India's Schooling Experiment Tests Rich and Poor 174
theodp writes "Passed in 2009, India's Right to Education Act mandates that private schools set aside 25% of admissions for low-income, underprivileged and disabled students. Many of the world's top private schools offer scholarships to smart poor kids, but India's plan is more sweeping in that the rules prohibit admission-testing of students. 'Over the years schooling offered by these two systems [public and private] has become increasingly disparate and unequal,' explained Anshu Vaish of the Dept. of Human Resource Development. But the most notable results of the experiment thus far, reports the WSJ, are frustration and disappointment as separations that define Indian society are upended, leading even some supporters to conclude that the chasm between the top and bottom of Indian society is too great to overcome. Hey, at least we don't have these kinds of problems in the US, right? BTW, about 30% of this year's Intel Science Talent Search 2011 Finalists hailed from private schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,750 at Ursuline Academy (the alma mater of Melinda Gates) to $37,020 at Groton School (the alma mater of FDR). Some 10% of all elementary and secondary school students were in private schools in 2009-2010, according to the US Dept. of Education."
An excellent illustration (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an excellent illustration at a much larger scale of exactly the education problems we face in the U.S., where we spend more on prisoners than students [alltop.com].
Speaking for myself, I have... let's call it an "above average" character in terms of education and intellect, and yet public schools couldn't be bothered with me. Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling, I would never have graduated from High School.
The answer is NOT for those who can afford such things to be taxed into giving up those funds to educate everyone else's children. The "answer" is not even something I can feasibly address with any sanity or brevity in a forum like this one (ok, I can in three words: "One room schoolhouse"), but it should be rather clearer now what a failure our current model is, where students are graduating from High School less educated than their parents - on average - for the first time in our nations history over the last several years, and that we need to completely re-address our schools, teaching methods, and sociocultural emphasis (or lack thereof) on education.
Nice strawman (Score:5, Informative)
This is an excellent illustration at a much larger scale of exactly the education problems we face in the U.S., where we spend more on prisoners than students [alltop.com].
Of course we spend more on prisoners than students. Prisoners live in prisons 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Students are in school for 7 hours a day, for only 8 months out of the year.
Re:Nice strawman (Score:5, Funny)
The solution is obvious then.
Lock those pesky kids in school 24/7.
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Years ago a teacher was telling me how kids see school. Some are there to learn, but others just see it as a prison sentence. You have to go there by law and have no choice in the matter. Some of them go on to do okay at college because their attitude changes when they are there by choice.
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Not only that, but a lot of prisons are beginning to force prisoners to work at menial jobs while they are in prison; in principle this is something I approve of, but when you realize that the prisoners don't need to be paid real wages, it gets bad.
What happens is this:
1. The state contracts out prison management to some private company, paying them per prisoner.
2. The private company turns around and signs contracts to have its prisoners do menial labor at some unbeatable price since not only is their work
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If prisons can be profitable businesses, why not? And that way, the former prisoners can at least say they've been working during the x previous years they've just spent in prison. Maybe it's slave labor, but it's still better than having them scratch their backs while free citizens keep on payi
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The main problem is if they're competing with some legitimate business that is forced to pay its workers minimum wage, they'll lose against the prison workforce every time, unless they are also forced to pay the prisoners an equal wage. Though, one potential solution I could see is to contract the workforce out to a private company, require that minimum wages be paid, and have the state garnish these wages to pay for the prison. Problem with this is what private company in their right mind would pay the sam
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The whole submission is an attempt to say "WE HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM HERE." The fact is that we don't. Our public schools have problems, but not anything like India, where the average class size is fifty and *TEACHER* absenteeism is a huge problem. You go to school, there's fifty kids in your class, and your teacher doesn't show up. That is not uncommon in India's public schools. Which is why the middle/upper class send their kids to private schools.
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Hey I went to private school in India and the class size was 60!
No teacher absenteeism though
What's the class size in the US?
