Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos

[hal2kilo]

And her brother is the founder of the Blackwater corporation.

It's getting better all the time..... better.... better... better....

 

[SMOGZINN]

And, what about the special education population? It's crazy that their test scores are lumped in with regular education. What about students who are severely cognitively impaired. Autistic? Severe behavior disorders?

I think the idea is that other countries would have similar levels of these things.

What about the inner cities?

It feels strange that you lumped this in with a list of sever mental impairments. The failing of schools in our inner cities is definitely a failure of our school system. Our school funding system is unfair by design and needs a major overhaul.

Talk is cheap. If you want to see real changes in our education system it's going to have to be drastic with serious consequences for both the parents, teachers and administrators. I don't see any other way.

I can see your point. But it is easy to complain. Do you have any solutions? How do we 'be drastic' with administrators and what sort of 'serious consequences' for parents would you propose? Maybe this tangent of the discussion would do better over in the Discussion Club?

 

[wirelessenabled]

Possibly 8 years, we'll see.

We can only hope that Betsy does not last for 8 years. Public education in the US is a mish-mash of great things and crappy things. Private education in the US is a mish-mash of great things and crappy things. Charter schools the same. The difference is that private (ie religious) education and charter schools get to pick their students and (mostly) reject the students they do not want or who can not pay.

Given that they choose their students, the other than public school system organizations have a pretty bad result given the cost to parents and the public where the transfer of public tax dollars is allowed.

I think the solution is that we need to let public schools be schools, first and foremost. For daycare needs, nutrition needs, psychological needs, dental care, and all the other stuff that the public schools have been saddled with over the last few decades, let some other public entity take those on or else FULLY FUND the public school systems to administer those programs in separate facilities.

Public schools need to be a place for ready and willing students to learn. All the rest of the younger care stuff should be outside the schools or only partially affiliated with them.

 

[SMOGZINN]

We can only hope that Betsy does not last for 8 years. Public education in the US is a mish-mash of great things and crappy things. Private education in the US is a mish-mash of great things and crappy things. Charter schools the same. The difference is that private (ie religious) education and charter schools get to pick their students and (mostly) reject the students they do not want or who can not pay.

Given that they choose their students, the other than public school system organizations have a pretty bad result given the cost to parents and the public where the transfer of public tax dollars is allowed.

I think the solution is that we need to let public schools be schools, first and foremost. For daycare needs, nutrition needs, psychological needs, dental care, and all the other stuff that the public schools have been saddled with over the last few decades, let some other public entity take those on or else FULLY FUND the public school systems to administer those programs in separate facilities.

Public schools need to be a place for ready and willing students to learn. All the rest of the younger care stuff should be outside the schools or only partially affiliated with them.

One of the bigger problems public schools have compared to private schools is that private schools can kick out the students that are not advancing or are major disruptions while private schools have to keep everyone. I don't know what the solution to this is, but it is the major difference between public and private schools.

 

[MtnMan]

Most of our Founding Fathers were fundamentalist religious people, with guns.

Fundamentalists 200+ years ago and today's would not recognize each other as practicing the same religion. Today's loony fundies probably feel that education is not necessary because jesus is coming and the world is going to end.

Same as Reagan's secretary of the interior, Watts, said there was no reason to protect the environment because JC and the end of the world was near.

 

[zinfamous]

Most of our Founding Fathers were fundamentalist religious people, with guns.

This is a complete lie.

 

[dank69]

She may be clueless about the current department of education.... but the U.S. is ranked 24th in science, 39th in math, and 24th in reading*. Pretty sad for a country that is home to Silicon Valley, M.I.T., etc. We basically have a dysfunctional public education system. I say it is time to shake things up. Whatever was happening the last 8 years hasn't been working.


*Source: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/

This is why you are a hack. Your post is specifically crafted to make it seem like public education was great until Obama came along.

 

[zinfamous]

This is why republicans are small-minded, thoughtless people.

The fact is, we have some of the best public education systems in the world. We also have some of the absolute worst. This is a big country and the quality of each system is determined by your community, and specific state laws, leadership, funding. Republicans like to shit on public education when they can make hay over it, but this is largely determined by shitty systems in po-dunk towns that are impoverished due to inept republican leadership, or overcrowded systems in large cities that are largely populated by poorer students and many of whom are ESL students.

But it's not a hard and fast rule in each and every one of these areas, from school to school. The federal publica education system, for all its failings, is still a rather remarkable institution considering the size and scope of its mission, and its need to work within extremely diverse circumstances across the country. I find it duplicitous to blame the entirety of its faults on the fed when so much of the success of each district is determined by inter-state machinations.

We also don't have any better model out there. Privatized charter schools are generally much, much worse in the extreme comparative cases and overall no better than the entirety of the public system.

 

[1prophet]

Fundamentalists 200+ years ago and today's would not recognize each other as practicing the same religion. Today's loony fundies probably feel that education is not necessary because jesus is coming and the world is going to end.

Same as Reagan's secretary of the interior, Watts, said there was no reason to protect the environment because JC and the end of the world was near.

Damn right, those fundamentalist from 200 years ago would have been aghast seeing black people walking around free, women having the right to vote,the right to what they wear as well as their bodies and hold positions of power over men, gay people not just marrying but being aloud to venture out of the closet, etc., etc..

A lot of you have no concept of how religion was actually used to promote, reinforce,and justify social policies of those times like slavery, women being restricted as second class citizens, and a myriad of other freedoms you take for granted today,

Today's Western religious fundamentalists are just noise in comparison and the courts knock em down like the Kim Davis's when they try to mix religion and state or bakers who refuse to bake a gay wedding cake.