Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

I went through public schools from preschool through grade 12 and then attended a land grant public university

And I post to ilx

my mom put me in a catholic school in second grade, i'm not entirely sure why other than she was catholic, but i think it was because i got bullied a lot. spoiler alert - it didn't help. high school i went back to public school.

anyway where i grew up got gentrified like five minutes after i was born so i had the option of world-class public schools, which most people don't.

Public/private/charter teacher here. Informed opinion says choice is good, etc., but most charters are profiteering wastelands. And among the charters that are good, many are good /because/ they skim high/low income, ethnic majority/minority students from/to neighborhood publics. IOW some charters good. But many good charters are good because they are re/segregating along the prejudices of the charter's beneficiary population.

Notwithstanding that, teacher workload in well-resourced public schools is pretty awful, and kept in check only by labor contracts. Charters don't even benefit from those contracts. Non-union teachers are often far less experienced, on the whole less well trained, and burn our more quickly than career educators. Until charters will work w/ unions they're gonna stay (mostly) lower tier.

and throwing all the special needs kids and behavior issues back into the local PS system

I'm 100% public school btw, went to a state university too until I dropped out

my high school also produced a rhodes scholar

I live a couple blocks from this high school, went to the city's magnet high school with a couple of the people listed as 99/00 notable alumni
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt_High_School_(Des_Moines)#Notable_alumni

i went to public school k-12 and a public university

same

me 2

My parents were both teachers. Both were reflexively liberal, both believed fervently in public education, and all of us went to public schools PreK-grad.

And yet! My mother taught in Catholic schools most of her career, at least partly because she preferred the behavior of Catholic schoolkids.

My father, in contrast, taught at a military school (oddly, a public magnet), where many of his students ended up because no other place would take them.

I think my daughter's school would be considered a magnet school. I guess? It's public and free but it's apparently very desirable so admission is by lottery. Our district calls it a "county-wide school" (as opposed to the "neighborhood school" where my son goes). She's been there five years and I still don't understand what's different about it.

It's all a vast tapestry.

I tend to agree that funding schools by locality leads inevitably to educational disparities that mirror economic ones. The antidotes to that involve decoupling education from the local/state level and basically federalizing it.

Thanks to one of the most devastating SCOTUS decisions of my lifetime yet no one discusses it: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1332

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, February 6, 2017 4:03 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i teach in the school district of the plaintiff from this case. this was the first case iirc in which all of nixon's FOUR appointees were on the bench. fuck richard nixon.

and fuck charter schools, fucking parasites.

cass sunstein argues that saisd v. rodriguez was the end of the court's gradual evolution to understand that the constitution guaranteed social and economic rights.

im a gov/econ teacher and last semester i taught the saisd v. rodriguez case alongside its subsequent state court case edgewood v. kirby (plaintiff won, creates the "robin hood" system which texas has jacked with over time)

public school k-12 then "prestigious east coast private university" -- was definitely at a disadvantage there, and the economic disparity of education in America was really clear to me. Had various classes where fellow students discussed false consciousness and Marxism and the evils of WalMart. I was the only one in the class that had a family that shopped at WalMart, that grew up where everyone shopped at WalMart. Loved their WalMart did the citizens of my stupid town.

Most college students shouldn't go to college. Especially humanities students.

he may have stopped posting, but his spirit still lives on

lol not my own original belief

we both know this

I teach writing and journalism. Mordy is partly right.

Possibly true in the US, less so in countries with a better cost / quality ratio.

Not if ILX is any indication.

I am a strong proponent of the fact most people can learn through conversation, classes, etc. and become more informed and more analytical

then again, I remember the guy who was in one of my college literature courses who was dumb as a brick

It's not that student writing is terrible; it's that 98 percent of it is an unending storm of mediocrity and received ideas.

I think the problem isn't really 'too many people going to college to goof off and read cool books' the problem is our country hasn't set up its funding and cost control very well. it doesn't really have to be that expensive to let people goof off and read cool books.

What else are 18-22 year olds supposed to do with their lives? It isn't like we have the military need for conscription.

play video games? more productive imo than another mildly intelligent bloke misunderstanding foucault passages.

neither of these are very productive

no, but video games are cheaper and don't put you into 20 years of debt.

if we remove debt from the equation ... also, who will pay the living and upkeep expenses for the video game players?

mildly intelligent bloke misunderstanding foucault passages.

i resemble that remark.

actually here's a conservative opinion: we should have comprehensive "great books" style education in high school. (but my liberal side would insist on quite a bit of diversity in that designation). less "critical thinking" skills (that's for college) more "you have to read this to graduate."

college is wasted on 18-22 year olds

college admission at 23 rather than 18 would seem preferable, wouldn't it

you all still haven't offered a credible alternative to what to do with the 18-22 year olds

send the ones who most resemble Jake Gyllenhaal to me.

conscription to build and improve infrastructure

some kind of public service thing would be cool

hunger games style reality show

IDK, some people are emotionally ready at 18. I wasn't and nor were most of my peers

oh, what to do with the adulthood-delusion set? they can study, read, work, socially develop at home - there should be an infrastructure for them that precedes college, including funded study materials for the poorest ones

and social clubs in their locales

an extra five years to work out what/if you'll study at college would be a godsend to most

They should all be forming bands that are a mix between The Stone Roses and Primal Scream with the swagger of Oasis. That's what happened under Thatcher.

paid-for nonsense college is a good step towards universal basic income

I guess this is probably the wrong thread for that opinion

it's less wrong than imago's opinion

why not skip the middle man and just give the money directly to the future judith butler scholars of america

I would imagine that the % of american college students who have heard of or read judith butler is probably like 5%. ilx is not a very representative place.

we should really be working to get that number down to .01%

I would imagine that the % of american college students who have heard of or read judith butler is probably like 5%. ilx is not a very representative place.

― iatee, Tuesday, February 14, 2017 1:51 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

id guess even lower tbh

haha yeah I went to berkeley and I'm not even sure it would be 20% there

you guys might be right that it's a low number but somehow that low number has an oversized presence on campuses and in the social justice and activism worlds - or at the very least they know the name and they know eg that butler said that gender and sex aren't the same thing even if they've never read a page of her work.

berkeley is such an overrated educational institution

did u know at berkeley idiot undergrad students can get credits for taking courses taught by other idiot undergrad students?