Bake-sale style funding for the military instead of for schools. That is a fantastic idea. I love it.
This bumper sticker has been seen on Volvos since the 1970s.
Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
71–80 of 146 posts
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#72It is objectively the case that our schools aren't bad in general. Not as good as Finland, but adjusted for demographics about average compared to the rest of Europe: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... . You can't really compare the school systems of a homogenous country with low income inequality to one where 30% of the population is from either a historically oppressed racial minority g…
Average salary for Finnish teachers is $55k/year.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. You left yourself a wiggle word there, but it doesn't make the sentiment correct. Just as a programmer I've worked with and for folks who have graduated from such juggernauts as Northwestern…
Still, lets not confuse matters here. People from lower tier schools make it, and make it big, all the time. Yes, you can find plenty of counter-examples, but the average income of the college graduate and the highschool dropout are miles apart.
enjo is talking about "lower tier" colleges. Not high school drop outs. He is saying that you don't have to go to a top, $40-50k a year school to be successful in the industry.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#74The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents? Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?
What is so bad about different children learning different things? At the end of the day, someone always ends up deciding what they learn, and the reality right now is that that curriculum is often highly politically motivated. Even if it wasn't, in an ideal world where everyone working on putting together course plans had the best intentions -- still, who decides what's right to teach and what's wrong? There is no right answer. And you certainly can't arrive at the answer "deductively". Having a variety of teaching experiences would be a big win in my mind in furthering development of good teaching practices.
We always seem to analyze these things in terms of best case scenarios. "If we can get everyone to agree on the things I find important, then education will work!" But they never consider the flip side of this: that you may end up in a community where everyone votes to get science classes to "teach the controversy" or something. That's what happens when everyone gets a standardized experience: you have to rely on "compromise" (which in our democracy is usually the winner forcing the loser to do what they say for X years).
Right now trying to get computer science into schools is a monumental task because it requires us asking permission to get it in there. I have to go and make a case to the school board that these subjects should be added. Instead of an organic process where specialized schools started adding it based on demand, we instead often need these big binary switches.
I am OK with you providing your child with whatever education you think is important. Because I want to provide my child the education I think is important.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#75He says he dislikes a private system but, at the same time, indirectly acknowledges that what makes the system at his district work is the fact that it is partly private. It is partly private because people actually raise money voluntarily and charge outsiders in order to make it work.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#76Linus is now seeing firsthand that opportunity is not equal in the United States. You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. That's how it works here in the United St…
> You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school
My parents were in the military so I floated all over as a kid, even through high school.
After high school I managed to get merit scholarships, but only enough to fully cover an in-state school 99% of you have never heard of, the very illustrious University of North Florida.
Despite all of that I've done just fine for myself since by taking advantage of opportunities that have been available to me. It depends on career field, but people are increasingly aware that graduating from a good school is not a predictor of success and that graduating from a "bad" school is not a predictor of failure.
I agree that education in the U.S. is broken in general, but I disagree on the emphasis you place on which University one attends.
P.S. In my travels as a child I've never been in a school system that wasn't already at a county level, so I'm not sure how helpful that suggestion would be. The counties are apparently still earmarking money from wealthy communities back to the schools that service those communities.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, lets not confuse matters here. People from lower tier schools make it, and make it big, all the time. Yes, you can find plenty of counter-examples, but the average income of the college graduate and the highschool dropout are miles apart.
enjo is talking about "lower tier" colleges. Not high school drop outs. He is saying that you don't have to go to a top, $40-50k a year school to be successful in the industry.
Good point, my misread, sorry.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link you cited is highly misleading. The Chicago metro area is a census tract of 10 million people. The City of Chicago is 2.7 million people. The Chicago school system and the Chicago teachers union disagree about how to compute the number, but CTU cites $71k and CPS cites $76k: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/how-much-do-chicago-p... Also misleading from that link: Chicago's cost of living is right aroun…
You are also required to live IN the city if you are a teacher in CPS. So you can't take that salary and escape to the suburbs after work.
Sure but the city of Chicago isn't very expensive. It's cheaper than the suburbs of say DC or NYC or SF by a good margin. $70k is a very good salary in the city. You can get a nice 2BR apartment in Lincoln Park (one of the more expensive areas) for only $1,600 per month. My studio Westchester costs almost that much!
Chicago teachers start around $51k with a bachelors. You can live better with that salary in Chicago than many Googlers earning $100k trying to live in SF...
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't put much faith in young children being able to direct their own learning effectively. I'm significantly older and I'm still not very good at it.
I'll clarify: I was homeschooled. My parents always had a set schedule and curriculum. Within that defined structure, I mostly taught myself. A parent is perfectly capable of evaluating and deciding on a wide variety of curriculum even if they may not be knowledgeable enough to write a Chemistry book.
There's a distinction between A parent and all parents.
Disproportionately more parents in low income areas (where kids have worse prospects already) will have very poor education themselves (possibly struggling with basic reading skills) and also possibly additional problems with drug/alcohol abuse etc. Not the sort of people who will be skilled at choosing curriculum and enforcing study.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#80SHOCKING NEWS: Ethnically and linguistically homogeneous people from tiny, frozen nation easier to educate than diverse citizens of world's most-immigrated-to nation. Stay tuned for more surprising revelations, as soon as we hear them!
So if the US were colder we wouldn't have education problems. Interesting theory.