Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Stupid, Capitalism 
and Education

 
part 5

It wasn’t always the case that America had state run schools. Once upon a time it was the communities that set up their own schools, and many parents home schooled. Back then, of course, teachers made very little money, but then it was the kids education and the future of society that mattered more, so there was plenty of volunteering. It wasn’t until around the 1830’s that the drive for state run schools was instituted.

Back then there was plenty of justified suspicion as to this matter. When the Massachusetts State Board of Education was formed, it was then promptly abolished. It was obvious that the organization was to lead to a centralization and monopoly of power in a few hands, and thus “anti-democratic” in its inception. How true!

Horace Mann, the so called Father of Public Education, believed that public schooling could cure all sorts of social ills. All in the name of reducing crime, he touted that 9/10ths of the penal code would soon be eradicated. Is that what happened?

These dreaming collectivists created a system that became the adversary of the good. Left to their own devices, private schools would have expanded. The money they saved could have been used to help the charities of the day.

Literally, we are protecting our kids from the benefits of competition by forcing them to exist inside of the system of a monopoly. I get a pretty good regular cup of coffee from a local Starbucks for about $1.50. The surrounding coffee service providers are forced to keep their coffee prices down in order to maintain a competitive edge. Their coffee had better be competitive too, or they won’t even make that margin. If you could only get coffee in one place, you’d be paying taxes on the coffee and have a limited choice as to what would be served... then what sort of service would you receive?

Monopolies don’t innovate. In much the same way as they hand out drab olive colored clothing to citizens in communist countries, these monopolies have “Orwellian” overtones contained in their prime directives. Why does school run from September to June? The Farm calendar from the early 1830’s is the template for this schedule.  Back then, the summer was for planting crops. Today we are no longer agrarian in our efforts on a major scale as a nation. But the public school system is one of blind obedience, not a responder to changing times. Year round schooling might even create shorter school days for kids and increase the amount of covered studies, many parents would indeed support the change. Less than 2% of our country lives by the farming cycle now, but has public education responded? You tell me.

We’re finding today that teenagers actually perform better on a later schedule than the early morning start, due to their unique physiology, but schools have done nothing to adjust to the findings. This should tell you something about the response they have to outdated methods also.

If you believe that America has the best education system in the world, you must be living under a rock. But, its not your fault, you’re not allowed to see anything better.

It would be nice to abolish government involvement in education all  together, but American’s are addicted to feeding at the teet of the Government. Sadly, there is simply no courage to move out on your own when mom and dad are willing to pay your bills for you.

The difference however, is that Government funded would be a better alternative than Government run. Our schools should have that “Starbucks” look, where we have a choice to go somewhere else for a low priced, excellent product. Customers get to decide where they want to have their coffee, and they should also get the choice of where they want to get their kids education. Vote with the feet. Vote with the wallet. It makes for superior choices.   

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Stupid, Capitalism 
and Education

part 4

It has been reported that teachers in New York City can be paid somewhere in the amount of 60 to 70 thousand dollars. For a nine month job, that’s not too shabby. But if you ask teachers they will tell you they work hard enough to be paid 85 to 90 thousand. And why not? Indeed they are given a huge responsibility for bringing up the next generation of our society. NYC teachers also have a pension plan with a government guarantee of an 8.25 per cent return. They are not taxed and the teachers also get ten days per year sick leave.

In the national sense, however, most teachers do make less. Most of the K-12 teachers make around 45 grand a year, but they only work nine months a year. For three months they receive paychecks and are free to do as they please every day. They make more than a chemist and computer programmer on an hourly wage basis.

But just imagine a free market of education. Parents would demand a bigger share of that government spending of $250,000 per classroom for great educators for their kids. Demand would make the value of teachers go even higher, and they could challenge entertainers and athletes for outrageous salaries.

How Much Money Does it Take?

 

Are they really underpaid? Why would you keep teaching if other opportunities arose that you could succeed at and make more money with. Are there that many sacrificial heroes in teaching? Do they all have Machiavellian type paradigms as they spend their own money to see to it that their kids have books and pencils? If teachers were paid too little, then they would never be able to retain teachers, we would have shortages all over the country. But statistics prove other wise. Many schools have multiple applications for each available position. At charter schools, teachers often make about 15-20 percent more than the government public school counterparts. One size fits all contracts reward bad teachers and punish good teachers. It’s a crying shame is what it is.

