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Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

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Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#221

Post by HDThoreaun »

tstrimple wrote: post #160
megaman821 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a fair way to compare then? If rich Asians kids from the "best" school perform the same as the rich Asians from the "worst" school and poor Native American kids from the "best" school perform same and poor Native American kids form the "worst" school, and the only differences between the best at the worst school is the proportion of each demographic, what does that say about the quality of the shcool?

I've largely been convinced that "good schools" are just a side effect of motivated parents migrating to an area with "good schools". It has nothing at all to do with the schools or teachers themselves, but the parents with means who make decisions based on education will likely be doing other things to encourage education as well. Achieving a critical mass of children with involved parents will make a school "good".

education is mostly at home but teachers do matter. Part of what is going on is that bad teachers get kicked out of schools with high parental participation so the errors are correlated I guess. If all parents became involved would bad teachers disappear or would the parents just have to live with them instead of being able to remove them?

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#222

Post by HDThoreaun »

mrguyorama wrote: post #216
pc86 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you touched on a key component to this and I'm curious if you agree with me or not. The level of effort expended by teachers in instructing their class varies wildly from teacher to teacher. I'm sure everyone remembers their best teacher and their worst teacher, and the delta between those two is often staggering. Wouldn't schools be better off if we could easily get rid of those bad teachers? I would love to…

Ah yes the famous "If only unions didn't prevent administration from firing bad workers everything would be peachy" excuse. 1) Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. All you have to do to fire someone in a union is take notes that they failed in their job duties, email them about it, take notes that they didn't improve. Unions cannot preven…

> Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue.

The leader of my cities police union had a relationship with a 17 year old at the high school he was stationed at. He was at jan 6. Hes been suspended 9 times and has 50 civilian complaints against him. 10 complaints were sustained. The city still could not fire him, though they certainly tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Catanzara

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#223

Post by HDThoreaun »

throwanem wrote: post #213
api wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s telling to me that like 2/3 of the replies to my comment think I’m arguing for extending inclusiveness to Nazis and KKK and such. That’s not what I said. I said rural Southern and Midwestern white working class culture. Many tend toward conservatism but the majority of them are not raging frothing at the mouth bigots. I was not talking about committed ideological hate mongers. I was talking about regular people…

You'll never meet a bigger hick or rube than that stupid asshole Curtis Yarvin, and these fucking chumps look up to him. Man can't wear a leather jacket or a pair of shoes, can't style himself or comport himself in any other manner than that of a surly teenager in his big brother's illfitting rocker drag, never uses one word where fifty will do because otherwise a toddler could see he's full of shit to the eyebrows,…

The yarvin stuff is crazy to me mostly because he legitimately is an awful writer. So much unexplored angst in his work it feels like Im reading catcher in the rye again but he's completely unironic. Surely the neoreactionaries can find someone a bit more eloquent?

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#224

Post by throwanem »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #223
throwanem wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll never meet a bigger hick or rube than that stupid asshole Curtis Yarvin, and these fucking chumps look up to him. Man can't wear a leather jacket or a pair of shoes, can't style himself or comport himself in any other manner than that of a surly teenager in his big brother's illfitting rocker drag, never uses one word where fifty will do because otherwise a toddler could see he's full of shit to the eyebrows,…

The yarvin stuff is crazy to me mostly because he legitimately is an awful writer. So much unexplored angst in his work it feels like Im reading catcher in the rye again but he's completely unironic. Surely the neoreactionaries can find someone a bit more eloquent?

They have Land, but he understands exactly what he is doing and he will hurt you if you're not very careful. Yarvin is perfect for edgelords precisely because that's not true.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#225

Post by mrguyorama »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #222
mrguyorama wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes the famous "If only unions didn't prevent administration from firing bad workers everything would be peachy" excuse. 1) Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. All you have to do to fire someone in a union is take notes that they failed in their job duties, email them about it, take notes that they didn't improve. Unions cannot preven…

> Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. The leader of my cities police union had a relationship with a 17 year old at the high school he was stationed at. He was at jan 6. Hes been suspended 9 times and has 50 civilian complaints against him. 10 complaints were sustained. The city still could not fire him, though they certainly tried. http…

>Catanzara resigned from the CPD in November 2021, as his firing from the CPD appeared imminent, and announced his intention to run for mayor of Chicago.

It takes a lot of paperwork to fire cops because they have zero accountability, so showing "they didn't do their job" is actually hard. You can thank the supreme court for that. More importantly, the person who SHOULD be the one firing them, the Sheriff or Chief of police, is a fellow member of the "Fraternal order of Police" and that violates the usual "labor"/"management" split of unions in other roles. Those roles are often either appointed, in which the city should be hiring someone willing to fire bad cops, or voted in, in which case that's a general problem in the US that cops and judges who get voted on tend to be extremely horrifyingly authoritarian and tyrannical and the voters LOVE it.

Nowhere in that link does it explain or document how they "tried to fire" the police officer at any point before 2021.

Unions have no legal authority or power. Their entire "power" is in getting your job specified in a contract, and suing the employer for violating that contract when someone gets fired and has enough pull with union management.

More importantly, for teachers, especially in Maine, the norm is single year contracts. There is no "tenure" or similar. You are only employed for a single year and the school districts have complete authority to just not hire you for the next year, which is their typical way to fire someone and happens often enough.

