View Poll Results: where do you stand on public education?
- Voters
- 39. You may not vote on this poll
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I think it is a great and important idea and a cornerstone to our country's success.
7 17.95% -
I think we should abolish public education and privatize the whole system.
1 2.56% -
"readin' and schoolin' is the devil"
1 2.56% -
I think it is not quite a failure, but certainly not a resounding success. It ought to be strengthened.
28 71.79% -
I don't care....
0 0% -
other
2 5.13%
Thread: education
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02-16-10, 02:29 PM #63
Re: education
Originally Posted by Potemkine
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02-16-10, 03:51 PM #64
Re: education
There needs to be a better means of quality control over teachers, because the current system of ranking based on test scores only encourages teaching to the test.
Trade disciplines are a good idea, and are already implemented in the big school systems around my area, but maybe not a lot of other places. The main issue with these is, what are our minimum standards for education in the other disciplines, i.e. history and english, how important are ensuring those standards in order to have a marginally educated public, and then how can we ensure these standards when someone focuses on a trade rather than the other disciplines. The current system seems to be that about half or a third of the day is spent doing trade skills while the rest is general ed. This seems reasonable to me, but in order to get the most out of it, it once again falls on the teachers. Teaching high school can be soul sucking sometimes but we still have to make sure we maintain quality teaching. As for how to do so more effectively, I'm not quite ready to speculate on that, I'll have to ask some people I know.
Another thing that would help a LOT is smaller class sizes. This makes the teacher much more able to engage students and students to engage each other and the teacher as well. Things are more intimate and it is much harder for people to get "left behind". Now of course this probably comes down to, we need more teachers, and better funding both for school construction and teacher salaries. Unfortunately this is taxpayer money, but personally I see this as one of if not the single most important funnel for tax money in this country,as it is vitally important for the success of democracy to have an educated public.
And as others have said, the solution is not privatization because this just leads to a quality of education based on one's means, which I can only see resulting in less people with a quality basic education and in a cycle of poverty even harder to break when basic education is cost prohibitive or at best lower quality than those who can pay. While capitalism is great for business and economics I don't think the competitive enterprise model fits well into the purpose of public education, i.e. a marginally educated populace necessary for voters in a democracy, and the maintenance and increase in the nation's intellectual capital.
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- 01-28-07
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- Arizona
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02-17-10, 11:14 PM #65Re: education
I think it needs to be fixed, and just some things would be to stop dumbing things down all the time. Seriously the AIMS test here is a joke anymore, they dumbed it down so damn much. On the subject of tests, the writing test here suckkeedd, i was doing college level essays but could never get excellent (the highest on it, and gets you some crap) on it. Get the feeling it was because i didn't write in their "block" standard (aka use this to fail your College English classes!)
I've seen both normal classes here and the advanced and would say the advanced is what should be the NORMAL! Granted some of them were also too advanced (college level vocab in 7th grade), but still.
Anyways, first needs to be don't dumb it down so stupid can pass. 2nd needs to be smaller classes to make it easier to, at the very least, get help if you need it. Plus, not a teacher but, think it would probably help to see if someone is struggling or needs help even if they don't ask.
3rd, spending on things that aren't that needed. Like someone said building new and better sports fields instead of focusing on education needs. Or (and this will piss some off) saying a flag of a certain size (certainly not the $5 size) must be in every classroom.
4th, trying to keep teachers from showing bias in grading etc. I had some really STUPID people in my College level class you had to test in to. I mean people asking shit like what the word "coalition" means *head went to desk* among other EASY shiz. Hell they even acted like stupid people. Only reason i could figure they even got in/stayed in was the teacher we had was also the volleyball coach (and they played volleyball)
Oh and to the earlier thing, i was only spanked once in my life and am going to college, doesn't do drugs (even smoke or drink), never been in a gang, jail, etc.
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02-18-10, 05:20 PM #67
Re: education
I chose option 4. There is no way around a public school system in my opinion but many of them are way below par. Alabama has one of the worst school systems in the nation. More funding, higher paid teachers and smaller classrooms would have a huge impact. Our voters are too fucking stupid to realize the benefit of a state run lottery. I also think that corruption of the system is as much of an issue as anything else which leads me to feel that a federally run system would be even worse. #2 pencils would end up costing $30 each if we turned it over to the feds.
I am fortunate that the city I live in has one of the top 100 school systems in the nation. I am also proud to say that we accept $0 state or federal funding for our schools. I am pretty sure that is one of the reasons we are in the top 100. The problem is that there are many that cant afford the property taxes that we pay to have such a nice school system so in turn they do not get the education that our students get. I can also say that if I did not live in one of 3 cities around Birmingham with good systems and had children they would be in private school.
I can think of some ideas to fix the problem but I am not interested in getting into a political debate today. Lets just say that we spend plenty of money on ridiculous agendas that we could spend on education.
In short we must have a public school system but most of the ones we have now are fucking broke.
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