The Truth About Home schooling

A growing number of parents fed up with public schools are opting for home schooling their kids. The numbers are still comparatively low, but they make headway every year.

The argument of course, is that socialization suffers in the home schooled child. But a lot of that is just assumptions of those who march in lock step with the establishment. School is where you are supposed to pay attention to the teacher, not have concerns over your classmates and their presence around you.

Home schooled kids have about four hours a day of real school. The rest of they day, usually spent trapped in the school system of regimented daily routines, can be spent for all the social involvement one needs. And that social involvement can be controlled. There is no need to remind parents of the horror that many kids go through as they step from a social environment of the home, where they are loved and accepted (hopefully) to an environment of neurotics and ego insecure strangers.

Everyone knows how puberty can ruin a perfectly sweet and good kid, why subject them to a society of children all being effected? As an added note, just keep in mind the success of Asian children as they practice a common theme for themselves on the way to school achievement. They often get together with friends to actually do the study and homework, and this is a trait that has made many an Asian child a top performer. They don’t struggle with the social paradigms of “giving into the man” if they are a good student, and the results have us all looking for doctors and lawyers and professionals from all walks of life who are Asian. Not because they are Asian, but because of the stand they take on studying throughout their scholastic careers.

It’s a statistical fact that home schooled kids consistently score 15-20 percent higher than kids in a school system setting. They also score higher on the ACT, about 10 percent higher. Schools held at homes have  freedom and love of the learning experience that has until now been crushed by the regimen of the system, and it shows in the results.

The “great thinkers” of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s  who wanted to create a society of piece meal workers who only knew how to repeat the same job over and over until the day they die, have sent us all into a hell no one could ever have foreseen. Home schooling is re-awakening the human spirit that was crushed with industrial maneuvering over the scholastic lives of America’s children. Only with the continual destruction of a system meant to enslave our kids can we see the true benefits of doing away with a system that has made our kids stupid all in the name of big money men who wanted to socially engineer their own workforce.

Voucher anyone?

But what if we gave parents education vouchers? One of these could be as much as $5,000 a year and would be attached to the child so that the parent could send the child to the best school that they could choose.

Critics say that these could destroy public education. (And your point is?......) Public schools would then be overrun with nothing but problem kids and this would turn them into public detention centers and they would not longer be schools. Sure, money would disappear from the system with a big sucking sound you could hear all across America.

This would in turn force the government to make long needed changes to maintain their own position as a school and not a detention center. What would they do? I think that perhaps they have no clue what would happen then. Just keep your kids in our unproductive system, it’s the good kids and the involved parents that keep them the way they are, for without them, the bad kids and uninvolved parents would have no leg to stand on. Remember, teachers and kids who give a dam are punished and the converse are kept afloat. It’s the American school system way. 

The school system in Milwaukee has actually tried the voucher system and the results proved that students everywhere did a better job, those who were pulled out of the public school and also those who remained. The public schools were forced to try harder and be more competent as the money went in other directions, and the kids improved in their performance.

Amazingly, organizations like “People for the American Way” have actually filed lawsuits over the voucher program, stating that it violates the separation of church and state. They say this because lots of parents with vouchers send their kids to religious schools. This was a huge threat, since most schools who are not government schools are indeed religious organizations. However, the ruling was that as long as parents chose those schools and as long as the government did not force them to go to those schools, then the violation was not present. The U.S Supreme court agreed.

Allowing for school choice is nothing new. The G.I. bill sent over 2 million soldiers to college after World War II and some of those colleges were the likes of Notre Dame and Bringham Young. Soldiers could choose whatever school they wanted. American colleges were sparked by the competition for government money from vouchers and in the end result, American colleges are now sought after institutions all over the world. 

more on this next time

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Stupid, Capitalism 
and Education

part 3

All over America thousands of Catholic schools outperform government schools. They spend less than half as much money. Average teachers make more than the top they are paid at Catholic schools, but Catholic schools get the job done. Why? Because they want to be there. They are not as well qualified, they don’t have fancy degrees. But, they are successful in ways public schools can only dream about. 

