Well-educated people are such a pain in the ass:
If Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has his way, the Badger State will become the first to stop requiring students in public schools to spend a minimum number of hours in class.
Remember what President Trump said on the night he won the Nevada caucuses?
Donald Trump speaks what’s on his mind, often as soon as it appears there. And after winning his third-straight contest in Nevada Tuesday, Trump credited his “poorly educated” supporters, in part, for the win.
“We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated,” he said during his victory speech.
I love the poorly educated, too, but not because they’re poorly educated. That’s one difference between me and Donald Trump and Scott Walker. The other difference is that I love the highly educated, too. But those two gentlemen hate them with a white-hot passion due to their massive inferiority complexes:
A proposal in Walker’s new budget plan calls for ending the state’s current minimum requirements — 437 hours for kindergarten, 1,050 hours for elementary schools and 1,137 hours for secondary schools — and allowing school districts to do what they want in terms of seat hours for students.
Fewer hours of school means less developed critical thinking, which suits demagogues and charlatans quite well.
Seat time is a means, not an end.
It’s a proxy measure of learning, and not a good one.
What you do with the time has much more of an effect on outcomes than the time.
If you had a proper system of proficiency-based learning in place, and whatever credentials the state gives are based on actual demonstrations of competency, then the seat time accumulated by students would vary, should vary, perhaps even vary wildly.
Not every nail is driven in the same number of swings of the hammer, and certainly not by every carpenter.
Read the linked piece.
What is your opinion on these New York state requirements for HS diploma?
Sorry, my bad. Chicago…http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/04/05/cps-to-set-new-graduation-requirement-have-a-plan-for-after-h
igh-school/
I think it stinks on ice. This is the education lobby pushing for more business. If you pass the ISAT and have your credits you should graduate.
Liberal elites should realize that there is no earthly reason to go to college or trade school to become a waiter or retail clerk which is where most jobs are.
I see nothing, beyond the fact that Walker’s a cheeseparing asshole who will use this as a stalking horse to cheap out, to weaken my general argument.
But Walker is not “just” a cheeseparing asshole. He’s also smart, for a certain cheeseparing definition of smart: somebody is always benefitting, bigly, from everything he does and that benefit comes back to Walker when he passes the hat at election time. Right now, the biggest lobbying operation in Wisconsin is the voucher/charter school lobby, and (see my comment below to BooMan) they are going to be helped by this.
Your general argument may have some merit, but if you think it means anything at all to Walker or has anything to do with his motivation for pushing this idea you are mistaken. Walker would just as quickly increase as reduce instructional hours if there were something in it that would benefit the people who support him.
It does, and I don’t.
I would disagree with that in general. I have some doubt that lowering school time is beneficial at all. Rather I would suppose that other things equal, increasing school time is the better course. I think it would increase proficiency and improve socialization. One does not need to merely meet some standard. Why not excel, as we are competing here with the world, and for our own futures. Education is something we can never get enough of and much of the world understands that. So cutting back time is short sighted in my view. I think your argument is useful to those who wish to redirect funds for schools, but that is all.
Well, if you know of anybody, anywhere in the world, at any time in the past or present, who has a proper system of proficiency based learning to sell, please tell us the name of the book or author, or provide a link to the web site. I don’t think anyone has ever developed such a system, mostly because evaluating proficiency is hard. And it costs money, which is what no conservatives want to hear.
This post is doubly ironic for me as I just now finished listening to an hour and a half broadcast of a David McCullough speech made on March 9 about the “Ideals of the Founding Fathers”.
While he’s always worth a listen, today he specifically emphasized how much value the founding fathers placed on an educated citizenry and quoted Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Not only did the founding fathers believe in free and public education, McCullough also pointed out that we were the first country to create a public library and that it was this era that also birthed the creation of the various state public universities. Apparently now we are being ruled by those who seek to undo all that our founding fathers sought to create and support. .
Neo-feudalism works best when the rabble are just skilled enough to press the buttons in the correct order at work, and spending their free time staring at their phones crushing candies and stalking ex-partners on Facebook.
That’s what my wife, who lived in Wisconsin for more than 15 years, thought. People like Walker want cheap labor that knows just enough to do the job.
Work force destruction. Public schools in WI will loose their acceditation and the students will be unable to compete on a national level. This is a failure to recognize that the children of WI are WI’s future and not some free market Randian thing.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” — Isaac Asimov
Full essay here.
That’s true but it’s more of a side-effect, and in any case it will take years for the marginal difference to appear. The main and more immediate benefit of this measure for Walker and the people who support him is it will relatively advantage voucher and some charter schools, relative to public schools. The latter will find it difficult (even though they’re now permitted) to cut instructional hours because they are still accountable to the public. Declining state school aid will ultimately force them down this road. The former, because they are not accountable to the public, can set up their programs any way they please and will now be free to tout their “computer-guided” instruction while they cut back on teaching staff and take the difference as profit.
Meanwhile, the children of the elite will continue going to real schools so they know how to best manage the Morlocks.
This is yet another step in what I refer to as “Guatemalization.” The Guatemalizing of America was begun in earnest with Ronald Reagan, and we witness its final stages wit the likes of Scott Walker.
How the GOP Could Use Science’s Reform Movement Against It
I think you’re overly optimistic about how much critical thinking students are taught now. Just look at recent evidence-free belief that the DNC computer was hacked, rather than the emails being stolen by a resentful staffer; that our election was manipulated by Russia, rather than by James Comey and the New York Times; that the chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun was done by Assad, rather than by Jabhat Fateh al Sham. And if anything it’s the more highly educated people who are most hysterically ready to drink the Kool-Aid.
The preening self-regard of the propaganda victims who will fall for the most transparent conspiracy theories so long as they match prior ironclad ideological commitments is fucking hysterical.