Private schools under govenment funding.

think of this system, I think you'll agree it's a good idea.

i'll statt with the current problems in education.
1. no freedom of choice.
choosing where your children are educated is currently a luxury, unless you have the extra money to foot the bill of a private school yourself, the govenment chooses what school your childern go to, and that sometimes means absurd zoning that forces you to drive your children across town, because "it's too far for the busses." despite you live only a block or two from ANOTHER school, maybe even in a nice neighborhood where you could even let your children walk, and get exercise, without worrying what may happen.

not to mention the government chooses what is taught, so say, if the govenment decides to teach a logshot theory with no REAL scientific backing that contradicts your family's faith, tough luck.(i think both far ends of the evolution debate are wrong, see my full thoughta at bottom)

2. no competition.
competition drives companies to strive to be the best. if you fall short of the competition, you lose money.

not something public schools have to worry about. doesn't matter if a private school can take a failing child that's behind two grades in public shool, and in less than a week, bring them up THREE grades, public shool is free, so that's where the children will go.

even if that school DID compete, and most parents sent thier childrten to privates schools, the public shools probably wouldn't lose a cent. they're invarably funded by the govenment, so even of public shools were EMPTIED by private shools, the taxplayers might even still have a battle in getting money taken away from a public scool with no children.

the people working in public schools can just toe the line of how lazy or inneffective they can be without getting fired, since the govenment money isn't going aywhere unless there's a SEVERE screw-up. so they can just go on wasting money, building expensive stadiums while students have classes in shoddy portable rooms.

that all stated, just eliminating public shools would be a hard if not impossible feat. the govenment funding that makes schools free is probably indispensible to the majority, so what do we do?

the govenment decides on a set amount of money per child. the parents choose what school thier child goes to, and the government pays that set amount for each child a school manages to get enrolled.

suddenly schools will all be competing to get that money. some will try to attract by being fast-track, and having a sytem where good students can move through grades faster, some will offer better dicipline, and it will be the children and partents who win. oh, and the teachers a well, but only the good ones. schools will try to attract good teachers by offering them more money or better benefits. if a school does a bad job, it will be dust as the children are moved to better schools.

true, the job of RUNNING a school will be harder, but everyone else involved comes out a winner.

(now for my bit on evolution. so we find that animals change over time. hell, we've been involved with it as monkeys shrink to adapt to smaller habitats, and wolves become dogs. but where the hell do we get the assumption that all life came about this way? where are all the transitionary fossils? and don't start with carbondating, that's to determine how long agon somethig died via it's REMAINS. a fossil is just an imprint of those remains. try arbondating paw prints left by a dog on a wet  cement sidewalk and tell me how accurate your readings are.

now the theologists are arguing there's no such thing as evolution, which is wrong as well as we've observed and CAUSED it. though there's no proof creationisim beliefs are false.

here's a comparison. let's say a group discovers the platypus. it lays eggs. they'll represent the evolutionists. because thier theoty is comparable to: "hey, this mammal lays eggs! ALL mamals must lay eggs!"
and it's a wild conclusion chosen from finding a tidbit. io can only assume that kind of theory comes from wanting it to be true.

some bilologists counter with: now way! mammals don't lay eggs! this platypus must be non-exzistant!

both sides are wrong because they're more concerned with proving each other wrong than finding the real truth.

it comes down to this: scientific findings and the bible don't disagree unless you MAKE them disagree. i've yet to see beliveable precedent otherwise. god created the animals as we made the earth, and they evolved from there. if you are to argue this, please do so in a new thread, this one's about privatizing schools under govenment funding.

While I was going to school in Canada, none of these problems existed, at least as far as I could tell. I didn't have to go to any specific public school, and you can bet parents were considering how well students from schools did.

You seem to have a habit of over-reinventing things, Top_Cat. Just because you see a problem doesn't mean you need to completely revamp the system; sometimes a few minor tweaks are all that are needed.

I'm in Canada, and years ago there were problems in my school district over one particular school that had a lot of natives and low-income homes in it's catchment.  Due to this, a lot of bullying and problems often came up at that school.  At the time, parents were free to pick which school to send their kids to.  As a result, this school got declining enrolment and the other schools went up.  Eventually, the school board considered forcing the zone boundaries.  The reason they gave was that all the parents were being racist because natives went there.  There was another dispute where native racism came up only to force people into political correctness.

Allowing choice is a very important thing.  I knew one pupil who did horrible and had no friends in a low-income/native catchment school who went to a high-income/white school and instantly became popular and did well.

If the government starts funding private schools,then the school becomes a public school.Private schools attain funding from the parents that pay school fees every year.

>>1
Government sux.
1: lol communism
2: lol socialism

fix'd

how about the govt. alloting a particular amount of money to a student, where the student gets to spend the money on the school of his choice? (i saw it in a tv show somewhere)

>>6
yeah, that's the idea.
I don't remember who came up with it though.

>>2
so why not propose some tweaks?

>>4
so what WOULD be good terminology for a govenment funded school system run by indedpendent schools rather than the government.

so why not propose some tweaks?

What you propose aren't tweaks.

If you want tweaks, look at more successful public education systems. After all, when you're at the bottom, there are plenty of examples to choose from...

>>4

In some places, private religious schools do get public funding.

>>8
i'm not so much in favor in small tweaks, if they're too easy, they may just get turned right back the moment the public blinks.

i'm more for re-shaping the system from the ground up, to ensure the good changes stick.

