The Washington Post Pans Apple-Sponsored School Reform TV Special (washingtonpost.com) 162
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On Friday night, the Big Four Networks simultaneously aired EIF Presents: XQ Super School Live [YouTube], a commercial-free, one-hour TV special that championed Laurene Powell Jobs' mission to rethink the American high school. The closing credits listed Jobs as an Executive Producer, and noted that the chock-full-of-celebrities special was sponsored in part by her Emerson Collective and Apple.
"Surely Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks, Mahershala Ali, Justin Timberlake, Cate Blanchett and a bevy of other celebrities have nothing but laudable intentions by appearing on Friday night's live televised high school reform spectacular on four -- count them, four -- major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox)," writes the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. "But when an hour of prime time on four networks is purchased, it's fair to ask whether that is a public service or propaganda."
The Post points out gently that "not everyone believes" in the need to "transform" high schools, while theodp notes "viewers were pitched XQ Super School Board Program kits, which XQ's website explains are designed to prepare individuals for a school board candidacy."
If this seems suspiciously political -- or at least a way to ensure schools are friendly to Laurene Powell Jobs' specific proposals -- the nonprofit's web site adds reassuringly that "XQ won't be endorsing or supporting particular candidates; we'll be supporting all candidates who stand with us in a shared commitment to rethink high school, so all young people can be educated as they deserve."
"Surely Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks, Mahershala Ali, Justin Timberlake, Cate Blanchett and a bevy of other celebrities have nothing but laudable intentions by appearing on Friday night's live televised high school reform spectacular on four -- count them, four -- major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox)," writes the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. "But when an hour of prime time on four networks is purchased, it's fair to ask whether that is a public service or propaganda."
The Post points out gently that "not everyone believes" in the need to "transform" high schools, while theodp notes "viewers were pitched XQ Super School Board Program kits, which XQ's website explains are designed to prepare individuals for a school board candidacy."
If this seems suspiciously political -- or at least a way to ensure schools are friendly to Laurene Powell Jobs' specific proposals -- the nonprofit's web site adds reassuringly that "XQ won't be endorsing or supporting particular candidates; we'll be supporting all candidates who stand with us in a shared commitment to rethink high school, so all young people can be educated as they deserve."
Times have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
This was on the four major broadcast networks (sorry, CW) - yet how many of us had no idea it was happening? This Slashdot submission was the first I'd heard of it, in any case...
Re:Times have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here.
That said, who still listens to the WaPo? Hearing them complain about something being too political or propaganda made my irony meter explode.
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I'm sure that's true... but, back in the "old days" when network TV still ruled the roost, (and most other people, I suspect)I would almost certainly have been aware of this sort of "special" even if I had no interest in watching it.
Re: Times have changed (Score:4, Insightful)
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If the people didn't give a fuck about what celebrities thought, they wouldn't have put one in the white House.
You weren't paying attention. The vast majority of high-profile celebrities (from the music, TV/Film, fashion, sports, and wider entertainment spectrum) breathlessly instructed you to vote for their chosen celebrity (Hillary Clinton), and poured the huge resources of their visibility, their shows, their concerts, and their social media machinery into making sure that their designated queen get the power to which she felt so entitled. And despite that enormously lopsided media environment, their celebrity-n
Re: Times have changed (Score:3)
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This was on the four major broadcast networks (sorry, CW) - yet how many of us had no idea it was happening
I think that probably answers your own question. How many people still get broadcast TV? I have a means to get it, but I never use it.
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Moron.
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This was on the four major broadcast networks (sorry, CW) - yet how many of us had no idea it was happening? This Slashdot submission was the first I'd heard of it, in any case...
Yes, but one thing you have to think about is target demographics. The people who participate in running for school board (or even voting for school board members for that matter) tend to be older and more likely to still be watching prime time network TV than your average Slashdot reader.
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This was on the four major broadcast networks (sorry, CW) - yet how many of us had no idea it was happening? This Slashdot submission was the first I'd heard of it, in any case...
I guess friday night football and Irma trumped this?
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Me too. Does anybody have a link to a simplified list of proposals? There's nothing specific on their website, only a bunch of liberal insanity.
Re: Same old message... (Score:2)
Private schools do better because the rich parents pay to send their kids there, and poverty makes it harder to learn things.
If public schools didn't rely on local property taxes for funding, you'd see them do a lot better.
Jeff Bezos pans apple!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wonder how Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post and Apple competitor Amazon figured in on the WP panning an Apple sponsored event.
