Obviously, this was not a good day to leave my camera at home. First the interesting James Smith speech, then Jim Rex visited us to report on his first year in office.
He talked for some length about his initiatives pushing public school choice. He had a lot to say about it, some of which I captured on my phone above (sorry again about the quality).
I haven’t really had time to go through all my notes yet from this meeting. When I do, maybe I’ll find the beginnings of a column; I don’t know. But in the meantime, I’ll share his response to my expressing one of my big reservations about school "choice," whether it’s public or private.
Specifically, I worry that there’s no way to administer choice so that everybody has access to it (which is why I’m always preaching that we need to improve ALL the schools). In a state where the Legislature won’t even come up with enough money to pay for the gasoline for buses to go where they go NOW, how are kids who don’t have middle-class Moms with a minivan to run them to a program 20 miles away supposed to avail themselves of these opportunities.
Rex had a fairly decent reply to that. He said that if you start a good program — say, single-gender programs — in a few schools, parents across the state will demand the same opportunities, and soon you’ll see it in every corner of the state. In the case of single-gender, the program started in a handful of schools, and this year is in 250. Of course, single-gender is a low-cost kind of "choice" to offer. It’s a little harder to ramp up such programs as Montessori.
But he’s committed to this course.
Again, sorry about the video quality. You know where my usual camera (which by the way is my own personal camera, not the newspaper’s) was? I’d left it at home where I’d taken some pictures of my twin grandbabies, who are — no offense intended here — WAY more photogenic than Jim Rex and James Smith. For proof, see below. (And that’s just ONE of them. I could have shown both, but I didn’t think y’all could stand that much cute.)
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I’ll think about school choice when all the children in our “corridor of shame” have any choice. Until our poorest child has as much access to the schooling he needs as our richest child does, ‘school choice’ is a cruel joke.
The beauty of the free market is that central planners and wannabees don’t have to lay awake at night trying to figure out how to make enough schools available to students who want a choice, and fail anyway.
The market will provide what is needed, with constant adjustment. If government ran fast food restaurants, we would still be waiting for the socialist planners to figure out how and where to build enough hamburger stands and pizza houses for everyone to have exactly the same thing on the first day.
Looks like that cute little girl is preparing herself to carry the weight of all the government burdens that Grandpa Brad hopes to place upon her….
Get ready, kid. We’re counting on you and your sister to pay our Social Security welfare checks and make sure we can go to the doctor for free.
Keep working on those shoulder muscles!
it’s a real shame those central planners in Japan, South Korea, Gernmany, France, etc. do not know how to run an educational system; certainly they do not in India which produces more engineers yearly than the US does total math/science graduates. I wish we had some of their socialist planners over here. China, of course, produces more engineers than we do total graduates. Of course their average students only learn two Chinese dialects and English while ours barely learn English.
“Until our poorest child has as much access to the schooling he needs as our richest child does, ‘school choice’ is a cruel joke.”
Surely you understand that only the most unusual circumstances for both the poorest child and the richest child could ever allow that to happen, Karen.
I don’t live in the “Corridor of Shame,” but I do close to it, in one of the worst school districts in the state, where the best of our schools ranks about 500th out of 600 in its classification on standardized tests.
We have two choices — a charter school with no windows than ranks in the Bottom 10, and the rest of the district, where only one other school apart from the first one I mentioned ranks above the Bottom 10.
I’m unopposed for the school board come November, so starting then, everyone can blame me for our lack of educational choice.
Believe it or not, I like your idealism, but the choices of the rich are not my concern.
I must consider the choices of the relatively poor and the remarkably poor in our drive-in school system, where teachers and administrators drive in from elsewhere, send their children to schools in other districts, and spend their paychecks elsewhere, too.
I must also consider the cadre of foreign-exchange teachers employed at virtual slave wages who cannot speak English as a first language. Their fractured speech cannot be understood by fellow teachers nor children who go home crying to their parents that they don’t know what the teacher said.
We have the worst ACT scores in the state, and not long ago, our high school had the worst arrest record of any school outside the correctional system.
We built that brand new high school six years ago, and though it has won about that many state basketball championships if we add up boys and girls titles since it opened, our consolidated castle on 60 acres has a firm grip on the Bottom 10 in virtually every academic category.
We’re building a brand new middle school now, with a 2,500-seat gymnasium we will probably never fill up, but two years ago, our superintendent laid off all the teachers assistants in special ed because we couldn’t afford to pay them.
The $22 million that school is costing would have helped, but, of course, our state’s funding system wouldn’t allow it to be spent that way, nor would our school board spend it on academics if they could.
They’ve been too busy making sure every academic financial opportunity went to an African-American to worry about little things like academics and discipline.
Two years ago, we hired a felon to handle discipline at the high school.
I’m looking forward to serving on the school board, hoping I’ll find out whether our troubles filter down from the state DOE, the legislature, our local board or our county council.
What do you think I’ll find out?
By the way, our new superintendent has been a deputy superintendent under Rex and Tenebaum over the last three years.
