I remember how it was -- JR
Does it now? Below is a Newsweak article about dysfunctional black schools. There is no doubt that such schools are a very poor preparation for life but why is that so? There is still the old kneejerk response that more money needs to be spent on them but even below there are admissions that increased funding is unlikely to help. After that the article below has few answers.
The article does however show that black behaviour is the big problem. The kid they follow was a real terror. Put a lot of badly behaved kids together in a school and you are going to have mayhem. So is it the fault of such a school if it succeeds in teaching its students very little? I can't see it. As long as young blacks behave in disruptive ways the opportunity to teach them anything is mostly just not there
So what can be done? As Thomas Sowell has often noted, black schools in years gone by often did succeed in giving their students a useful education. How did they do it? One word: Discipline. Modern Leftist educational theory is dead against discipline but experience tells us that that is what is needed.
As recently as half a century ago, schools did not tolerate indiscipline. Because schools were then much better respected than they are today, disciplinary measures were not often needed, but when they were, the punishment for indiscipline was a beating of some sort. Not all kids were beaten but any kid who refused to sit down and shut up was. It may seem cruel but it was a case of being cruel to be kind. That did succeed in keeping order and thus gave teachers the opportunity to teach.
So applying heavy physical discipline to black schools from Grade 1 onwards is what is needed. That is the thing that is missing. The prospect of that changing would however appear to be nil. Leftist "kindness" and "compassion" has produced very unkind results and will continue to do so. They have destroyed black education.
The only hope is that high discipline charter schools might spring up to help black kids. The existing regulations may prevent that, however
“I never rode a bike with training wheels,” says Taheem Fennell
One day, when he was four, he just ran and jumped on, his feet pushing forward on the pedals. Taheem is now 13, but his riding has been curtailed. His mother forbids him from tooling around their Quaker Hill neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware, because she’s worried about his safety. In the summer of 2017, Taheem’s 16-year-old sister, Naveha Gibbs, was shot and killed 20 minutes away; she was with a 26-year-old man thought to be in a gang. In the crisis over income inequality in the U.S., Wilmington is ground zero. For youth, the city is the most dangerous in the country. In Taheem’s neighborhood, where students are predominantly black, schools are underfunded and under-resourced.
They’re also being neglected by the Trump administration. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ push for alternatives to the traditional public system would help drive students toward charter schools and private schools at the local level. (Her Obama-ap-pointed predecessor, Arne Duncan, also pushed reforms that favored charter schools.) Enrollment in the lowest-performing public schools in Wilmington has plummeted. The city’s lowest performing school, Bayard Middle School, lost nearly half its students in the last 10 years.
Lately the issue has gotten some attention, however. Parents and advocates are suing in more than a dozen states to increase spending for schools that serve low-income students, including a suit against Delaware. And presidential candidates are starting to talk about it: Former Vice President Joe Biden made increasing school funding central to his education platform, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed tripling Title I funding for low-income schools and Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed limiting support for charter schools and boosting funding for traditional public schools.
But Taheem’s experience shows how high the stakes are for the children living, and being educated, in these neighborhoods.
While Taheem was in elementary school, the system seemed to be working. His sister was killed about a month before he started fifth grade and, understandably, he was prone to angry outbursts. The school arranged for him to see a counselor, who taught him strategies to cope with feelings of sadness or rage. “When I get mad, I calm myself down,” says Taheem. “I either go in the corner and read a book or count to ten with my fingers and then think of something nice, fun.” The elementary school librarian also helped Taheem find books that he liked to read, such as the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which helped focus his mind on something positive, his mother, Charmaine Jones, says.
But when Taheem graduated to Bayard, a virtually windowless brick fortress surrounded by a chain-linked fence, matters took a downward turn. In his first month, Taheem got into a fight in math class. In October, he says, eighth-grade boys jumped him in the hallway and left him with a bump on his head and a busted lip. He made friends with boys who drew the attention of the police. His mother was called into school so often to deal with his behavioral problems that she quit one of her jobs as a home health aide. “I had to choose between my other job and my son,” Jones said.
The school, she found, had too few resources to help Taheem cope. It has a library but no librarian to run it— so most of the time it is closed. The school has only one behavioral health consultant for about 325 students, the vast majority of whom, says the school counselor, have experienced trauma. Since the consultant can only take on a dozen or so cases at a time, teachers and administrators serve as ad hoc mental health or social service providers for children in crisis. Taheem eventually saw the counselor, but critical time had been lost. Jones wanted to transfer Taheem to another school, but she was told there were no spots available until the next school year.