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Wonder how Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post and Apple competitor Amazon figured in on the WP panning an Apple sponsored event.
This time it has less to do with Amazon than Bezos' own competing School Reform plans.
Excerpt (Score:1)
"A combination of Alexa-enabled Kindles and Echos by Amazon would serve the children very well instead of anything made by Apple."
-WP
Early education more important (Score:3, Interesting)
Improvements to high school are fine - but they are not of that much importance. If America is ever going to achieve racial equality, quality early childhood education is required for all. When a child is behind their piers by a year or two it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
Children of parents that are financially secure are often enrolled in programs where they are taught to read, are exposed to more language, and perform activities designed to stimulate intellect. So while poor parents can find no time to spend with their children, wealthy parents are giving their kids a head start. It has been shown that this head start stays with them all the way to adulthood. Social mobility is reduced - the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich, one generation after the other.
Racial inequality will exist so long as racial stereotypes can be statistically validated. Without social mobility, historically poor racial groups with remain poor and the stereotypes will continue. It is a never ending circle - a horrible circle which human nature will ensure persists. Those that think we can change human nature are horribly naive. But we do have control of social mobility in the form of early childhood education.
Providing more early education will lead to breaking the circle which will invalidate the stereotypes and finally end all of this hatred. Education is the only thing we have control of so we should start there.
Re:Early education more important (Score:4, Interesting)
Racial inequality will exist so long as racial stereotypes can be statistically validated.
I'm not sure what you mean. Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics? Racial inequality exists because we define a person as a race and not a person. If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
Providing more early education will lead to breaking the circle which will invalidate the stereotypes and finally end all of this hatred. Education is the only thing we have control of so we should start there.
Education to stop the hatred would be a great idea. Such as stop teaching children in school that the "white man" spread disease among the First Nations with blankets tainted with disease. The germ theory wasn't established then. European colonists certainly did a lot of horrible things. What they also did was end the practice in India of throwing the surviving wife onto the funeral fire of her dead husband. White men didn't "invent" slavery, they ended it.
It's the white male that is continually shit upon in the USA. We'll have Black History Month. We'll see Cinco de Mayo celebrated in the USA. There's quite a list of months for celebrating "diversity". Where's my month?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I say ending the hatred is a very good idea. As a white male living today I have never owned slaves. As someone with Germanic ancestry it's quite likely my ancestors were slaves. The word "slave" comes from "slav", as in the people were often taken as slaves by the Moors. Don't teach children that only one skin color were slaves and that only one skin color owned them. Be honest to your children. Everyone on Earth today has slavery in their history. The debts on that was wiped clean many times over with war, healing, and time. We need to remember it happened as a warning to not do it again.
I find it odd about the tearing down of Civil War monuments. These people don't want to forget the Civil War. If they did then the race based politics starts to disappear. What is really happening is the Democrats wanting to rewrite history by taking down the statues of prominent Democrat leaders. They want people to forget the rascist past of the Democrat Party.
Do people really want that clean break from the horrors of slavery? Then we need to break free from the Democrat Party. We can start by getting the Democrats out of our schools.
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I don't think it was on purpose- but there's a reason there was a malaria epidemic in the Oregon territory in 1830, at a time when very few of the natives had ever visited the tropics.
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SHUT UP YOU RACIST! I bet you don't send your cat to school and try to teach it to read purely because it differs genetically from you. I DID. It failed but I can tell everyone I TRIED and be proud of myself and stuff.
Look at how proud and noble I am! While the rest of you racist fucks were being racist, I sent my black cat to school and then when they tried to flunk it, I went there threatening with my lawyer BECAUSE I CARE. Now it got an A in everything and via affirmative action, is going to Harvard
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I'm not sure what you mean. Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics?
Can you? Which genes? What do they have with the genes that are contributing to the factors that identify as race?
Racial inequality exists because we define a person as a race and not a person.
Nope. Racial inequality exists because inequality exists in a manner that correlates with race.
If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
Well, that's stupid, because just because you can't see something since you closed your eyes (ironic name there), doesn't mean it ceases to exist.
Education to stop the hatred would be a great idea.
Good idea. Why don't you go through the collection of text books [wikipedia.org] and find some examples [wikipedia.org] of white supremacy that was being taught?
Why is it your primary e
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White men didn't "invent" slavery, they ended it.
This single quote shows that your head is so far up your own ass that it is amazing you even know the color of your own skin.
