Stossel with a couple good reads

[Controlled Chaos]

Cheating the children

Jan 11, 2006

by John Stossel ( bio | archive )

 

Last week, Florida's supreme court ruled that public money can't be spent on private schools because the state constitution commands the funding of only "uniform . . . high-quality" schools. How absurd. As if government schools are uniformly high quality. Or even mostly decent.

 

Apparently competition, which made even the Postal Service improve, is unconstitutional when it comes to public education in Florida.

 

Remember when the Postal Service said it couldn't get it there overnight? Then companies like FedEx were allowed to compete. Private enterprise got it there absolutely, positively overnight. Now even the Post Office guarantees overnight delivery sometimes. Competition works.

 

 

Why can't education work the same way? If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. My tiny brain can't begin to imagine the possibilities, but even I can guess there soon would be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

 

This already happens overseas, and the results are good.

 

For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and Belgium. The Belgians trounced the Americans. We didn't pick smart kids in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey kids' test scores are above average for America. "It has to be something with the school," said a New Jersey student, "'cause I don't think we're stupider."

 

She was right: It's the schools. At age 10, students from 25 countries take the same test, and American kids place eighth, well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th, well below the international average. In other words, the longer American kids stay in American schools, the worse they do. They do worse than kids from much poorer countries, like Korea and Poland.

 

This should come as no surprise since public education in the USA is a government monopoly. If you don't like your public school? Tough. If the school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad.

 

Government monopolies routinely fail their customers.

 

Kaat Vandensavel runs a Belgian government school, but in Belgium, school funding follows students, even to private schools. So Vandensavel has to work hard to impress the parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." That pressure makes a world of difference, she says. It forces Belgian schools to innovate in order to appeal to parents and students. Vandensavel's school offers extra sports programs and classes in hairdressing, car mechanics, cooking, and furniture building. She told us, "We have to work hard day after day. Otherwise you just [go] out of business."

 

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

 

Vandensavel adds, "America seems like a medieval country . . . a Communist country on the educational level, because there's no freedom of choice -- not for parents, not for pupils."

 

In kindergarten through 12th grade, that is. Colleges compete, so the United States has many of the most prestigious in the world -- eight of the top 10 universities, on a Chinese list of the world's top 500. (The other two are Cambridge and Oxford.)

 

Accountability is why universities and private schools perform better. Every day they are held accountable by parents and students, and if they fail the kids, school administrators lose their jobs. Public school officials almost never lose jobs.

 

Government schools are accountable only to their fellow politicians, and that kind of accountability is virtually no accountability.

 

The public schools are cheating the children.

 

 

 

Myth: Schools don't have enough money

Jan 18, 2006

by John Stossel ( bio | archive )

 

"Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism." "Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue."

 

The hate mail is coming in to ABC over a TV special I did Friday (1/13). I suggested that public schools had plenty of money but were squandering it, because that's what government monopolies do.

 

Many such comments came in after the National Education Association (NEA) informed its members about the special and claimed that I have a "documented history of blatant antagonism toward public schools."

 

 

The NEA says public schools need more money. That's the refrain heard in politicians' speeches, ballot initiatives and maybe even in your child's own classroom. At a union demonstration, teachers carried signs that said schools will only improve "when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."

 

Not enough money for education? It's a myth.

 

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

 

Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.

 

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

 

In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything?

 

Well, they learned how to waste lots of money.

 

The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!

 

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.

 

A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.

 

"Everyone has been conned -- you can give public schools all the money in America, and it will not be enough," says Ben Chavis, a former public school principal who now runs the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, Calif. His school spends thousands less per student than Oakland's government-run schools spend.

 

Chavis saves money by having students help clean the grounds and set up for lunch. "We don't have a full-time janitor," he told me. "We don't have security guards. We don't have computers. We don't have a cafeteria staff." Since Chavis took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst middle schools in Oakland to the one where the kids get the best test scores. "I see my school as a business," he said. "And my students are the shareholders. And the families are the shareholders. I have to provide them with something."

[Balta1701]

Since the thread opens with excerpts...Here's an excerpt responding to his TV program. I'd talk more...but have only like 10 minutes before I have to be upstairs, and this is IMO a very complicated issue, much moreso than the simplistic explanations of Stossel.