There are those who will tell you that Catholic schools succeed the way that they do because they have a choice of students. Public schools must take everyone. Catholic schools are able to throw out the trouble makers, but they rarely do. The parents and the students both know that expulsion could happen at any time. Catholic schools involve the parents in ways that public schools simply don’t bother with. Problem kids get the education that is coming their way, they have no choice in the matter.

The Catholic school system has the freedom to fail students without interference and this is one of the main reasons they are as successful as they are. New York City’s CHS system serves the same disadvantaged population as the government does, but they graduate 99% of their students. Government schools hover around the 50% range for student graduation. A huge difference that continues despite the obvious results of the two systems. Whom does the public school system serve? Whom do they REALLY serve?

Of course, there are always the charter schools to go to if Catholic school is not your thing. But try to open one. For many who try to open charter schools, or perhaps, switch out a government run school into a charter school, the headaches are enormous. There are massive amounts of government regulations that attempt to limit and control the abilities of charter schools. There have been instances of the public schools fighting the development of charter schools all the way to the Supreme Court. The bottom line here, is of course, the money being lost to charter schools. It seems the development of future generations of educated kids comes at a price. 

A Governor of a southern state was once offered to place his kids in the best schools in his area by the school board. The local school was sub par, and if he had not been Governor, his kids would have been required to attend that school because of the location of his residence. But for the Governor, the rules didn’t apply. 

He then decided that he would institute a plan that would help all kids with their education and called the plan: Put Parents in Charge. Parents could choose any school they wanted and if they wanted to go to a private school, then they would receive a tax credit to assist them with the choice. 

Competition makes everything better. No one would settle for just one kind of product these days, not when production moves us all ahead in various ways in the relentless pursuit of the top profit spot. With kids falling through the cracks right now, how can we continue to ignore the process of competition? But the school boards are locked into their testament of fear, despite the obvious results in every other facet of life. 

The Governor’s plan of Putting Parents in Charge was voted down by the legislature as being a “victory” for education. The claims being that they system is too accountable to allow competition to ruin our education system, it’s just not a proven commodity, at least not where education is considered. But that commodity is proven in every other area of life. Never mind that, though. 

Accountability is the very reason Private and Catholic schools do better than public schools. Everyone there works to make sure the product, an educated human child, is what is produced. If they don’t produce them, the administrator is out of a job.   

The USSR was a government monopoly, and we all know what has happened there. The only thing worse is a unionized government monopoly. If teachers are all paid the same, and they can’t be fired, then they can fart around all day and the kids don’t matter anyhow. Just deliver the health benefits and let them have their coffee lounge.

New York City has something called the NTE, the National Teacher’s Examination. Many teachers refuse to take these tests, even though they are used to determine benefits and pay scales. Teachers in the system are mediocre because it is tolerated. They are all paid the same. 

(Just take a look at the Movie: Waiting on Superman, for an inside look at how these things happen.)

Teachers are ferried around from school to school in the dance of the lemons because excellence is barred by contract. In this contract there are 205 pages of rules to follow. Union monopolies create these kinds of things. The rules forbid paying excellent teachers more than others and they also prohibit firing of teachers who rarely show up for class or maybe have a thing for one of their students. Teachers who are violent, incompetent or sexually aggressive to students make big bucks, and the litigation to fire them is cost prohibitive... so they say.

Tax payers pay millions every year for unproductive teachers in the public school system. Many are put in holding, throwing their own lives away each day as they DO NOT teach, but might as well be watching TV for a living. The system keeps them even though they are afraid to let them near a student. The contract demands that. Avoiding getting in trouble with the union creates an atmosphere where the lazy people drag everyone else down. 

