pyrephox | Gah.

Gah.

As someone who is planning to go into education in South Carolina, the ongoing attempt to push intelligent design into our classrooms is of intense interest to me. And, of course, you know my opinion of intelligent design's validity. So, when I read this story from our local paper, it makes me wish to weep.

"A lawmaker pushing to give teachers alternatives to evolution won’t identify the people he has asked to advise a state panel.

State Sen. Mike Fair has invited two experts to advise the school reform oversight agency, which is evaluating the standards for teaching the origins of life.

Fair said he promised the two advisers he would protect their identities to minimize scrutiny of their views and credentials prior to their appearance before an EOC subcommittee next week..."

Now why, I must wonder, if these to are experts in their fields, would they wish to MINIMIZE scrutiny of their credentials? If they have good credentials, relevant to the science of evolution and the practice of public education, then they should be proclaiming them loudly and proudly. Credentials sell opinions...unless, of course, you don't have any.

"Fair has emerged as the leading voice to modify lesson guidelines for high school biology by advocating for the inclusion of language that gives teachers more leeway in discussing alternatives to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Fair insists he is not advocating teachers present lessons about creationism, which draws on the Bible to explain the origins of life, or “intelligent design,” a relatively new theory challenging evolution because it cannot fully explain some of life’s mysteries."

...then what /is/ he proposing? What 'alternatives' does he wish to teach? The world sprung from the loins of the Great Mother Goddess (God, if I were a teacher who did not value my job, I would /love/ to teach that as an 'alternative')? For that matter...

It's not Darwin's theory! Darwin was one of the /original/ theorists, and certainly the father of evolutionary biology, but the theory of evolution has gone far, far beyond his work. It has been adapted for new evidence, expanded, revised through experimentation and study, and held up through decades of intense scrutiny by brilliant minds of many different disciplines. Evolution, in some form or fashion, is the /only/ theory we have that adequately explains what we see in the world around us. "God did it" is not an explanation. It tells us nothing about our world, it gives us no areas for exploration, and it helps not at all with the development of new technologies and knowledges. It's not a bloody alternative, no matter how you phrase it, or what kind of mealy-mouthed pretty psuedo-scientific language that you put it in.

Damn it all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Actually, I would /love/ to see funding of schools divorced from district-level tax support. The current funding scheme ensures that children from poor tax-value neighborhoods will have poor schools, inferior equipment, and fewer enrichment opportunities than children from rich neighborhoods. That's a big problem, and funding every school based on population, state of school building, and financial need, would be a good start with it. However, the solution there is moving the funding, not the children.

When you take children out of schools local to themselves, and put them in schools that are distant, you're losing valuable opportunities to involve communities in schooling, as well as helping children, school staff, and parents get involved in school activities. Additionally, parents and children of the school they're moving to often feel resentment at being 'invaded', or worry that 'those children' will bring the school's scores down.

The private school option is also not as good as you may think. One of the main reasons why private schools do better than public schools is because a) they get to choose their students and b) they have a limited number of students. The smaller your school (student/teacher ratio in particular), assuming full funding per student, the better that school is going to do. It's almost universal. When you can not accept any student who doesn't meet your dress code, your grade standards, your behavior standards, then you're self selecting for students who /want/ to be there and are usually in a condition to be able to learn.

If the ever-popular school choice idea would be implemented, you'd see a massive funding suck from public education to private, and then many private schools' scores would crash, as they got an influx of students of wildly different proficiency levels, educational experience, behavioral difficulties, special needs, and interest level. Additionally, what standards are you going to hold these schools to? Will they be required to take any student whose parents wish them to attend? Will they have to make the same special education and ESL accomodations that public schools have to? Will teachers all be required to be certified? By who? Will religious institutes be required to accept students not of their religious affiliation? What about students of religious affiliations openly hostile to their own? How often will private schools be inspected, compared to public schools? Will private schools be required to have the same facilities and support personnel as public schools, in the same ratios? Very, very few of the voucher/school choice programs that are floated (at least in this state) have done anything to address these questions. The protests from the educational community are not rabid job-protection, but sincere concerns from people on the ground level of what politicians are looking at as a theoretical problem.

(Continued in next comment...)

The current funding scheme ensures that children from poor tax-value neighborhoods will have poor schools, inferior equipment, and fewer enrichment opportunities than children from rich neighborhoods.