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But the school aged population [nsf.gov] of over 50 million in the United States is about 7 times larger than the prisoner population [wikipedia.org] of about 7 million. And it seems reasonable to assume that educating a person is more resource demanding than detaining a person. The fact that the amount spend on prisons is even on the same order of magnitude as the amount spent on schools is more than a little disconcerting to me.
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The incarcerated population in the US is about 2.3 million - the other 4.7 million are on probation or parole. The school-age population does not count preschool, early kindergarten or any students over age 17, so it should be ~12% higher. The ratio of populations is about 24.
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Is it not more likely better education would reduce crime, thus reducing the overall societal burden?
Of course those more educated are less likely to commit crimes. No one is arguing that. But tell me this: how do we educate those that don't want to be educated? We already have compulsory education, look how well that works. We make the students sit there and listen to the teachers, but they still fall asleep, or skip class. These days, there is a significant amount of people that glorify ignorance, laud and emulate those that shun education. A lot of these people don't want to put in the effort to b
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To see the real issue is to simply look at the videos students submit of the fine examples of classroom order and the learning environment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhi2mAPu3lU [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYqfzsxA0ps [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-LPwegNXB8 [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5To2G6yEh00 [youtube.com]
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdeui_crazy-student_fun [dailymotion.com]
http://www.twitvid.com/FNWJB [twitvid.com]
How long will it take you to decide to move your kids from the zoo to a school?
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In many families both parents have to work, and sometimes even then they can't afford books, hobbies, computers and educational trips. By the government subsidising quality pre-school care, after-school activities and educational materials some of that damage can be offset.
The media loves to show us the benefit scroungers with 14 kids who don't give a fuck but in reality most parents want their kids to do well in life. They might not have the time, money or know-how to help them but they still care. Bringin
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Many people in prisons are there for things that should not be crimes, or, if they should, should not be crimes worth sending someone to prison over.
We could reduce the societal burden of prison in this country hugely if we decided to only lock people away for violent crimes they directly committed or incited/ordered someone else to commit.
Unfortunately, with the shift to for-profit prisons, this won't happen.
My point here being that improved education is a great goal, but there's a very easy way to reduce
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> Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling
Two problems with that. Firstly it is not simply a matter of "working hard". All the evidence suggests that it is much harder for poor people to get on in life. Social mobility has actually gone down in the last decade. If you don't have the money to live in a good neighbourhood, both parents have to work so can't spend as much time reading to you at an early age, can't afford to tra
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I agree with your first paragraph and the overall point of your whole post, but you say:
"Secondly it is in your interest to subsidise poorer children. You want the best and brightest children to power the economy or become your doctor. "
Yes, but ability is highly correlated with parental wealth. This is because intelligence and other success related qualities of the parents are correlated with earning power, and these abilities are highly heritable, both genetically and indirectly through parent-child inter
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So, do genetics work differently in the US than other countries which don't have anywhere near the same correlation between a parent's income and that of the child?
Why does a Swedish doctor or lawyer not confer the same earning potential or intelligence to his child than an American?
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Short answer: who says ability is less heritable in Sweden? And even if so, who says that Sweden allows higher ability people to keep their earnings, or even tolerates the idea that some people just have more general ability than others?
Long answer:
I'm not sure that the correlation is actually much less, rather the range of incomes is more restricted due to taxation and culture (not rewarding greater ability, denying its existence, or even ostracizing high ability people for insufficient humility). Also th
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Because of the free market nature of the US gaining the maximum benefit of public education is also competitive. Parents of means have always had the opportunity to enroll in private school or move to
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So privatize the schools then. NJ already spends the same $15,000 - $30,000+ per pupil pear year on public schools, so it's not the price, it's the monopoly that's destroying the quality.
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Speaking for myself, I have... let's call it an "above average" character in terms of education and intellect, and yet public schools couldn't be bothered with me. Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling, I would never have graduated from High School.
No offense, but it sounds like you're, let's call it "below average", on a number of other skill-sets, if you were unable to graduate from public school, especially High School.
