Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[entropy]

Can we all just agree to hate AA?


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[iam416]

That's been motioned, seconded, thirded and agreed to for the past decade. Him and THE PROPHET.

[Da Geezer]

froot: regarding cherry-picking, I previously said

As to the entire category of at-risk or special need student, it works like this: If the student wins the entry lottery, or any sibling of his wins the lottery, then the at-risk child has a place in the school. It really is a matter of chance. Our charters build a room for the parents where they can hang out, and many parents of needy children like to be around their child, which we encourage. Nationally, charters have a higher percentage of at-risk students than district schools and a higher percentage of poor students than district schools (the PC way of saying this is "free and reduced lunch students"). There are additional programs for at-risk students that give charters the same amount per student that district students receive, not 63% of the district amount.

Charters in Michigan have no discretion in which students they take, other than we are required to take siblings of kids who win the lottery for a place in the school. That's it. Sign your kid up for the lottery, and hope you get in.

You might think I'm awful, but we most certainly do cherry pick parents. If the parent is too lazy to even attempt to get into a charter, then there is no way we can find that kid and try to help him. By your own numbers, roughly 67% of Detroit's students have found their way to charters. If you read the Stanford study, you'll see that Detroit is one of the areas where charters are having the biggest impact.

And I've not even broached the matter of the increasing competence in government schools in response to charters in their districts. The reason there are so many charters in Detroit is that is where the big money is. I just don't find that so very complicated.

[froot loops]

The newness of voter ID in Michigan is certainly not a fabrication. For most of my voting life I didn't have to use id. It was passed in the 90s and renewed in 2005 but it wasn't enforced until a GOP AG came I to office.

He is not fabricating anything.

[Hannibal]

6. That's as bad as privatizing social security. Imagine your parents have scrapped and saved a paltry $500k in a 401(k). The month before they retire a 2008-like market dump occurs. Now they can't retire. On the flip side, that fixed pension has no ability to outperform the fixed amount, regardless of how well the market (or fund manager) does. I have both a pension and a 401(k). The pension was part of the company strategy to hire the best into their ranks. It worked as far as I can tell, judging by the quality of my co-workers. Perhaps there is our difference - I look at pensions as a carrot to lure the best and brightest, you look at them as a cash outflow.

Fixed pensions are how we got to the disaster of under-funded pensions. This is a looming disaster in both the public and private sector. Maybe I shouldn't call it a "looming" disaster since many workers have already been hit by it. My company had to switch to a defined contribution model about five years ago because they realized that they couldn't promise to pay people 30 years after they were done working. The nightmare story about the market crashing the day before you retire is silly. A collapse like this is always preceded by a long runup. If it is a 401k or a pension, then that means that you have been dollar cost averaging your way into the market, which means that you have made a lot of money on paper and then lost some of it back.

If the average American was good enough at math to see what an incredible ripoff Social Security is vs. private retirement accounts, there would be riots.

For those of you here who are good at spreadsheets...

Use one of those on-line Social Security estimators to figure out how much you are going to get when you are 67. Then do a comparison with how much you would have saved up at age 67 if that portion of your salary (including your employer's contributions) had been going into a stock market index account earning what the NYSE has averaged over the past 50 years. Warning -- not a good exercise for people who have blood pressure issues.

[Da Geezer]

The newness of voter ID in Michigan is certainly not a fabrication. For most of my voting life I didn't have to use id. It was passed in the 90s and renewed in 2005 but it wasn't enforced until a GOP AG came I to office.

So the law wasn't enforced in the Detroit area until Snyder was elected?

[froot loops]

I have no idea who starting enforcing it, I only remember ever having to show my id when I voted in 2012. I don't recall having to do it prior to that. I said AG not governor.

He's not lying or fabricating.

[Da Geezer]

on a more positive note Jon said:

4. Nothing wrong with merit pay, the hard part is setting up a policy that actually measures performance. How do you measure the performance of a good teacher in an inner city war zone that has a class full of 'students' that don't want to be there much less learn?

Right. I can only tell you what we do in out charters. First, we don't do high-stakes testing with the teachers' job on the line. You are correct when you say that the makeup of the class is going to be a large factor in test outcomes. We do use testing in order to keep constantly updated on what the student is or is not learning. That involves at least monthly testing with immediate feedback to the teacher.