 

On the January 13 broadcast of ABC's 20/20, host John Stossel presented an hour-long "special report" on the purported failures of public schools in the United States. Titled "Stupid in America: How We Cheat Our Kids," the report tilted heavily in favor of those who advocate for expanding such "school choice" initiatives as voucher and charter school programs, ostensibly as the means for increasing academic achievement.

 

Through a series of misleading claims, a lack of balance in reporting and interviews, and video clips apparently created primarily for entertainment, Stossel's report failed to offer viewers an accurate picture of the debate over charter schools and voucher programs, and gave significantly greater coverage to the arguments of "school choice" proponents, with Stossel frequently criticizing public schools. At one point, the reporter warned, "Most Americans don't know what stupid schools are doing to American kids."

 

School voucher programs, such as those highlighted by Stossel, allow parents to withdraw their children from public schools and enroll them in private schools with the help of vouchers for a set amount of public funding that is then transferred to the private school. Such programs are usually promoted under the rubric of "school choice." According to edweek.org, the website of Editorial Projects in Education (publisher of Education Week and Teacher Magazine): "At its most basic and uncontroversial, school choice is a reform movement focused on affording parents the right to choose which school their child attends." In recent years, with the advent of school voucher programs and charter schools, the issue of "school choice" has become more contentious. According to the ERIC Digest, proponents of school choice incentives such as vouchers argue that, among other things, the resulting "increased competition from voucher schools will force public schools to improve, or risk closure"; opponents worry that such school choice initiatives will "drain money from public schools, cull the most highly motivated students and parents, violate church-state separation, be costly to administer, and raise property taxes."

 

Another facet of "school choice" is that of charter schools, which are public schools that are often freed from the regulations that apply to their non-charter counterparts, ostensibly to better serve a specific and often narrowly defined mission adopted by the school as part of its "charter." From the U.S. Department of Education:

 

    A public charter school is a publicly funded school that, in accordance with an enabling state statute, has been granted a charter exempting it from selected state or local rules and regulations. A charter school may be newly created, or it may previously have been a public or private school; it is typically governed by a group or organization (e.g., a group of educators, a corporation, or a university) under a contract or charter with the state. In return for funding and autonomy, the charter school must meet accountability standards. A school's charter is reviewed (typically every 3 to 5 years) and can be revoked if guidelines on curriculum and management are not followed or the standards are not met.

 

Stossel's "evidence" of poor public schools

 

Throughout his report, Stossel repeatedly presented out-of-context material in making derogatory statements about the state of public schools, teaching methods employed, and students' general knowledge.

 

For example:

 

    * Responding to a disgruntled student's comments that his school was like a "hellhole," Stossel aired footage taped at a different high school of a teacher using the board game Monopoly to teach students geography.

    * After airing the results of a Stossel-administered "international test" in which students in a Belgian classroom scored significantly higher than students in an "above-average New Jersey school," Stossel questioned whether American students were "stupid." He showed a clip of the "Jaywalking" segment from NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, in which Leno roams the streets asking people "totally simple questions" and airs clips of those who make notoriously ill-informed responses. Stossel then attempted to imitate Leno's routine by asking a class of New Jersey students such basic history questions as, "What is the purpose of the Bill of Rights?" and, "What was the major cause of the Civil War?" The only response Stossel aired to his history quiz was one student saying, "I don't know."

    * Stossel also aired clips from the 1989 film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the 1995 film Clueless, then asked, "Is school as bad as the movie suggests?"

 

Misleading claims

 

As Media Matters for America has previously noted (here and here), Stossel has a history of making misleading or false claims to make his point, and in "Stupid in America," Stossel and his guests made a series of false or misleading claims in support of school choice:

 

    * Competition improves schools. Stossel spent a significant portion of the program endorsing the concept that school choice would improve public schools as a whole because the resulting competition between public, charter, and private schools, Stossel claimed, "forces schools to try harder." To illustrate this point, Stossel interviewed Harvard University economist Caroline Hoxby about her studies of the effects of competition among schools on student performance. Using a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, voucher program as an example, Hoxby claimed that after its implementation the test scores of students at both public and private schools improved "by leaps and bounds."

