Friday, January 25, 2008

"Homeschooling" at college level

Online colleges are a logical extension of homeschooling. You work at home still and they offer a chance to get out from under the conventional educational system. But how good are they? How do you tell a good one from a diploma mill?

There is now an organization that gathers together a heap of information on each one and publishes an annual ranking of them all. See here for the latest rankings.

For each college, they gather data for eight different metrics: acceptance rate, financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio, and years accredited. The overall ranking ranks each college by its average ranking for each metric for which data was available.




Controversy Over School-Targeted Advertising Forces McDonald's to Abandon Promotions for Honor Students in Florida

It's just the usual Mac-hatred

McDonald's has decided to stop sponsoring Happy Meals as rewards for children with good grades and attendance records in elementary schools in Seminole County, Fla. The "food prize" program, as it was called, for students of the Seminole County Public Schools in kindergarten through fifth grade was sponsored by the owners of the McDonald's restaurants in Seminole County. The decision to end the promotions for the program, appearing on children's report-card jackets, came from executives at McDonald's, the NY Times reports.

The sponsorship, between the restaurant owners and the Seminole County school board, drew national and international attention amid an outcry over childhood obesity and junk food diets because a fast-food chain was tying its products to academic performance. It also generated controversy because McDonald's had agreed to curb its advertising to children in schools, reports Times columnist Stuart Elliott.

The decision was made "because we believe the focus should be on the importance of a good education," William Whitman, senior director for communications and public affairs at McDonald's, said last week. "McDonald's, not the school district, will cover the cost to reprint the report-card jackets," he added, and "remove our trademarks," he told the Times. The reward program, called Made the Grade, will continue, Whitman said, because the local restaurant owners agreed in September that it would run through the current school year.

The sponsorship became known last month when a parent complained about it to an activist organization, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. The parent, Susan Pagan, was upset about the promotion on her daughter's report-card jacket. The jacket showed Ronald McDonald, the company's mascot for children; its Golden Arches logo; and Happy Meal menu items like Chicken McNuggets.

"Check your grades," the jacket advised. "Reward yourself with a Happy Meal from McDonald's." Because of the attention the complaint drew, the school district said last month that it would review the appropriateness of the jackets in the spring when making plans for the 2008-9 year.

Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said Thursday that she was pleased with the end of the report-card advertising. "In the absence of needed government regulation to protect schoolchildren from predatory companies like McDonald's," she told the Times, "the burden is on parents to be vigilant about exploitative marketing aimed at children."

Source

A good comment on the above below:

Exploitive? Advertising a reward for hard work exploits children? How did thinking get so twisted? We should thank McDonalds for giving away some of its profits to help motivate kids to do better. Don't worry about children being exposed to advertising - advertising is the basis of our country's success as a consumer economy. Advertising is key to our great standard of living. So what if school children get some free McNuggets for getting good grades? Kids are going to see advertising their entire lives.





Schools now bad for boys

Boys and girls should be educated in separate classes because their brains are hard-wired to learn in different ways, a controversial book says. Too many schools are creating an environment that is "toxic" to boys, turning them off learning and leaving them quite unprepared for adult life, according to Leonard Sax, a family doctor and research psychologist from Washington DC.

For the past decade parents and teachers have become worried increasingly about boys, who are now routinely outperformed by girls at every level and who show growing levels of disaffection and lack of motivation.

In his book Boys Adrift, Dr Sax argues that this yawning gender gap is the result of innately differently learning styles of boys and girls, and that most classrooms play to the strengths of girls. "In the co-educational classroom so many of the choices we make are to the advantage of girls, but disadvantage boys," he said. "The fact that girls are doing well is not the problem. The problem is, why can't their brothers do as well?"

Dr Sax, founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the United States, believes the answer lies in subtle, but important differences in the brains of boys and girls. "Until ten years ago, people said that boys are spatial and girls are verbal. That's nonsense. There is not much difference in how girls and boys think, but there are differences in how they see and hear," he told The Times at the start of a lecture tour of boys' schools in Britain.

