Abolish the Department of Education?

[packsaddle]

BadenP,

Then eliminate welfare. We know for a fact that we're not willing to pay the price to educate them.

 

If you read my posts, you'll see that I do understand how poorly our students rank with some of the rest of the world. Take a look at the link:

 

http://www.air.org/files/phillips.chance.favors.the.prepared.mind.pdf

starting with 'results' on page 14. The national proficiency is ranked there and then later individual states are compared to other countries. It is an interesting comparison. Not a single state ranks greater than 5th (Massachusetts) and Mississippi barely edges out Moldova or Serbia.

One note regarding textbooks: for K-12 there is no such thing as an out-of-date math book. This is true for much of science as well until you get to college prep or AP courses.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[BS-87]

http://cafehayek.com/2011/04/grocery-school.html

 

This is a pretty interesting analogy to argue the point that the Dept. of Education should be abolished.

 

To pre-argue the point, Education is very comparable to food.

[JoeBob]

"Then eliminate welfare. We know for a fact that we're not willing to pay the price to educate them."

 

I think we're paying both.

 

You can lead a horse to water, and you can confine a child to school (Until he is 16); but you can't make either of them drink.

 

Muddying the water just makes it not as satisfying for those who do want to drink.

 

[BadenP]

Pack

 

Man you don't get it, even if welfare went away you would still have all these unemployable people living in the streets. Same thing happened in the Great Depression, if it wasn't for the government work programs and finally WWII our country would have been in a world of economic hurt for at least another decade or more. Yes science and math books can be out of date, most babyboomers would struggle with the way math is taught today,would you even understand quadratic equations which didn't even exsist when we went to school, and then there are new discoveries in science and scientific theory that didn't even exsist five years ago. Why do you think we are so far behind in science and math with the rest of the world, many schools are still teaching outdated curriculums with outdated books.(This message has been edited by BadenP)

[packsaddle]

OK, if only education could merely be purchased like...bread. To some extent the argument in your link is contradictory. Food is really, heavily controlled and regulated by the federal government. More than one agency actually, when you consider all aspects of its production. Are you advocating abolition of the DofAgriculture and the FDA? How about Commerce or Transportation? Both of those are involved as well.

 

The analogy fails because food is quite different in several respects. First, for example, once acquired, education is a permanent acquisition while food must be replenished periodically. Physically speaking, education has no mass nor does it occupy space. In addition, the process of 'getting' it involves most of the work to be done by the 'customer'...a quite different characteristic.

 

Edit: BadenP, fella, quadratic equations have existed for a very long time. I remember them and I can pick an old math book off the shelf dated from the 1950's and the math still works the same. Yes, there may be some improvements in the 'way' it is taught but K-12 math itself was in place a very long time ago....I just did it. I pulled a book from the 1940's and guess what I'm looking at: quadratic equations.

From Wiki, "The Bakhshali Manuscript written in India in the 7th century AD contained an algebraic formula for solving quadratic equations, as well as quadratic indeterminate equations." and then, "The first appearance of the general solution in the modern mathematical literature appeared in a 1896 paper by Henry Heaton."

Sorry, I don't have any books going back that far.

As far as science goes, K-12 education doesn't hang in the balance on the basis of discoveries in the last 5 years...especially if they can't understand basic things like pH, electron transport, or thermodynamics.

 

As far as the consequences of abolishing welfare, hey, that's the marketplace that we are all anxious to have as the foundation of society. It can't be as bad as all that.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[BS-87]

"Physically speaking, education has no mass nor does it occupy space. In addition, the process of 'getting' it involves most of the work to be done by the 'customer'...a quite different characteristic."

 

 

Maybe the real problem is that there's people in this world who don't think you have to work to "get" anything, not even an education!

 

Education should be more important to us than the air we breathe. Children should be working to "get" it far harder than their teachers do to "give" it.

 

Education may not occupy space, but it will decide what space you occupy.

 

 

Edited to add: Also, the article is a thought experiment. Taking it literally for the sole purpose of criticizing it is counterproductive to the debate.(This message has been edited by BS-87)

[packsaddle]

BS-87, If you think showing the difference between products, a difference in the way they are regulated, produced, and consumed..is counterproductive, I'm not sure how you think someone should respond. If I contend that the analogy fails, and you can't address the criticisms, then your support is hardly strengthened.

[BadenP]

Pack

 

I wasn't a math major in school. However my analogy that we as a society will have to pay for this crisis sooner or later is still valid. If we wait until the latter the cost is going to be much much higher than if we took the time to educate now. In fact eventually the need for a massive welfare program would phase itself out over time. A quality modern education, at least up through high school, should be a right of all children and not a privilege in our country. If not our country is doomed to become a mediocre third rate nation, uncompetitive in a rapidly changing global economy.

