Quote:
Originally Posted by jimjamuser
Maybe paying teachers better salaries and having more competition for teachers' jobs would HELP turn young CHILDREN into BETTER, more productive, smarter, and happier well-adjusted ADULTS ?
..........OH Yes, I forgot we don't REALLY want that because our TAXES might have to go up a notch.
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An all-too-common misapprehension. As a matter of fact, the only provable correlation between money spent for public school education and the quality of the finished product (graduation rates, test scores, post-secondary education rates) is inverse. Take any state you care to choose, compare the money spent for public schooling district-to-district, and then apply the criteria mentioned and I’ll guarantee you that as a whole the districts that spend the most, have the poorest results. To propose addressing that problem by throwing even more money at those districts is the definition of illogic.
There is a very good reason for this, and it has nothing to do with the schools. It has everything to do with how the kids are socialized. There are of course exceptions, but in general a kid’s direction in life is determined between birth and age five when the majority of that kid’s socialization happens. So what do you think will be the result if a young toddler is exposed to two wholesome parental influences, solid role-models, praise given to older siblings who succeed in school, a strong moral code with solid values, etc., as compared to a kid who from infancy on hears about how bad the establishment (read “Whitey”) is, whose only parental influence may very well be only a mother whose “mothering” is tepid at best, no solid father figure but rather a series of older males (siblings, whatever) who are involved with the criminal justice system from a very young age, whose knowledge of the school system before he ever entered it extends to hearing it ridiculed at home and those who succeed in school routinely put down, and then topped off by being told by various means that he is incapable of succeeding UNLESS he accepts help from the very establishment he has been taught to hate—and what is the result? Answer is obvious. Many if not most of these kids are beyond hope by the time the school system has anything at all to do with them, and to expect to buy miracles by throwing ever-more money at the schools who have to deal with these kids—well, in my book that’s a pretty good definition of insanity.
The only logical answer to this is the one the advocates would never allow, and that is to fix these kids during that zero-to-five window when his or her future is shaped, and that can happen only if the family itself is fixed. All the present course dictates is that we will be saddled with a permanent underclass that our own shortsightedness helped bring into being.