I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay
schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan
to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market.
That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn’t it? I think it’s
the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft,
sensuous labials of the first syllable.
Here is more.
I think this is the more notable quote: Children… have positive rights. They have a right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care on someone else’s dime.
That particular quote from McArdle is a good example of the sort of sophomoric smart-assery that turns this liberal away from most libertarian blogs.
First graders should take the SAT?
It’s all about performance measurement. Private schools face the same problem. They solve it by selection.
“her whole argument seems a bit immature, like that of many libertarians who lock themselves in their apartments and read ayn rand and contemplate on how much superior they are to everyone else.”
Oh, sweet irony.
Tracy W
Are you talking about what is done in Virginia
or about some ideal plan you have in your mind?
In Virginia, the school systems lose the money,
and there may be no other school system around
that they can go to. Send them somewhere else
while the schools restructure is not what happens.
Your point that for some things one might want to
test for improvement somehow or other, while for
others one may be interested in absolute levels
is reasonable. But, which subjects are which and
who is to decide and what instruments will they use?
Whatever instrument is used, the system will focus
on satisfying that instrument and nothing else. I
would suggest that this is instantly narrowing. It
may be OK for dealing with the worst off students,
but for the rest it is deadly dull. Everybody in
Virginia knows that you do not want to send your kid
to some school where they are worried about whether
they are meeting the standards or not, because unless
your kid is a moron, the school will be garbage, a
dump full of rote memorization of narrow material and
nothing else.
That is a novel idea.
I say we pay the Defense Department using the same…market.
The way I figure, they owe us a $500 billion refund.
One question that I have about all of these counterarguments about “real learning” versus “memorizing a lot of facts.”
What exactly is the point of early education… high school aside, other than to learn basic facts like multiplication tables, world geography, how to read, vocabulary improvement, basic animal names and maybe habitats, and to get skills in how to continue increasing the number of facts that you know in the future?
When did learning suddenly become so violently divorced from “factual knowledge” and what is the fuzzy and intangible idea of “really learning” that liberals and teachers’ unions in particular scream and rant and cry and bemoan the lack of in the accountability systems that underly the evaluation systems (tests, performance evals, etc) of things like the SOLs and NCLB?
Seriously, a straight answer would be nice, because in all the blogside and real life bickering about this issue i have had to sit through or been a party to, I have yet to hear a coherent or even marginal answer about how education, especially elementary and to a large extent middle-school/junior high education can’t be boiled down into testable facts and memorization.
And as far as I know no primary-junior high schools are giving standardized tests in vocational or research/theory-based classes where the “learning ability” is somehow not intrinsically tied to the ability of an instructor to convey facts and evaluate students in their grasp, competence, or uninterest and refusal to learn said facts. Really!
Megan McArdle/Jane Galt is exactly right. And here’s why it’s vitally important.
The truth is that the only government policy that will have an inevitable impact on long term school performance is immigration policy. Import more highly skilled people and/or fewer unskilled people and in the long run you will have higher scoring students.
If you cut funding for the schools that obviously need it the most, how could one expect them to ever improve? It seems that cutting their funding would only sentence them to a form of education that simply would not prepare it’s students for the real world. Teachers have one of the most important jobs, pay them more to do an already difficult job, and I’m sure the results would be satisfactory.
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