IE, the entire worry of pc86 was invalid from the get go.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#226

Post by Kon-Peki »

motorest wrote: post #207
Kon-Peki wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results. I strongly suspect that Mississippi should be allocating more resources to education. But this is a political problem and the schools have nearly no say in whether the legislature does or does not increase funding. So. Do we close down the schools and wait until it is resolved? Or do the schools do the best they can with the resour…

> This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results. "Ton of spending" are weasel words. "Not a ton of results" is already the problem. If your school system fails to teach kids how to read after 3 years, this is a school system that fails at it's primary and most basic responsibility. These third-graders are not the problem, they are the canary in the coal mine. Advocating for hol…

> this is a school system that fails

I never disagreed on this point.

Now what? Every morning, kids wake up a day older. Is there a way to hit pause so you have time to go in and fix it?

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#227

Post by Karrot_Kream »

hooverd wrote: post #178
api wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rural way of life is already insanely subsidized. So is ours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo None of this would exist without probably trillions in DARPA, NASA, DoD, and government-funded university research on computers and networks. We live in a complex internetworked and interdependent civilization. Everyone is subsidized by everyone else, and balancing the books is incredibly hard.

Sure, but I don't yap about being a yeoman software developer and how independent I am from it despite being totally dependent on a long petrochemical supply chain.

Half the content that gets upvoted on this site is about being hipster, independent yeoman software developers.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#228

Post by mcphage »

Izkata wrote: post #196
leereeves wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly so well as they as they used to. What's changed?

This is a straight up guess, but the timing is really close: adoption of Common Core? What I've seen of Common Core math is very different from how it's traditionally taught, to the point that parents don't understand it. I think I can see a thread in there, that it's attempting to teach what those of us good at math end up figuring out ourselves with numbers, but the examples online are bad and lead to further misun…

I'm not sure what the Common Core curriculum for reading is, although on the whole Common Core math curriculum, it's a good system. You're right that often parents don't understand that—but that's due to Americans on the whole being uncomfortable and unskilled in mathematics. It does require teacher education, however, and lots of places are cutting that back.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#229

Post by api »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #223
throwanem wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll never meet a bigger hick or rube than that stupid asshole Curtis Yarvin, and these fucking chumps look up to him. Man can't wear a leather jacket or a pair of shoes, can't style himself or comport himself in any other manner than that of a surly teenager in his big brother's illfitting rocker drag, never uses one word where fifty will do because otherwise a toddler could see he's full of shit to the eyebrows,…

The yarvin stuff is crazy to me mostly because he legitimately is an awful writer. So much unexplored angst in his work it feels like Im reading catcher in the rye again but he's completely unironic. Surely the neoreactionaries can find someone a bit more eloquent?

I read it and… I don’t get it. There isn’t much of a real argument.

Like in the famous “gentle introduction” he spends like 10000 words to convince you that… maybe Samuel Adams was an asshole? Okay, fine. Therefore the American revolution was a fraud, because… some Tory wrote a witty book mocking its leaders? Wow, so you are saying that a major revolution was not absolutely black and white and that maybe some of the folks on “our” side were dicks? What a revelation. Meanwhile there’s little engagement with the actual ideas, which are the important and lasting part.

That’s just one example. I have no interest in spending days deconstructing those walls of text. Let’s just say they did not change my mind on anything.

I have this theory that much of Yarvin’s underlying motive is a sublimated rage out about the idiocy and hypocrisy of San Francisco politics. He lived there at the time. But he couldn’t just say damn these SF latte sipping rich lefty people are hypocritical assholes. If you don’t like a place then for fuck’s sake just move.

A big irony is that SF is not a well functioning democracy. It’s a one party state controlled by boomer NIMBY property owners with a gigantic divide between rich and poor. It’s a f’ing feudal city state run by landlords, and he thinks the whole world should be like that?

I happen to dislike a lot of things about how SF is run and some things about its zeitgeist which is why I don’t live there.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#230

Post by throwanem »

api wrote: post #229
HDThoreaun wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The yarvin stuff is crazy to me mostly because he legitimately is an awful writer. So much unexplored angst in his work it feels like Im reading catcher in the rye again but he's completely unironic. Surely the neoreactionaries can find someone a bit more eloquent?

I read it and… I don’t get it. There isn’t much of a real argument. Like in the famous “gentle introduction” he spends like 10000 words to convince you that… maybe Samuel Adams was an asshole? Okay, fine. Therefore the American revolution was a fraud, because… some Tory wrote a witty book mocking its leaders? Wow, so you are saying that a major revolution was not absolutely black and white and that maybe some of the…

Treating each link as a reference, the perhaps more famous "Open Letter" has a bibliography about eight hundred items deep.

That sounds impressive as hell till you actually start looking at them. Filtering out Youtube, broken, and frothing-at-the-eyeballs, less than a hundred were interesting and a couple of dozen proved actually worth following, when I carried out this exercise for my own interest some time around 2013.

As a collator, that gives Yarvin a considerably poorer score than Noah Smith, which I think would embarrass me were I either man. As anything else, I'm not sure whether Smith or Yarvin is actually more useless, but I may just need to move the decimal one place to the left in my epsilon.

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