In contrast, it is competition that always stimulates innovation. At KIPP charter schools, kids may stay in class until 5pm every day. They have school on Saturday every other day of the week. Kids and parents have the cell phone numbers of teachers who are always on call to help students with class work. People are involved in these types of schools and the difference shows. Everyone has a jobs here, and the students are the ones who benefit. The student has the job of succeeding in school. The Teacher has the job of turning out high graduation rates for kids who have actually done the work and succeeded, and the parents are the supporters and nurtures of the process.

more on this next time

This is an interesting website, it has some great points to make about what is going on in the world of teaching.  

http://www.belch.com/blog/category/why-homeschool/

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

A Sylvan Learning Center

Stupid, Capitalism and Education


part 2

Those who administer the international tests to students at about the age of 15, say that the freedom to choose a school and the act of schools governing themselves, matters more than the people who run those schools. It is increasingly obvious that the freedom for parents to choose and the freedom for schools to create the type of school they want is more important than the ability to create a uniformed, “lock step” type society within schools which produce more and more inferior educational results. Since 1989 Belgium and France have shown marked differences with divergent types of schools on each side of the country. The kids on the Flemish side of the country do remarkably better in the international tests  than the French side, and they have a greater autonomy. 

Better for the Disadvantaged?

The Public School officials will tell the public that the school system levels the playing field.  According to them, the poor and minorities are given better opportunities to succeed. It’s a load of hogwash. Public schools are regularly more segregated than private schools. Studies have shown that 54% of public school students were in classrooms that were 90% white or more than 90% minority. Only around 40% of private school students had the same experience.*

*Education Myths, Jay Green

These statistics are the result of the wealthy being able to move near good schools, and the poor being stuck with what they can get. Washington DC has a school called, Ballou High; a place where teachers often don’t even show up. And why should they since they can’t be fired? The kids have no where to go, hanging in the hallways, they know they are stuck and it seems no one cares. Of course, she and her parents could try to pretend that they live in another school district, but then the school zone border patrol might exercise their right to control trespassers. 

Where Liberals Run Wild and Free

Even in California, “the left coast”, school detectives go around making sure kids in schools of the Freemont district actually live where they say they do. Freemont schools are markedly better than the surrounding schools in the area, and kids and parents who want better have to become clandestine to do so. One grandmother who created a room and address for her grandson was “caught” as she tried to give her grand kid a better education. Big Brother saw to it that a better education was denied as they “corrected” the situation. Can you say, “Papers please!” 

I can remember my own high school experience of being forced into a remedial reading class my freshman year, all of us were, even the kids who were in the “A” class. So pervasive is the poor education that is being produced, that even the “brains” have to be screened. One might think that all is the fault of the kids themselves, their parents, or maybe the media influence upon them. You would be right, of course, to claim that parents who read to their kids create better readers. Parents who take an interest in the school work of their kids, make better students for teachers, and the teacher’s job is much less insurmountable. Many parents however, have no option but to send their kids to these horrific schools created by the government system.

Ah, well... someone has to work for the Government

The U. S Department of Education says that  25% of American high school students can’t read at a basic level. They tell the kids to just go home and read on their own, the kid plays video games instead, and the system passes them to the next level anyway. Some of these kids were taken by a private investigative party to the Sylvan Learning Center and in 72 hours of instruction the reading comprehension jumped two grade levels. The government system loves to have meetings with parents and throw around all sorts of high sounding words and existentialist philosophy, then deny the reality of kids who graduate from their schools that still cannot read, but the final statistics show that private institutions succeed in teaching kids even the basics of reading at an alarmingly more efficient rate over the long term.

Is there an answer?

Sylvan learning centers are an example of accountability. They have to do what they say they will do, if not: no business, no income. A Sylvan program may cost upwards of about $3,000 dollars, the government spends about $10,000 on a child’s education. Why not just fund the parents for going to private instruction? Perhaps the bloated costs are not all they have to be. 

Supposedly, the public schools have no money. Just study the abject failure of “No Child Left Behind”, an exercise in government excess at the planning stage with no execution afterward, due to “lack of funding”. When one asks school officials if more money would be the answer, they always reply in the affirmative. More money would indeed fix the problem. How much you ask? Millions. They tell you millions would fix the school system.

Right now they spend about 10,000 per student. In a class of 25 that’s $250,000, and that’s per classroom. That’s all operating money, not capital expense. The surrounding infrastructure are all paid for. With $250,000  a lot can be done to make the student experience radically different than it is at this point.

The stats don’t lie though, America spends more on education that it does on the military, and we still score lower than most countries that spend less. It makes one wonder if the education system isn’t just a store front for another kind of organization in the shadows.  Spending billions on “country clubbing” up the schools has only made the education system results worse. 

