Stand and Deliver Teacher Jaime Escalante Dies 389
DesScorp writes "Jaime Escalante, the math teacher portrayed in the hit '80s movie Stand and Deliver, has died of cancer at age 79. Escalante is legendary for creating the advanced math 'pipeline' program at Garfield High in East Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s, an area populated mostly by poorer Hispanic families. Escalante's students eventually outpaced even richer schools in advanced placement tests for calculus. Escalante refused to accept excuses from his students or community about why they couldn't succeed, and demanded a standard of excellence from them, defying the notion that poor Hispanic kids just weren't capable of advanced work. While Escalante became a celebrity because of the hit movie about his efforts, jealousy from other teachers ... as well as red tape from teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy, resulted in Escalante and his hand-picked teachers leaving Garfield. Since his departure, Garfield has never replicated Escalante's success with math students, and Reason Magazine reported on the shameful way in which others tore down what Escalante and his teachers worked so hard to build."
Truly (Score:2)
Re:Truly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Truly (Score:4, Funny)
Juana tell us more about her and her experiences in Escalante's class?
Re:Truly (Score:4, Funny)
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Juana tell us more about her and her experiences in Escalante's class?
Hey B.A.G., that was a pun not an analogy. Maybe you should expand your nick to BadTropeGuy.
Re:Truly (Score:5, Interesting)
one thing that caught by eye:
Open Enrollment. Escalante did not approve of programs for the gifted, academic tracking, or even qualifying examinations. If students wanted to take his classes, he let them.
His open-door policy bore fruit. Students who would never have been selected for honors classes or programs for the gifted chose to enroll in Escalante's math enrichment classes and succeeded there.
it hints perhaps that the drive to try is far more important than natural ability.
Re:Truly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Truly (Score:4, Funny)
it hints perhaps that the drive to try is far more important than natural ability.
Disagree with you Yoda does.
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Re:Truly (Score:4, Funny)
Bunch of savages.
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I think he was Bolivian maybe.
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Technically, Mexico and Bolivia are both American.
And as we all know, "technically correct" is the best kind.
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But Mexico is not Bolivia. That was my only point.
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That doesn't speak highly of your intelligence.
Re:Truly (Score:5, Informative)
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But he educated the Hispanic poor community, which is why he would be an icon for them.
St. Patrick wasn't Irish, but is definitely an Irish icon.
Re:Truly (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, they were much too effective in facilitating actual learning to be useful in a modern teaching environment. The system works!
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If people were to make that mistake, it may be due to the actor who portrayed him, who was (and might still be) Mexican.
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I think Carlos Mencias pointed this out before. If you are hispanic and live in L.A. you are Mexican.
Re:Truly (Score:4, Funny)
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Truly an American icon. Or at least a Mexican one.
Escalante was from Bolivia.
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Should have rtfa. Mr. Escalante was of Bolivian heritage.
Rest in peace. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to cry. Really.
I had the blessing to meet Mr. Escalante just a few months ago, before he was diagnosed with cancer. What a wonderful, wonderful man.
They should name schools after people like him.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Rest in peace. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you don't have those special people because they were driven out without good cause... then yes, it's scandal.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.
I think this gentleman and John Taylor Gatto have a lot in common [cantrip.org]. The "special" thing about Gatto is his ability to see a spade and call it a spade [johntaylorgatto.com] instead of getting lost in all of the justifications and excuses. This one-line summary in no way does justice to either of the above-linked works, but Gatto went to some of the poorest inner-city schools in some of the worst neighborhoods and found that the children there were eager and very able learners once you stopped treating them like idiots. You'd think the school systems would appreciate anyone who can demonstrate that, but they didn't.
So I think your analogy to the Chicago Bulls doesn't really work. The Bulls experienced a particularly outstanding individual but presumably, all the other players would have wanted to attain that level of talent. The school systems are experiencing problems that are institutional and profoundly anti-educational. I don't believe the problem with schools is funding or ability. I think the problem is that they are not really interested in improving their methods or looking too closely at their results.
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So it'd be better if it came from a pseudo-communist Democratic shilling rags?
Reason has been named one of the best english language magazines twice in the last 10 years.
I work in K-12 education and have for the last 15 years, sorry to burst your bubble but it takes a moderate or right-wing news source to critically look at public education, the Unions and administration. Reason will look at it, so might the Atlantic but the New York Times sure isn't going to.