In my school, we found that Mr. Smith's section of 5th grade consistently scored better than Ms. Jones' class in math. The reverse held true in reading. It was not a massive leap of logic to ask the two teachers to teach to their strengths, Smith to math for both sections and Jones to reading.

What seems to work best for us is, twice per year, a team of 2 retired administrators, mostly from government schools, just show up and evaluate each teacher. These evaluators are not involved with in-school politics, and they do several evaluations per day. We look for patterns, and we understand that there is a variance in the evaluators just as there is for teachers.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Well, I remember you were the guy who agreed with DSL's post that he said showed 14 cases of multiple registrations out of 82,000,000, when, in fact, the number from the posted article was 5,000,000. So you accepted a figure that is .00028% of the actual total in the article you agreed with. So you were off by about 350,000 times.

Of course, you are the fellow who never shows his ID when voting (in either Iowa or Michigan), and who sent his kids to a rural charter school that pays starting teachers $ 23,000. There are no rural charters in Michigan, unless you consider Canton to be rural. But you won't even hint at where you are located, and I assume that is because much of what you post is simply a lie and made up out of whole cloth. What is the name of the charter that, as you later claimed, increased its starting pay to $ 34,000 in the last 10 years. Pure fabrication. No voter ID in Michigan, again, pure fabrication.

And once again I'll reiterate that duplicate registrations is not the same thing as "voter fraud". People move and can be on two voting rolls at the same time until they gets removed from their old location. You're not committing voter fraud unless you actually attempt to vote more than once, and there's virtually no examples of people doing that.

But then again I'm talking to the guy when asked "what makes a good school?" replies with "It's one that maximizes shareholder value!". When Jon asks you about curriculum, you return a blank stare.

[Mike]

There is a charter school in Jon's neck of the woods. And yes, it is rural.

Edit: didn't see the above post before I posted.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I just opened my moderator tool tab and was one click away from closing the thread until we get through a weekend of football and then re-open it and see how things go.

I stopped when I realized there's a lot more going on here that is worth continuing than the charter v. Public schools debate that is not worth continuing. Im asking those involved in the heated debate that's getting personal to end comment for now.

[Mike]

This is the best non-sports thread we've ever had. Geezer's rants against public institutions and their employees are really the only cantankerous exchanges there's been.

[The Oracle]

And anything Stan posts, but that's entertainment more than anything.

[AlabamAlum]

That's been motioned, seconded, thirded and agreed to for the past decade. Him and THE PROPHET.

Concur. Motion carried.

[UMStan White]

CMD Publishes List of Closed Charter Schools (with Interactive Map)
Today, (September 2015) the Center for Media and Democracy is releasing a complete state-by-state list of the failed charter schools since 2000. Among other things, this data reveals that millions and millions of federal tax dollars went to "ghost" schools that never even opened to students. The exact amount is unknown because the U.S. Department of Education is not required to report its failures, where money went to groups to help them start new charters that never even opened.
This data set also provides reporters and citizens of each state an opportunity to take a closer look at how much taxpayer money has been squandered on the failed charter school experiment in their states. The data set and the interactive map below are based on more than a decade's worth of official but raw data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
This release comes as the U.S. Department of Education and industry insiders currently deciding which states to award half a billion dollar in grants designed to bolster the school privatization industry under the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP).
As CMD has calculated, nearly 2,500 charter schools have shuttered between 2001 and 2013, affecting 288,000 American children enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and the failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools.

For example, in the 2011-2012 school year, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result of closure. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate. In 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools, and he concluded that closures decreased "high school graduation rates by nearly 10%." He found that the effects persist "even if the students attends a better quality school after closure."
Hidden behind the statistics are the social consequences. According to 2013 paper by Robert Scott and Miguel Saucedo at the University of Illinois, school closures "have exacerbated inter-neighborhood tensions among Chicago youth in recent years" and have been a contributing factor to the high rate of youth incarceration.
Then there are the charter schools that never opened despite tax money from a federal program to help more entities apply to create even more charters. Drilling down into the data of just one state in just one school year, 25 charter schools (or, really, prospective charter schools) awarded grants in 2011-'12 never opened in Michigan. The non-profit groups behind these were granted a total of $3.7 million in federal tax money in implementation and planning grants, and they also received at least $1.7 million in state tax dollars.