Don't tell me, you were "soooo bored" with school that you just couldn't hack it....right? Do what the rest of us did and read during class, program on your TI85 during class, hell do diffeq in your head if you feel like it. "I'm soooo smart but can't do the work" rings, well, false.
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A lot of schools simply have no idea what to do with gifted children.
Which is why a lot of systems are creating Magnet and IB schools that draw from their entire district and concentrate those gifted children into one place. Thanks to my Magnet program, I graduated high school as almost a sophomore, with 21 college credit hours before I ever set foot in a college classroom. And the school wasn't just a Magnet school. The Magnet program was in fact just a small portion of the school's population. The non-Magnet students could take many of the AP classes I took as well, if
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Moreover it doesn't address the social learning that takes place in school. By forcing a gifted student into classes with more "mature" students you put them at a disadvantage socially on a number of levels. I realize this is Slashdot and we don't entirely value the process of social education here, but it is arguably the most vital component to having success in the modern economic environment.
I failed miserably at my first passion because I had not forced myself to become acclimated to certain sorts of
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I was in an experimental program in elementary that incorporated aptitude based approaches with at your own pace coursework. Basically if you read at a 6th grade level you were given 6th grade coursework for your reading/English lessons regardless of whether you were in 1st or 8th grade. Further, we were given basically a whole lesson plan outline ahead of time and a series of things to accomplish before we could move on.
This was great for me - I am very much a self-starter and wound up ripping through my l
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My school had different sets for most subjects. You had exams at the end of each year, and were put with people who scored similar marks in each subject. They would be the same age as you, and they'd be moving at a similar speed. The weakest students were in a class that moved slowly, the stronger ones covered it more quickly. At the end of the year, there would be another exam and the students would be reassigned the next year. Typically, most students stayed in the same set, with a few moving up or d
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That would, I think, be a pretty cost effective way to handle most of the students performing (in whichever direction) outside the current norm.
There are still some edge cases - students who would be in a set of their own at their school, for example. One way might be to aggregate those students from across a region and then have the set system applied there again.
In Chicago, we did something like that - some of us were given the SATs and depending on how well we scored on those we were put in college or hi
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Unfortunately, in my country that's not even an option. The law mandates 10 years in school (our system is different from the American one with different names etc.), no exceptions.
Second to last year of school I finally got to a school that didn't mind bumping me up a class. I completed what I thought would be the final year, finished my exams with an average of B+ if my conversion isn't entirely off ... and was told by the Department of Education that my exam papers were invalid and I had to take the last
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THIS was a superb solution. Sadly the same thing is happening in America and in Canada. It is often thought that "Well for the child's social development we shouldn't take him out of his age group" or "If we bump little Johnny it might make little Eric and Matthew feel stupid".
#1 is stupid because by the time I as 8 my peers were all 11 or 12 year olds anyways. I didn't hang out with anyone from my own age group regardless. This continued all through school and I went to several different schools.
#2 is reta
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One technique that my high school used (it's a little more difficult for public schools, I was sent to a private school due to behavioral handicaps, paid for by my local school district) was, if they had advanced students, send them to college, starting their freshman year of high school if applicable.
The local technical college even had a program where college classes counted for both college and high school credit. So, they basically outsourced their advanced classes, and students got free college credit.
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That sounds like a great program, and is another option available.
Really, the biggest concern here is the "no child left behind" bullshit. They're increasingly targeting the lowest of the set while the highest languish and eventually get so messed up in the head due to a severe lack of challenge that they may as well have been the lowest.
I propose we reset and take the school system backwards about 30-40 years, see what happens.
