Here's an interesting bit of discussion over whether or not black boys should be segregated in the UK. It's strange that Europe is seen as liberal and progressive, yet nothing like this would be conceivable in America.
The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, has said that black boys should be taught separately in certain subjects to improve their grades. Do you back Mr Phillips' views on segregation in schools - or do you feel that such measures would be counterproductive by branding all black children as needing special help?
Anyway, it sure doesn't sound like a good idea to me... we have de facto racial segregation in schools due to neighborhood selection, and the poor, majority black schools don't tend to do too well. Ideally -- regardless of race -- the worst performing students would be distributed evenly throughout the school system so that they could be lifted up by their peers. Unfortunately, there are so many terrible students in our education system that the good students and parents tend to segregate themselves into private schools.
Wow I'm kind of shocked we agree on anything Michael! Usually I read you to disagree!
If only more parents would realize that numerous studies have proven integrating their children with poorly performing children has shown to have no impact on their own children's test scores and in fact, improves learning and test scores for ALL children, instead of just shuttling their kids off to private school, maybe education reform in this country would really happen.
Yeah, Kitten, but without having the fallback of sending them to the best schools, the parents might have to start getting involved with their children's education. This way, they can pay someone else to do it all for them and sleep well at night.
It's so darkly ironic that the head of the "Racial Equality" Dept. wants to segregate races. Overdose of ironic. Too...much..irony.
As I've elaborated upon earlier, parental responsibility is lacking in our public education system... and it may singularly be the most significant problem with the system.
It's not the school's job to fill in for a broken family unit. Violent students are the big problem with inner-city schools.... and unfair funding mechanisms at the state level are the big problem with rural and suburban schools..... generally speaking.
In Wisconsin, for example, we have the wonderfully idiotic QEO (Qualified Economic Offer)... instituted in 1993... under the auspices of then-Governor Tommy Thompson. It put revenue caps on all Wisconsin public school districts. The amount that each district's revenue would be capped at was determined by what those school districts were currently spending. Districts that were not-so-thrifty with their spending were capped at that high level... and districts that were penny-pinchers were capped at that low level. The result of this is that the rich schools kept getting richer.. and the poor schools kept getting poorer. The district I work for, for example, has one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the state... and our standardized testing scores are above the state average. We don't have a lot of "fat", so to speak, to trim from our budget... but this upcoming year we'll have to cut the budget again.
We could go to a referendum for additional funding... but it was like pulling teeth to get our recent facilities referendum passed... you know, so we could maintain our school buildings. I think the only way for our district to make it clear to the district's taxpayers what kind of bind we're in is to cut athletics out of the budget completely. We're a small-town school.... sporting events like football games, etc. are a big deal... regularly attended by lots of parents.
I know you probably don't care about anything I've said... but whoever tells you that schools have too much money should take a trip out to my district. The funding inequity I described up above is just Wisconsin's problem. Similar funding issues exist in other states as well.
Clearly, there are districts that waste a lot of money. There are also a lot of districts that have no money to waste.
Mark: From what I've read, money often doesn't correlate with performance. It's no surprise, however, that a centrally managed education system allocates resources poorly. That's why I think we need to move towards a capitalist/private system.
I never said that money always correlates with performance.
The problem with education funding isn't necessarily that it's centrally-managed... and the solution isn't necessarily turning education into a capitalist/private system. Some states just have to reform their systems to avoid starving some districts while fattening up others based on some arbitrary snapshot-of-a-certain-year cost estimation.
Mark: Managers simply aren't as efficient at allocating resources as markets are.
MW: Free markets cannot solve all of the world's problems.