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Our small town school district has very similar cheating going on with the state tests. The teachers involved are fairly bold about it. The kids would talk abou

by bendoit 12y ago

Our small town school district has very similar cheating going on with the state tests. The teachers involved are fairly bold about it. The kids would talk about getting advance copies of the final secured tests to bring home and practice with. I made copies of these tests, contacted the state department of education, and tried to report it. That was difficult and there was a lot of runaround regarding who would accept reports. Technically parents and others are not allowed to report cheating, it is to be done only by school staff. I then contacted several local media reporters. They were surprisingly uninterested, perhaps since nearly everyone around has family members that work for schools in some capacity or another. After contacting media though the state board must have heard what I was trying to do because the person in charge of testing at the state level personally contacted me, told me that although it might technically be considered cheating it wasn't really cheating, and that there was nothing to report. Why is all this? Everyone is cheating, everyone knows they're cheating, and they all think they are so clever cheating the system because it results somehow in more federal funding via race to the top grants and the like. I let my kids finish this school year. But that's the last year in that system, and now we are going back to homeschooling where they can learn something. Despite the advantages of cheating, the school has almost total dedication to test preparation every day of the year and no time for real academics. School is a tedious bore and the students are ignorant.

kdragon 12y ago
"There's a reason education sucks, it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club." - George Carlin There's your answer to why. The answer to how involves more details, but it basically has to do with pacifying the concept of critical thinking from our education system and all facets of american culture, and replacing it with rote learning. It's a lower form of intelligence, which is great for passing arbitrary tests and producing the obedient workers who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. The best thing you can do for a child is teach them how to think and learn for themselves. Grow their critical thinking skills and get them into programming or engineering. Teach them empathy. Oh, and buy them a bitcoin.
- maximumoverload 12y ago
  Yeah, I don't think there is a conspiracy. I think you are full of it. edit: see, that was a critical thinking.
  - sp332 12y ago
    It's not a conspiracy, it's a self-organizing system. Each person acts in their own interests with the information and resources they have available, and this is the end result.
    - kdragon 12y ago
      Exactly.
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    No it wasn't, and just calling it that just highlights the problem.
- Loughla 12y ago
  As someone inside the higher education machine and who is married to a long-time teacher, that's false; there is no conspiracy to keep kids dumb in schools. The problem is that we're tasked with coming up with a universal system of education for an unbelievably varied skill set presented by students. So, we shoot for the middle (or just slightly below the middle when parents complain that it's too hard). Combine that with apathy and burn-out among the aging workforce in education, and you get the full picture. There's no conspiracy, just an averaging out of student abilities and bitter, resigned teachers who are tired of being told how to do their jobs by politicians and loud-mouths in the media. Whether or not critical thinking skills are being fostered in our current system in all classrooms, that's another question. But, there is no conspiracy. As a side note; working in programming and engineering doesn't magically imbue a person with more or better critical thinking skills than English literature or art history.
  - danielweber 12y ago
marvin 12y ago
Are there private schools in the US that are reasonably priced? There is one thing that going to a school with ambitious and reasonably well-behaved kids will teach you better than homeschooling: The social skills and games required to navigate the world around you. Interesting comment by the way. Ridiculous that it has become this bad.
- prawks 12y ago
  In my (somewhat limited, I don't have kids, but went to school in towns with many options for private education) experience, private schooling in the US at every level is prohibitively expensive for all but the upper-middle class, and even then is usually a significant financial burden.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    It really depends on your social circle. When pricing private schools, you need to realize that the very top will always be crazy expensive, because the very richest parents are paying whatever it takes to make sure their kids only interact with the kids of other rich parents. Whether this is effective is debatable, but enough do it that you have to slice them out of any analysis. Private schooling doesn't have to be crazy expensive. 15 students in a room paying $500 a month is $7500 in revenue, and with roughly half going to overhead that still leaves $3750 going to the teacher, which over 10 months is a little less than the average US wage. If you make the workplace pleasant enough (such as not requiring teachers to have co-workers who cannot be fired) you can fill the roles. That's about 5K a year. We can probably go down a huge rat-hole of whether a middle-class family can "afford" 5K, but I don't think it crosses into the lines of "prohibitively expensive." There are also Catholic schools, which used to be much more prevalent, but they still exist.
    - prawks 12y ago
      My mistake in wording, I didn't mean that it was prohibitively expensive by necessity. It seems that education costs are artificially inflated in the US at all levels. I agree completely that education doesn't need to be expensive to be effective.

