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on the left posted:Explain the societal benefit of dropping 70k/year on special ed for a single student. I'm assuming we will never see any of that money back in the form of income taxes. You save a bunch of money on future services, people who can care for themselves and live in supported environments with supported employment are much less of a burden than those who are institutionalized. And yes, some special education students will actually become productive tax paying citizens, possibly extremely productive ones. If you can spend 70k turning nonverbal kid with autism into a scientist or engineer, that investment will pay for itself, perhaps many times over.
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Feb 9, 2017 20:44
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The problem isn't asking for a justification for SpEd resource allocation, the problem is the assumption that justification can't exist because SpEd is worthless.
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Feb 9, 2017 20:49
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You can justify sped funding on pure utilitarian grounds. It's cheaper to spend money on education now than incarceration, institutionalization, and increased dependence on social services later.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:19
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(Good) teaching is a lot more like performing than sitting at a desk in an office job. You have to be "on" the whole time. The archetypal bad teacher sits behind a desk, disengaged from the class. comparisons based solely on hours and not on intensity of work are probably misleading.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:51
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Hawkgirl posted:"Just send disruptive kids out of the room." No. For a million reasons, but first and foremost because sending them out denies them their education. But also because we tend to do that to kids of color a lot more than the other kids. And because our job is to teach ALL our students, even if some are not interested in learning. Also because it undermines our authority in the classroom when we have to make someone else solve our problems. So instead we learn to be disciplinarians while also not letting discipline be the only thing we do. You know, so we can teach. And because some kids will quickly realize the only thing they need to do to avoid work is to be disruptive and get sent out. Getting kicked out of class is only a punishment if you enjoy being in the class in the first place, and those don't tend to be the kids with behavior problems.
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Feb 10, 2017 01:31
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There's a proxy fight for the Devos nomination in the Los Angeles school board race. The current school board president is Steve Zimmer, a TFA guy who taught for 17 years. He's supported by the teacher's union and is generally popular. He's got pretty reasonable views on charters, he doesn't think they're a panacea, but he's not trying to close them all down either. LAUSD has a process where parents and teachers can make their school a district charter, meaning they'll have more local control, but keeping a lot of district structures in place and keeping teachers in their union, which is some brilliant co-opting if you ask me. The challenger, Nick Melvoin, who's been able to run a significant amount of negative advertising (I saw one ad on MSNBC), is also a TFA guy, who taught for two years in Watts and then got fired because there were budget cuts and he had low seniority, and then went to law school and nonprofit world. He's strongly pro-charters and (maybe?) vouchers. He's got wacky ideas about letting any student go to any school in the district and dealing with the transportation nightmare with uber for kids. http://www.hopskipdrive.com/ The TFA vs TFA angle is more interesting because Zimmer's last election saw Michelle Rhee (another TFA alum) give half a million dollars to his pro-charter opponent, who he beat handily. I think the Devos backlash is going to sail him to victory, but I'm not exactly batting 1000 in the political prediction market recently so I'm still worried.
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Feb 10, 2017 03:36
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Shbobdb posted:What if we just brought back the good paying factory jobs and made education a moot point. Not everybody needs to have a college degree. Is knowing about the Battle of Hastings or how to take a derivative really that important for most people? Germany's manufacturing sector fared far better than ours in a global market. Germany has a fantastic vocational education system, which does not eliminate history or any other core component of the curriculum. These two things are probably related.
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Feb 20, 2017 00:24
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Shbobdb posted:They also segregate students at grade 4. We should probably start doing the same thing. Dumping more money into the system when the system clearly can't serve and isn't meant to serve everyone seems like a better approach. Since people at the top are more likely to be able to afford more, the charter/private system isn't so bad. There's a lot of neoliberal rhetoric in this response that I disagree with. The market ain't fixing poo poo, and more funding is absolutely necessary. Tracking and segregation aren't really the same thing, although they might be in practice if implemented in the US. But magnet programs and honors track classes aren't segregation, and we don't need heavy handed tracking to improve the vocational options in our schools. The problem we have in US education is that we operate under the illusion that all students need to be prepared to go to college, which simply isn't true. All students should have the option to be on a college track curriculum, but many would be better served with vocational alternatives that currently suck or don't exist at all.
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Feb 20, 2017 01:32
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Yes, Germany's manufacturing sector has been declining like ours. But it's still a lot more robust, and their educational system is very likely the reason. There are quite a lot of jobs that require training, but not a college degree -- particularly in the medical field -- that are prime targets for vocational ed, too. Many students would be a lot better off if they could graduate from secondary school with the qualifications to work as a dental or radiology technician without having to pay thousands of dollars to a certification program, for instance.
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Feb 20, 2017 01:43
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Huzanko posted:Does anyone know why they even introduced standardized testing? It's so loving stupid and is just national dickmeasuring. To provide the best bureaucrats for the Chinese emperor's government.
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Feb 21, 2017 07:57
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I interact with around 30 schools and can confirm a good principal, and good administration in general, make a big difference. I've also worked in a school with a bad principal and inept administration in general and can confirm it impacts the classroom significantly. It's like building your own island fortress of competence in a sea of disorder. That's probably more true with SpEd, though.
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Mar 14, 2017 01:55
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