I'm sorry, but this is not correct. Take Char-Meck in NC for example. The schools which have the highest per pupil spending in CMS are the inner city schools. Those are also the worst performing. Are there cases where it is true what you say? Yes. But it isn't a given. Further, more money, from all available evidence doesn't necessarily mean a better education.

As for your statements about private schools, I'm sorry, but that doesn't jibe with what Germany and much of Europe has experienced. It also shows a misunderstanding of how markets work. Let me give an example.

The county I was from had three high schools. West, Central and East. The county being a vague rectangle was pretty much divided into three sections. Whichever of the three you were in, that's the school you went to. Schools were then funded based on number of students equally. But there was no competition. They were guaranteed enough kids because if you were in the Western district, that's where you had to go.

Now, let's imagine we used a pupil based funding instead of district based. I'm going to ignore the details of whether it's state or national based for now. Every kid in the county has the exact same amount spent on him, regardless of what school he goes to. So you can't make the argument that it's unfair to the poor; the money follows the kid. Say someone like me who lives near the border of the Eastern and Central districts is deciding which school to go to. My parents can see graduation rates, test scores (part of the funding by pupil instead of distric requires every school to make publically available these rubrics), college acceptance rate, scholarship rates, etc. They see that the Eastern school has better than the Central school and send me there. Now, the school is getting more cash so even if there's a hundred of us transferring, they can afford to build more space. They can probably even pay to expand bus routes. It also means that the Central school, if it wants to continue operating and the administrators and teachers want to keep their jobs, are going to have to perform better and bring up their scores. Add in the threat of a private school opening which doesn't have admission requirements; and you will get better schools across the board. This is what has happened in Germany in particular, and other European countries as well.

As for selective admissions, yes, some schools would continue to be selective. They'd probably charge more than the theoretical 10k. And that's fine. Not everyone can afford a Mercedes. But there'd be plenty of Mazda's and Fords and Volkswagons, schools with no more stringent policies than the public schools have. They wouldn't be top flight prep schools, but they'd a) be better than current schools, which are horrible and b) they'd be geared more toward those who weren't up to the challenge a more elite school offers. No one would argue that UNC-Wilmington is on par with Duke, but nor would anyone argue UNCW provides a sub-par education. You'd have a similar situation in secondary schools, and it would be an improvement over the current situation.

No, it doesn't. A /lot/ matters about where that money is going. And honestly? I would very much support some sane restructuring of the educational financial system. I suspect that we would disagree on the definition of 'sane', however.

And I attempt to do research on German schools! I find the absolutely perfect site, with comprehensive lists of everything I want to know...except for the small problem that all the good stuff is in German. It is to weep. However, based on what I /can/ read, it seems to have state schools. Certainly state regulated schools...http://www.bildungsserver.de/index_e.html if you're interested.

And while I agree with you that there needs to be public school reform, I'm honestly not sure that that 'school choice' is the way to go...at least in its current political incarnation.

ABC News Story

Sorry, it was Belgium, not Germany that I know for sure does this. My fault. I got the two confused (so much for my geography, huh?). Though according to a prof. from Harvard quoted in the article it's common in Western Europe.

As for money, I'll say one last thing, all the studies I've seen in the past twelve years (and this is an issue I've been following since college. Going to a teachers' college and majoring in poli/sci tends to bring that up) indicate there is no correlation between spending and education. Some of the best performing schools in the country are parochials schools. Yet their per pupils spending can be half of what the local public school is spending.

Another example that it does, in fact, work is Maine which has a sort of limited voucher system. They have been using them in some towns since the 1800s. The result has been that kids in private schools there get a better education based on test scores and college admissions than those at the public schools. Unfortunately it's not a universal system, you have to be lucky enough to live in a town too small to have a public school. Here's a link to the .pdf. Maine Vouchers . Further, the evidence from Milwaukee which has a program limited to vouchers for poor students, has shown radical progress in the 12 years it's been going on. It has, in fact, helped the poorest students by giving them choice.

I can't fathom why someone, esp. a progressive, would be against giving everyone the same choice and opportunity that only the wealthy have currently when it comes to schools when all the evidence we have indicates that it would be improve education for /everyone/. I mean, can you point me to a single shred of actual evidence that vouchers or tax credits would have the effect you claim? A study or report that shows more money spent means better education? A single study showing, with real data that where various voucher and tax credit/scholarships have been tried that education has gotten worse?