 

      "Of course they did," Stossel added. "That's what competition does." But, contrary to the definitive way in which Stossel presented the results, Hoxby's studies are far from conclusive and some have garnered significant criticism. While Milwaukee students' test scores have improved (though they recently appear to have leveled or slowed), other research studies have yielded conflicting explanations for the improvement in test scores. For instance, Cecilia Elena Rouse, a Princeton University economics professor, noted that three different studies on Milwaukee schools all reached different conclusions. Rouse concluded that "the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is too small to provide insight into the potential student achievement benefits of an unrestricted voucher program." Also, Helen F. Ladd, Duke University professor of economics and professor of public policy, criticized the findings in one of Hoxby's studies. Ladd claimed that Hoxby, in touting the academic achievement of students attending private schools via voucher programs, neglected to note that there were "no statistically significant average differences between the achievement of voucher and non-voucher students"; additionally, Ladd noted that other research from Texas and North Carolina "indicates that students in charter schools experience smaller gains in achievement than they would have had they remained in the traditional public schools."

 

    * Charter schools are succeeding. Touting the success of charter schools, Stossel misleadingly claimed, "Many charter schools are succeeding." In fact, as a whole, charter school students have actually posted lower test scores than their public school counterparts. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) --the "primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education" -- found (NAEP data is compiled here) that charter school fourth-graders had lower average reading and math test scores in both 2003 and 2005 than non-charter school fourth-graders. Eighth-grade non-charter school students nationally posted 2005 NAEP average scores that were 10 points higher in math and five points higher in reading than their charter school counterparts. Although some advocates of charter schools argue that this is because they have significant populations of students who have failed at public schools, Stossel never informed his viewers that the debate even existed.

    * Insufficient funding is not the problem. Stossel also attempted to debunk educators' concerns that low funding is "the biggest problem facing public schools" with his interview of Jay Greene, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, who offered data purporting to show that increased funding has no effect on student achievement. "We doubled per-pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years and yet schools aren't better...," Greene claimed. "We now spend more than $10,000 per pupil per year," he said.

 

      In fact, according to the latest U.S. Census Data from 2003, per-pupil spending in the United States averages $8,019, with an average of $4,902 going toward instruction. Also, an analysis of several research studies exploring the roles of school funding and student achievement by researchers Bruce J. Biddle, professor emeritus of psychology and sociology at University of Missouri, and David C. Berliner, regent's professor of education at University of Arizona, found that most "strong studies" -- research studies whose methodology is not disputed -- concluded that school "funding has substantial effects" on student achievement. And because of new demands on schools outside of their academic mission, Biddle and Berliner argued that to view school funding only in terms of an increase in dollars over the last 30 years does not adequately address the issue of the impact of funding on educational achievement:

 

        Another claim sometimes made by critics of public schools is that aggregate funding for schools has increased sharply in recent years, but this increase has not generated achievement gains.

 

        [...]

 

        [R]ecent legislative mandates and court decisions have created a host of new responsibilities for our schools designed to meet the needs of disadvantaged students -- those with physical and mental handicaps, those from impoverished homes, those representing racial and ethnic minorities, those from immigrant families who do not speak English at home, those who are unruly and unmotivated, and the like -- mandates that have often been underfunded but, taken together, have raised costs for public schools significantly. As a result, Miles and Rothstein found, about one-third of net new dollars during this period went to support special-education students; 8 percent went to dropout prevention programs, alternative instruction, and counseling aimed at keeping youths in school; another 8 percent went to expand school-lunch programs; another 28 percent went to fund increased salaries for a teacher population whose average age was increasing; and so forth. In contrast, during these years very few additional dollars were provided for needs associated with basic instruction.

 

 

    Stossel provided no evidence to counter Greene's assertion, nor did he identify Greene's affiliation with the Manhattan Institute or Greene's fellowship there. According to Media Transparency -- a website that tracks grants made to conservative organizations -- the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research is heavily funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc. and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.-- three of the top four conservative foundations known as the Four Sisters. Together with the Carthage Foundation -- another foundation controlled by the Scaife family -- the three foundations granted the Manhattan Institute more than $11 million between the years of 1985 and 2003.