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I never said didn't want, I said "couldn't be bothered with". As in, no time to slow down for a student who struggles at math: just fail them. Student too smart for other classes, too bored to be bothered spending hours doing homework for material they mastered years before? Fail them! (I should note though the opposite idea of eliminating competition or grades so students don't get their little feelings hurt is too extreme a polar reaction for my liking and fails with similar substance, if in different way
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I had an extremely difficult time in public school, for many reasons. I was identified as a gifted student early on, but my school was a small-town school and didn't offer much in the way of an interesting curriculum. I came perilously close to failing and dropping out. Ironically, although my grades were borderline, my examination average was at or near 100% in all of my classes. The reason for this was that my school counted "daily work," i.e., veritable mountains of tedious, mind-numbing knowledge regurg
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I was fortunately enough to go to a good high school in an affluent community where a lot of the parents worked in technology related fields. The parents of most of my friends had advanced degrees in STEM fields so the school was set up to deal with high performers because they had a LOT of them. The real problems occur when you are unique in a school.
My wife (from Chile) had a rather different experience. She was home schooled until age 10 when she won a scholarship to an elite private school in Chile by c
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I had pretty much the same experience, but it started a bit younger. Somewhere in 3rd or 4th grade I was labeled a "problem student" and generally disruptive, I was given an IQ test, and some other random tests. My IQ tested out to be rather high, and I did wonderful on the other tests (my reading level was 11th grade, for instance). But being that I was disruptive, they stuck me in the special education classes, and coerced my parents into doctor shopping to get me label as bona fide ADHD (under threat
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Indeed, this thread is turning into a veritable blizzard of special little snowflakes.
Don't have these kinds of problems in the US... (Score:2)
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-private-schools-2011-4 [businessinsider.com]
The US just has to ensure testing is fully funded in every state and that its best and brightest get scholarships to the top endowment funded U.S. universities.
Testing 100% of every states students vs educating the bottom ~90% every year? Best to put limited state tax funding into the top few %.
The real question is how to keep the bottom 90% distracted every year?
How to keep the bottom 90% distracted? (Score:2)
I believe that you are looking for this video. [comedycentral.com]
The Real Lowdown (Score:5, Informative)
By the time I was finishing high school the situation was so bad that in my State 70% of the seats were reserved for these castes. The remaining 30% was considered to be "open competition", which means any disadvantaged student who scores high will not be counted towards the quota. The closing score for engineering/medical admission for my caste was some 98.5%, that is anyone scoring less would not get admission. The closing score for the ST category was some 45% and SC was 55% and BC was around 75%. The central government did not have the BC category so for IITs 80% of the seats were in play. Some 1350 seats for the entire population of India. If you have been wondering why the IIT alumni of that age (45 to 55 presently) are so strong in academics and engineering, it is because they were the students score above mean+3 sigma.
Over the years a creamy layer has developed and the people who benefited by the reservation policy in 1950s, their children and their great grand children enjoy all the benefits. The benefits do not reach the really stuggling, poor deserving people of these castes. Among the so-called forward castes so many poor rural people have much higher disadvantages. The situation is so bad there, even the corrupt Indian politicians and the corrupt journalists pandering to the semi-literate allegedly suppressed communities are coming out periodically with such band aids to sooth the raging public anger. The really poor disadvantaged people of all castes are pissed off. Only the creamy layer of people belonging to the SC/ST/BC castes likes the present situation.
One good that has happened over the last two decades is the mushrooming growth of private colleges that finally gave all people to get an engineering degree if they wanted it. Now the private colleges are outshining State funded colleges. Now the creamy layer has its eyes on the private colleges. They want in, into that sector too. So this is their way of forcing the private colleges also to impose a reservation system.
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re the Schedule Castes and Tribes policy.
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This comment is ignorant of the reality in India and is representative of only one part of the population he belongs to. The reservation by the Indian Government was an initiative to bring the un-educated and down trodden the means to higher education and higher jobs and thus higher standards of life. Even though lately the competition in the open category is cut throat, it has not stopped the author of the comment from seeking alternative avenues, he and his caste had the information and the means to seek
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If any of my kids in those classes scored 70% and was preferred over my brother scoring 95%, I would call it fair.
Calling it fair is nothing like being fair. It's not fair to be poorer than someone else, or otherwise disadvantaged (by definition). But it also isn't fair to sneak weak students in because they weren't treated fairly earlier in their life. We can't fix those harms merely by gaming an entrance exam.
