Drew Carey: Education Revolt on Reason TV!

I am not saying get rid of private schools , I am saying , a free thinking republic , cannot depend on them to be the only source of decent education.

I didn't know getting rid of private schools was under debate. Do your truly believe public schools are bastions of free thinking and that you should count on bureaucrats with zero accountability as the primary source of education.

Everyone must have this available to them . Or we rot from the inside out.

Connecting the money directly to children and allowing parents to choose a school means more sources of eduction, not less. This would in no way decrease availability.

>The real "pay off" of education is in the future of the >country. When the kids grow up and become productive >members of society .
I completely agree that a republic needs a well educated populace to ensure a healthy society and the economy needs a well educated populace to ensure a strong economy.

>The for profit business model is too short sighted for >endeavors such as this.
Why is this? Private schools were around for thousands of years before public schools existed. Private schools still exist and continue to provide superior education to their public counterparts at a lower price. So again. Why is this short sighted? Private schools have a longer history of providing superior education at a lower price while public schools have a shorter history of providing inferior education at a higher price.

>I go so far as to say it is criminal.
Why are private schools criminal. That seems odd considering they predate public schools and continue to operate besides them.

>Education is the foundation of a healthy culture,
I couldn't agree more.

>what is the price of failing a generation?
The price is several generations of despair. One generation will produce the next generation of civic leaders, businessman, scientists, and artists all without a proper education. This may very well produce another lost generation. This could continue indefinitely.

>No guarantee of getting back on track.
Again I completely agree. This chain reaction could end very badly for our nation.

>When money becomes more important than children, >they cannot even value themselves.
You are definitely right about this.

>It is easy to throw away a worthwhile future then you >have little guidance.
Indeed we have been misguided for too long.

>It is this lazy way of valuing things purely by monetary >means that brought us to where we are today.
If you are refereeing to our instant gratification superficial materialistic debt ridden culture than I am in complete agreement.

>I live in a healthy community, with great public schools. >Kids from here have become astronauts and opera >singers.
I'm truly happy for you and your children. I just wish everyone had similar opportunities.

>Many teachers I know do not get paid for the extra hours >devoted to the kids.
It is unfortunate that superior public educators are not appropriately compensated. Private schools reward teachers according to their performance not just their time in class. This sort of meritocracy is at the heart of excellence and where it is absence mediocrity rules.

>Many parents are lucky enough to have time to volunteer.
Sounds like a very nice community.

>Yes, times are rough, lately.
Yes, yes they are. We must pay for previous overindulgences.

>There is one place in the community that should always >have the rock solid support it deserves. The kids.
I just wish more would realize this. That kids are our most important and sacred responsibilities.

>You cannot treat kids like you do assembly line >production, and expect decent, civilized adults.
I again agree. Kids are all too often forced through federally mandated institutionalized standards of mediocrity. Generation after generation are forced to go through constantly deteriorating schools with more and more apathetic teachers. Desperate parents call upon the public schools teachers and administrators but they have no power over these institutional bureaucrats, their efforts are futile. Parents spending a fraction of what they are forced to pay for public schools on private schools get to choose and their children reap huge benefits. And if one private school performs poorly the parents can easily transfer their child to another one.

>We cannot afford to have to "bail out" the education >system too. The price of failure is too high.
The price of failure has been too high. The current system needs a major overhaul before it is too late and we lose another generation.

>We are already loosing a generation in some places, to ignorance and decay . .
We have already lost several generations to ignorance and decay as generations of parents are forced to send their children to the same public institutions where they learned about apathy and lack of accountability.

>Kids try their best when they know they are cared for and important.
With the accountability and incentives of private schools both teachers and students would know they are cared, important and strive for excellence.

>Education should not be for profit.
Why? If it works better at a lower cost.

>It should be public and what works best for kids.
What works best for kids, using every measurable means of performance, is private not public.

>This is a community problem .
No, this is a parental problem and parents need freedom to choose what is best for their children.

>Parents need to have a way to spend more time with >kids , kids need to be a priority in the culture .
I completely agree with this one. The saving of privatizing education could allow parents to spend more time with their children.

>Every person counts , in stead of every penny . Our >culture is on the wrong foundation .

Money most certainly does count. Money is a measure of resources and resources are limited. We must decide how best to utilize those resources. Spending $25,000 per student to get a substandard education that makes the rest of the world laugh at us is not a good use of limited resources. Spending $5,000 to get a superior education that would make the rest of the world envious is a good use of our limited resources. Every penny does count. If you privatize education it costs less for a superior product. These savings could be passed onto the public and allow for either more money or more time. This could allow those who want to to work less and spend more time with their families.

That's the one, thank you.

I disagree with you about capitalism.