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http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/obama-takes-on-the-teacher-unions/
Oh really? [nytimes.com]
From the first paragraph:
President Obama gets an A+ for his education speech just now. He made all the traditional and necessary points that one would expect a progressive Democrat to make — such as the crucial necessity of more early childhood programs — but he also added elements that will make teachers’ unions uncomfortable. And, frankly, that’s terrific. The Democratic Party has been too close to the unions for too long, and their interest is not precisely the same as the students’. The unions would be failing their members if they didn’t cry foul when bad teachers were pushed out, but that’s what we need more of. Education reform is going to mean challenging the unions, and Obama signaled that that’s what he plans to do.
And that's not really the only opinion piece you can find from the New York Times that is critical of the teacher's unions.
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That's a nice sentiment. Too bad it is just empty rhetoric. Where the rubber meets the road, the President killed the highly successful voucher program in Washington DC - actions defensible only as a chit tossed to the public teachers unions. And that's action he took before the referenced editorial was written. Unfortunately, this has been his M.O. - using the language of the right but governing from the left. It is actually a very effective rhetorical technique for a politician to use. Claiming that
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... it takes a moderate or right-wing news source to critically look at public education, the Unions and administration. Reason will look at it, so might the Atlantic but the New York Times sure isn't going to.
The Washington Post can be rather left leaning, but the education columnist, Jay Mathews, wrote a book on Jamie Escalante and often refers to his methods in his column. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/30/AR2010033003629.html?sid=ST2010033003904 [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't speak for the magazine in general, but this article seemed fairly balanced. It did leave some blame on the doorstep of the teacher's union, but pretty clearly laid the lion's share on the school's administration. It also (having been written in the beginning of the decade) expressed concern about the (then anticipated) No Child Left Behind act. That was a conservative darling at the time of the writing. Most of the facts are undeniable anyway. He build a huge and successful program, he was driven out by perceived lack of support from the administration and union, and the program fell apart after he left.
As someone who generally supports both unions and government services, even I have to admit that neither encourage excellence. They are both very good things in many ways, and both serve useful functions in bringing the most good to the most people, but neither is designed to accommodate the exceptional well. Like so many things in our society, public schools and teacher's unions fall into the "terrible idea, but better than the alternative" category. This case simply demonstrates the lacks of both structures particularly well, because of the particularly exception nature of the people involved.
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Well, it tried to leave some blame, as it was being written for a stridently anti-union publication, but all I see the writer saying is that the union wouldn't allow Escalante's successor to jam more than 35 students into his classes. Which I think is a good thing.
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I'm going to cry. Really. I had the blessing to meet Mr. Escalante just a few months ago, before he was diagnosed with cancer. What a wonderful, wonderful man.
They should name schools after people like him.
One of my math teachers from high school was a huge fan of the movie and Mr. Escalante's work. So much that he even inspired me with his joy of teaching... to win the regional math competition; as my reward was a free pass to sleep through his class the rest of the semester.
Needless to say I caught up on a lot of sleep during those days...
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:4, Insightful)
They should name schools after people like him.
Sure, whatever. Name whatever you want.
What they REALLY should do is stop dumbing down the curriculum and "passing" ever-crappier performance, and follow the methods he used (no more excuses, no more "but it's hard why should I learn" bullcrap). Set the bar high and the kids will reach for it, set the bar low and kids will nap.
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Why? Because education is cumulative. The difference between the 8th grade and the 7th grade is supposed to be that the 8th grade students learn more advanced materials based on their learning in the 7th grade. In practice, it doesn't work that way, because curricula are myopic, because teachers don't care/only care about their fiefdom, because students lack any moti
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... In retirement, he divided his time between California and Bolivia, where he complained that several schools were named after him but had given him no money for the rights.
One reason why they usually wait until someone dies to name something after the person.
As an aside, Purdue University was named after John Purdue, and not only did the state of Indiana not pay him anything for the name, he had to bequeath many acres of land to get them to put his name on it.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:4, Insightful)
All the high and mighty ideals go out the window when push comes to shove and you're broke.
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Or instead of wasting time and resources on trivial things like naming and renaming schools (does the name of the school really mean anything?) they should instead be working to foster more teachers like Escalante.