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Exactly. Slavery was there long before such a thing as "white men" even existed.
But they certainly did NOT end it; slavery never really stopped in central Africa.
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So the Civil War wasn't fought to end slavery?
Not disputed.
300,000 white men died so the slaves could be free.
And how many white men died fighting to keep slavery? You can't give credit to "white men" for one thing and not the other. Or maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be attributing the accomplishments of specific groups of people to an entire race.
The Royal Navy put an end to the slave trade on the high seas.
Yes, after they stopped being part of the slave trade themselves for the previous 150 years. I'd say they owed it to the world. And while it was great that it was stopped, that doesn't mean we should applaud "white men" generally as having accomplished this
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So, all of the blame when things go wrong, but no credit for realizing it was wrong and changing. Wow. So in other words, there is zero incentive to do the right thing.
And while it was great that it was stopped, that doesn't mean we should applaud "white men" generally as having accomplished this.
But it was entirely white men who did this. 100%. I think you just have a lot of racial hate and don't want to admit your enemies ever did anything good. It would be like saying Hitler's anti-smoking or a
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> Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics?
Sometimes, because it is not a guarantee. We should assess intelligence with tests of intelligence. The SAT is not such a test.
> Where's my month?
You don't need one because you are not disadvantaged. The whole point of having things like black history month, pride parades, and so on, is because these are groups of people who are severely disadvantaged.
> I find it odd about the tearing down of Civil War monuments.
I don
Re:Early education more important (Score:5, Insightful)
The Civil War monuments were mostly erected a half-century or more after the Civil War, about the time that Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South. Conclude from that what you wish, but why are they celebrating the traitorous, ugly, losing side in the Civil War and not the winning side? After almost every other war, it is the winning side that is honored.
The argument that taking them down would erase history is absurd. Why are there no monuments in the South celebrating the Union side? That is the history we should be remembering. I see the Confederate monuments as symbols of the slavery they wish they could still have. I've wondered that since I was a kid raised in North Carolina (and no one had a good answer), long before the current media focus on them. I can see how blacks could find these monuments unsettling.
Would you support replacing the Confederate monuments with ones that celebrate the winning side and the end of slavery? If not, why not?
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Would you support replacing the Confederate monuments with ones that celebrate the winning side and the end of slavery? If not, why not?
We should not tear down the Confederate monuments, for the same reason we don't burn books. We can learn from our mistakes, destroying evidence of our history can mean being doomed to repeat it.
A Confederate monument doesn't have to be a "celebration" of the how things used to be. Germany keeps their reminders of past wars, I've seen them. Perhaps instead of tearing them down we put a sign in front of them that reads, "Never again."
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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The problem is that they are not considered as warnings or reminders by most southerners. The confederate flag-wavers even have ceremonies honoring their Civil War "heroes". I don't think that a bunch of swastika flag-wavers in Germany praising Nazi heroes would be tolerated.
That is a good idea, though. I would consider "Never again" signs a reasonable compromise. But somehow I think they would be considered almost sacrilegious by a lot of southerners and repeatedly torn down. Hatred and illogic pla
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Fuck right off. If you're a white hetero male then every day is your day. I say this as one myself - we don't need a day because, fuck me, we don't need to struggle for anything as a population group. Man, whiny people who are part of the establishment (whether they see it or not) really annoy me. Pipe down!
Stop obfuscating the role that Europeans / European Americans had in the slave trade. A machine has many parts, sure, but you're making a false equivalence.
The statues thing - the term "these people" - w
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Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics?
Sure, but what does that have to do with race? Race is a naive folk hypothesis that purports to explain the geographic distribution of certain sets of superficial phenotype characteristics. As a scientific concept it fell apart as soon as we were able to actually look at people's genotypes.
There's this notion that the US will become a majority minority nation by 2044. Except, as one demographer I've read pointed out, by the one-drop standards used to reach that conclusion it's already happened. After
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Identity politics is racism. Erase identity from the social constructs, and you will erase racism permanently.
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Identity politics is racism. Erase identity from the social constructs...
Well, then. Easy-peasy.
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Racial inequality exists because we define a person as a race and not a person. If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
If the problem's existence is based on human perception, then ignoring the problem may indeed make it go away. However, if there are endemic economic causes, then ignoring the problem or ceasing to ask questions about it simply makes diagnoses disappear, but the actual problems will be perpetuated.
Such as stop teaching children in school that the "white man" spread disease among the First Nations with blankets tainted with disease. The germ theory wasn't established then.