Boys, for example, do not hear as well as girls. So a female teacher with a soft voice may believe that a boy who is not paying attention is playing up, when actually he cannot hear her properly. Her reaction may be to discipline him. But Dr Sax says that she would get better results by speaking louder and moving purposefully around the classroom. Boys' eyes also respond better to movement and direction, while girls' eyes are more affected by colour and texture. Asked to draw, five-year-old girls produce flowers, pets and people. Boys will draw a car crash, but may be reproached by teachers for producing something that is "not nice".

Similarly, he says, although most girls can sit still from a young age, most boys need to be active to discover their own pace. "Asking a five-year-old to sit still and read and write is something that many girls can do, but many boys can't. I have visited more than 200 schools. This is what I hear the teachers saying, `Jason, why are you standing?', `Gerard, are you making a buzzing noise?', `Robert, can you stop tapping?', `Look at Emily, she's sitting still and is good'. "The message that boys are getting from the age of 5 is that doing what the teacher wants is unmasculine," Dr Sax says.

One result, Dr Sax believes, is the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder among boys who are considered inattentive by teachers. Parents and doctors are tempted to treat this with medication, when simply putting them in a boyfriendly classroom would be far more effective.

The failure of schools to understand why gender matters means that boys very often switch off from learning from an early age and never re-engage. Long after their sisters have gone to university, they are still trapped at home suffering from "failure to launch" into adult life. The solution, Dr Sax believes, lies in single-sex education provided by teachers trained to understand the differences in brain function between boys and girls. "Let boys tap the table. Let them jump up from their seat when asked to spell a word. It won't disturb the boy next to them. Girls are bothered by extraneous noise levels 10 to 40 times lower than the levels that bother men. Girls are aware of what is going on around them. Boys are oblivious," Dr Sax says.

When such these methods were used in single-sex classes in Florida, pass rates for primary school fourth-grade boys (Year Three in Britain) rose from 55 per cent to 85 per cent.

Source






Government Schooling is Welfare

I wonder if I'll ever get to a point where I'm no longer burdened with trying to convince people that government - the State - is force. It is not voluntaryism. It is coercion. It is violence, pure and simple.

For example, if you want to send your kids to a government school, you are asking to have other people - non-parents - threatened with violence if they don't pay for what should be your responsibility. When you get a bill in the mail from the State, and you ignore it, chances are, men with guns will be knocking your door. If you try resisting their demands, they can use violent force - even lethal force, if necessary - to ensure your compliance.

And don't give me this, "I pay taxes too!" crap. All things equal, a parent pays less taxes, while consuming more government services.

Let's say me, a non-parent, and Sally Singlemom both make $40,000 year in income. When tax time comes around, not only does she get to file in a more favorable status - the "Head of Household" designation grants a larger standard deduction than does "Single" (about 7700 vs. about 5300) - but she also gets an extra exemption for her child (another 3300 per child), plus the child tax credit (up to $1000 per kid). And don't even get me started on the "Earned Income Tax Credit", which is just a wealth transfer mechanism.

The net result is not only that Sally's taxable income adjusted downward much more than mine, her tax obligation is credited by virtue of the fact that she has a kid. So she is paying less in taxes, while at the same time demanding more of the system we are both forced to pay into. That's a pretty sweet deal...for her.

So, for all you parents out there who send your children to government schools, show some respect for those individuals who are being forced to subsidize your lack of personal responsibility. Don't try to mask your willingness to steal from others by spouting off pious platitudes and false moral arguments about "the greater good", the importance of education, and "the poor". It's theft and you know it.

Source

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, but parents spend tons of money raising kids, but when the kids reach adulthood Social Security siphons off part of their income to pay to old people, some of whom raised children and others who did not. The childless find it easier to earn higher salaries (they can move geographically without uprooting children and they can work any shift and any set of hours) and it is also easier for them to save money because they have lower fixed expenses. And when the childless retire, they can collect LARGER benefits because they paid more into the system, even though they failed to contribute any "new workers" to the Ponzi scheme, which is the most critical contribution you could make to keeping the system afloat.

Still, I agree with your basic point, especially for K-8th grade. People who can't provide an eighth grade education for their own children probably shouldn't have children. I'm a single mom, and my kids went to parochial schools through high school.