Think that will help us?
george22,
Did you see the NBC special last week on how few Chinese make it to college? In the entire nation of over 1 BILLION people, only 200 were selected to stand an exam for math. 40 of those won a scholarship. The vast majority of Chinese will be just literate enough to work in a sports shoe factory for the rest of their lives.
France and Germany also weed out students constantly into vocational school. The exchange students who were at Dreher had to go back to finish high school and commit to a major while still in high school.
Japan has a strong culture of family, and small families. The 75% of black children born into bastardy and the 70% living with one parent or just a relative cannot compete with that.
Best of luck, pm! You’re going to need it.
When will the edu-ocracy understand that the only area where money will help our schools is by hiring and paying the best teachers and principals? Bricks and mortar, fad programs like single gender, the latest and greatest technology, 4 year old daycare “classes”, and pervasive testing have done little to alter the performance of our schools in South Carolina.
A good education requires a) a motivated and disciplined student body b) a supporting and engaged family structure and c) a skilled teacher who is compensated for his/her talent.
The edu-ocracy thinks they can tinker with all the stuff on the periphery of that triangle and make a difference. They can’t. They haven’t. They won’t.
The schools cannot fix a broken home. The schools have decided not to take a real stand on discipline. And the money that could be used to compensate teachers has been wasted on bureacracy, technology, testing, and fancy buildings.
And when that doesn’t work, all we hear is the same old plea for more money because “it’s for the children!”
If it’s really for the children, let’s give the children a voucher for $10,000 for education every year. Then we’ll see what happens.
A Duke University study cites 350,00 annually, the NIE/NSF study, which Gingrich cites all the time, uses 600,000 for Chinese engineeering graduates. Governments in Japan, Germany, France and many others do focus securing the future of their countries with wiser educational policies than ours which seems to be guided by ‘keep my property taxes low so I can go to USC football games and watch the gladiators-I mean Gamecocks.’ In re NBC-the left leaning MSM-rural Chinese are as poorly served as rural SC students; teach them enough to run the Wal Mart register and be thankful for their job.
Socialist economies are totally materialistic, and they control children to make them into “human resources”, not to develop themselves as individual citizens.
Japan keeps children in school all day and 6 days a week, because schools are a childcare service so the parents can work in the factories. Apartments are tiny, cities are huge and crowded, and children have few places to go or decent activities, so they are kept in school.
Germany, Japan, Scandanavia, Switzerland, and most of Europe have homogenous cultures of people who are willing and able to learn, unlike the US, which is saddled with tens of millions of sub-tropic immigrants and illegal aliens who actively resist education, morality and other self-improvement.
Europe is beginning to get a taste of it with the Muslim and African immigrants and temporary laborers who refuse to exit.
Thanks, Doug. Going in, I’m thinking we need to change “daycare” for 4-year-olds to daycare that teaches 4-year-olds to read.
I can’t understand how anything else could possibly be a better (or cheaper) educational solution for lack of family structure.
What we should have done, or been able to do if the state’s funding parameters allowed it, instead of building new high and middle schools, was to channel some of that $40 million toward kindergarten and give kids a real Head Start that would continue to pay dividends.
It sounds too simple, I know, but to grow a plant, why wait six years after it’s sprouted to water it?
While school is obviously better than the horrible “home life” of many 4-year olds, those in good homes actually don’t benefit much from kindergarten. Studies long ago by Harvard and the University of Michigan found that the learning of those in kindergarten vs control groups were gone by age 8. Boys, especially, are not ready to read at age 4. They may not read at 6 but catch up at 8.
What’s missing from education is the ability of the system to categorize children, to tell us the potential of each category, tell us exactly what needs to be done to each in order to reach that potential or some lesser achievement, and what it will cost. They just wave their hands, demand more money, and blame the taxpayers when they fail over and over.
I read at age 4, Lee. Those who couldn’t never caught up with me, not at age 8, not before high school graduation.
That’s the point — giving fertile minds a chance to germinate.
Mind you, I came from a good home. I learned less in kindergarten than I did at the beckoning of my mother.
But everyone can’t be my mother’s son, and those who can learn need to start learning as early in life as possible to reach their full potential.
Pardon me, but no non-reading six-year-old could catch up to an eight-year-old who had been reading since age 4, unless the system were dumbed down enough to allow it.
Still, I agree with you about categorizing children. It’s important to put the peg in a hole where it fits comfortably, no matter what shape it is.
pm,
I was reading the newspaper at 5, but a lot of boys are 7 or 8 before their reading kicks in. Lots of educational research shows that kindergarten is not going to teach any more than some social skills to many children.
It is time the so-called professionals recognized and admitted that it is a waste of money and other resources to try to send every high school student to college. That is the pipe dream of educrats, who want more students and more spending to build their empires, their income, and their retirement plans.
If the educators cannot categorize students and tell us exactly what they can do with them for what amount of money, those educators need to step aside.
Before they get any more money for any new schemes, they should be able to take a set of students, impose the curriculum and regime on them, and deliver X results for Y dollars. And they should be able to repeat it several times.
Then the taxpayers need to decide if X results is worth Y dollars.