Yeah haters, this *is* News for Nerds (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yeah haters, this *is* News for Nerds (Score:5, Informative)
Public schools (Score:4, Insightful)
It's no wonder he got lots of resistance against his peers, administration and teachers union. Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." [deliberate...ngdown.com] - John D. Rockefeller
Agreed, schools are for dumbing us down (Score:3, Interesting)
So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:
Gatto:
"Dumb
Re:Public schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, the answer to the problem of owning class people gaming the system in their favor is to do away with all government oversight of the owning class, and sell the government to them wholesale. Because, if we had an unregulated free market, all the little mom and pop operations would rise up against their corporate masters and we would immediately have a free and fair market in everything. Obviously, the government is not protecting the little guy from the owning class, they are keeping the little guy down for the owning class.
But wait, if all that is true, why is it the owning class telling us this? Why are the rich leading the charge to get rid of government regulations? Are they trying to use reverse psychology on us or something?
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Ah, good to know you can always be counted on to defend the forces that tore down Escalante's progress. Just what I expected.
(Hint: The ruling class isn't leading the charge to bring meaningful improvements to schools ... just ask Congress.)
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If anyone working for Bill could actually think for themselves, they wouldn't be working for Bill.
I guess everyone who thinks for themselves thinks the same as you.
Of course not, but if they could think for themselves, they would see they are getting reamed working for a sociopath who produces inferior products and survives by being the most brutal, underhanded, and duplicitous fucker in the business. If his workers could think for themselves, they would see that they could do better NOT working for such a sociopath. But our public schools teach kids to kowtow to authority, not to question their 'betters,' and not to rock the boat.
But more importantly, people who can
Way to miss my point completely, dude (Score:3, Informative)
You, uh, might want to reread my post. Don't just stop when you begin to get angry at what you think I'm saying. Read the last paragraph.
Exactly (Score:2)
I don't quite understand why you're being modded troll when critics of the system from both right and left agree that public schools aren't so much focused on education as they are on producing "useful people"... to employers, government, etc. As much as conservative groups support things like charter schools, minority families... traditionally loyal Democratic voters... support them even more, because despite ever increasing dollars on public schools, the public system isn't getting it done with their kids
Re:Public schools (Score:4, Insightful)
He's still calling the shots, is he? Plutocrats are bad enough, but zombie plutocrats is just going too far.
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But *WHY* are the teachers useless? It's not because the don't care. People entering the teaching profession care more than most, and many who are retiring still care. It's not because they're stupid. I've known and know many teachers.
Hint: The teachers that I know who are the best teachers have never gone to a University Dept. of Education. Most of them are legally forbidden to teach in a public school. Most of them would be unwilling to even try to operate in that kind of an environment.
(I'm leavin
Re:Public schools (Score:5, Informative)
>>Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
You know it's funny. I work teaching teachers technology, and I can't recall ever hearing a teacher say they really wished their kids would all be dumbed down automatons. Instead, you hear them all sharing positive stories about a kid that gets engaged with the subject matter and starts thinking on his own. Except for some really burned out teachers, this is pretty much universally true. They ALL want kids interested in a subject, capable of critical and independent thought, and being successful in life (ideally by going to college).
Now - inter-teacher rivalries and jealousies? Sure, I'll believe in that explanation as to why they undid the program at Garfield. But losing your entire cadre of teachers trained in his method probably had more to do with it than anything.
The only bit that I will agree with you in this regard is that schools tend to be very socially conservative institutions (by this I don't mean politically conservative, like Republicans, but rather resistant to change). AAA teachers tend to get kicked out of the system. I had Jan Gabay as my English teacher for the 9th and 12th grades - she was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990-something, did a year traveling the country speaking on teaching, went back to Serra High for a couple years, and has since quit public schools to teach at the UC San Diego Charter School.
I also had Rick Halsey (IIRC, grandson of Admiral Bull Halsey) as a bio an AP Bio teacher, was an amazing teacher who took us into the canyons near the school to study actual plants and animals in the chaparral ecosystem. Every year he took his students on a week-long trip during Spring Break to go kayaking down the Colorado River or hiking in Anza Borrego, etc. He quit because the school was worried he was exposing them to too much liability risk.
Our system right now is rather dysfunctional. But teachers want kids to succeed - they don't want to produce dumb automatons. It's no longer the 1800s where we need to prep kids for work in the mills - "21st Century Skills" and all that is the current paradigm in education.