[packsaddle]

BadenP, I agree with your assessment. However, we have essentially made the decision NOT to follow that path but rather go with the free market approach. Might as well wrap our arms around it and make love to it.

[Oak Tree]

Pack,

 

Going back to your response to me where you stated that good educational opportunities are available in the current system if you work to find them - that's something that we have found to be true in our family.

 

I don't want to say that the public schools are "broken". There are many good teachers and there are a lot of good courses available. I'm very skeptical about data that shows how our country compares to other countries - although perhaps some statisticians have done a good job in making sure that it's the same relevant part of the population that's being tested. For all I know, the better schools may be just as good here as anywhere else.

 

But I also don't think it's OK that some people get their requests rejected by the system for arbitrary reasons. The food system doesn't work that way - you don't get told "We've allocated all of the blackberries to Middletown, so you'll have to eat blueberries." And those people don't get told "Blackberries are good food too, you can make some really delightful things with them." So even though I'm not going so far as to say the system is broken, I'll definitely allow that there are some aspects that could be made better, and competition is a great way to induce people to work hard to do that.

 

As for your latest stats - they're good to know, and I don't know that I see the value of contracts, but that data in general is very open to the "correlation does not imply causation" argument. Schools in the south share all kinds of common styles, and it's very difficult to know which of those things might cause the historical poor performance. North Carolina has been rapidly moving up the ranks of the schools over the past couple of decades. I remember arriving here and hearing about how they were setting aggressive goals of getting to average (and yes, those were aggressive goals). Looks like the state is almost there from your stats.

 

The funny thing is, I don't think that NC really adopted much reform at all that has made any difference. What they did get was an absolute overwhelming flood of educated northern immigrants. Parental education level is a pretty good predictor of success in school.

 

NC SAT scores were about 38 points below the national average just 15 years ago (combined math+reading). The gap was down to 10 in 2008. (and NC has a higher participation rate than average).

 

Wake County, which has all the same rules as the rest of NC, scores well above the national average. It also has higher average income than the state as a whole, and more educated parents, both of which are very strong predictors of academic success.

 

So yes, our schools are not bad, we do have IEPs and charter schools and private schools and home schooling options (home schooling requires a trivial amount of government interaction in NC). And as a country, we do still seem to be pretty competitive (way more immigrants than emigrants). Still, that doesn't mean we can't all look around and see things that could be better and come up with suggestions on how to make it happen.

[packsaddle]

Oak Tree, I understand and agree. Would you also invoke that statement about correlation if the data showed the opposite relationship? I would hope so.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[jrush]

I agree there's a lot of money being wasted in education, but remember this: It takes the fedgov waving the carrot of dollars in front of States to get some of them to the educational level of 2nd world countries. Lord knows where they'll wind up without any motivation at all.

 

 

[perdidochas]

jrush,

Show proof of that statement. That educational achievement has increased since the advent of the Department of Education "carrots."

 

Educational achievement has essentially been flat since 1980 (when the Department of Education was established). However, federal educational spending has not been flat. It's been growing steadily.

 

http://nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2008/ltt0002.asp?subtab_id=Tab_3&tab_id=tab1#chart

 

 

 

[packsaddle]

Right about the growth, at least in dollars that don't account for inflation.

Reagan began with a little more than $14B in his 1981 budget and finished with $15.4B in 1988. GHWBush began with $22.6B in 1989 and ended with $31.3B in 1992. Clinton began with $33B in 1993 and ended with $37.5B in 2000. GWBush began with $40B in 2001 and ended with $62.6B in 2008. Funding has actually declined during Obama. Oops, the ARRA during Obama boosted overall education funding to much greater levels - $98.2B. About half of it was 'stimulus' money.

 

I have only associated each administration with the budgets that THAT administration had requested.

 

I also note that Congress, each year, has consistently appropriated more than requested by the executive. In 2006 the Bush budget requested a little over $69B but Congress appropriated over $100B. This was largely due, however, to one-time emergency appropriations in response to Katrina, etc. Draw your own conclusions.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/edhistory.pdf(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[jrush]

perdidochas, where do you get that it's been flat?

 

Nationally, SAT reading scores have seen a gradual increase from 492 in 1980 to 516 last year, and that was after 30 seconds' research. Is that due to federally-funded reading programs? Maybe or maybe not, but the increase is right there in black and white.

 

Now, you can certainly argue that the billions spent on education don't justify the results, but don't pretend that results don't exist.