong unions, so unions aren't the problem. There's strong evidence (NAEP scores) that charter schools are slightly worse overall than public schools. There's no country in the world with a successful universal privatized education system. Michelle Rhee, the conservative school reform darling, got caught cheating. High stakes testing leads to widespread cheating.
Yes, blacks can be racists, and it's right to point it out when they are.
However, Shirley Sherrod wasn't a racist, and the NAACP audience wasn't racist.
Breitbart distorted her words by taking them out of context, and distributed them on the Internet to promote a false charge that she and the NAACP are racist -- as you're doing right now. That's racist.
It's racist to do it for the purpose of destroying a black organization.
It's also racist to repeat racist charges without knowing enough about them to know whether they're true or false -- as you're doing now.
You're not "point[ing] out racist behaviors." You're repeating lies.
No, you and Breitbart are racist bastards who were attacking the NAACP because it's a black organization. I heard the video and you're mischaracterizing the response of the audience.
This video was deceptive and irresponsible to the point of lying. If Shirley Sherrod wasn't a public figure, it would be libel, and it may be libel anyway.
This was a classic case of quoting someone out of context to make it look as if they were saying the opposite of what they were actually saying.
Professional news organizations, if they're doing what they claim to do, contact the subject of personal attacks before they publish it.
Breitbart irresponsibly published this deceptive excerpt without contacting the victim of his attack. That's why he's irresponsible.
The Obama administration didn't behave responsibly on this either. The people who made the decision to fire Shirley Sherrod should have been fired themselves.
* I use the quotes around innocent woman because of Sherrod's involvement in the Pigford settlement which has elements that suggest impropriety. I have not followed the Pigford settlement story cloesly enough to have a clear opinion on whether or not improprieties actually occurred or whether or not Sherrod was involved in such improprieties.
Well that's the issue, isn't it? Why don't you look it up on Wikipedia before you repeat Breitbart's racist attacks.
As for ACORN, it was a lie because most or all of the people caught on the video realized that somebody was scamming them, and they responded in different ways, including playing along. Some of the ACORN offices reported it to the police. Others correctly concluded that the story was so absurd that it wasn't real. Others were caught off guard and didn't know how to respond -- this isn't the kind of situation they're trained for and expecting. O'Keefe selectively and deceptively picked out the worst ones. You can look that up on Wikipedia too.
And nothing on that video represents the overall policies and actions of ACORN.
The Democrats didn't respond too well to this one either.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of this is due - directly or indirectly - to federal mandates:
I've heard this claim a lot and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. I'm skeptical but I'll believe it if the facts support it. How much of this is affirmative action and how much of it is for workplace safety? (When I studied chemistry we had asbestos everywhere.)
When Christie Whitman was governor of New Jersey, she said that she wanted to cut the costs of public schools by getting rid of administrators. It turned out that administrators included school librarians.
Nothing in that link shows that 50% of the population doesn't pay any tax at all -- if you include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare as "taxes."
Nothing in that link contradicts my statement (and the NYT's statement).
The reason that the bottom 50% have been paying less taxes over 20 years is that they've been making less money over 20 years (as the top 50% make more).
At one time we had intelligent conservatives who actually listened to the other side's argument and admitted it when they were wrong. We even had principled Republicans who were more concerned with the good of their country than making a buck.
Those days are gone.
Oh, and don't forget - right now, America puts virtually the entire tax burden on the upper middle classes, and the rest on the middle class. About 1/2 the population doesn't pay any taxes at all
That Republican lie again. About 1/2 the population doesn't pay any taxes "at all" if you define payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare to be "not taxes" (and ignore sales taxes, real estate taxes, and other local taxes that pay for schools, etc.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/opinion/the-new-resentment-of-the-poor.html?hp
Editorial
The New Resentment of the Poor
Published: August 30, 2011
The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.
First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.
There is absolutely no danger in using stem cell to treat a fatal disease. So what if your stem cell injection may cause cancer in 2 years if your current disease will cause death in 6 months?
There is a danger of using untested treatments to treat a fatal disease. Your current disease might cause death in 2 years, while your stem cell injection might cause death in 6 months -- or 24 hours.
Patients who are close to death should be allowed to opt into almost any treatment that has a plausible chance of success (unlike therapies which are proven frauds, like homeopathy, etc.)
Legally, the patient can opt into anything he wants, including proven frauds. The providers have certain restrictions in this country, but in this case, they're doing it in countries with weaker regulatory systems.
But the important issue here is whether this stem cell therapy is a fraud like homeopathy.