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in Asia it's all about the test and mass cheating (Score:2)
Read the articles! (Score:2)
I urge everyone to read to the end which relates impoverished Vipil's successes, showing why good education for everyone is a great boon for society.
Though I like the outcomes of India's law, I think it is impinging on the freedom of the schools too much. Consider the borderline families, where the effective 25% price premium means the difference between sending their children to a good school or not. We barely afford to send our own kids to private school, and an extra charge of that size might well kick
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It only takes a few Sumit's to screw it up for not only Vipil, but all the 75% set-asides there.
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And I'm giving up vacations, cars, and retirement savings to do that,
Here in Australia, I did the maths and find it better to spend the extra money buying (or renting) a house in the area of a good public school, than to pay fees for private schools. Hopefully I still can still get it all back for retirement by selling the house, if the market doesn't crash.
Does that approach work in the US?
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Yes.
However I also believe that the primary difference between good schools and inferior schools is in how serious the parents are about the whole process.
This is why private schools get better results.
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That's an insightful question. You name precisely the tradeoff many others choose in my situation, typically accepting a long commute for one -- sometimes both -- parents in exchange for certainty and quality of schooling (as well as big lawns and so on). For context: my profession pretty much requires that I work in a big city.
I decided I didn't want the second car and the yard, and most importantly that having a short commute would give me 5-10 hours of extra time with my kids every week. Pricing that
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examples [yankeeinstitute.org]
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It really is irrelevant how India gets where it's going, and it's going towards more productive economy, regardless of how it is done.
Even if all that Indian's wealthy were doing today is catering to the US market, eventually they will be able to save enough of their own capital to start their own production, and that's what I am talking about, and given that USA is destroying its currency and economy quickly, Indians will not have much choice soon enough, but to start catering to their own markets.
A "basic income" is a better solution to inequity (Score:3)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html [pdfernhout.net] :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
See also:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ [basicincome.org]
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html [iovialis.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee [wikipedia.org]
"A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system[1] of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households[2], groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[3] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.""
What good is education as far as economic advancement when the robots and AIs and voluntary social networks are going to do most of the jobs inthe future?
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/ [wordpress.com]
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That would be a great idea--if most of these families wouldn't immediately run out and blow the money on crack, gold jewelry, flashy cars, etc. almost immediately, And they would.
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Perhaps some would. Let's say you are right. Remember, most of these people are the product of schooling. What does that say about raising those now adults during their formative years during the 1980s in day-prisons confined in chairs doing paperwork most of their youth and then fed mainstream TV promoting consumerism the rest of the time? It might take a while for the culture to heal...
Also, why should everyone suffer because a few will mess up? There are already plenty of laws about "negect" and kids. O
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"I wonder how long it would take for the population of New York State to double."
And the problem with that is?
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Schooling is not education; you prefer this? http://thewaronkids.com/ [thewaronkids.com]
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"I am well aware of its shortcomings,"
Which include drugging children, suspension of civil rights, terrorizing kids, fostering a climate of bullying, breaking the bonds between children and their families, damaging the teachers in other ways, destroying intrinsic motivation, boring people, keeping people from reaching their full potential by wasting years of their lives, and so on...
Do you have alternative proposals?
Anyway, after you have mulled the idea over for a while, you may get past a knee-jerk reacti
Is this novel? (Score:2)
There is similar happening in Scotland, albeit via a different approach - essentially private schools can have their charitable status revoked if they do not pass the "public benefit" test. This is applicable to all charities, though generally interpreted in private schools in relation to the level of fees charged and the proportions of bursaries granted: if high fees mean poor people are effectively excluded from the school, their "public benefit" is not so very "public".
There was quite a push specifically
Private != Good (Score:2)
Re:What it comes down to (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is far more complex then your gross oversimplification. A good example is that one of the main requirements of getting proper schooling is environment. As public schools lose more and more of good, calm, studious students to private schools, the problem of concentration of lack of talent intensifies. This in turn feeds the "white flight" element even further by pressing more good students out.
