16th December 2003, 6:40 PM
Quote:Originally posted by A Black Falcon
How are you so sure that it used to be so much better? I'm not... were public schools once far more effective and successful? I'm doubtful. Sure, some schools have problems, but most of that can be attributed to lack of funds, not lack of teaching... though yes, some schools are just bad even with more money and should be improved. But I wouldn't use the true problem schools as representative of the public school system. The biggest problem in public education is chronic and long-term underfunding, which has been going on for decades and continues to be a major issue. This, of course, is due to state and local underfunding as well as national, but national is a huge piece of the pie...
As for this "No Child Left Behind" thing to try to raise school standards, it is a bad law. It is biased strongly against rural areas and requires high levels of compliance among specific subgroups. Now in cities that's fine, but in the country like here those groups often have just a couple of people in them... if just a couple of people miss the test then the school could fail... it seems to me to be a thinly veiled attempt to get every single school in the country to fail and give as much money as possible to religious schools, because the standards as they are set are not even remotely realistic.
Oh, and as for discipline, if the price of not letting teachers hit their students is slightly less performance, then it's worth it since that kind of discipline should definitely not be allowed in schools.
Clarify one thing for me. What part of SCHOOLS GET MORE FUNDING THAN EVER BEFORE YET STUDENT PERFORMANCE IS AT AN ALL-TIME LOW did you not understand?
And then you say that raising standards and expectations is bad. That it is wrong and discriminatory that we should expect our students not to be the worst in the whole freaking WORLD.
I'll give you points for honesty, but seriously, are you so terribly deluded that you believe any of this? Are you saying, with a straight face, that it is OKAY that our students achieve NOTHING in school? Can you really be essentially personifying the worst stereotypes of liberals, the idea that throwing more money at things will fix them, and actually BELIEVE it?
You come across as wanting government control over education, no matter how awful and wasteful it is, out of hatred for Christianity and some twisted, evil version of 'fairness' you possess. Everything you said above proves that.
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