If you define a fraud as a medical treatment that is promoted and sold to patients without a track record of safe and effective treatment, then it is a fraud.
who said people who are brain dead has no rights? is that somewhere in our legal system?
Legally, people who are brain dead are dead. They can never be brought back to life. They have, or don't have, the rights of a dead body. You can pull the plug on their ventilator, and they'll stop breathing, but they won't die, because they're already dead.
I know the Israelis don't permit any Palestinians from Gaza to leave for academic activities, Right?
in Israel, murdering an Arab civilian is considered an atrocity, in the West Bank, murdering a Jewish civilian is considered an accomplishment.
"Is considered"? By whom? There are a lot of settlers who still celebrate at Baruch Goldstein's tomb. And Ezelden Al-Ayesh, the Gaza doctor, refused to call for violence against the Jews even after his daughters were killed.
Boycott, divestiture and sanctions can mean a lot of things. One distinction is inside or outside the settelements.
I personally would never buy any product made in the settlements. I think the settlers are occupying land illegally (and that's what Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry in 1967, wrote in a memo at that time). At least some of the settlers are criminals, who celebrate Baruch Goldstein.
I read the Goldstone report, and the B'Tselem reports that preceded it, and I don't even feel right buying products from a country that does that.
The Jews in this country, and I think the Israeli government, were enthusiastic about boycotting the Soviet Union until they let Soviet Jews emigrate. They were enthusiastic about boycotting Switzerland until they got compensation for WWII.
So why shouldn't we use the same methods to get the same freedom for Palestinians?
I don't feel comfortable about boycotting Israeli academics. However, I'm even less comfortable about the Israeli policies restricting the freedom to travel of Palestinian students and academics (from Gaza to the West Bank, for example).
Consistent policies, anyone? Stop killing grandmothers holding white flags with their 4-year-old and 7-year old children, stop killing Ezzelden Al-Ayesh's daughters, treat the Palestinians the way you want to be treated, and I'd be happy to see an end to BDS.
Actually the word democracy comes from the Greek demos (people) and Latin crassius (the worst). It's a system in which the worst people rule.
Do you know any oncologists?
I've gone to lectures, and talked to a lot of them. I've heard that there are dumb oncologists, but I've never met one.
Oncologists are pretty smart. They *already* know the medical literature cold. There aren't that many high-quality clinical studies on a major cancer -- say, breast cancer -- and an oncologist who treats breast cancer will know them all. They may not have *read* them all, because they've heard the results of the studies when they were first reported at medical meetings. But they know them, and they understand the biological mechanisms of cancer as well as anybody knows.
And oncologists *already* use computers in those applications where it's useful. They have electronic medical records in at least the major hospitals. (Some doctors complain that EMRs make it too easy to fill up a medical record with irrelevant information that nobody has time to get through. The old paper records forced doctors to get to the point and concentrate on relevant information.)
PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed is free and probably the best medical database created for any money.
Oncologists aren't ashamed to search Google when they hit a dead end.
Peter Norvig wrote some great algorithms for Google, and they can do some wonderful things -- translate languages, finish your search request, and other amazing things.
Norvig was lucky. The kind of problems that doctors face haven't fallen to clever algorithms yet.
2 points:
(1) The best way to manage medical information is in a doctor's head. If computers can help, that's great, but don't get overconfident.
(2) You'll never know if a particular computer application works in medicine until somebody does a well-designed randomized controlled trial to find out -- the old scientific method. The results of computers in medicine are mixed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If your life is important, use the scientific method.
As I understand it, the main thing that distinguishes a hearing aid from a simple amplifier is that the hearing aid doesn't amplify sound when it's too loud -- so that it wouldn't amplify background noise. For a hunter's aid, it wouldn't amplify the sound of a gunshot.
The second thing that a hearing aid does is amplify sound selectively at the frequencies you need. So if your hearing is tapering off at the high end of the hearing range, the hearing aid should amplify just the high end and not the middle range. The cheap hearing aids, including the ones sold at hunting shops, don't do that. They're set for a generic hearing loss profile, which would work for many people, but not everyone.
Radio Shack was selling one of the cheap amplifiers for about $30, then marked it down to $20. I was going to buy one, just to play with, but I saw reviews by customers and by audiologists that the ones in the under-$500 price range weren't too good, even the disposable $50 Songbird. They weren't much better than using nothing at all, and people who bought them usually wound up not using them.
I'd like to see better reviews.
Given Moore's law, we should have $20 hearing aids today that are as good as the $3,000 hearing aids of 10 years ago.
We should have $20 hearing aids that are good enough for 90% of the hearing aid population.
We should be able to program them ourselves through our own computer.
