Palm Boy links an interesting column by P.J. O'Rourke advocating the end to the government schools, and one figure therein is that nearly half of the employees of the government schools are not teachers--a disturbingly large portion of them (300,000) employed apparently to comply with"Most Children Left Behind." It's also worth noting that the national teacher to student ration is 15.4, and that average spending per student is about $15,000. Now if only a homeschooling parent of five could get this--or better yet what they're spending in DC--to educate one's own children......
Seriously, if we could only figure out a way to see about getting more of that funding to the "point of use," letting kids do a lot of the cleaning (they're making the mess after all), one could reduce school funding by over half without hurting the teacher's pay at all. Another interesting fact about those days; the rate of illiteracy was actually quite a bit lower.
Podcast #1047: The Roman Caesars’ Guide to Ruling
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The Roman caesars were the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning in 27 BC
with Julius Caesar’s heir Augustus, from whom subsequent caesars took their
nam...
14 hours ago
2 comments:
What has always bugged me is that NCLB isn't exactly asking for the moon. It's asking that people be able to, um, do what people who graduate from high school should be able to do, by the time they graduate from high school, with measurements along the way.
No, NCLB isn't the way to do it, but really, there's something seriously broken (well, we already knew that) when a call for basic proficiency appears to require massive tinkering, expenditures, and "teaching to the test" in order to meet the requirements. You and I both know a $40 math book can teach an average child a year of elementary school math -- that leaves a LOT left over for the special needs kids, at current funding levels. So while I agree that NCLB is a fundamentally misguided program, blaming NCLB for the stupidity that's resulted from implementing it is in some ways just a massive smoke screen.
As a home schooled graduate, I agree with these assessments. :D
NCLB was a smoke screen, and it stifled national discussion on the issue for the next decade under the pretext of a solution.
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