>>2
was the one who thinks we could go with simple tweaks. i was asking him to suggest some.

>>10
if they're too easy, they may just get turned right back the moment the public blinks.

If it's too easy to fix, let's reinvent it all? Come now, that's a terrible mentality.

The public system works, you just need to take a look at all industrialized countries. That the US's public system is one of the worst of the bunch should tell you something.

And how do you know your proposed system won't be corrupted by small tweaks? Think Marx here.

>>11

because it's too far from the current problematic system to easily regress.

the idea is that the govenment would only be able to set guidelines and standards, and the schools would be more liberated to make thier own choices, for example, what "facts" to teach. and if you agknoledge that not all people are the same, you should be able to imagine that haveing a variety of schools would make things better was well. self-motivated fast-learning students wouldn't be held back by a metod that tries to work both for them and uninterested, unruly children.

and come to think of it, where's the line of "over re-inventing"? as of now, the only thing i see govenment RUN schools have going for them is that they're free. what do we lose by changing "too much" and having the govenment pay for schools that will run like current private schools, which have shown themselve to preform better?

because it's too far from the current problematic system to easily regress.

If the world worked this way, there would be no such thing as stepwise refinement. Science? Literature? Philosophy? Mathematics? Engineering? Manufacturing? Everything? Let's just chuck that out the window; we don't like them shifty-eyed refining scum, we only allow revolutions here!

I recommend you go explore this little planet we live on a little more before coming up with grand New Deals (TM) for education. Everything you have mentioned has been dealt with in other public systems. The problem, the real problem, lies in the attitudes and dogma in the US, not it the form of the education system.

Incidentally, I went to a private school. The government paid for most of it. Even if I hadn't, my education would still have been first-class (public is competitive with private), since education matters here, unlike decadent fatass Americans who look down on intellectual pursuits (hint, hint).

>>13
>If the world worked this way, there would be no such thing as stepwise refinement. Science? Literature? Philosophy? Mathematics? Engineering? Manufacturing? Everything? Let's just chuck that out the window; we don't like them shifty-eyed refining scum, we only allow revolutions here!

literature and philosphy can't really be measured. as for the rest, well, you can't change science to get iron special benefits at the expense of steel, or have a system of manufacturing with loopholes that screws armchairs while benefitting couches. in fact, just writing this points out the comparison in itself is absurd.

this is politics, not physics.

and nobody has even suggested improvements to deal with how poorly america is doing compared to countries that don't even spend a tenth of what we do per child. which is first and most notably, a clear showing of how much waste there is of our education dollars.

let me smmarize how this discussion has gone:

"i think education would improve if schools competed for govenment money"
"why do you have to rewrite the system? you can just make adjustments"
"like what?"
"you aren't suggesting adjustments"
"and that's because if the adjustments are too subtle, they could just as easily been undone, chaning the system from the ground up makes it less possible for the system to take steps back to where it was to begin with."
"why does it have to be completely rewritten? other areas have been just fine adjusting slowly."

let me put my next point:
"how does that fact that it's a big change make my argument invalid? well, if someone cares to suggest less drastic changes to the curent system, i'll give them some thought"

i'm suggesting schools that compete for govenment money, without direct government control, forcing schools to provide better quality, and allowing parents and thir children freedom of choice. doing it that way would make the improvement happen automatically, rather than having to fight for improvemant and getting politicised plans that "improve" education by bogging teachers and students down with more testing.

and about the only disagreement i've heard so far is "new system LOL" if you're going to disagree, offer an alternative you think is better. otherwise your whole argument amounts to a long, well-written "you're dumb"

some of you are suggesting that some simple tweaks will be fine, so let's hear them.

It has been suggested how, multiple times, and by more than one person: look at other systems. Let me repeat: there is a huge wide world out there full of great public education systems. Why you attempt to fix a system without being familiar with all the issues is beyond me.

You shouldn't make drastic changes, unless you have a good reason because:
a) It costs a lot of money, which isn't being put into teaching the students themselves.
b) Now you have a whole new set of new problems which you need to solve first. These things don't come bug-free.

And while it's not physics, set in stone, it's close to engineering, which isn't. Imagine where we'd be if every engineer who came along decided to reinvent the wheel, arch, and cantilever.

Or, imagine this: where would we be if every political system was reinvented from scratch? No, don't look at Athens, France, and the rest. Ignore all the political philosophers, and redo it all. You have to start from scratch. Right.

i think you should discuss the actual changes that you would like instead of arguing about not liking big or small changes without knowing what the changes are.

>>16

agreed,
i just suggested this plan thought up by someone else, and now we've got tons of people aruing against it because it's too big a change, and saying that smaller changes or refinemant would be better, yet ive yet to see anyone in this thread actually suggest adjustments to deal with the:

1. lax attitude allowed by the fact that it's govenment program, and not subject to natural pressure of competition that drives constant improvement.

2. the government control of public shools limits choice for those who can't afford a private school.

private schools have proven themselves to work much better, an exaple i've heard is a child failing by two years went to a syllivan center, and not only caught up, but soared PAST the grade level he was "supposed" to be at, and all in about 74 hours.

i think this is because private schools have to prove themselves, while public shools can simply do an "okay" job and not lose any funding.

so i suggest the plan of offer vouchers to all students, in place of the money spent funding public shools, so that america gets a free school system that incorparates competition to force progress, and offers freedom of choice to parents and students.

>>17

You are the second dumbest fucking person on 4chan, which I must say is quite an accomplishment.