Spending from 1971 to 2001 went from $4,479 per student to $8,996 per student. High school graduation rates from ‘71 to ‘01 went from 75.6% to 72.2% during the same duration. The facts are irrefutable, one can give the American school system all the money it wants, and things just don’t get better. 

And yet, all that money goes ..... somewhere....

All over the country there are schools that outperform the government public schools. In South Carolina, there is a school where kids jump from their chairs to answer math questions in a “math game” exercise. They play relay math. They play bingo. They play “phonics around the world”. 

This school, called “Middleton” charges about $3,000 per student, less than half of the money the government gives to the public schools in the surrounding area. Students there do better there with less money spent. Parents pay for the extra, despite the fact that they already are taxed and paying for the surrounding public schools; because their kids are fundamentally superior students.

more on this next time

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Students of the Wildly Successful European School System

Stupid, Capitalism and Education

When one looks at the histories of nations in the last 2,000 years or so, there is a definite dichotomy of progress that is readily observable. Some may point out a racial divergence as the source of this progress, but they would be over simplifying cause and effect. The bottom line is that when we consider the countries of Western Europe, we see a progress that the rest of the world still has not been blessed with.

One can observe the histories of African nations, Samoan nations, and even the Middle East, and there is a consistency of action among these nations that has held them at bay from the beneficial onset of Western European type progress, which is more than skin deep. Britain, France, Spain, Italy and surrounding nations in the late 18th century and beyond all competed for the larger piece of the “world pie”.

The Real Tool of Motivation

 

Competition was the name of the game, and its fanatical use was instrumental in the changing of the face of the world, for better or for worse. The evidence of the benefits of competition is undeniable. Evidence of the lack of it, in the nations that have stayed behind, living in the former centuries even today, is also ubiquitous.

This has also worked toward the benefit of mankind in the smaller arena of business and entertainment. How many creative ideas have come from the imaginary stage of Hollywood, searching for the next big money draw, only to end up as a similar reality in the world of business. My grandfather would be amazed at our society wide use of hand held devices whereby one can even chat live with another person face to face, much like the old Dick Tracy wrist watches. This is not the only part of the result of competition, but inclusive is also the speed at which innovation is taking place. Those who have passed away only in the last 25 years or so, say in the ‘80’s, knew nothing of the internet, cell phones, electric cars, artificial limbs that respond to brain waves, and any number of innovations brought about by invention in just the recent years of mankind’s history. An yet how many of us fondly remember the 80’s as though it were yesterday?

Sadly, much can be said about the lack of competition and it’s stifling effects when it comes to education and our schools. Much like those anachronistic nations I have mentioned, our schools have not just floundered, but they have fallen behind and deteriorated. Hijacked by those with business and sociological agendas, our kids have become intellectual anathema in the scholastic realm.

Stupid is a hard word. It carries with it certain judgements and requirements for plausibility that may or may not have real world applications. It is also relative, as many of our popular beliefs will lead you to believe that we, today, are OF COURSE, intellectually superior than any group of people who has ever lived.

We're Smarter, but closer to annihilation

I recently saw the movie Thor, and they even mention this type of thinking in relation to Norse mythology. The statement is made that primitive people such as the Vikings would have worshiped Thor as a god, clearly implying that we today are way too smart for that sort of thing. Yet, how ignorant can this concept be when we consider the gross dilapidation of our educational system. Vikings may have not discovered the atom, but they were far from stupid cave dwelling types. In fact, over history, nobody was a stupid cave man type. Stupid people die quickly, they don’t survive to make more stupid. They just didn’t have the educational progress that we today supposedly have, although much of what we are taught in school is now subject to scrutiny as revisionist in compliance with industrial agendas of the past.

Science must be observable, unless it happened millions of years ago

An example of this would be carbon-14 dating. Wholly believed to be evidence that substantiates such things as a Paleolithic period by droves of students who attend grade schools and on into college, little is mentioned, if ever, of the intrinsic need for atmospheric conditions to be conducive to the rate of carbon-14 atom creation. Simply because there is a certain amount of carbon-14 in a dinosaur bone, an imaginary extrapolation about the term of age of said bone is produced and then expanded in to “what must have been”, based upon the “evidence”. However, had the environment been such that carbon-14 production was inhibited until radical atmospheric change took place, then the rate of carbon-14 in ANYTHING is a result of that change and not a result of great age. But you never hear this from grade school history books.