This is a diversionary strawman. I doubt that the colonial Europeans in North America were so technologically advanced to intentionally wage biological warfare. However, their ignorance doesn't eliminate culpab
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Uh, not really. White people were the customers. Islamics are the ones who made the money off the slave trade- and still are in sub-Sahara Africa.
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Uh, not really. White people were the customers. Islamics are the ones who made the money off the slave trade- and still are in sub-Sahara Africa.
This is mostly incorrect. Africans, including mostly non-Muslim Africans, captures slaves who were then sold to European slave traders. The traders transported the slaves to the Western Hemisphere and sold them to the eventual slave owners. The vast majority of the money made off the slave trade and slave economy went into white hands.
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We'll see Cinco de Mayo celebrated in the USA.
You do realize that Cinco de Mayo [wikipedia.org] is roughly the Mexican equivalent of St. Patrick's day, right? The difference is they drove out the French rather than snakes. It's a big day for parties and drinking beer. Diez y Seis [houstonculture.org] is the Mexican independence day.
At least if you're going to complain about something, complain about the right something, like cities renaming streets in honor of liberal heartthrob Cesar Chavez, because they think of him as the black MLK.
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Racial inequality will exist so long as racial stereotypes can be statistically validated.
I'm not sure what you mean. Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics?
Yes because no such causal link exists.
Racial inequality exists because we define a person as a race and not a person.
Actually, it's far more about economics than it is about race, race got mixed in due to racism. Poor areas have a tendency to get less funding for education than rich areas. If we balanced it out, within a generation you would be getting similar outcomes.
If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
I agree. Universities shouldn't be looking for "racial diversity" they should be looking for "economic diversity".
Education to stop the hatred would be a great idea. Such as stop teaching children in school that the "white man" spread disease among the First Nations with blankets tainted with disease. The germ theory wasn't established then.
At least in my education, the term "white man" was never mentioned. However, they did spread disease
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I don't see how anything you propose would improve the education system. While I don't agree with the OP's suggestion that an ambiguous improvement of early education will be some magic remedy for racism and racial inequality, I find it odd that your reaction to his suggestion is to rant about how unfairly the white man has been treated.
Furthermore, I don't believe children are taught that only black people were ever slaves. But it wouldn't be incorrect to teach them that only black people were legally ensl
Re: Early education more important (Score:2)
How did this useless assortment of white-boy talking points get modded up?
"Um where's MY month" is old and tired in highschool.
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Education to stop the hatred would be a great idea. Such as stop teaching children in school that the "white man" spread disease among the First Nations with blankets tainted with disease. The germ theory wasn't established then.
That's like arguing that nobody would build a catapult until the Theory of Gravity said the stuff shot with it would come back down. If you know something works, you use it.
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The party that sunk Bernie so they could run their choice of candidate, and not the choice of those voting in the primary? It may be a party of democrats, but it's not a democratic party.
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That's right. Republican voters got the populist candidate they wanted, and Democratic voters were denied the candidate they wanted.
I think Keith Ellison understands that Democrats don't want any more centrist Obamas and Hillaries, they want progressives like Bernie. I'm not sure Tom Perez understands that yet.
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When a child is behind their piers by a year or two it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
They end up completely out at sea.
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Yeah, when a (presumed) College graduate can't spell "peers" correctly, it'll be hard for him/her/it to catch up with said peers...
Or were you talking about people living down by the docks? If so, never mind....
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When a child is tied to the piers for a year or two, it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
ftfy
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Re:Early education more important (Score:5, Interesting)
You really need to pay attention.
A number of years ago our federal government got sold a new method of teaching reading to kids - sight words [k12reader.com]. This method of teaching was designed to bridge the gap between "poor" kids and "rich" kids ability to read. It does this by eliminating the focus on phonics (sounding words out, and how sounds relate to character combinations) and instead having the kids completely memorize small words. If you show your kid the word "brain" and they say "banana", this is what's going on. When they look at words, they either know them or they don't, they don't try to sound them out, they are taught to simply take a guess and everyone around them will help correct them if necessary and maybe they will get it next time. They are being evaluated by how many out of say 200 words they get memorized through the end of the school year.
Our education system was able to ensure that poor kids could read at a level much more closer to rich kids by effectively not teaching kids how to read anymore. Instead of trying to bring some kids up, they brought them all way down. We are ending up with a bunch of stories like http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/schools-dont-teach-kids-to-read/ [wnd.com] that are getting buried in the news.
