Chicago Mayor Calls For "Brainiac High" 419
theodp writes "In a private lunch with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, BusinessWeek's Michael Arndt was taken aback by the mayor's candid monologues against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of public schools — Chicago's included — to adequately train kids today in technology, math, and science. Among the education fixes Daley said he's contemplating are a fifth year of high school and elite math and science academies for Chicago's brainiest students. Endless wars that divert hundreds of billions a year from schools and job training are also undermining America's competitiveness, Daley added, wondering where the public outrage is."
Outstanding chutzpa! (Score:5, Informative)
Not THE Richard M. Daley, from the outstanding bunch of politicos who have shaped Chicago's history for the last 50 years?
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daley_family [wikipedia.org]
Reap what you sow, then bitch about it...what amazing hypocrisy.
Re:Schools vs. Killing brown people (Score:5, Informative)
Like it or not, there's no such thing as a school that couldn't do a better job educating kids with more money. It does take money to teach kids. The more the better.
People point to public schools and say "See, they spend more money and don't get better results" than private schools.
What those people don't take into account is that private schools self-select their students based on social and economic measures, and start off with better students. Further, unlike the public schools, private schools are not required to take the most difficult cases: students with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, behavioral problems. Public schools MUST take those students, and that's where a huge amount of the funding in public schools goes.
Anybody who parrots the right-wing talking point that the problem is teachers unions has never taught in both public and private schools. I taught in both systems, back when I was working my way through grad-school in the 80s, and was on the school board for both my daughter's k-8 and high schools. She went to public schools here in Chicago and got a first-rate education (she's in grad school now). Chicago is supposedly "ground zero" for a school system that is dysfunctional because of the teachers' union, and I can tell you from direct experience that's not the problem.
The problems are many, but at the top are funding, shitty parenting, a growing socially and economically-impoverished underclass (thank you Ronald Reagan) and a society that is increasingly anti-education (thank you, Fox News).
Chicago Political Machine (Score:4, Informative)
I think the big thing to take away from this is that Mayor Daily IS the Chicago Political Machine. To do business as a politician you have to be in his good graces and of the same mind.
Obama is cut from the same cloth. Much of his staff grew up as part of Chicago Politics. As a rule, what is popular in Chicago does NOT play well in the rest of the country. So Obama can't say these things himself. But watch how he governs. His mindset and agenda are the same.
If you agree with that agenda then you should be very happy with his presidency. If you don't agree with his agenda, at the very least you should not be surprised by it.
Re:Why add a 5th year? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:5th year? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why add a 5th year? (Score:3, Informative)
I was in the 5 year program, and I think the problem is that when you got to University, you're in first year with a bunch of other students who may not be from Ontario, so they may not have taken the 5th year of high school. The idea of the 5 year program was to help subsidize post-secondary education by teaching introductory level university courses to university-bound students without them having to pay tuition or live away from home, etc. I agree that it originally worked that way in principle, but once students started going to university out-of-province, the universities in Ontario had to assume you didn't have those courses, and universities outside of Ontario assumed nobody had them either, so you just ended up with a lot of repetition in first year.
Specifically I remember thinking that calculus was really easy in first year, but I was in class with people who hadn't done integration in high school. Things got harder again when everyone was up to speed.
I agreed with removing the 5th year. Not because it was a bad idea in principle, but because it was flawed in practice.
Re:Schools vs. Killing brown people (Score:2, Informative)
To really solve Chicago's education problem, you have to prioritize the schools that cater to the very worst students; it makes no sense to spend more money on students who are already succeeding.
Re:It will work at least as well (Score:4, Informative)
It's wrong to suggest that federal and state taxation have nothing to do with each other. Decreases in federal spending leave more money in the pool that states can tap.
If the federal government stopped taxing its citizens to pay for the military, state and local governments could either
1) keep taxes the same so that people get to keep more of their own money, or
2) raise taxes so that the tax burden would be the same as if the feds were spending trillions on the war, but instead spend that money on schools.
Re:Your racism is really offensive (Score:3, Informative)
These folks are not Arabic, they actually have a strong Aryan (Persian/Iranian ethnic background) and Caucasian (The Caucasus mtns are just to the north) genetic background. The one exception to this are the Hazera who are descended from the Mongols.