 

Stossel complains of cherry-picking, but does his own

 

During his "Stupid" report, Stossel complained of difficulties he said he had gaining access to public schools with news cameras, claiming, "It's hard to get our cameras into schools." Stossel continued: "New York City's school district wouldn't allow us in at all. Washington, D.C., steered us to the best classrooms, like this one taught by Jason Camorras, the national teacher of the year. ... But we wanted to tape typical classrooms. We were turned down in state after state. Finally, Washington, D.C., did allow us to give cameras to a few students they hand-picked at two schools they hand-picked." Yet Stossel himself cherry-picked the charter schools he chose to highlight in his special, apparently choosing only schools with reported successes and ignoring studies that, again, show that in the aggregate, charter schools posted lower test scores.

 

Lack of balance

 

The 20/20 "Stupid in America" report skewed heavily in favor of "school choice" and school vouchers, both in the number of people interviewed and of time devoted to allowing them to make their argument. While Stossel's report included portions of interviews with eight "school choice" or school voucher advocates, he interviewed only two who opposed either vouchers or charter schools. (See table below.)

 

Stossel placed those two opponents of "school choice" at a further disadvantage by providing significantly more coverage to charter school and voucher supporters, as shown in the second table, below.

 

 

School choice opponents

 

South Carolina state Rep. J. Todd Rutherford (D)

 

 

South Carolina Superintendent of Education Inez Moore Tenenbaum

 

School choice advocates

 

Harvard University economist Caroline Hoxby

 

 

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jay P. Greene

 

Kevin Chavous, a former Washington, D.C., councilman and current fellow at the pro-school choice organization Center for Education Reform

 

 

Ben Chavis, charter school principal

 

 

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford ®

 

 

New York City School Chancellor Joel I. Klein

 

 

Gompers Charter Middle School teacher Lisa Young

 

 

Michael Cordell, chief academic officer of Friendship Charter School

 

 

Word count -- public school critics

About 1,400

 

Word count -- public school supporters

About 360

Edited January 23, 2006 by Balta1701

[Rex Kickass]

I didn't read any of this, but I would like to slap the mustache off John Stossel.

 

For no real reason, I just find him annoying.

[EvilMonkey]

2003, per-pupil spending in the United States averages $8,019, with an average of $4,902 going toward instruction

 

That is way too much for 'admin'. But the whole thing is a useless argument until a better way to fund schools can be made. As long as property taxes are the basis, there will always be disparity among schools. Also, can Media Matters be considered an unbiased source themselves? Their own homepage has links for things such as 'Why is CNN hiring conservative misinformer Bill Bennett?' and 'Support our fight against conservative misinformation'. Nah, they wouldn't make up stuff, or cherry pick either, would they?

[Balta1701]

That is way too much for 'admin'.  But the whole thing is a useless argument until a better way to fund schools can be made.  As long as property taxes are the basis, there will always be disparity among schools.  Also, can Media Matters be considered an unbiased source themselves?  Their own homepage has links for things such as 'Why is CNN hiring conservative misinformer Bill Bennett?' and 'Support our fight against conservative misinformation'.  Nah, they wouldn't make up stuff, or cherry pick either, would they?

I'll more than admit MMFA is biased and you won't find things disproving stuff that say Mr. Kerry says on some random day at their page. But I really don't think Stossel is that unbiased of a source either, and given how heavily they cite everything they write, they at least provide a very useful counterpoint to a guy like Stossel who doesn't provide many of his sources. If you disagree with something they say...follow the link and check their sources. They give you basically everything there. That's why I like them for certain purposes.

 

$8000 also is not all necessarily for "Admin"...there may well be maintenance, construction, supplies, transportation, sports equipment all included in those numbers as well.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Exactly Balta, IIRC -- those funds include heating the school in the winter, busing costs, reduced lunch costs, etc. These things may not be directly part of "instruction" but I would easily argue that getting the kid's ass in the seat and keeping the school warm in the winter, having reduced lunch for the needy kids, etc. is definitely a benefit to the instruction process.

