March to War

[bigstr8bulge]

[quote author=DeeBlackthorne link=board=99;num=1073836729;start=0#19 date=01/11/04 at 21:09:03]J
And concerning Mr. O'Neill...

You know what?  He might be violating the law and he may have to suffer the consequences for that, but I respect any political representative who has had enough of the president's policies -- whether said Prez is Democrat or Republican -- and decides, once and for all, to draw attention to some potentially heinous shit that went on behind the administration's closed doors.  Even if it were Dean under fire right now, the point is, the President's committing a serious injustice to his people if he's passing legislation with ulterior motives.  Though I would smirk if the President said, "Well, I needed to take care of some business my daddy left behind..." fine!  Damn!  That's more of a straight answer than the public has seen or heard in a long time.

In my head, the Truth supercedes the Law.[/quote]

Certainly Truth does suercede teh Law which brings us back to the premise: we have no reason to believe his "truth" is correct!

Good comments on NCLB Dee, but I still hold that its general idea works just fine. We will always have fuding disparities if states continue to hold the pursetrings of public education and if voters in one town tend to be more levy-friendly than those of another town. Not sure how to fix that without another mindless beauracracy.

 

[jay_too]

Today's Washington Post has a story on the detour on terror, the war on Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8435-2004Jan11.html

Oh yeah, it is not written by a knowledgeable 20-something but by an Army professional under the auspices of the U.S. Army.

Among the points that the article makes are: 1) the war on Iraq was a needless detour on the war on terrorism, 2) the Iraq war has stretched our military too thin, 3) our focus should be on defeating al Queda, 4) it is time to consider enlarging the military, 5) western democracy is not likely in Iraq in the near term; perhaps, a benign autocracy would be an acceptable exit strategy for the coalition.

This seems like views that have been expressed in the Etc. threads in the past year or so.

jay

 

[13788]

longtimelurker: Seeing that you are talking about nationalised school tests and I happen to live in officially the most tested country in the world (we have national testing at (maybe 5, not sure) 7,11 and 14 AS WELL AS exams that actually mean something at 16 and 18).

What has come to pass here is that there are huge rushes of parents to send their kids to the 'best' schools. These schools can then cherry-pick the best students, which boosts their scores and keeps those at the bottom of the heap at the bottom. What happens then is that the worst schools close down and new ones get built to take the old pupils and everyone is amazed that nothing really changes. It doesn't strike me as the most efficient of ways to fund the educational system.

A new idea that they have introduced recently regarding the 'delapidated area' problem is a seperate statistic to show 'added value' - basically whether a school manages to get above-average graduates from a below-average sudent intake or not by comparing entry tests to tests when the students leave the school.

 

[13788]

mindseye: An interesting site, germane to the topic:

http://www.costofwar.com

 

[13788]

Inwood: Apparently there is now an investigation launched to determine how a "classified" document ended up in CBS's hands for the broadcast on 60 Minutes with O'Neill.

This should be interesting.

The author says he's never was given a classified document by O'Neill and O'Neill apparently got all his 19,000 documents by request to Treasury where it was all vetted by Treasury lawyers before being sent to him.

I wonder who's document that might have been?

 

[jay_too]

I think that it is time to ditch the NCLB-approach to education. Education does not lend itself to assembly-line organization, or you are not making identical widgets but training unique minds. Training for testing is different from education; education ignites sparks of imagination and trains the nueral processes to see patterns or associations or their lack. Training for testing, well, is useful for testing.

Each of us has innate limitations and talents; education is a process of identifying and developing an individual. Neither testing nor physical facilities are the prime movers [though both have a part to play]. The essential element in education is the teacher. When I was a child, my grandfather had his professor to dinner one night. Prof. X is/was a well-known physicist who told of starting college after WW II in central europe. The buildings did not have running water, electricity, windows, or heat; in short, campus was a pile of rubble.

The faculties had to concentrate on what they had [chalk, string, and imagination] to teach. For some reason, my mental image of sitting in a classroom in zero-degree weather with the tarps pulled back to let in light and the cold has remained with me for more than a decade as has the Prof. saying, "Whatelse could we do? Education is our contract with the future."

A long-term solution to the problem of education is to provide incentives for people to spend time (a career or a few years) teaching. Incentives such as higher salaries and fewer contact hours, additional education and training, and mentoring for teachers would attract or retain those who can teach. I know lots of engineering grads who have said, "I would love to go back and teach math and science at my high school. I could do it so much better than Mr. X." Why don't they? Well, there is the matter of certification to teach, there is not enough room for an additional teacher (smaller classes and fewer contact hours/teacher would solve this), AND the biggie, "Do you realize I can make twice as much as a beginning engineer?"

Given the choice I would have voted to spend money on education rather than attacking at 4th rate military power. But then we have an administration that is dedicated to Leaving No Halliburton or Bechtel Behind.

jay

 

[13788]

SpeedoGuy: I'd love to be a full time teacher. I know I could do a good job teaching physical sciences or math at the high school level. Right now, instructing small training classes in physical science is a component of my current job but I'd do it full time if I could.

The trouble is this: I want to teach, not baby sit.