I feel sorry for the audiologists. They went to school for so long, learning how to fit hearing aids, it was a good business, and now their main profit center may be reduced to a niche business.
But that's what the internet is doing to all of us.
The summary wasn't quite accurate. $3000 to $8000 a pair is supposed to be the traditional price.
This story is actually a product marketing newsletter for the company that sells Audicus hearing aids http://www.audicus.com/category/hearing-aids/ which start from $400 a pair.
http://www.mdhearingaid.com/acoustitone_max/ starts at $200 per pair.
The cheapest was http://www.dealextreme.com/p/axon-hearing-aid-v163-4326 Axon Hearing Aid (V163) for about $27 a pair, but they don't seem to adjust to the frequency of the patient's loss.
That's the point of a programmable hearing aid (if I'm using the word right). The amplification can be matched to your deficit in hearing. It's like a mixer in a sound studio. As best as I could figure out, the $14 hearing aids aren't programmable, but the $100 ones are.
Interesting, the $14 Axon hearing aid gives the specs, but I can't find the specs for the other ones.
I think the main difference between the Axon and the $100 MDHearingAid.com. is that MDHearingAid.com is programmable to match the frequencies of your hearing loss, and Axon isn't programmable.
Or is Axon just assembling the same components more cheaply?
I'd love to take one of those $14 hearing Axon aids to a professor of audiology for an evaluation, as the Chicago Tribune did.
Here's my kind of guy. He sells a hearing aid for under $200.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-03-09/health/sc-health-0309-hearing-aid-20110309_1_hearing-aid-hearing-loss-hearing-loss-association
Now hear this
When it comes time to crank the volume on everyday banter, there are hearing aids that won't break the bank
March 09, 2011
By Barbara Mahany
Chicago Tribune
In 2007, when the iPhone came on the market, Cherukuri saw reports showing that the phone's components cost an average of $130 to $140. "I started thinking that if you can make a fantastic phone for under $200, I could make a hearing aid that's pretty good for about the same price," he said.
This article also recommends
http://www.hearingaidscentral.com/
which starts at $300.
Here's the Consumer Reports article on hearing aids
http://www.consumerreports.org/health/healthy-living/home-medical-supplies/hearing/hearing-aids/overview/hearing-aids-ov.htm
and here's a Washington Post article about it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062201623.html
Unfortunately it's 2 years old, and the ratings are behind a paywall (CR doesn't take ads, and they've got to pay the bills somehow).
Also unfortunately they only tested hearing aids selling for $1,800 to $6,800 per pair.
They said there's about a 100% markup, so there's room to negotiate.
What I was really looking for, and what I couldn't find, was an article from an audiology journal which rated the low-priced hearing aids. They said that there were $500 hearing aids that were quite adequate for most people.
Can anybody who follows this research help me out with some cites?
But the Republicans are responsible for the movement to destroy teachers' unions, fire teachers on the basis of invalid tests, and privatize the school system.
Yeah but what does that have to do with kids respecting teachers? Sorry I guess I misunderstood your original post if those were meant to be unrelated points.
I think there's some spillover from the Republican anti-teacher movement. They encourage parents to disrespect teachers, and that sometimes affects the attitude of their kids. I just read a story in Science about how conservatives (which is to say Republicans) are attacking science teachers and specifically geology teachers over their teaching of global warming. Some state laws require "balance" in teaching the "controversy". There are lawsuits against teachers.
The reason public schools are reluctant to kick kids out is that somebody is asking the question, "What happens to them after we kick them out?"
I'm more cynical about their motivations.
Well, *somebody* has to worry about what's going to happen to those kids if they get kicked out of school. This country now has a conveyor belt into jail, where it costs at least $30,000 a year per prisoner. That's $1 million over 30 years. It's a lot cheaper to use well-known methods to improve their behavior than to jail them for the rest of their life (putting aside the damage to society they'll do).
I've yet to see any plan saying that test scores would be the only thing used to determine who is a "good" or "bad" teacher.
No Child Left Behind does require that teachers be fired under certain circumstances. Here's an example from in New York City of an intermediate school teacher whose principal thinks she's a good teacher, and wants to keep her, whose students are getting good grades and admissions to the best competitive high schools. Yet the teacher has to be fired because she did badly on a test that nobody can figure out. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07winerip.html
The test concluded that she was in the 7th percentile from the bottom of teaching ability, so the principal couldn't keepher. But the confidence interval of the test was between 0 and the 52nd percentile. So it's meaningless. If you know what a confidence interval is, you'll understand that.