End result is bad for both - on one hand poor get worse schooling. On the other hand, rich become so disconnected from reality, you end up with tiered society and all its problems.
If you want to see the most historically infamous case on where tiered society leads, look up French Revolution. That said, historic examples of this stretch from India mentioned here, to more modern examples such as Arab Spring phenomenon. And to get there, you usually have a gross collapse of socioeconomic environment, including but not limited to massively raised crime rates, gradual economic decline, social and political instability, and shrinking middle class, majority of which drop down to the poor tier of society with small minority joining the rich.
Rich win in short term, which is why it appears to be a natural state of human society to slowly edge towards tiered society in known history, which ends reset when it's not longer supportable and social imbalance causes a revolution and re-distribution of wealth.
Re:What it comes down to (Score:5, Insightful)
The best part, I might add, is that there is nothing "better" about private schools except the mental image society collectively has. The only reason private school students do better is because they are selected for nice things more frequently because of their prestigious background. In fact, I would argue that private school teaching is probably inferior to public schools (at least in Canada); private school teachers are paid significantly less than public schools, and so public schools get their pick first.
The only reason private school students do better on standardized tests is because private schools pick all of the best students with supportive parents. If you have a class who can practically teach themselves, it doesn't matter if a monkey is teaching them, they're going to do better than the class of low income and disenfranchised students.
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Re:What it comes down to (Score:4, Insightful)
The private school teachers (partially as a result of the lower pay) are also the ones who want to teach -- not the ones who got an English degree and then realized that they couldn't get any other job.
Huh? I see no evidence for that.
In general, I think most teachers go into teaching because they want to teach, public and private. Some of them just burn out faster.
The one advantage that private schools do have is that it's much easier for them to eject students out for being disruptive.
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The private school teachers (partially as a result of the lower pay) are also the ones who want to teach -- not the ones who got an English degree and then realized that they couldn't get any other job.
Huh? I see no evidence for that.
In general, I think most teachers go into teaching because they want to teach, public and private. Some of them just burn out faster.
The one advantage that private schools do have is that it's much easier for them to eject students out for being disruptive.
? I have two teenage siblings, and I must say that the most infuriating element of public school here in Italy is that it shirks problems whenever it can. Inferior teachers, security problems, hazing, students pushed on even if they lack both the will and the preparation...I am fortunate because both my sons are good students, but we are not an "average" family, in that my wife could afford to stay at home and grow the kids, which is a luxury these days.
coming back to the"student ejection" problem, rememb
Smarties & Dummies Should Stay Away from EachO (Score:2)
The bottom line is that birds of a feather flock together - that old line about "opposites attract" is nonsense.
The problem is that dumber, lazier people tend to go in for conspiracy theories that claim all their problems are due to the rich, privileged elite, and little else is responsible for their lower quality of life.
I'd say that you can't argue with a paranoid, and that freedom of association/dissociation must prevail. If the smart people separate out to form their own society and the dumb people form
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Simply put, the marking system looks at how your school ranked you (say they said you were 10th in your year), they look at the marks everyone scored at the exams - say you got the highest mark in your school, this is given to the student who
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The best part, I might add, is that there is nothing "better" about private schools except the mental image society collectively has. The only reason private school students do better is because they are selected for nice things more frequently because of their prestigious background. In fact, I would argue that private school teaching is probably inferior to public schools (at least in Canada); private school teachers are paid significantly less than public schools, and so public schools get their pick first.
The only reason private school students do better on standardized tests is because private schools pick all of the best students with supportive parents. If you have a class who can practically teach themselves, it doesn't matter if a monkey is teaching them, they're going to do better than the class of low income and disenfranchised students.
Can you cite any studies or well known facts to support these statements? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd just like to see something other than some anonymous person's assertions on a tech chatboard.