Be careful what you wish for.
As a parent of a 7 year old having to teach my kid to read myself, I'm pretty damn sure Grey's Law applies here, rather than Hanlon's Razor. At the moment, the kids that are getting ahead are the ones that a) are going to private schools early on (that voucher nonsense? last year when I figured this out, I began to actually start thinking they might have some merit...), b) have parents who actually identify that this is going on, and c) have parents who have the capabilities to do something about it. All the other kids are absolutely being left behind. This failure of our system of education is absolutely unprecedented, and it's all the more horrifying when you understand that the basis of further learning is dependent completely on competent reading skills.
Thank you federal government, for doing your best to make sure that when we fail, we all fail together.
Re: Early education more important (Score:2, Insightful)
When you consider that these laws and benchmarks are written by people who have gone through private schools, have children or grandchildren in those same private schools, one has to wonder whether stories like this are a matter of politicians trying to help everyone, or help set their own above and apart from the rest... planting the roots of the caste system in America.
Proper reading is based on IMAGE, not sound (Score:3, Interesting)
'sounding out' is NEVER a reading method, but a method for people who speak a language far better than they (currently) read it to learn new words. This means young children- but actual PROPER reading must be taught in a way that bypasses the verbal part of our brain.
You should read by SEEING each word, in the same way you see a car or cat. If you read by sounding out inside your head, you are effectively reading 'disabled'.
The confusion comes from the mechanism of understanding NEW words- and dim witted pa
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You appear to have a terribly warped view of the role of sight words in reading and more generally of language and reading development. Just because kids of a certain level should have certain sight words does not mean that they never use phonetics. It is actually a completely natural part of reading development to guess at words sometimes instead of sounding them out. Sight words are simply part of how reading works. If you think adults read by sounding out every word you are mistaken. Adults are simp
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I have 6 kids, 4 have learned how to read, the fifth is in kindergarten and on is only 2. They all learned site words first and probably read way better then you do. Honor roll, advanced classes, etc...
Site words work, phonics works, kids all learn different and the mark of a great school / teacher is adaptability. We can't always have great, so parents have to step up and find out what works for their kids.
You probably learned simp [thisreadingmama.com]
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I thought Idiocracy (2006) [imdb.com] was supposed to be a political satire comedy not a documentary? :-/
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Even with a greater investment in early education, children from educated families will always have a leg up on their peers. There are also the problems of school funding being local (thereby ensuring that wealthy neighborhoods have better funded schools), but overall we spend enough on schools to expect better results.
I think it's easy to point out the problems in education but finding solutions is difficult. Your solution seems to be "provide more early education." That sounds great, but how do you execut
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So in other words public school education has failed, public school teachers unions are guilty for keeping black kids in poor schools, administrators take most of the funds for themselves to pay their fat salaries, and politicians don't care as long as they keep the tax revenues flowing.
Nope, Public school education has been set up to fail, teacher's unions are blamed for failures, and administrators are finding ways to enrich themselves as they exploit the perception of fails. Politicians don't care as long as the campaign donations keep flowing.
They especially like the donations to set up charter schools and give tuition to religious schools, and for more testing programs.
We spend four times more per student than we did 40 years ago corrected for inflation, and yet the outcomes are the same. Yep that pretty much sums up the state of public education in America.
Not really, no. We actually spend less on student's education, you're just confusing the numbers because you're tak
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Your only specific example is DC, a jurisdiction under the explicit control of Congress
No, congress does not run the DC school board or the DC school system. Which you know, though you're implying they do so you can cravenly dodge the substance of the matter. Nice attempt to avoid the reality of the situation. I cite DC because YOU, along with me, get to pay for a large portion of that very high per-student expense and its historically awful per-student results. Shall we examine the exact same problem in Baltimore, or Detroit, or Chicago?All cities run for decades, of course, by liberal Demo
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He's too chickenshit to say it, but you know what he's talking about. It's the *coloreds*, and those greasy mexicans swarming across the borde
Wow, you're a racist, aren't you.
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First it says that the need for high school "redesign" is a faulty narrative, then it says that the school system "needs serious reform". Which is it?
Redesign is when you make elaborate plans to change it so people think you're going to do something. Reform is when you actually do it.
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Bravest little dog I have ever seen. Muriel and Eustace were lucky to have him.