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Be careful not to make a classical mistake of confusing the intentions of the parts (teachers, who I agree mostly mean well and want to help kids grow), with the intentions of the whole system (to dumb kids down so they fit into a 19th century militaristic industrial society, like NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto writes about).
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the a
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Shining Example (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a shining example of how politics are ruining America's youth.
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Maybe a good place to spell out what you are talking about, rather than relying on "this".
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Did you know that Californians, on average, have the 3rd lowest IQ in the country? Only Louisiana and Mississippi have lower average IQs than California.
When I read stories like this one about post-Escalante Garfield, I'm not surprised.
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Would you mind showing the source for that data? Just curious
"Racial Makeup" (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anyone be surprised? Look at the racial makeup of California. Except for a few pockets of whites in Northern California, the state is almost overrun with Blacks and Mexicans.
While I know the poster was trolling, his comments are in stark contrast to Escalante's own work: anyone, regardless of skin color or income, can better themselves if they're willing to work hard enough and dedicate themselves in the long run. Escalante proved it, and he proved it with student AP calculus scores eventually outpacing even the very rich schools like Beverly Hills. It's shameful that some of his own fellow teachers thought he was being "cruel" to Hispanic kids by expecting excellence, and that
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Sort of. From TFA, it appears that on top of Escalante's skill at teaching, he was also a good organizer and coach. He developed a system and an infrastructure to get the students the basic skills they needed and to allow them to continue along. Even if you're willing to work hard, if you don't have an environment that supports the work and allows it to grow, then it's
Jesse Jackson was wrong (Score:2, Funny)
East Los Angeles, not New York, was the real Jaime-town.
Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!
In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Insightful)
Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education: subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools. If voucher programs exclude religious schools, there would be no schools to send the children to.
Also, vouchers don't cover the whole cost: Mr Escalante couldn't do what he did in a private school as, even with vouchers, the students couldn't afford to attend.
Wait... What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.
The parents of the kids in parochial school pay twice: once for their own kids' tuition, once again for their neighbors' kids via the school and property taxes. The typical voucher plan doesn't "force a taxpayer to pay for religious education," it allows a taxpayer to pay for what he actually uses.
Meanwhile, if all the kids who were in parochial school were to leave parochial school and enter the public system (into which their parents
Re:Wait... What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you thought that, then you'd be petitioning for childless people to be exempt from property tax. Public schools spread the burden across all. Their status as a parent or not is irrelevant, so they don't "pay twice" for the same thing. They pay once for educating everyone, before and after they have children, and the point is that an educated populous is productive. Regardless of whether they have kids, that's the goal of that. Second, once they do have kids, they have the choice of enrolling them for free into the institutions set up that they vote on. If they are so bad, why aren't they voting in better people? Why aren't they involved in the decision process? Instead, they want to take their ball and go home.
But the problem is that the voucher systems I've seen are all designed not to help children, but to provide tax cuts for the rich and harm anyone in public schools (while not improving private schools at all). If you've seen one that doesn't do this, please enlighten me.
Vouchers should be made available. And any school that takes a voucher should be required to take vouchers for payment-in-full and be required to take all applicants. But that'll never happen because the people against vouchers won't see what good they can do when done right (because they can do lots of harm when done wrong) and those that want them don't want to help the kids, but they want a tax break and to harm the public schools.
Re:Wait... What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I find it far more rational to stop thinking about "my" taxes. I'm not purchasing individual goods with taxes. Whether I drive a car or not has little impact on the need for roads, as an example. There are certain needs we have as a society (I would include public education in that), and that is what "our" taxes are for. It stops being "your" money when you make your contribution to those social necessities via taxation.
You're free to argue that there is waste in our system, or that tax money goes to things that are not contributive to societal living, or that the tax law is imbalanced in some way, but none of that changes the fact that the tax money is not yours to be used solely on the parts of group living that you feel you take advantage of.
Re:Wait... What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Non sequitur. I never claimed that they were distributed equally. In fact, even if just property tax, it would be progressive because rich use more land than the poor. So "equally" was stated by no one, and if I did use such wording it was to indicate that the burden was shared by all, not held to the same dollar amount.
The manner in which the funding is obtained is also irrelevant. The majority of property tax in some places goes to schools, and Texas claims that half of all school funding is "local" but I don't know if that would include federal grants given directly to local schools.
But none of that contradicts what I said. Please quote my assertion that's false which you addressed.