Private schools can and do kick out trouble-causing students, and there is a direct correlation [nber.org] between the presence of such children and the overall performance of a class. This is probably a larger factor than merely selecting the academic elite, who themselves may come from abusive or otherwise trou
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Well Northern Ireland and some counties in England have Grammar Schools, which are state schools which select the students who get the best marks in the 11+ exam. They generally get better results than private and public[1] schools.
[1] In British English, a public school is type of fee paying private school, not a state funded school. It can lead to confusion when having these types of debates.
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In British English, a public school is type of fee paying private school,
No it isn't. Private and public schools are both forms of independent schools, neither is a subcategory of the other. Private schools are businesses run to make money and typically accept pupils based on their parents' ability to pay. Public schools are non-profit entities (typically registered charities), which exist to provide education. They typically do charge fees, but also provide financial assistance to a significant number (often over 20%) of students who are academically able, but not from fami
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In British English, a public school is type of fee paying private school,
No it isn't. Private and public schools are both forms of independent schools, neither is a subcategory of the other. Private schools are businesses run to make money and typically accept pupils based on their parents' ability to pay. Public schools are non-profit entities (typically registered charities), which exist to provide education. They typically do charge fees, but also provide financial assistance to a significant number (often over 20%) of students who are academically able, but not from families that are able to pay.
Which, more or less, makes a British 'public' school what Americans think of when they say 'private school'. Well, excepting that most american private schools are in some fashion religious, but our notable secular private schools are things pretty much directly modeled on British public schools. In some cases explicitly so.
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That's not quite true. The vast majority of private schools are charities. It would be very difficult for a non-charitable private school to compete with the tax breaks that charities get. "Public schools" originally referred to those schools regulated under the Public Schools Acts of 1868 and 1873. They were "public" in the sense that anyone who could afford the fees and pass the entrance exam could get a place, and were not restricted to members of a particular religion or to royalty or members of the
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Yes it is.
monkey spunk. A public school is just an older and more prestigious private school.
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I have no studies, and I'm not going to look any up for you. I'm a teacher, if that helps. It is, however, generally accepted that you don't compete for the best employees with the lowest pay/benefits (and in my region, private schools pay the least). My goal is not to say public is better, but to challenge the assumption that private is better.
It is absolutely disputable whether public schools or private schools, on average, have higher quality teachers. Unionized public school teachers may very well start
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I went to a fairly prestigious high school in the bay area that was private. I can say based on anecdotal experience, shared by peers who were in public schools, that the teachers at my high school on the whole were "superior" to those at the public schools. If nothing else, the bar was set far higher for us than for those in the public school. A good friend of mine, who is extremely intelligent, shared with me his high school experience and essentially for merely showing up he was lauded for his brillia
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its completely opposite here in india. public school teachers are paid significantly less than private school teachers. the infrastructure in govt run schools is pathetic, the teachers callous and undedicated.
also i don't think that a class consisting of smarter people does not need good teachers.
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Private schools do better because the class clown that disrupts the learning environment is not required to remain in the classroom. Search online for student videos of my science class or other cell phone videos of public classroom teaching. Most of them show the learning environment is a zoo and can be hardly listed as a learning environment.
Schools cut down on special ed and tried to integrate special needs kids back into the classroom. This was followed with no child left behind. This coupled with re
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What it comes down to is that the govt sees that pvt schools are doing a better job than the govt schools.
Instead of making the govt schools better, make the pvt schools share the load.
Spend 35 grand per pupil in the "govt" schools and they will magically get better.
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That's a different world from India. According to the article, the posh private school is $1,500 per year, and the government only pays $300 for the 25% poor students it has forced the school to take. $1,500 per year is less than 1/10th what some US states pay per pupil.
Doing some poking around, it appears the average primary school teacher salary is about $3,000 per year in India, with a student:teacher ratio of 40:1, meaning the government expenditure on teaching is only $75/year per student. Even so, tha
Actually... no. Several of them. (Score:2)
If I take my money, which belongs to me, and I open *my* school, it's *my* business - and no one elses.