by bendoit 12y ago

kdragon 12y ago

"There's a reason education sucks, it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club." - George Carlin There's your answer to why. The answer to how involves more details, but it basically has to do with pacifying the concept of critical thinking from our education system and all facets of american culture, and replacing it with rote learning. It's a lower form of intelligence, which is great for passing arbitrary tests and producing the obedient workers who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. The best thing you can do for a child is teach them how to think and learn for themselves. Grow their critical thinking skills and get them into programming or engineering. Teach them empathy. Oh, and buy them a bitcoin.

maximumoverload 12y ago
Yeah, I don't think there is a conspiracy. I think you are full of it. edit: see, that was a critical thinking.
- sp332 12y ago
  It's not a conspiracy, it's a self-organizing system. Each person acts in their own interests with the information and resources they have available, and this is the end result.
  - kdragon 12y ago
    Exactly.
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  No it wasn't, and just calling it that just highlights the problem.
Loughla 12y ago
As someone inside the higher education machine and who is married to a long-time teacher, that's false; there is no conspiracy to keep kids dumb in schools. The problem is that we're tasked with coming up with a universal system of education for an unbelievably varied skill set presented by students. So, we shoot for the middle (or just slightly below the middle when parents complain that it's too hard). Combine that with apathy and burn-out among the aging workforce in education, and you get the full picture. There's no conspiracy, just an averaging out of student abilities and bitter, resigned teachers who are tired of being told how to do their jobs by politicians and loud-mouths in the media. Whether or not critical thinking skills are being fostered in our current system in all classrooms, that's another question. But, there is no conspiracy. As a side note; working in programming and engineering doesn't magically imbue a person with more or better critical thinking skills than English literature or art history.
- danielweber 12y ago

marvin 12y ago

Are there private schools in the US that are reasonably priced? There is one thing that going to a school with ambitious and reasonably well-behaved kids will teach you better than homeschooling: The social skills and games required to navigate the world around you. Interesting comment by the way. Ridiculous that it has become this bad.

prawks 12y ago
In my (somewhat limited, I don't have kids, but went to school in towns with many options for private education) experience, private schooling in the US at every level is prohibitively expensive for all but the upper-middle class, and even then is usually a significant financial burden.
- danielweber 12y ago
  It really depends on your social circle. When pricing private schools, you need to realize that the very top will always be crazy expensive, because the very richest parents are paying whatever it takes to make sure their kids only interact with the kids of other rich parents. Whether this is effective is debatable, but enough do it that you have to slice them out of any analysis. Private schooling doesn't have to be crazy expensive. 15 students in a room paying $500 a month is $7500 in revenue, and with roughly half going to overhead that still leaves $3750 going to the teacher, which over 10 months is a little less than the average US wage. If you make the workplace pleasant enough (such as not requiring teachers to have co-workers who cannot be fired) you can fill the roles. That's about 5K a year. We can probably go down a huge rat-hole of whether a middle-class family can "afford" 5K, but I don't think it crosses into the lines of "prohibitively expensive." There are also Catholic schools, which used to be much more prevalent, but they still exist.
  - prawks 12y ago
    My mistake in wording, I didn't mean that it was prohibitively expensive by necessity. It seems that education costs are artificially inflated in the US at all levels. I agree completely that education doesn't need to be expensive to be effective.