I am a civil libertarian who voted against Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. I am pro-choice on sex, birth control, abortion, and gay marriage. I am against the Cuban embargo, the war on drugs, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and privatizing social security.
Many public school systems don't want to teach critical thinking skills. Instead, they want to brainwash students into supporting the military/industrial complex, so they will shop at Wal-Mart, join the military, and never question the dictatorship policies of the Bush administration. The current system teaches students that loyalty to their school football teams at pep rallies is more important than learning critical thinking skills in the classroom.
And now our fascist dictator President wants mandatory testing for "mental illness" for all public school students. Don't you just know that anyone who questions the Bush regime will be labeled as "mentally ill" and put on some sort of mind altering/brainwashing drug, reminiscent of Winston Smith in 1984?
I am opposed to using tax dollars to pay for private school tuition. Bush wants vouchers for private schools so he can force them to adopt his totalitarian fascist right wing tactics. Don't let him do it. Say no to using tax dollars to pay for private schools.
I urge all free thinking liberal parents to home school their children, or send them to a good, decent private school. Montessori schools and Marva Collins schools, and Catholic schools and Jewish schools are examples of good private schools.
I read a lot of libertarian websites. Here is some interesting information about education:
http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/19990606kelly7.aspA year ago April, I visited a kindergarten class in the basement of a black church in Dayton, Ohio. None of the parents had ever been to college. Still, all 13 kids could read. (Two girls read me one of Aesop's fables, and explained -- correctly -- its meaning.) In addition, each of the kids could pick out any of the 50 states on a map, and they knew all the state capitals -- even though most had never been farther than Cincinnati.
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http://www.marvacollins.com/biography.htmlBIOGRAPHY
Marva N. Collins
Marva Collins grew up in Atmore, Alabama at a time when segregation was the rule. Black children were not permitted to use the public library, and her schools had few books. Nonetheless, her father, a successful businessman, instilled in her an awareness of the family's historical excellence and helped develop her strong desire for learning, achievement and independence. After graduating from Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, she taught school in Alabama for two years. She moved to Chicago and, later taught in Chicago's public school system for fourteen years.
Her experiences in that system, coupled with her dissatisfaction with the quality of education that her two youngest children were receiving in prestigious private schools, led to her decision to open her own school on the second floor of her home. She took the $5,000 balance from her pension fund and began her educational program with an enrollment of her own two children and four other neighborhood youngsters.
Thus, Westside Preparatory School was founded in 1975 in Garfield Park, a Chicago inner-city area. During the first year Marva took in learning disabled, problem children and even one child labeled border-line retarded. At the end of the first year every child scored at least five grades higher proving that the previous labels placed on these children were misguided.
In 1990 Mrs. Collins worked with over thirty public schools in Oklahoma. Harvard University tracked the progress of eight principals, four who accepted the model enthusiastically and four who did not aggressively promote it in their schools. The results after one year were astounding. The four schools who did the work had an average increase on the Iowa Standardized Test of over 172%. One school almost tripled their test scores. The four schools that did not do the work had an increase of only 10%.
In 1995, Charles Murray wrote a controversial book called "The Bell Curve." In the book he mentioned that Marva Collins' work would have no long lasting effects on the children. 60 Minutes ( CBS' TV News show) wanted to find out if this was true. So, they ran a second story showcasing the lives of the first thirty-three students who attended Westside Preparatory School. Statistically, one of the students should have been shot, two in jail and five on welfare. This was not the case. All thirty-three students, now adults, were leading very successful lives with a majority choosing teaching as a profession.
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http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=11200Average per_pupil spending in U.S. public schools rose 212 percent from 1960 to 1995 in real (inflation_adjusted) dollars.
In 1960, for every U.S. public school teacher there were approximately 26 students enrolled in the schools. In 1995, there were 17.
In 1994, fewer than 50 percent of the personnel employed by U.S. public schools were teachers.
The average salary of U.S. public school teachers rose 45 percent in real dollars from 1960 to 1995.
Only 38 percent of U.S. public school teachers majored in an academic subject in college.
40 percent of public high school science teachers have neither an undergraduate major nor minor in their main teaching field, and 34 percent of public high school math teachers did not major or minor in math or related fields.
In Florida, it takes six times as many people to administer a federal education dollar as a state dollar: 297 state employees are responsible for $1 billion in federal funds, while 374 employees oversee $7 billion in state funds.
In Arizona, 45 percent of the staff of the state education department are responsible for managing federal programs that account for 6 percent of the state's education spending.
After spending $118 billion since 1965 on Title I, the federal government's largest K_12 program, evaluations conclude that the "program has been unable to lift academic level of poor students."
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http://i2i.org/article.aspx?ID=111The Roman Catholic church has run schools in the poorest parts of American cities for over 100 years. In 1990, the RAND Corporation, hardly a statistically naïve or purposefully deceptive group, studied New York City high schools. It found that Catholic high schools drawing from the same neighborhoods as New York City’s "zoned" high schools produced higher graduation rates and better test scores at a cost of about $3,500 per student. The City’s cost was $6,700 per student.
A score of other studies has documented similar results. In 1996-97, Washington, D.C., had the largest per-pupil expenditures and smallest teacher student ratios in the nation at $9,123 and 14 to 1 respectively. Despite this, 12% of D.C. public classrooms did not have textbooks at the beginning of the 1996-97 school year. When the city pumped $63 million into roof repairs in the early 1990s, the system spent only 7% of the money on roofs.
At an actual cost per student of only $2,700, Washington, D.C., Catholic schools provided books, a safe environment, and far better levels of academic achievement. The data also show that the most disadvantaged children benefit the most from Catholic school attendance.
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http://www.justfacts.com/education_2.htmlPublic schools in Washington, D.C. cost $8,920 per student in the 94-95 school year (among the highest in the U.S.) and ranked near the bottom on almost every level of performance. Upon entering the D.C. school system, students are shown to be average.
As of 1996, there were 88 private schools in the D.C. area that cost $4,000 per year or less.
As of 1998, public school teachers make 52% more than private school teachers.
46% of private school budgets go to teacher pay. If public schools paid teachers that same percentage, the average public school teacher's annual salary would jump from $38,509 to $54,421.
Over 50% of employees added to public school payrolls between 1959 and 1998 are not teachers.
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http://www.justfacts.com/education_1.htmlA study done in 1999 compared the math scores of black public school and black Catholic school students in Washington, DC. They included the education of child's mother, the child's family status (one or two parents in the home), the availability of reading materials in the child's home, and the median income of the neighborhood in which the child lived. The study used data from 1996.
* The results of the study are:
- The average black eighth-grade student who attends Catholic school has math scores better than 72% of comparable students in public schools.
- The effect of attending a Catholic school has a greater positive effect on mathematics achievement than the effect of reducing the student to teacher ration from 25:1 to 15:1.
- The effect of attending a Catholic school has a greater positive effect on mathematics achievement than the effect of a student's mother having some college education.
- The effect of attending a Catholic school has a greater positive effect on mathematics achievement than the effect of living in a two-parent family.
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http://www.justfacts.com/education_1.htmlIn Cleveland, 39.7% of public school teachers have sent or are sending at least one of their own children to private school. In Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the percentages are 44.6%, 36.3%, and 35.9% respectively. Nationally, 14.1% of all children attend private schools.
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