No one else has *any* right to come along and order me around - let alone ordering me who my students will be.
First of all, running an education establishment like a business will inevitably lead to intellectual bankruptcy - education is a public service.
As such, it is A-OK for public service to lose money as long as it provides acceptable service - which is education, which in turn is there to provide progress and higher standard of living and happiness for both citizens AND their society in general.
That is why it is A-OK for the education sector to be subsidized by the government. Which leads us to the next point
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Actually in the UK no school gives out diplomas, the students of private schools just pay a fee to sit the same exams from the same exam boards as everyone else does.
(I'm not sure why they should have to pay a fee when everyone else gets to sit the exams at the expense of the taxpayer)
Anyway, in the US do high schools seriously get to adjudicate and hand out their own diplomas? Isn't that system just perfectly set up for abuse, variability, cheating and anything else you can think of?
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The UK system isn't perfect. Now that we have multiple exam boards, each handing out certificates that are nominally of the same value, there's an incentive for teachers to shop around for the easiest exam for their pupils. In the USA, the high school diploma typically isn't worth much - it's like having 5 GCSE, something that's just expected of anyone who is mostly literate and numerate. Individual schools with a good reputation may give out diplomas that are more valuable, but universities are more lik
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"How many charities are founded by rich people? By their very nature, almost all of them."
Nonsense. There are millions of charities in the world. The number set up by some rich guy with an endowment is miniscule compared to all the grass roots efforts.
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USA before 1965. That was not difficult, was it?
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You put in awful lot of faith in the free market working in education. Can you point to a single situation where it has worked? Looking at any list of the world's top economies or eduction systems shows a list filled with countries with a strong government investment in education.
USA before 1965. That was not difficult, was it?
To understand how the US got where it is today you need to understand one important detail: up to around 1950 the US was a strongly immigration driven economy - unlike any of the other major economies.
If you look at key "US inventions" before 1965 resulting in a Nobel prize then virtually all of them were invented by people who were born and taught elsewhere (mostly in Europe) and then emigrated to the US . If you look at the list of Nobel laureates there's barely anyone born and educated in the US in that
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Well, since you are a government shill, I am not really surprised to see you in yet another thread of mine, but you are wrong here just as well.
I am not talking about Nobel prize winners or anything of the sort. I am clearly talking about public schools, which are overpriced in USA today, which is on the brink of economic disaster of unimaginable magnitude, all due to its government driven economic policies that destroy the free market competition.
1979 was when they introduced the DOE, but 1965 was when the
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1979-80 was when they created the 'department of education', so that was clearly a huge loss for education quality and affordability, but 1965 was when they passed SS act and Medicare as well, so they started collecting even more taxes for government spending and growing, that's why I hold that year as an important one in terms of affordable education and other services (health care, insurance) becoming the thing of the past.
People used to be able to pay for their education and health care before government
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Well, we are in the story about a successful private schooling system in India being raided by the government, so that's one. But USA used to have private schooling system - private schools, which provided competitive education at affordable rates before federal government brought in all sorts of money, which created artificial demand and pushed prices up and quality down, simply because there is no reason to bother with quality - anybody can get a loan, and there is no reason to bother with competitive af
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Your example is a system that struggled, then failed, then struggled again, then only when we went to war and the Government was the customer to the booming industries in the US and factories were full of relatively cheap labor (women mostly) did it start to thrive again?
- this sentence by (probably) a US 'educated' AC, is the example of the magnitude of sheer ignorance on the role that the government of US played in creation of the Great Depression via money printing in late twenties, to pump up the valuation of UK pound, which then lead to an asset bubble, resulting in the market collapse, which then prompted the US government to do all sorts of spending, bail outs and stimulus, that I have outlined here in some detail [slashdot.org]
The Great Depression ended only once the WWII ended,
Run-on? More like a marathon! (Score:2)
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You read it, you understood it, I am not a book writer, so what's your problem? Or should I write it in my mother tongue instead to make it easier for you to comprehend?