 

And oh yeah, Jonathan Kozol would whip Stossel's monkey ass in a debate about education. I take Kozol's ideas for reform a lot more seriously than I do Stossel's (just because Kozol was a teacher and has spent the last 20+ years investigating the status of the national school system)

[Cknolls]

How do you explain the lack of achievement of students in Washington D.C, which

 

spends over $13000 per pupil per year (the highest in the country). Once again

 

the old adage: you can't fix a problem by appropriating more money.

[mreye]

For what it's worth, I thought this was a pretty good read. Very objective, especially for National Review.

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/petr...00601250830.asp

[Controlled Chaos]

Learning to read in South Carolina

by John Stossel

 

With public schools spending more than $100,000 per student on K-12 education, you'd think they could teach students how to read and write.

 

South Carolina is one of many states to have trouble with this. It spends $9,000 per student per year, and its state school superintendent told me South Carolina has been "ranked as having some of the highest standards of learning in the entire country." So let's ask the infamous question, "Is our children learning?"

 

Dorian Cain told me he wants to learn to read. He's 18 years old and in 12th grade, but when I asked him to read from a first-grade level book, he struggled with it.

 

"Did they try to teach you to read?" I asked him.

 

"From time to time."

 

His mom, Gena Cain, has been trying to get him help for years. If Dorian were in private school, or if South Carolina allowed parents to choose schools the way we choose other products and services in life, Dorian and Gena would be "customers" and able to go elsewhere -- if any school were dumb enough to serve a customer as poorly as Dorian has been served. But since Gena is merely a taxpayer, forced to pay for the public schools whether they do her any good or not, she can't even demand a better education for her son. "You have to beg," she said. "Whatever you ask for, you're begging. Because they have the power." They do. What are you going to do -- go elsewhere? Gena can't afford that.

 

Gena's begging eventually got results -- just not results that helped her son. What the school bureaucrats did was hold meetings to talk about Dorian. (Bureaucrats are good at holding meetings.) At the meeting we watched, lots of important people attended: a director of programs for exceptional children, a resource teacher, a district special education coordinator, a counselor and even a gym teacher. The meeting went on for 45 minutes.

 

"I'm seeing great progress in him," said the principal. "So I don't have any concerns."

 

Well, Gena still had a concern: Her son could barely read.

 

Was Dorian just incapable of learning? No. ABC News did see great progress in him -- when we sent him to a private, for-profit tutoring center. In just 72 hours of tutoring, Sylvan Learning Center brought Dorian's reading up more than two grade levels.

 

In 72 hours, a private company did what South Carolina's government schools could not do in over 12 years.

 

President Bush's answer to school systems that pass students like Dorian on to the next grade year after year was "No Child Left Behind." It demands that states test students, and it establishes consequences for schools whose students consistently do poorly. Teachers in at least one South Carolina school responded to the pressures of the law by giving some students the answers to the test in advance, said Dale Hammond, grandmother of one such boy. "They were teaching him to cheat!" she told me.

 

She promptly pulled her grandson out of that government school and enrolled him in private school, but most parents can't afford that. Once you've been taxed to support the public schools and other wastes of public money, you don't have a lot left to spring for private school tuition.

 

But there is good news, said the state school's superintendent: South Carolina is seeing great progress in some areas. "We are ranked No. 1 in the country," she bragged, "on improvement on SAT."

 

That's great. But when you're ranked at the bottom, improvement doesn't mean much, and South Carolina, even after its "No. 1 improvement" is still last among states. SATs don't make for perfect comparisons because states have different participation rates, but South Carolina's participation rate is about average, and yet its students perform well below the average.

 

That's not good. Yet the superintendent said, "We are making tremendous progress in South Carolina, and we're very proud."

 

In government monopolies, that's how bureaucrats think.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Stossel's argument is "common sense" but it is desperately misleading.

 

Unfortunately, I can't find a e-copy of Richard Rothstein's "A Wider Lens on the Black-White Achievement Gap" but the gist of it is argued here at this site: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v86/k0410lew.htm

 

Holding teachers "accountable" for test scores is overly simplistic and ultimately, quite stupid. A teacher sees a kid for 45 minutes to a little over an hour a day in the classroom. The kid is affected by home life, other classes, hobbies, extracurriculars, etc. etc. etc.