I'll think on the charter school thing some more, but one thing I should point out is that I started school in the Bronx public school system, and my wife did in Florida. I didn't have to walk through metal detectors but my wife did. But, I would like to point out that you present Charter/private schools as the only solution to this. Why? There is more than one solution to problems like this. I'm not going to pretend to have the solution, but why can't we solve this in the public sector?

Don't tell me that I'm pretending to care, because I actually do and you have no way of knowing my feelings so I'm going to just take that as the meaningless ad hominem attack that it is.

Also, you jump to non sequitur conclusions that I would rather "stick it to the man" then throw a lifeline to the children. You and I both know that is just another ad hominem attack, based on the fact that we disagree what will help our educational system. I have little doubt that you and I both want the education system to work, but that we just disagree on how that can happen.

I could be like you and just dismiss everything you're saying based on what I perceive to be your idealistic view. I could just dismiss you as a free-market idealist, and that you'll support any initiative that goes along with your idealism whether or not it makes sense on its own merits, and say you don't give a rats ass about anything except profits, but where would that get us?

I've already stated my case to my capability on this matter, and just because I'm no expert doesn't automatically make you right. I'd gladly debate you more thoroughly on issues that I know more about, but admitting I am not an expert on charter schools was me being honest. It was not an invitation for you to just start throwing ad hominems at me in all your superior glory.

There are better people than I in supporting the reasons why we should improve the public school system rather than relying on charter schools. I've personally reached my limit and I'm too tired to do more research right this second. My kids are in public school so I have no reason to research this further, but I will keep the things you said in mind though because I never am so arrogant to think I am always right.

I also never said that the public sector is without its own corruption. It is corrupt like most institutions and I agree with you. There's another non sequitur for you. Why does that mean we should give up. I'd rather fix it.

You started out OK, but then you descended into ad hominems and you ended with a nice insult. My current opinion unchanged for now, but like I said I will keep what you said in mind (if you stop insulting me) and then in the future when I look at this issue deeper I'll give what you said more thought. If I weren't so tired I would have been a more enjoyable debate for you, so I apologize for that. Have a nice day.

I realize that you've stated your case to your capability on this matter. You come on here and talk about the evils of capitalism and wring your hands about how something must be done to help the children, but when I ask you for some sort of factual basis for your nonsense you wave it off.

You're damn right it's an ad hominem attack. I am directly and unequivocally calling your character and motives into question.

If it was debate you wanted, you would have answered the damn questions. Instead, you dropped your steaming piles of conversational doo and then slunk off when I pointed them out. You're too tired, you've done too much research already, you're no expert.

I'm glad to see that you approved of my methodology in the beginning and that you're interested in continuing a civilized and productive debate in the future, but I'm not buying your veneer of civil discourse for a minute. You want me to be the bad guy? Fine, I'm the bad guy.

Now stop telling me how we all want to solve this problem and put a practical solution on the table that can stand up to the light of direct questioning.

Dude why are you being such a dick?

to say that capitalism failed because of a periodic recession is like saying that humans are a failed species because they get the flu, cancer, or AIDS.

likewise, to say that "public schools fail" because some schools SUCK, is a broad generalization that doesn't hold water either.

the part of the equation that people don't want to discuss, is that some schools fail because their students SUCK. There. You can't force some ignoramus to learn, if he doesn't want to.

The school fails because the system forces the school to keep every swinging dick in it, and THAT is the secret to public school reform: KICK OUT THE TROUBLE MAKERS.

In some countries, such as India and in Latin America, at the end of every year, the kids have to take an achievement test. You failed (even a single subject)? You redo the entire year. ALL subjects. Fail again? You are OUT.

Boy, you'd be amazed at how the parents becomes really strict and start paying attention to Junior's grades once their future rides on passing those tests.

Vouchers restore the element of "survival of the fittest" to the schools, just like businesses, just like in nature. Private schools kick bad kids out. So they can have better results. Public schools won't kick anyone out. What's more, they even "mainstream" mentally handicapped kids that slow down the entire class, just to give them the time to "socialize".

School should NOT be about socialization, it's about education. You succeed, or you fail. PERIOD.

In several different schools I've seen administrators threaten to fire teachers who fail "too many" children. What does that mean? You set a standard, you create tests, you even provide extra credit, but if a kid can't or won't do his work and doesn't learn the material, why should he be advanced to the next level?

Who does that help?

I said my opinion was an opinion. I said I could be wrong. I said I would give your comments more thought in the future, and you are acting like I am trying to debate you, when I told you that I'm not. Not today. So you turn that around to make it look like I'm attempting to prove something, when it is you that is attempting to prove something. All I attempted to do was express my opinion which is what I did. I really think that it is your character that is in question, not mine. I was just being honest, and you are just being combative. Get a friggen grip.

hi curtis,

you are saying that i said something that I didn't. All I did was say that the private sector failed in that instance. I never said all of capitalism failed. Capitalism has done a lot of good. I'm just not a fan of laissez-faire capitalism, and I don't think that capitalism automatically solves all of our problems.

