In regards to charter schools most have failed in NJ. They continue to rank at the bottom of the barrell in regards to test scores.
This guy Stossel is a hatchet man and completely full of it.
I've seen his stories before and they were always very slanted and full of misinformation.
One controversy that caught mainstream media's attention concerned Stossel's interview of a group of grade-school students for his ABC News special "What's Wrong With Tampering With Nature?" (6/29/01). The children's parents had signed releases for them to appear on the show, but after witnessing Stossel's methods, several withdrew their consent and protested to ABC.
The special caricatured environmentalists as "preachers of doom and gloom" whose fanaticism would have us all "running around naked, hungry for food, maybe killing a rabbit with a rock, then dying young." A key theme was Stossel's claim that U.S. schools have become an "environmental boot camp" to indoctrinate children with green propaganda, when in fact the environment is doing just fine.
To illustrate his point, Stossel arranged an interview with a group of California kids, asking what parents described as leading questions to try to show that the children had been taught environmentalist lies. Several parents said they hadn't known about this slant when they granted permission for the interviews. They complained that ABC had "misrepresented" the segment by telling them simply that it was an Earth Day special, and by concealing Stossel's involvement (L.A. Times, 6/26/01).
One father, Brad Neal, told the Washington Post (6/26/01) that Stossel's questioning was "entirely misleading," and that "he'd repeat the questions until he got the answer he wanted?. We knew we were hoodwinked." Parents said Stossel even tried to lead the children in chant suggesting that "all scientists agree there is a greenhouse effect" (L.A. Times, 6/26/01).
As a result of the negative publicity, ABC pulled the interviews before the show aired, though the network stood by Stossel's work. Stossel's own response was instructive. He found new kids to interview, apparently with the same techniques: On the special, they responded in well-coordinated unison to Stossel's questions. He also went on the attack against the parents, saying that they had been "brainwashed" by environmental activists, whom he characterized as "the totalitarian left" (O'Reilly Factor, 6/27/01).
Tricky editing
Little kids aren't the only ones who should beware of Stossel's tactics. During his one-hour special "Is America No. 1?" (9/19/99), Stossel used tricky editing to misrepresent the views of James K. Galbraith, a leading economist at the University of Texas.
Rife with factual inaccuracies (Extra!, 11-12/99), the show attempted to demonstrate that laissez-faire economics are "what makes a country work well for its people." Stossel claimed that Europe has high unemployment rates because of policies that provide benefits such as paid parental leave and make it "very hard" to fire workers.
The facts are so persuasive, said Stossel, that "many economists who once argued that we could learn from Europe, like James Galbraith, have now changed their minds." Stossel then played a clip from his interview with Galbraith: "There might be a moment for the European to learn from us, rather than for us to be studying them." The implication was clear: Galbraith believes Europe should follow the U.S.'s lead and require fewer protections and benefits for workers.
In fact, Galbraith is an outspoken opponent of the adoption of U.S.-style laissez-faire policies in Europe. "My point is quite different from the one Stossel makes in the lead-in," Galbraith told Extra!'s Seth Ackerman (11-12/99). Galbraith explained that he had actually told Stossel that "Europe could, in short, benefit from adopting some of the continent-wide transfer mechanisms, such as Social Security, that we have long enjoyed in the United States." In other words, Galbraith did feel Europe could learn from the U.S. by expanding social benefit programs--the opposite position, essentially, from the one implied by Stossel's editing.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1134
You know somebody has found something when this many character assasinate him without even watching the show.
techs
Lifer
- Sep 26, 2000
- 28,559
- 4
- 0
Everything I have seen shows mixed results with vouchers with an edge to kids actually doing worse. Of course the implementation of the vouchers is different all over. Plus you have to take into account the parents and kids who choose to use vouchers. The very fact that they choose it may indicate (I believe it does) is they are motivated people who are working and striving more and probably smarter than those who choose not to use the vouchers.
I've watched his show before, and wanted to jump through the screen and throttle him because of the lies he was telling. Check out my link and see some of his lies and distortions. He is worse than O'Lielly.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=19&media_outlet_id=19
He was on the Colbert Report a couple nights ago, and he said that the solution to catch our schools up to European schools is to make them LESS like the European model. Yeah, that's gonna work great. He's a butt-broomed jackass.
Perhaps it's just me, but all this griping and moaning about the sorry state of schools in the US isn't really supported by how we compare to students in other countries. Sure, on standardized tests, students in Japan and the like do much better, and as a result everyone is asking what's wrong with our schools. But who gives a damn about standardized tests? What matters is how we compete in the real world, and from that perspective, we don't seem so bad. Because as good as schools in some countries are, they also tend to focus on knowledge at the expense of problem solving and other real world skills. So they do well on tests, but when it comes to applying what they know, it tends to balance out. I can't speak for all fields, but in engineering, knowledge is a distant second to being able to solve problems. Being able to reproduce a red-black tree sorting algorithm on demand, without any reference books, makes you look smart. But in the real world, you HAVE reference books, it's far more important to know WHEN to use it and how it fits into the bigger picture.