 

I have a kid in a class I'm teaching right now that is always very tired when he is at school because he has to stay up late to help his siblings while his parents work. Taking Stossel's line of thought -- it would then be my fault if his test scores aren't up to snuff because he is dead tired when he gets to school. He could know all the information (and he does), his grades just take a hit because he lacks the time to do the assignments due to other things that I mentioned before (his parents working and therefore he has added responsibilities) Then if the parents don't work, they get taken to task for being lazy parents and the whole "leeches on welfare" argument. It is difficult for a teacher to control a student's behavior out of the school and out of the classroom -- yet the teacher becomes "accountable" even though numerous other factors can influence the success of a child in the schoolroom.

 

Stossel's argument is a "feel-good" argument with little substance behind it. It should also be known that his only expertice in the field of education is having attended the public school system with no emphasis on the field of study.

 

And Knolls, averages can be misleading. Try a more accurate stat like the median. It would also help to look at how much goes to administrative costs (i.e. heating, busing, free/reduced lunch programs, etc.) that are not direct instruction costs but are necessary to keep the student in the school so they are able to learn.

[Controlled Chaos]

Stossel's argument is "common sense" but it is desperately misleading.

 

Unfortunately, I can't find a e-copy of Richard Rothstein's "A Wider Lens on the Black-White Achievement Gap" but the gist of it is argued here at this site: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v86/k0410lew.htm

 

Holding teachers "accountable" for test scores is overly simplistic and ultimately, quite stupid.  A teacher sees a kid for 45 minutes to a little over an hour a day in the classroom.  The kid is affected by home life, other classes, hobbies, extracurriculars, etc. etc. etc.

 

I have a kid in a class I'm teaching right now that is always very tired when he is at school because he has to stay up late to help his siblings while his parents work.  Taking Stossel's line of thought -- it would then be my fault if his test scores aren't up to snuff because he is dead tired when he gets to school.  He could know all the information (and he does), his grades just take a hit because he lacks the time to do the assignments due to other things that I mentioned before (his parents working and therefore he has added responsibilities)  Then if the parents don't work, they get taken to task for being lazy parents and the whole "leeches on welfare" argument.  It is difficult for a teacher to control a student's behavior out of the school and out of the classroom -- yet the teacher becomes "accountable" even though numerous other factors can influence the success of a child in the schoolroom.

 

Stossel's argument is a "feel-good" argument with little substance behind it.  It should also be known that his only expertice in the field of education is having attended the public school system with no emphasis on the field of study.

 

And Knolls, averages can be misleading.  Try a more accurate stat like the median.  It would also help to look at how much goes to administrative costs (i.e. heating, busing, free/reduced lunch programs, etc.) that are not direct instruction costs but are necessary to keep the student in the school so they are able to learn.

 

 

Wow...I wish you were my teacher. My dog ate my homework!! That's ok son...it's not your fault.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Wow...I wish you were my teacher.  My dog ate my homework!!  That's ok son...it's not your fault.

I have high expectations of the students and expect them to meet them. I, however, don't buy into the argument that only teachers should be held accountable for performance of the student in the classroom.

 

For instance, I had a kid throw a punch in my classroom because somebody stepped on his foot. When I wrote him up, he said that his dad says it is fine to throw punches if somebody crosses you.

 

Now -- I'm reinforcing that the behavior is wrong but his parents are telling him it is right. He sees me for 45 minutes (and that 1/2 hour detention) and he sees his parents much more. I wonder which reinforcement is going to win out.

 

But please continue to undercut complex debate about issues of race, socio-economic status and privilege with simpleminded platitudes. It makes you look smart. I swear.

 

And Stossel is great at showing anecdotal evidence without relying on nationwide, scientifically valid statistics for the most part. As Rothstein argues "In both social classes, some students perform well above or below the average performance of their social class peers. If schools can select (or attract) a disproportionate share of lower class students whose performance is above average for their social class, these schools can appear to be quite successful. Many such schools are excellent and should be commended. But their successes provide no evidence that their instructional approaches would close the achievement gap for students who are average for their social class groups."