For a better explanation on carbon-14 dating problems please see this link: http://contenderministries.org/evolution/carbon14.php

You would, however, hear about this sort of thing if there were competition over money and power involved. So why the intellectual political slant? Why are out of date “truths” taught to our kids despite the updated advances in our knowledge about such things as carbon-14 dating, which we owe to the progress of competition?

Monopolies. Basically, our education system has gone nowhere fast due to the death grip of monopolies. The monopoly in education is the government itself. If you concede my examples of entire nations throughout history as an example, then you understand the prescriptive point toward the results our education is reeling beneath. A pejorative word for both stupid and union-dominated monopolies that run our school system would be redundant in its essence.

Unionized monopolies create ossified, bloated bureaucracies that do little to help the people they are supposed to serve. One may move from the grass hut to the adobe home, but you’ll never see a skyscraper.

Competition, however, made Europe great. It has made our technology better in leaps and bounds, thanks mostly to Microsoft and Apple. And yes, I have to give credits to the movie industry for blazing a trail of innovation in contributing to technological advances.

We're number two, we try harder

When there is a battle for the almighty dollar, those in competition have to try harder. It often seems that all one needs in advertising is a pretty girl in a bikini. No real need for all the advertising research that is done, since everyone has a firm grip on what sells an audience. But if all advertising was only focused on sex, then where do you go next? Therefore, advertisers must try harder.

Take also as an example of this: the U.S. Postal service. The stigma of lousy service due to ineffectual government employees has remained with them despite their best efforts to compete with private industry such as UPS and FedEx. Today we do have a better postal service than our grandfathers had, but they are still not better than UPS and FedEX. They are still government.

Cell phone companies offer tons of different plans in the hopes of covering an entire market of needs. Education should be doing the same. If people get to choose their kids school then the options would be endless. There would be schools everywhere, for the general to the specific. You could have Wal-Mart type schools, sports schools, music schools, and all of it right at home on the computer. In fact, we have lots of this sort of thing happening already. But not with the public school system.
 

Mark of the Best? hmmm...

Kids from around the world, scratching their heads in disbelief

 
Belgian kids and New Jersey kids were given the same test in one experiment. The Belgian kids thought that the test was easy and believed that the American kids given the same test would have no trouble. Not so. The schools the kids came from were comparable in their performance, but the Belgian kids scored 30% higher in the test scores. The American kids were shocked at the rate of advancement of those Belgian kids.

At the age of ten, students from twenty five countries take the same test and kids in America place eighth in ranking. (Singapore. Guess who is number one? Finland.) But by the time they reach fifteen, American kids are in the bottom of the chart at 25th place. The longer American kids stay in school, the worse they do in international competition. Poorer countries like Korea and Poland score much higher and spend less on education.

But government education in America is a monopoly. Families who send kids to public school must take what they are given. Is your school terrible? Do the teachers get moved around from school to school no matter how bad they are? Tough. Taxes pay for it, that’s what you get, government employed teachers. Just like the post office, teachers in government employ become a part of the substandard system. And why not? They can’t be fired.

The government often fails to live up to the market need in many facets of life. Instead of being a regulator of private industry (God help us!) or a delegate to private industry, it attempts to offer the “yellow box” product  or service to the public. Government airlines and automobiles like the “Trabant” are prime examples of this grade C type of production.

Can anyone remember the government phone company? Every phone was black, and an answering machine was an “illegal device”. Once the monopoly was broken up and competition was introduced, the phone market took off. Just take a look at old phones and compare the usage we have today since the introduction of competition. That is only in a little over 60 years and it won’t be long at this rate before “Star Trek” type communication is considered quaint in the face of the new technological reality.

Other countries have government run schools, but the money from the government is given to the kids and their parents so that they may choose where they want to go.  Schools are forced to innovate in order to appeal to parents so that business comes their way, even if that business brings in the government’s own money. The funding comes from the customer, so to speak, not from an office in City Hall and the like.                  

   
More on this next time