Hmm. Okay. I can't give you direct links to papers...I use a university password, and many of them are only downloadble for a fee. However, citations:

McEwan, Patrick J., The Potential Impact of Vouchers. Peabody Journal of Education; 2004, Vol. 79 Issue 3, p57-80

Quote from abstract: Conclusions are that African American students who are offered vouchers experience small achievement gains. The results are highly sensitive to analytical assumptions and are not evident for other racial or ethnic groups. The evidence further indicates that large-scale voucher plans encourage sorting that could lower the achievement of public school students. There is no compelling evidence that such losses are outweighed by competitive gains in public schools. The conclusions on sorting and competition are most applicable to unrestricted choice plans in which flat-rate vouchers are offered to a large number of students with few eligibility restrictions.

(On the other hand, the author does suggest that modified policies may have better results, and I would like to see them.)

Also, look at the success...or lack thereof, of the 'Edison' school system.

As for school funding, I have an article on .pdf that I could send you that addresses the issues that you've brought up, fairly well, I think. However, it's a professional magazine, and not a journal article. I'm running late for work, so delving more into the maze of universit journal collections will have to wait.

However, I'm eagerly awaiting your academic citations in return! I'd like to read the studies on successful voucher and school choice programs. I've no doubt that there are benefits to be mined within those. If you can get a citation, I can probably look it up through our collections. :)

Larry V. Hedges, Richard D. Laine, and Rob Greenwald, "Does Money Matter? A Meta-Analysis of Studies of the Effects of Differential School Inputs on Student Outcomes," Educational Researcher, April 1994, pp. 5-14

Rob Greenwald, Larry V. Hedges, and Richard D. Laine, "The Effect of School Resources on School Achievement," Review of Educational Research, vol. 66, 1996, pp. 361-96

(These are older citations, however, and may not reflect the most recent research.) Unfortunately, I'm restricted to Google at work, which gives several studies for correlation between class size and achievement, and library resources and achievement, but I'm unable to refine the search to tease out specifically school funding as a whole and achievement. Once I get back home, I'll try some more. :)

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Here's an abstract:

"I identify the effects of class size on student achievement using longitudinal variation in the population associated with each grade in 649 elementary schools. I use variation in class size driven by idiosyncratic variation in the population. I also use discrete jumps in class size that occur when a small change in enrollment triggers a maximum or minimum class size rule. The estimates indicate that class size does not have a statistically significant effect on student achievement. I rule out even modest effects (2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation in scores for a 10 percent reduction in class size). © 2000 the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" From "The Effects Of Class Size On Student Achievement: New Evidence From Population Variation" by Caroline Hoxby. <a href="http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v115y2000i4p1239-1285.html#abstract"> Linky </a>

Further, while the STAR study from Tennesee, considered a 'small' class to be 13-17 students. And a large one to be 22-26. Unfortunately for your viewpoint, the average class size is already down to around 16, which is down over the last 20 years from 18. So we're already down into the range of small classes on average. Making them even smaller isn't going to help. And, according to <a href="http://www.alec.org/meSWFiles/pdf/0424.pdf> this </a> in inflation adjusted dollars we've tripled spending over the last 40 years.

Re: the first citation on this post, I can't read either the original or Hedges, Laine and Greenwald's rebuttal so I can't judge for myself who is more accurate in their methodology. Judging from the abstract though, it seems that Hedge et. al. had a viewpoint and went looking to refute a major analysis of various studies that disagreed with that viewpoint. And surprise! They did.

I think there's an important point here I didn't make earlier. Would I agree that spending 3K on a student will have some impact on quality of education versus say 9K on another student? Sure. I'm arguing that overall totals have gone up, and up, and up, with no real improvements. So let's say that <a href="http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kbid9709.htm">this guy</a> is right and it's the disparting that's the problem. A tax voucher system at the state level -solves- that problem, not adds to it. Because you take the total state education revenues, say NC's of 9 Billion and divided it by the number of students at a little over 130K, and you get 6900.00 per student. John Smith who is poor gets the same as Jane Doe who is rich to fund his education. And his parents get to choose where he goes. So if the inner city school down the block isn't cutting it, his parents can choose another school. Overcrowding is alleviated, as the best schools will be most in demand and will be able to build to keep up with the demand. In short, school choice is -more- egaliatarian than how we do it now.