We don't want to harm the public schools, and they don't need any help in that department anyway. It is hypocritical (and possibly mean-spirited) to say that those who want to pay for their kids' education are just trying to have more money but those who want their kids' education to paid for by other people are somehow virtuous.
Again, a non sequitur. I explicitly stated that the act of "public education" is irrelevant to how a person educates their children or even whether they have any children at all. "Public education" is what you are being taxed for, not paying for the right to send your own children to public school.
Your argument is like saying that welfare is broken because the only ones who can afford to pay in are the people who aren't using it. The act of paying in and the act of using the service are unrelated (well, not necessarily for unemployment and SS, but for most all other services it's true). How can I say this to say it so that you understand my point? It was declared that having an educated populous was important, and as such, education is provided for free. That's irrelevant to what you do with your own children. One is a public need and the other is a private need. You don't petition to get your police taxes refunded because you bought a gun for yourself, or try to get a refund on the fire department taxes because you didn't have a fire that year. It's simply not done as a "you pay this in taxes, you get this benefit directly back." Not for schools. Not for the police. Not for the fire department. Not for welfare.
You've seen very few actual proposals on vouchers. I've never seen one that could be classified as a tax break for the rich. Why? All the proposals I've seen are a flat per-child amount, not tied to income at all.
Right. And none of them covered the price of the public education, not to mention the much higher price of a private education. So someone who is offered a voucher would still have to come up with money. For the private school I attended, the proposed vouchers for Texas would have covered less than 25% of the cost. And the private schools would have had the same autonimy as before, so they would do as they have done, take who was already enrolled and only fill the small (about 5%) drop out rate (drop out of the school, like moving and such, not actual drop out as in never finishing). So the only people who'd be able to use them would be the people going there already, and they were overwhelmingly rich.
It wasn't a "if you make more, you get more" scheme. But if you looked at who would actually be using the vouchers and the effect on their finances, it was a tax rebate for the rich.
Thus, we would have a "regressive" tax cut in the sen
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Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education: subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.
The easy solution to that problem: the voucher can only pay for the non-religious portion of any classes. So if the student takes 6 classes with 2 being religious (theology, and I'll even give you science) and 4 being secular (music, math, literature, history), then the voucher can't cover more than 66% of the cost of tuition.
Any opposition to that based purely on the school rules and code of conduct being based on the attendee's religion is just as silly and petty as those who oppose public schools purel
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Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Interesting)
As a leftist extremist, I've never been able to understand it either.
When I was volunteering at the Obama campaign office, this was probably my second biggest argument with most of my fellow workers, after nuclear power.
There have been some very bad voucher schemes proposed, which amount to nothing more than yet another tax break for wealthy people while shifting the burden to the poor.
But there have also been some good voucher schemes proposed. Something that would let parents send their children to any school, public or private, that they wanted, would be awesome. Something that would actually reduce the cost of expensive private schools for those who can't afford it would be great.
Getting the fundamentalist nutjobs out of the public schools and into their own little inbred communities where they can't do any harm to the rest of society would just be a bonus, as far as I'm concerned.
One bizarre danger of vouchers (Score:4, Informative)
Why? Well, eventually the voucher program was brought to court. The schools had grown dependent on the voucher program. The families had grown dependent. When the money was gone, they all had to shut down. Except for the schools which had avoided the voucher program.
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Explain to me how this is a "leftist extremist" point of view.
It's simple: the poster is not an ideologue. He/she holds mostly leftist views but finds some views on the other side of the fence not so bad. It's a benefit of having an open mind.
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Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!
In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.
Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.
As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral - schools that are not only sub-par, but lacking funding and interaction with a diverse body of students, since all the brightest have made it into the "nice" schools.
When you consider that some students are going to be shafted big time by this arrangement, you may see why some (not just on the left) don't like the voucher system. Education after 18 is no longer compulsory, so good luck compensating for those all-important developmental years of education.
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This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vo
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Informative)
Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.
Yes, vouchers help some parents place their students into better schools. Undoubtedly. But what you are breezing over is the effect this has on the other students who aren't quite so lucky. When considering educational models, you need to give attention to all students - not just the bright ones. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that. That is where vouchers fail.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:4, Insightful)
The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?
You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:4, Informative)
The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?
I would not trust such a system like homeschooling to objectively and effectively educate most children. Relying on parents is an invitation for indoctrination and intellectual inbreeding. Forget teaching kids about skills that aren't already developed in adults, much less the ability to cope with different environments and alternative viewpoints.