My experience in public school taught me that so few US students are interested in actually learning that the public school teacher is often reduced to simply filling class time and preventing kdis from getting into trouble. Academic standards are generally so low in the US and the students so poorly disciplined and unmotivated that, well, why bother. It should be an embarrasment to us that US students compare so poorly in international tests. We have the resources to educate ourselves better than anyone else in the world yet we consistently fail to do so. Why? Some kind of cultural malaise, I guess.

Could I teach at a private school and avoid the discipline problems plaguing public shools? Maybe, but the pay and benefits for teachers at private schools are doggo. I can make much better pay and benefits at my current job so that's why I keep it.

SG

 

[jonb]

[quote author=bigstr8bulge link=board=99;num=1073836729;start=20#20 date=01/11/04 at 21:29:50]Good comments on NCLB Dee, but I still hold that its general idea works just fine.[/quote]
NCLB's even worse because all demographics have to pass the test. And I'll tell you something: I've seen how school boards work, putting all the retarded kids in one school - and not a separate school, either: A public school in a poor area. Those retarded kids have to score above median, even if they score below the third percentile on every other test they've taken in their lives.

We will always have fuding disparities if states continue to hold the pursetrings of public education and if voters in one town tend to be more levy-friendly than those of another town.  Not sure how to fix that without another mindless beauracracy.

NCLB's method - where rich schools get more funding and poor schools pay penalties - won't work. It's trickle-down applied to education.

 

[13788]

Ineligible: jay_too's comment that education is not like a widget factory is very true. One result is that statistically there is a lot of variation from one year to another. Whole cohorts of students can be hard-working and thoughtful one year, and then the next year's cohort are mostly lazy and don't care. Part of the reason is that students tend to get their standards from each other: an example of positive feedback, which electronics engineers know tends to cause oscillation.

In consequence, measurements of student performance reflect variations in student attitude far more than they reflect differences in teaching quality, and are quite useless for measuring the latter. In fact, in my experience at college level (high schools might be different), quality of teaching usually has quite a small effect on student academic performance. The good students will learn regardless of having a poor teacher; the bad students won't learn with anyone. It takes a really exceptional teacher, exceptionally good or bad, to have any discernable effect on grades, as distinct from popularity. (And a popular teacher is not always a good teacher.)

 

[bigstr8bulge]

While all of this is certainly interesting, NCLB tests don't say in what ways or methods teachers have to teach things to these unique minds, simply that every student needs to learn the basics. That's it. If they know the basics, they should be able to pass a test about them. Whether or not you think "tests" are somehow unfair, if students don't know how to learn and prepare for exams they are going to be sorely disapointed in college and other areas the rest of their lives. Not ground breaking. Completely bi-partisan support. Way over due.

Also, engineers don't get summers off in addition to the myriad breaks built into the school year.

 

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mindseye: [quote author=bigstr8bulge link=board=99;num=1073836729;start=20#29 date=01/13/04 at 18:26:11] if students don't know how to learn and prepare for exams they are going to be sorely disapointed in college and other areas the rest of their lives.[/quote]

College, yes. Other areas? I doubt it. . .

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Boss:	Smith! Get in here!
Smith:	Yes, ma'am?
Boss:	I need to have the Capital One proposal on my desk by 4:00 today.
Smith:	Sure thing; in fact, it's almost finished.
Boss:	Oh, and one more thing, Smith -- it's closed-book, and no calculators!

---

The skills people need in real life generally aren't measured on standardized tests. In fact, for the SAT, ETS itself only claims that it's predictive validity extends only through the first year of college. In other words, the test is only statistically reliable at predicting how well a student will do during that first year; generally before the student has definitively settled on a major, and while the student is still taking 'general ed' courses.

From http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html (the College Board has recently renamed the "SAT I" back to the "SAT"):

The SAT I is designed to predict first-year college grades - it is not validated to predict grades beyond the freshman year, graduation rates, pursuit of a graduate degree, or for placement or advising purposes. However, according to research done by the tests' manufacturers, class rank and/or high school grades are still both better predictors of college performance than the SAT I.
How well does the SAT I predict first-year college grades? The College Board and ETS conduct periodic studies of the SAT I. This usually involves examining the relationship between test scores and first-year college grades, generally expressed as the correlation coefficient (or r value). The College Board's Handbook for the SAT Program 2000-2001 claims the SAT-V and SAT-M have a correlation of .47 and .48, respectively, with freshman GPA (FGPA). This number is deceptive, however. To determine how much of the difference in first-year grades between students the SAT I really predicts, the correlation coefficient must be multiplied by itself. The result, called r squared, describes the difference (or variation) among college freshman grades. Thus, the predictive ability (or r squared) of the SAT I is just .22, meaning the test explains only 22% of the variation in freshman grades. With a correlation of .54, high school grades alone do a better job, explaining almost 30% of the variance in first-year college performance.

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...as an aside, the name "Capital One" really irks me. It's a number, ferchrissakes -- how do you make a capital one?

 

[13788]

Inwood: Maybe it's a part of Bush's chant on the march to war:

Capital One - Saddam zero

Just thought I'd bring it around to the subject. (God...and I thought live conversations wandered.) ;D