Has LJ denied us the ability to use links?

And while I do agree that there could be significant reform in the area of educational funding (I don't think we're using the money we're getting in necessarily the right ways), I still don't see any compelling evidence that vouchers will do anything other than shift the problems around.

Will some students benefit? Probably. Will enough students consistently benefit in order to make it a worthwhile adjustment, while staving off some of the truly unpleasant consequences of giving public funds to private schools of dubious qualifications? ...I don't see it. I don't see any data to really support that conclusion. I see a lot of hope. I see a lot of optimism. But concrete examples? Not so much. Thus, I'm exercising my right to be conservative, and suggest that perhaps tossing our kids into an entirely new system should wait until the data proves out, one way or another.

I'm seeing the attitude "we shouldn't try it because there isn't enough data." Unfortunately, one can't get data unless one tries it. So that's circular reasoning.

From everything I've found, and you've shown me, the students who benefit the most are the ones at the bottom. At worst, the middle and upper stay about where they are. And none of these have shown that it makes things worse for the worst off, unless I missed something.

You mention 'truly unpleasant consequences'. Like what? Schools that graduate students who are functionally illiterate? Happening right now under gov't monopoly. And without choice programs, or being wealthy, there's nothing those worst served can do about it. With a choice program they can go to another school, where it may only be marginally better or it may be a great deal better.

Schools that are dangerous? Already have that in gov't monopoly. And you can't /make/ them clean it up, because they know if you're kid is in their district and you're not wealthy, he's got to go there and that school is gonna get funding regardless. Heck, even if you do take the kid out, they still get funding for him. The current gov't monopoly /disincentivises/ improving schools.

Schools where money is wasted in vast sums? Again, we're spending, on average 10K a year per student on schools, not counting capital expenditures. Look at Kansas city from 1995 to 2000. Look into the waste going on at CMS just a little north of where you're at. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent and the board and administration have intentionally underbuilt in the suburbs where most of the growth is, and overbuilt in the inner city so they can get around a court order to stop busing. The result has been the inner city schools doing increasingly worse, and overcrowding in the suburban schools. And ever higher numbers of people moving out of the county, or home schooling, or sucking up the extra cost of paying for private education out of pocket.

Drain of resources from public schools? What difference does /that/ make. Unless the primary concern is making sure the school is part of the gov't monopoly, this is irrelevant. If everyone can get an education at a private facility, or a mix of public and private, with the ~~gov't~~ taxpayers picking up the tab for those that can't afford it, what difference does it make? The resources are going to the student directly, the only people hurt by it are the umpteen layers of bureacracy. The driving off of taxpayers to districts where things are done more reasonably is more of a drain and danger for the poor than a follow-the-pupil system would be.

I should probably stop though, I think we're going in circles at this point. In all the stuff I've presented I've yet to see any of the following disproved:

* The government is spending more and more money overall, while getting worse and worse results

* There have been successes both here and abroad in numerous places, some are, at worst, moderate successes. Others are quite spectacular.

* That in a democratic society parents should have a choice in where their children go to school. There's no evidence showing that compulsory system we have is working.

I mean, I understand why a few teachers, but esp. bureaucrats and teacher union /leaders/ fear this. It means they'll have to compete like the rest of us. No more cushy tenure (or whatever the equivalent is for H.S.), no more being able to ignore parents complaints, no more being able to carry out their grand social experiments with other people's money. They'll have to be responsive and accountable in a way the ridiculous NCLB doesn't make them, because if they aren't, if they don't provide a good education, they wind up looking for a real job.

To the first, let me say: the burden of proof is on the one who wants to change things. Prove that this will be demonstrably /better/. Not just 'as bad' or 'as good'. I don't think public schools are beyond saving. I don't think that private schools can 'pick up the slack' on any kind of consistent basis.

And no, it's not about being afraid to compete. It's about being afraid that kids are going to get screwed over. You may think that belief is /wrong/, but please don't automatically assume selfish motives to those who disagree with you.

I think our fundamental assumptions are so diverse, here, that unless we can come up with some really firm data one way or another, we can toss isolated examples of both viewpoints at each other all night without changing each other's minds. But I've enjoyed the discussion, and it's given me some new things to look up! Thanks!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Gah.

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