Harry is my understanding correct that access to education has never been better for the poor, in general?

I guess my thing is that we often hear about "people voting against their own monetary interests" and we all know this is done through wedge/emotional issues and "some things are more important than money - like stopping Sharia Law" but I am almost at a loss for how one gets through to these types.

I'm a cynic. I think we are getting the government and systems we deserve. And until we as a people stand up and demand more we will continue to get shafted. I agree with harry that education is key, but I'm not as hopeful it will succeed, especially as we see the education system continually attacked.

Isn't there some famous quote from a founding father or some such that basically says that the biggest threat to democracy is an uneducated population?

1. Texas textbook selection mandates replacing evolution with Creationism.
2. The gap between the quality of what affluent communities get and communities of poverty get is astonishing. The grounded experiences in an elementrary school in Newark compared to one in Morris County, they exist in different universes.
3. The 25-34 year old demographic has fewer skills than its elders for the first time in US history.
4. Adult immigration was at such a rate in the last 20 years that we have the highest percentage of adults who did not complete high school in the US in over 50 years.
5. Adult literacy has actually declined slightly in the last 15 years.
6. A mother's literacy is the single highest predictor of a poor child's health... more even than access to healthcare.
7. Parents' education level has more bearing on a child's improvement on high stakes test than any intervention in schools.

On and on and on... so the definition of "access" needs to be studied. Access to what? What are the outcomes of that access?

Ah. I guess 1 and 2 are answers to what I was asking, but the rest is very interesting, if that's the right word for it. I was wondering more about what's made available, so that I could then wonder why people don't take advantage of it, if such is the case.

"What's Wrong with Kansas?" was published around the world with another title: "What's Wrong with America?"

I understand that you, of all people, know this crisis and, in your own way, are working to address it. You, the madras-pantsed julip-sipping Southern cracker and me, the oldman hippie California fruit cake are brothers in the struggle to save our country.

In other words...sure, everybody gets to go to school. Poor people just get to go to shitty ones.

Which makes me curious about how / if that's changed over the years. Ie, what the fuck explains our apparent country-wide dumbening?

Yeah but some GOP knob from College Station, TX wants the taxpayers to pay for private school textbooks! Because it's more fair!

Pride in willful ignorance. I DON'T KNOW HOW THE TIDES WORK.

Jefferson... said that no free country would ever last if its people were uneducated. Couldn't find the exact quote. The "Enlightenment" which gave us our democracy is actually "godless secularism" to the American Taliban of the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institue... etc.

But this one is interesting too:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826 (in the last letter he penned)

This is a huge deal, and it somehow went from "We don't need no Northern Eggheads tellin us how to run our state" to "We don't even want to know how to run our state, so long as y'all keep building them Wal Marts and Kohl's and all."

Appropriate about for this thread, which started about Wisconsin... Gov Walker's central education plan was/is (after the tax cuts he promoted) cut education drastically, and expand the voucher system, already one of the country's largest, to upper income. I.e. the rich could use tax money to subsidize their kids' tuition at private schools.

Heh heh, I heard about that.

FUCKING MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?

yeah i've personally seen a lot of this. sometimes it seems to be nothing more than a defense mechanism against the possibility of failure. its jarring when you see older family members ridiculing younger family members who want to pursue higher education or advanced degrees.

Yes, the culture of anti-intellectualism is a serious problem in this country.

Our gadgetism only expands that. Our "selves" are flattened to the digital environment just like soundwaves. Cultural reproduction, in almost all activities, shapes our thoughts to lessen our sense of self and place, to "fit" into parameters pre-determined, almost mechanically, by the steering mechanisms of privilege.

Multiple studies of urban black male teenagers: acting "dumb", not achieving in school, because they don't want to be perceived as "white."

Truth. Hell, when a sitting Congressman here can refer to his constituents as "unwashed" and still win in a landslide it tells you how people have no clue what they're voting for.

That shrug you hear is people utterly frustrated with the stranglehold that the Right has on this state. Every major office, and complete control of both House and Senate. The fact that we are in a dire economic hole, unemployment is sky high, we're near the bottom in education, and THIS is what they decide is going to stop the bleeding? Not only that but FAST TRACKED it through. Everything here is so fucking short sighted. I wouldnt' say they gutted HOPE but it certainly looks nothing like what it did for you and me.


Also, to add insult to injury, this came out today:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la ... 9263.story

He had a lot of time to think about these things while his blacks did his laundry.

I don't know what you mean by adding "insult to injury". The NCLB testing and evaluation standards are completely ridiculous, and the fact that 82% of our public schools are going to "fail" is almost meaningless. It's a preposterous system because even when a school does really good, they have to do even better the following year or they will "fail". If you'll read the article, that's one of the issues that the current administration has with it. I'm actually really happy that they finally want to do something about it.

I'm sure you've watched Season 4 of The Wire, right? You know the whole "teaching the test" thing? That's what NCLB forces schools to do. It doesn't promote reform or improve or even evaluate our educational system in any kind of real way at all. It just causes schools to devote more of their time to standardized testing and trying to force all of their students to meet the same standards.

Even the more positive aspects of NCLB, like inclusion, don't really pan out like they should because the proper funds aren't there to support them.

I'll admit to not fully reading the whole article and was in a bit of a "the country is going to hell" fail spiral when I posted. The HOPE issue and harry's debbie downer take on US education didn't help.

Agree that NCLB has been a disaster.

And the bright side of this is that the Obama administration and Congress seem to finally be convinced that it needs changing. The reality is that it probably took a ridiculous statistic like "82% failure" in order to get them to finally accept this.

No, the shrug was by the same population of dipshits that voted all these fuggers in by landslide margins (and then say their embrace of the Republican candidates had nothing to do with the President being Black)

Speaking in the broadest of generalizations...it's interesting to me that elements of Conservative and Black cultures both embrace being "know nothings"...they also share this constant sense that they are somehow being "disrespected" by the mainstream.

Oh and they don't really like homosexuals. This is starting to feel like a coalition.

i've seen a lot of stats about Wisconsin showing the disparity between what teachers are paid public and private, and I assume that is true for much of the country. But I was curious to see (but couldn't find) stats on how their jobs are different. Class size, number of classes and if they have assistants or not.

And also how skewed are those numbers due to Catholic schools and nuns vowing a life of poverty.

And of then finally, why is anyone arguing in favor of teachers who at best make okay money to make even less money.