Another example of firing teachers on the basis of test scores was Michelle Rhee in the DC school district. USA Today had a series of stories on that. Rhee was firing lots of teachers based on student test scores, and giving bonuses to teachers whose students were doing well on test scores. But it turned out that there was widespread cheating on the tests. Furthermore, when Rhee heard about these accusations, she hired a firm to look into the cheating who merely asked the school officials whether there was cheating and reported back to Rhee that they said there wasn't. You can find the whole story on Rhee in her Wikipedia entry.
There is no evidence that US workers, particularly US teachers, are more likely to do nothing if they can get away with it. There is no evidence that a significant number of teachers have exploited the union system to earn over $100,000 a year even though they're incompetent. You're just making that up. I challenge you to provide a link to evidence.
There's lots of good data on teaching and education in the US, what makes students and teachers effective. The best writing I've seen is by Diane Ravitch, who was secretary of education in the GHW Bush and the Clinton administration. She uses the scientific method and follows the data. She started out believing some of the things you said, but the data made her decide that she was wrong. She said that the major factor that was associated with school performance was family income. She said that unions aren't the problem, and the anti-union movement is doing lots of harm.
So that tells you how to make student performance worse -- lower their family income. And that's what the anti-union movement is doing.
We would expect kids with disciplinary problems to disrespect teachers. The Republicans aren't responsible for that.
But the Republicans are responsible for the movement to destroy teachers' unions, fire teachers on the basis of invalid tests, and privatize the school system.
The reason public schools are reluctant to kick kids out is that somebody is asking the question, "What happens to them after we kick them out?"
The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?
Good questions. The first thing that visitors notice in those schools is that teachers are highly respected.
The Republicans right now are demonizing teachers, with calls for the end of unions, calls for pay cuts, high-stakes testing where they blame teachers for the results and fire the lower 10% (like Jack Welch at GE), vouchers, charter schools and privatization.
Finland has strong unions, so unions aren't the problem. There's strong evidence (NAEP scores) that charter schools are slightly worse overall than public schools. There's no country in the world with a successful universal privatized education system. Michelle Rhee, the conservative school reform darling, got caught cheating. High stakes testing leads to widespread cheating.
Killing all republicans would be a good start to just 'fix' the school system.
Effective but somewhat brutal.
There are bad people in the world.
Unfortunately they've taken over the Republican Party and a good part of the Democratic party.
Yes, blacks can be racists, and it's right to point it out when they are.
However, Shirley Sherrod wasn't a racist, and the NAACP audience wasn't racist.
Breitbart distorted her words by taking them out of context, and distributed them on the Internet to promote a false charge that she and the NAACP are racist -- as you're doing right now. That's racist.
It's racist to do it for the purpose of destroying a black organization.
It's also racist to repeat racist charges without knowing enough about them to know whether they're true or false -- as you're doing now.
You're not "point[ing] out racist behaviors." You're repeating lies.
No, you and Breitbart are racist bastards who were attacking the NAACP because it's a black organization. I heard the video and you're mischaracterizing the response of the audience.
This video was deceptive and irresponsible to the point of lying. If Shirley Sherrod wasn't a public figure, it would be libel, and it may be libel anyway.
This was a classic case of quoting someone out of context to make it look as if they were saying the opposite of what they were actually saying.
Professional news organizations, if they're doing what they claim to do, contact the subject of personal attacks before they publish it.
Breitbart irresponsibly published this deceptive excerpt without contacting the victim of his attack. That's why he's irresponsible.
The Obama administration didn't behave responsibly on this either. The people who made the decision to fire Shirley Sherrod should have been fired themselves.
* I use the quotes around innocent woman because of Sherrod's involvement in the Pigford settlement which has elements that suggest impropriety. I have not followed the Pigford settlement story cloesly enough to have a clear opinion on whether or not improprieties actually occurred or whether or not Sherrod was involved in such improprieties.
Well that's the issue, isn't it? Why don't you look it up on Wikipedia before you repeat Breitbart's racist attacks.
As for ACORN, it was a lie because most or all of the people caught on the video realized that somebody was scamming them, and they responded in different ways, including playing along. Some of the ACORN offices reported it to the police. Others correctly concluded that the story was so absurd that it wasn't real. Others were caught off guard and didn't know how to respond -- this isn't the kind of situation they're trained for and expecting. O'Keefe selectively and deceptively picked out the worst ones. You can look that up on Wikipedia too.
And nothing on that video represents the overall policies and actions of ACORN.
The Democrats didn't respond too well to this one either.
Unfortunately those companies that lasted decades by serving the public and society didn't survive the free market competition and corporate reorganization starting with the Reagan era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_street_journal