Research shows that a lack of safety takes a big toll on school children, even those who haven’t themselves been a victim of a crime. Students living in unsafe neighborhoods—or go to school with students who live in those places—score one-tenth of a school year behind on academic achievement tests than children who live in safer places, according to a 2018 study of Chicago Public Schools. There are things that schools can do to help—hire more counselors, train staffin trauma-informed teaching and provide art and music programs— but they need resources to do it.
One of the biggest obstacles to fixing inequality in school spending is figuring out how much schools already spend. The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015, required states to publicly reveal how much money each school gets from local, state and federal sources per student. (The Trump administration rolled back some of the ESSA regulations but rules that require school-level spending reports remain in effect.) Historically, public schools have organized spending by category on the district-wide level—teachers, benefits and materials, for instance—but there were no structures in place to calculate how much money was spent in each individual school, causing significant delays in releasing the new data.
States have now begun publishing how much is spent in each school, and it’s sure to fuel more debate, says Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. It will be shocking, even to school principals, how much money is spent on individual schools, she says. “It’s often jaw-dropping for them,” says Roza.
The push for transparency is part of a movement to overhaul school funding formulas so that schools in poorer neighborhoods are provided similar resources to those in wealthy ones. Nationally, schools primarily serving black and brown children receive $23 billion less than schools primarily serving white students, according to EdBuild, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Advocates hope schools’ new numbers will have some effect as they continue trickling out next year, helping pressure state legislatures to spend more money on children from low-in-come families. Three states, including notoriously stingy Mississippi, have hired a national organization to help change their formulas. The new funding transparency is also giving ammunition to the teacher protests that have swept the country, bringing additional pressure for change from within the classroom. Teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, West Virginia and Oakland walked offthe job this year over teacher compensation, class size and classroom funding.
Critics of increased funding have argued that the problem isn’t a lack of money, it’s that traditional public schools in poorer neighborhoods tend to be dysfunctional. Along with high staffturnover, they often lack a coherent approach to address the emotional and academic needs of students.
Hardly anyone would argue that school funding does not make any difference, but academic research on the effects of school funding on kids’ classroom performance and longterm success has been mixed. More money does not always equal better results for students—at least not as can be measured by math and reading assessments. An influx of money at Bayard wouldn’t immediately solve troubles like how to attract the best teachers to this tough neighborhood.
Nor would it remove union rules that can block school leaders from picking which teachers get assigned there. Bayard, for example, was given occasional infusions of cash and marched through state-monitored turnaround efforts with few signs of improvement—most recently, about five years ago, when it was given money and assistance supported by Obama’s Race to the Top grants. This year, roughly only 4 percent of its students were proficient in math and 13 percent were proficient in reading.
“It turns out when you give schools extra funds they rarely feel like they can actually rethink what they can actually do with them,” says Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “You end up putting more dollars into schools, and everything they have been doing for 40 years remains intact.”
Even still, public schools across the country have been grappling with the messy reality of figuring out how much to spend per child. It’s not a straightforward calculation: it also involves accounting for expenditure in administrative offices and teacher pension liabilities, which can vary widely. After the Every Student Succeeds Act’s federal mandate, Delaware was the first state to set rules for how to report the data, and it is expected to release that information next fiscal year. So far, nearly 20 states have published their data publicly. But this fall, an Education Department official complained that states were burying spending reports for fear the public wouldn’t be able to understand them.
Many others are grappling with how to best present the complicated data—which can include non-teach-ing costs and initially weren’t calculated uniformly—to the public, Roza said, and they should begin to release their information in the coming year.
Figuring out how much schools spend is just the start. To get a better understanding of what a school lacks, policymakers need to know what the money is being spent on. A recent report from the ACLU, for instance, found 1.7 million children nationwide attend schools where there are police officers but no counselors.
But the years spent dithering about how to send more resources to struggling schools like Bayard, and track where the money is spent, come at a cost even more difficult to calculate. As dysfunctional as some of this nation’s schools are, for children like Taheem, who was harmed by violence he can’t comprehend, they’re the best hope they have.
“Y’all pile them all up in one school, and all these kids have all these problems,” says Taheem’s mother, who plans to move her family to a safer neighborhood as soon as she can afford it. “It’s ridiculous.”
SOURCE
50 Reasons the Democratic Idea of Free College Isn’t That Easy
Democratic presidential candidates are fighting over who should be eligible for free college based on income, but a bigger question is how to structure a plan that could work in all 50 states.
The United States has no national system of higher education, and each of the states works somewhat differently. Overlooking this basic fact risks creating a policy that could make things worse instead of better.