Yes High Schools Need Transformation (Score:4, Insightful)
You got several levels of schooling in this country. The elite go to prep schools and other private routes and go to elite colleges and then to elite jobs where they get an education. The elite take care of themselves just fine.
Then you got public school which has to take care of the worst (special ed, and pls spare me the crap) to the best, some who might likely get identified early and sped along. Many not. And whether they are at 25% or 90%, many have to attend the same classes.
And public school has little tolerance for trade jobs, the overriding message is "Go to College" nevermind that many people work well with their hands, don't have the funds for college, and that college doesn't automatically mean better pay in the long haul.
We can also seperate this between inner city schools, most are underfunded, and suburban schools -- where the teachers often make more than the surrounding median population but will cry how poor they are like inner city teachers while their pay/benefits/pensions put crushing taxes on their districts in some states.
Public schools are generally a one-size-fits-all system when it doesn't and that is the overriding problem. Children can certainly benefit some customization something like a tablet running Khan Academy or Duoling-like programs can bring. But then again, tablets in their current form with browsing and other manner of garbage are unsuitable. Before someone mentions cost, prepaid smartphones are down to $30 at Walmart... they certainly can play Netflix and such. Not much more is needed for a tablet. A classroom of kids can be outfitted for less than a single iPad.
What states really need to do is hire people at a state and national level to cooperate on these programs and on public-copyright textbooks and save on costs over time by cooperation and having development costs spread out over thousands of school districts rather than rely on vendors.
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One thing with XQ is that they are pushing to change the one
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no abstract on their web site? (Score:2)
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The premise of Friday's show looked good but it lacked any substance. It was just celebrities.
PBS NOVA had a great episode a year ago called School of the Future [pbs.org] that gave a lot studies behind each of the proposed ideas.
Errrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Errrr... (Score:1)
What is fair to ask? Well, for one, they didn't buy the front page on all the newspapers....
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Of course the rich will always be able to get the best education available. They can pay for it. Why is that a problem? Them getting the best education has nothing to do with everyone else being able to get a good education.
The real question should be how do we improve education for children whose environment teaches them education is unimportant? That's the real problem. Children in homes where education is valued will almost always get a good education. Children in homes where education is not values, whe
Translation service (Score:5, Insightful)
"We'll be supporting all candidates who stand with us"
Translation: "We'll be supporting all candidates who will buy our stuff."
war of the corporate propagandists (Score:3)
So we have one Democratic billionaire corporate master (Bezos) criticizing another Democratic billionaire corporate master (Jobs) over how to spend tax dollars on education. This is the vision Democrats have for America: propaganda, corporatism, and government by elites and billionaires.
What these pricks are united in is in denying Americans the right to make their own choices for how their kids are educated with the tax dollars their parents have spent.
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How are they denying anything? The XQ thing, as you'll see if you read the article, was a competition open to anyone to suggest innovative school models. Nothing was prescriptive. The WaPo riposte says, confusedly, that there's no problem to solve really, plus the schools have been fixing the problem for decades, and yes the schools do need to be reformed ... but not the XQ way. This is a debate (sort of) and a difference of opinion. No laws are being passed about how to spend tax dollars.
I cannot part
What is really needed (Score:1)
Having been in the homes of many poor families I can tell you quite honestly that there will be no equal education until homework is abolished. As soon as kids step off of school grounds they are no longer equal, no longer have equal access to materials and systems, and do not have the time free that homework requires.
As for the video linked in the article, I tried watching it but found it so cringe inducing that I started skipping through it, trying to find some informative element of the message they want
What is the solution to failed state schools (Score:2)
State run schools in the US on the whole are an abject failure, both compared to schools in the US historically and compared to schools around the globe. The only honest question is how to fix them.
Teachers unions have been claiming for 30 years (at least) that the schools need more money and that will fix the problem. The US now pays 28% above average for first world countries to educate children: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/c... [ed.gov] and US students still score well below average for first world countries
Re: (Score:1)
State run schools in the US on the whole are an abject failure, both compared to schools in the US historically and compared to schools around the globe. The only honest question is how to fix them.
No, it isn't the only honest question. For example, we might honest question why you think that they are on the whole, an abject failure, when on the whole, there are widely different results in different schools. We might ask honest questions about what is a failing school. We might even ask, honestly, why schools are failing. We might ask honest questions about why you think there is only one question to ask.
Teachers unions have been claiming for 30 years (at least) that the schools need more money and that will fix the problem.
Or we might ask why you are trying to boil down actual specific requests by Teachers, and Teac