121–130 of 209 posts
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Yeah but the US pays for national defense only to fund corporations continuously with unneeded weapon manufacturing so that the respective politicians in those districts can keep winning. There is really no national defense reasons there.
What's an example of an unneeded weapons system?
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I don't think we should be opposed to nationalizing education. A common curriculum would help mobility when it comes to families moving across state lines. It would also ensure uniform funding and plentiful opportunities to poorer and rural schools.
One size fits all policy? Where do you draw the line with local parents fundraising to ensure schools in richer areas are always ahead in terms of opportunities? Local education can prepare areas differently. Some states/areas like Texas would benefit from Spanish as a language course others like Hawaii might be better served with Japanese. Gym in Alaska must be different compared to Florida. Nevermind the private sc…
Local fundraising, usually for arts and music, do very little for “getting ahead”.
Private schools operate by mostly weeding out the disruptive/ low performing kids and selecting self motivated students with supportive parents. They don’t usually have amazing teachers that “work magic”.
I’ve lived in some very poor areas in my life as both a child and adult. By far the #1 influencing factor is the education of the parents.
There are countries that try to ban inequality and the only thing that happens is things go underground and get more unequal.
That said, even if things aren’t all the same, there is no excuse for the bottom to be so low. A variety of terrible policies ranging from finances to letting disruptive kids have their way ruin what could be a much better experience.
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I'm a teacher myself, and I think this is very much needed. Right now, good neighborhoods just get better schools, while bad neighborhoods get worse. It's a horribly vicious circle, and shows even in areas where there's only one school (my county, the 5th biggest in the state, only has 25k people and one high school) if there's a huge amount of poverty (something like 65% of our students are on free or reduced lunch;…
When I moved to the US, this was one of the things that surprised me the most. I found it really odd that my coworkers would look for homes based on how good the schools were in that neighborhood. The fact that all kids don't get equal opportunity makes it feel like a very broken society.
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The problem is not in information quality. I agree that is a solved problem. But that was never the big challenge in education (besides the politics of it). The problem is in getting students to complete the work, be honestly assessed about the work, get feedback on their work as well as for employers to believe that the assessment means anything.
> The problem is not in information quality. Information quality can be interpreted many ways. I wouldn't say most teachers are good at their job or at presenting information. Most I had were not good at the job - a lot of them were babysitters and acted as such. At the college level, it's possibly worse where the people are so consumed with their research that they have absolutely no interest in teaching or getting…
I agree with respect to the current education system.
History is hard to correct as it is politically thorny and frequently disputed. If I built a e-learning system, I wouldn't include that.
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I don't think we should be opposed to nationalizing education. A common curriculum would help mobility when it comes to families moving across state lines. It would also ensure uniform funding and plentiful opportunities to poorer and rural schools.
> common curriculum You mean something like Common Core? We have that.
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Even shorter term I'd like us to move away from local property taxes being used for local schools. The state government should have a statewide pool of money they allocate to schools based on enrollment numbers, cost of living. This should be sufficiently funded such that teachers can make a living wage in the local school district. Those who don't like this can still send their kids to private schools.
I'm a teacher myself, and I think this is very much needed. Right now, good neighborhoods just get better schools, while bad neighborhoods get worse. It's a horribly vicious circle, and shows even in areas where there's only one school (my county, the 5th biggest in the state, only has 25k people and one high school) if there's a huge amount of poverty (something like 65% of our students are on free or reduced lunch;…
Germany uses a decentralized system where the federal government and state government allocate budget to schools with some small additional contributions by local districts. Apparently 80% of the budget is spent on salaries. In 2016 the total education spending was 7100 Euros per student per year. This system seems to work quite well.
P.S.: I was a fool for not taking advantage of free university in Germany.
You know who’s not laying off anyone? The military. Local funding of schools is ridiculous. Education benefits the whole nation. Educational investments shouldn’t be dictated by transient economic conditions.
> Educational investments shouldn’t be dictated by transient economic conditions. Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense? Education is funded largely by local taxes, and local tax revenues are being gutted, so there isn't much that can be done here without nationalizing public education.
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> Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense? > national defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... I'm not as against military spending as some people, but almost 800 billion dollars is too much
How much would be appropriate? What weapons systems should be canceled? Serious question. I would agree that $800B seems ridiculously high, and yet it's not easy to tease apart what should be cut.
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It's almost as if pedagogy is a deep and rich field and you can't as easily absorb information without the guidance of a knowledgeable mentor. Who would have thought?
I don't know, after a few months of home schooling, I'm pretty sure that mentor could be an AI.
Could also do with cutting police funding. A local city in WA spends 53% of their budget on police[0]. Imagine if just a fraction of that went to education? I’d love to see solid studies on the efficacy/use of police budgeting. At a cursory glance, it’s an easy dataset with which to mislead: is crime going down because budgets are going up? Probably not. But without a solid study, we can’t say for sure. Still, I thin…