All of the leading Democratic presidential candidates want to make college free for at least some students. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren say all public colleges should be tuition-free.
Pete Buttigieg has proposed making public college tuition free for families earning up to $100,000, saying at Thursday’s debate that “I just want you to go ahead and pay your own tuition” if “you’re in that lucky top 10 percent.” And Joe Biden has proposed eliminating tuition at community colleges, but not at four-year ones.
Widely varying tuition negates a one-size-fits-all solution.
But the candidates’ plans generally fail to explain how the federal government should make college free nationwide. States vary widely in how well they fund their public colleges, and how much they charge for tuition. In-state prices for a year at a four-year public college range from about $6,000 in Florida and Wyoming to about $17,000 in Vermont and New Hampshire. States that charge students the most tend to be those that fund their colleges the least.
This creates a problem for federal policymakers who want to make college affordable everywhere.
A plan that simply pays whatever colleges are charging would bail out states like Vermont at the expense of states like Wyoming — and encourage states to raise tuition to capture more federal money. The solution would have to consider states’ investment, and the details matter a lot.
More specific free-college proposals from members of Congress and think tanks are usually built around a state-federal partnership that provides matching funds if states meet certain requirements. This is similar to the approach of programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Mr. Sanders has proposed a plan to provide matching funds to states that eliminate tuition and meet other requirements such as quality benchmarks. Separately, a fellow senator, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and the Center for American Progress have plans that take a similar approach but would allow states to charge tuition based on family income. Depending on the plan, the states would pay 30 percent to 50 percent of the cost.
The Century Foundation has proposed a tiered system in which states can choose how widely to offer free college, with wealthier states expected to cover a larger share of the cost.
This approach could lead to free college in some states, but probably not all. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion is instructive, with many states declining to participate despite the federal government’s promise to cover 90 percent of the cost.
How many states would participate in a free college partnership with the federal government? It would probably depend on how much federal money is on the line; how much states are required to contribute; and the politics of college affordability.
The design of a free college policy matters not just for how many states participate, but also for which students in those states benefit — and which might be hurt. States that stretch their budget to adopt free college might lack the resources to provide highquality instruction or support services for students who need them most. These states might fund their institutions inadequately, inequitably or both.
Eliminating tuition as a revenue source could also constrain states’ ability to expand popular institutions and programs. A lowincome student might find the promise of a free college education dashed by a rejection letter from a local public college, grown more selective as the lure of free tuition pulls students away from private colleges and into public ones.
To avoid such unintended consequences would require the federal government to do far more than just provide funding to states. Existing free college proposals count on federal requirements and oversight.
A bolder approach to free college would make participating in a federal-state partnership the only way a state could get federal money for higher education. A 2016 proposal from New America would do this by eliminating Pell grants, student loans and education tax credits. This plan would instead fund colleges through formula- based grants to institutions and states that meet federal requirements.
Putting all federal money on the line could get all states to participate but would be an enormous expansion of the federal role in higher education.
No candidate has proposed blowing up the state-based system and replacing it with one in which the federal government mandates free college — for some or for all. But even a modest freecollege policy would involve significantly expanding the federal role. And it is unclear how effectively the Department of Education could ensure that public colleges in every state offer a highquality education to all students who want one.
If Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren were running for governor of a state, the income cap issue — whether college should be free for everyone or just for low- and middle-income families — might be the most important point of disagreement about free college. But as a federal policy, the major challenge is how to ensure broad participation while avoiding the pitfalls inherent in a national answer to a 50-state question.
SOURCE
Faith shown in Australia's Christian schools
Christian school enrolments have soared over the past five years, surpassing growth in the public and broader independent sectors, amid claims the rising influence of identity politics in many schools is alienating families with traditional values.
Data provided by the Independent Schools Council of Australia reveals enrolments in Christian schools have increased by an average of 33 per cent a year for the past five years, accelerating to 4,4 per cent in the past two years.
Christian schools, while a minority in the broader independent school sector, added more than 10,000 students between 2013 and 2018, with the 18 per cent overall growth outstripping the 7.7 per cent growth seen in government school numbers. The independent sector recorded a more muted 1.7 per cent annual growth over the same period.
According to the Australian Association of Christian Schools, enrolment growth was being driven by an increasing demand for a Christian education rather than the establishment of new schools.
Fees are typically modest — in the $3000 to $7000 range—meaning the schools are more accessible than many non-government schools.
AACS executive director Alithea Westerman said reports from schools suggested an increasing number of parents were drawn to a Christian education in the wake of the public furore around programs such as Safe Schools, which lost federal support
From the "Weekend Australian" of 28 December, 2019
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