I agree with you that not all public schools suck.

I agree with you that some students fail because they are just stupid, but our teaching methodology is also lacking.

I also agree with you that it is not ok to pass a student to just meet a quota or whatever. It doesn't help anyone to just breeze kids through the system. I really think we need to take a look at the methods we use to teach students. We can improve on that... but I know there are some students that just won't get it no matter what, so I mostly agree with you curtis.

"capitalism doesn't necessarily lead to capitalism" haha i told you i'm tired.

I meant "quality".

"Advertising the performace would of course be only one thing that was advertised."
...And?

"Because charter schools are less accountable than public schools."
How so?

"Cherry picking the best and the brightest to "lead by example" wouldn't be a good thing because children should not have to compete for a good education."
My point is that the students would not be competing. Who would they be competing against? Do you think there would be a limited number of seats available in a privatized system like some perverse game of musical chairs? It is the schools who would be in competition, not the students. The students would benefit from having the choice of where to go. We have no education in this country because students have no choice where to go unless their parents have enough money to fund both a public and a private education. How is that fair or good or equitable?

I understand that you disagree. I just don't understand why. Show me how free-market capitalism has been "discredited." Show me how "our public education system" equates to "all our problems." Show me how with a proven track record of success on the private side and a proven track record of abysmal failure on the public side there is any valid argument for public administration.

If someone said to you, you can have this Yugo for $14,000 or this Ferrari for $10,000, which would you take? Would you take the Yugo and thumb your nose at the Ferrari because the owner of Yugo says that he believes everyone SHOULD own a car and the owner of Ferrari says that everyone CAN own a car? Would you put a gun to your neighbor's head and make them buy Yugos for anyone who can't scrape the $10,000 together for a Ferrari? All in the name of "the People"?

You're holding onto a dream that's falling apart. Everyone wants an educated America. The government has failed. Private industry has succeeded. How are you going to make the government succeed? Or are you just paying polite lip service to the kids in inner city schools who want to learn but have no opportunity.

Where did you go to school? What hood did you grow up in? What do you know about opportunity?

noxidereus, the problem is that 'performance' is already available, but the mostly liberal media never does its job by investigating the real results.

if you look at a charter school where they cherry pick a percentage of affluent white kids, you'll see their overall scores going up. THAT is all that they advertise: "See, we're a success!"

It's only when you tear the data apart that you see that the minority kids are still not succeeding. The media won't study that and actually do their own thinking. And when I approached the Denver Post journalist on the school beat, for example, they wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

But the evidence is incontrovertible.

So I for one am not convinced that the public schools can be reformed. Not until they lose their primacy, and you can't do that if private schools are so expensive, and parents still have taxes taken out to support a failed system.

Once you give them their "voucher" for what they pay into local taxes for schools, does the price of private schools become more affordable.

curtis, thanks - . I would hope that the public school system could be reformed, but I'll keep what you said in mind when I take a closer look at this issue. I just don't know enough about it. I only know this issue at a superficial level.

Why not private schools? What's so bad about that?

It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but I personally would prefer to improve our public education. Charter schools can sometimes foster unequal opportunity and suck up public funds. Charter schools would have the incentive to enroll higher-performing students in order to improve their marketing of the school (because they could advertise the performance).

I am under the impression (but I am no expert) that charter schools are less accountable to the public and vouchers (for children whose families can't afford charter schools) would make public spending less accountable.

I could be wrong, but that's how I feel currently. I just think if there is a better method for education, it can be applied to public education. We don't need competition to force us to properly educate our children, in my view.

I don't see how they would foster unequal opportunity. How would they do that?

Do they, in fact, suck up public funds? I remember a few years back a study was done on the DC public school system, which found that the per-pupil spending was something like 14k per year, compared to the 10 or 12k per pupil of the area private schools - And bear in mind, these are some of the worst public schools in existence and some of the best private schools. Ask your representatives who live in the DC metro area where they send their kids to school.

As far as incentives go, that cherry-picking and advertising the performance is an unsustainable business model. If the purpose of that advertisement is to attract more students of all stripe, presumably the more the merrier, and hence more profit, they still have to be able to improve that general population or the parents will not see the point of choosing school B over school A and school B would fail. I have attended inner city public schools. I would argue that the best and brightest SHOULD be cherry picked in that manner, giving them a chance not only to succeed but to lead by example. It encourages a virtuous cycle.

How are they less accountable? How would vouchers be less accountable than the general budget?