Not that I'm suggesting we don't have room for improvement, we do. But people who think we need to scrap the whole system and start over, especially with a totally private system that would almost certainly result in smart, but poor, kids being left behind, are missing the point. Hell, how much better would we do by simply paying teachers a reasonable wage? They are among the most underpaid people in this country, spend more education dollars on teachers and less on pointless testing and without spending an additional dime, you'd see a dramatic improvement in our education system.
Not that I'm suggesting we don't have room for improvement, we do. But people who think we need to scrap the whole system and start over, especially with a totally private system that would almost certainly result in smart, but poor, kids being left behind, are missing the point. Hell, how much better would we do by simply paying teachers a reasonable wage? They are among the most underpaid people in this country, spend more education dollars on teachers and less on pointless testing and without spending an additional dime, you'd see a dramatic improvement in our education system.
Maybe we should also check out how much money we spend per student in our schools compared with countries that do better and spend quite a bit less.
No Republican will admit it, but the reason that European kids do better on tests and are all around more successful is because of the well funded government schools. Sure, the government takes 50 percent of their income in taxes, but they have a higher standard of living, much better health and a much better education. Big government works as long as there are no crazy Republicans to hamstring it at every turn.
WhipperSnapper
Lifer
- Oct 30, 2004
- 11,442
- 32
- 91
The problem is not merely an issue of whether or not we have socialized education, it's an issue about the nation's overall philosophy and it's educational philosophy. The root of the problem is that we aren't teaching the ability to use reason. We are too much of a faith-based and touchy-feely-subjectivist-mushy society.
Education very strongly relies on the student. More so than the teacher.
We obsess with things like top 100 schools and whatnot, and throwing more money at school. But none of that is going to matter if children don't focus on their own time. Our society doesn't value strong work ethics, and intelligence. We value sports, celebrities...so much that it's the topic of many news articles.
We obsess with things like top 100 schools and whatnot, and throwing more money at school. But none of that is going to matter if children don't focus on their own time. Our society doesn't value strong work ethics, and intelligence. We value sports, celebrities...so much that it's the topic of many news articles.
Well yes, that is certainly another problem. Kids tease the smart kids in 3rd grade, and those kids never quite seem to quite get over it, even when they are 40 years old and have kids of their own. We have a rather strange lack of respect for intelligence and knowledge, in fact, we have almost the opposite attitude towards those things.
I think we waste a lot of money on things that have little to do with the educational process, like dozens of mandatory, standardized tests that really aren't very helpful. If we actually focused that money on education, instead of education related activities, I think we'd be a lot better off and get a lot more bang for our buck.
Other countries have a similar problem teaching reason, not the same problem we do though, their problem is a focus on knowing things to the exclusion of learning how to think. Memorization of a lot of facts is pushed in countries with the "best" schools, but that doesn't mean they know how to think or solve problems.
Do they? Last I heard their living spaces were tiny. Last I heard the United States spends more money per student than any other country in the world.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/09/16/sprj.sch.education.compared.ap/ (it's a couple years old)
And we have a problem with having to bend over backwards for illegal immigrants that can't speak English in this country and wind up not even finishing school.
dahunan
Lifer
- Jan 10, 2002
- 18,191
- 3
- 0
I think the real problem is that people can't acknowledge that not everyone is made equal, and modern market economies do not provide for everyone, so anyone who is not so good is destined to a life of lower wages. School is much about idealogical propaganda creating upper and lower classes as it is about education for jobs.
No amount of education is going to give kids incentive to become scientists or engineers if they hear or see in the news that american companies can pay 3 or more equally skilled people like that in india or china for what they'd need just to have a middle class lifestyle.
Education problem is not simple, no amount of privitization or money will solve what are fundmentally human beings sticking their head in the sand.
Global market economies create disincentives for demanding jobs because of things like offshoring to other low wage+high skilled worker countries. This is a double whammy to any country, how can you give kids an incentive to work hard when they know the company only cares about the bottom line and the 3+ cheap workers the company can get in another country for the price of what it costs him to live a middle class lifestyle in his own?
Not all kid's are created equal, so what happens to the ones that can't do as well as others? What kind of future do they have in modern markets? Very little. It's no wonder they are apathetic when no one is acknowledging these people want to work hard and live comfortably too within their abilities, but modern markets punish these people and create huge social problems.
These are huge problems that are all inter-related - natural human limitatations (biology) + education + global economies + wage disparity amongst international high skilled (and low skilled) workers. The same thing is happening to white collar jobs now as what happened to blue collar factory jobs, companies move their operations to where they can get the cheapest workers possible. Or they try to manipulate supply and demand through the media and propaganda of certain workers to drive down theri wages and standard of living.
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