You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.
No, I've absorbed the idea that people who have achieved a modicum of qualification are better suited to instruct our youth than parents who have a vested interest in protecting children from the scary world outside their home.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Informative)
Because public schools aren't an invitation for indoctrination? What you're saying is, you don't want them being indoctrinated with things you don't like. In other words, you're just another control freak.
Hardly.
The difference between public schools and home schooling in this case is that there is much more scrutiny in a public school. Though indoctrination most certainly happens in schools, it can at least be identified and handled, either through the media or in the courts - often both.
If you can identify a mechanism in homeschooling which prevents Mr. Smith from telling his child that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old, I'd be glad to entertain the idea in a more serious light. But until then, public school is the lesser of two evils.
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If totalitarian thought control is your goal, then yes, public school is the lesser of two evils.
However, the poor kid who has only been taught about the biblical story of creation is the exception, not the norm.
The norm i
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Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork.
That sounds like a problem it itself, not a problem with vouchers per se.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:4, Insightful)
All the vouchers I've seen proposed so far do not cover the whole cost of private school, and as such, would make the schools inaccessible to the poor. They will be stuck in their failed school, while those with the means to leave will.
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This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!
Well, over time, no, there isn't. But in the short term the limit is effectively what we have now; under the private academy scheme in the UK (where I live and therefore what I'm familiar with) the average cost of an "academy" - a privately financed school - was £35m (~$53m), with an average lead time of 4 years from planning to creation, not including finding the teachers and staff you need to operate it. You can't just conjure a new school, so if you consign a school to failure you also consign all
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral
It's not like these schools are so great, some of them in the inner city have pretty much hit the bottom of the downward spiral, they really can't get much worse. The kids are already forced into those kinds of schools, with the system as it is now they have no real option to go somewhere else. At least with vouchers they will have the choice to attend a different school if they want to. Besides, if a school is really that bad, it should be shut down, and something else put in its place.
I'll tell y
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And yet the schools in the rest of the developed world, which (pretty much universally) have better-educated students, seem to have bypassed these problems.
I wonder why that is?
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It's ultimately about controlling the ideas that youth are exposed to. Sure, children may be sent to some pretty wrong-headed schools with these vouchers... but the parents, and eventually the child, presumably are taxpayers.
It's all about social control. The left is concerned (rightfully) about children being taught anti-evolution, racist, religious bullshit, but it's more than that. It's about instilling social, democratic values into youth. The right tends to feel that vouchers/homeschooling are a go
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I've never understood why the left
Union, unions, UNIONS! vs. Blacks!
Yes, it's one of the issues that tears at the fabric of two core Democratic Party groups. I've seen polls [citation needed] where the majority of Blacks support vouchers. Many of their communities are strongly religious, and that tends to be part of the reason for the support. Unions, OTOH, know that many of those small, diverse, competing schools won't sign a contract.
So far, Union money beats Black desire in the Democratic Party.
Sai
Going beyond vouchers (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's just give the school money directly to the parents instead of schools, as I suggest here in some detail:
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html [pdfernhout.net]
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschoo
Some of his achievements (Score:4, Informative)
It would be hard to overstate the impact Escalante has made on the education reform movement in the U.S. He and Rafe Esquith were the first to prove very publicly and definitively that demography is not destiny and that inner-city kids, with great teaching and high expectations, could achieve at high levels.
At his peak, Escalante had 187 students at one time sitting for the Calculus AP exam — and his students accounted for ONE-THIRD of all Mexican-Americans passing the exam in the country.
Teachers should be the celebrities (Score:2)
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Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves. (Score:4, Insightful)
You on the other hand are barking up the "people should just help themselves" tree.
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Escalante's example is nearly opposite of what you're proposing. It's about someone caring enough about OTHERs and improving their situation dramatically.
You on the other hand are barking up the "people should just help themselves" tree.
But while he personally sacrificed to help others... he could have made a lot more money had he stayed at Burroughs... he in fact did very much demand that his students take personal initiative. He wasn't a raging Libertarian or anything, but he DID expect a large sense of personal responsibility from his students.
Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves. (Score:5, Insightful)
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How dare he create the expectation that teachers who claim to be "professionals" should be held to a standard of actually producing results. We can't have that, and unions are there specifically to make sure that it doesn't happen.