What you have to realize is that the argument here is not about education, it is about administration. Better administration breeds a better product. And the natural laws of the free market that drive the machinery of business simply cannot be applied to bureaucracy. Institutions as grossly overpriced and ineffectual as the public school system simply could not survive in the free market. Absent the gun held to my head and that of every other taxpayer that funds that ineptitude, it would be quickly replaced by a much more cost-effective private option.

noxiderus hit it on the head in the first part of his comment. I've seen a charter school that did exactly this. here's the game: charter schools have the ability to weed out students, which is fine, private schools do also. But in places (like Denver) they create charter schools in areas where the inner urban schools are "failing". They have a huge population of "minorities" who are not doing well in school, so they create some kind of attractive program--Spanish immersion, for example--to draw in the affluent white students, whose state standardized scores bring up the overall average of the school.

but it doesn't necessarily benefit those same minorities. I've researched the test scores of some of these schools (you can access state standardized test scores at your local Dept of Ed site), and when you normalize by ethnicity, very often you see that they are still exactly where they were before, and compared to schools just blocks away, the minorities are not benefitting.

It's a shell game. Plain and simple.

In a school where my wife taught, in DPS, she and her Latina colleagues found that the program was set up in a way that benefitted the wealthy white kids, but actually disadvantaged the Latino kids they taught. So those kids continued to fail their standardized tests. When they brought that up, they were drummed out of the school, harassed, abused, and insulted.

It turns out that the year before, 11 teachers had left under pressure for uncovering the same disparate results and the failed program. A number of these were "non-renewed" at the district level because they had tried to report their findings. Imagine that: teachers that are good enough, and caring enough, to notice that their kids are being discriminated against, essentially they were "whistle blowers", were fired and kicked out of the district so they wouldn't cause trouble.

Contrary to common opinion, the Union was powerless to help them, the law was totally on the side of the principals.

BUT, the Union didn't want to raise too much of an alarm: the entire district is run by Democrats, and there is a simbiotic relationship between the Union and the Dems. One union leader said they didn't want to make the system look bad because it would be more ammunition for Republicans who want vouchers so the kids could go to private schools--and of course, they would lose teachers, money and power if that trend caught on.

Not just to the education system, our economic system as well. Unions aren't more than legal mafias.

@carl0s808

Ending child labor was pretty evil, eh? Creating the middle class was organized crime, hmm? You know what else was bad? The Civil Rights Movement. And abolitionists. And the Suffragettes.

>Ending child labor was pretty evil, eh?

The national law against child labor didn't pass until the Great Depression — in 1938, with the Fair Labor Standards Act. By 1930, only 6.4 percent of kids between the ages of 10 and 15 were actually employed, and 3 out of 4 of those were in agriculture. Kids under tha age of 16 may still work in a family business.

More developed economies permit parents to "purchase" their children's education out of the family's surplus income — if only by foregoing what would otherwise be their earnings.

>Creating the middle class was organized crime, hmm?

How did the unions create the middle class? Before the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed parents were sending their children to school. This was simply the transition from an agrarian, to an industrialized, to a modern service economy.
>You know what else was bad? The Civil Rights Movement. And abolitionists. And the >Suffragettes.

Wow, the unions did all this? Please explain how.

@bullpcp

Look, if you don't know anything about socio-economic history and have no understanding of the role of collective action in advancing social and economic justice, I'm not going to sit here and educate you. Go read a fucking book not written by a revisionist wingnut from the WSJ.

I will call out people for offensive and ignorant comments, but I will not hold people's hands and walk them through the basics.

My questions were to see what you believed and why. You interpreted my questions as signs of my ignorance. Yet you offered no supporting data for any of the views you shared.

That is why history and common knowledge is often wrong. Enough people saying the same things repeatedly does not make them true. If I can go back and collect accurate statistical data that supports an alternate view of history, especially if it contradicts the traditional anecdotal view of history, then it is my duty as an intellectual free agent with integrity to do so.

You offered no counter argument, no contradictory data, you stated that I didn't know anything and left it at that. I'm tired of the logical fallacy that common knowledge equals truth. I know about socio-economic history. It is just that when unions, governments, and other organizations take credit for essential cultural paradigm shifts they often offer very little or not corroborating evidence. It's like the president taking credit for the state of the economy. That somehow he magically materializes trillions of dollars of production. This makes as little sense as people sacrificing their kings when their crops failed. This is obviously utter nonsense. The sad thing is that I have read about soci-economic history. I have a mathematics and economics bachelors degree and I'm currently pursuing a PHD in economics. I have taken many advanced courses in economics including economic history, economics of healthcare, economic policy, economics of labor, as well as upper level anthropological, psychological, and sociological classes. Maybe it is you who needs to be more discerning reader. I am a social scientist and I base my views of those who offer the best evidence. Maybe you should do the same.

I'm still open to rebuttal. Was my data set invalid or my conclusion illogical? If so please let me know. I will also call out people for offensive and ignorant comments, but, unlike you, I will hold people's hands and walk them through the basics.

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