Over time, most local school districts in Kansas have found that the best way to deal with the excesses of the Kansas State Board of Education is to ignore them. So it will be interesting to see whether any follow the urging of the Kansas Citizens for Science and the lead of the Manhattan-Ogden public schools — and reject the state board’s new science standards, which encourage the teaching of criticisms of evolution. In its letter to superintendents of the state’s 300 districts, the advocacy group said the “standards are so flawed that they may be unconstitutional, and if endorsed by a local school district could lead to serious legal difficulties.”
That seems like an overstatement, but David Awbrey, communications director for the Kansas Department of Education, told The Hutchinson News that the state gives districts considerable latitude on curriculum. “They are just suggestions, guidelines," Awbrey said of the science standards. That being the case, school districts that care about the integrity of science education arguably should not shy away from rejecting the state board’s faulty standards.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Registered?
Commenting on WE Blog now requires you to be a Kansas.com member. Use the links above to register, if you haven't already, or to log in.Contact us
Follow us
Daily Archives
-
Recent Comments
- DorisKing on Open thread 11/22
- Chas on Open thread 11/22
- george on Health care reform would save state money
- satatom on Open thread 11/22
- satatom on Open thread 11/22
- Politico on So they said
- BlueJay on Open thread 11/22
- JWink on Health care reform would save state money
- Politico on Health care reform would save state money
- BlueJay on Open thread 11/22
160 Comments
The Manhattan-Ogden School district should be commended for their bold action! The state BOE is a joke, at least the ones who voted to adopt Science Standards that make Kansas the laughing stock of the nation if not the world. A Science Standards Committee was empaneled to make the required review and revisions. These recommendations were totally in line with the National Science Education Standards. The RW majority of the this BOE did not like the results so they adopted the recommendation of a select “minority” committee. The “minority” report contained a shift toward creationism, AGAIN. This time it is in the guise of “Intelligent Design” The Dover, PA case has already shown ID is unconstitutional.In this election cycle, five of the BOE positions are up for election. The members who consistently make education decisions based on their social beliefs have to go! They are not making decisions that are in the best interests of our children. Look at the issues: Science Standards, Sex Ed., hiring an incompetent, anti-public education Commissioner. Go to the polls in August and vote these radicals out of office.
ALL local BOE’s should follow the lead of Manhattan-Odgen and REFUSE to follow theses directives. We know the vast majority of Science teachers follow the National Science Education Standards.
The problem is, with 72% of the Kansas population agreeing with the BOE, it will be impossible to vote them out. I, for one, find it difficult to believe that the majority of this state are so ignorant as to what science in the real world is. That, to me, is a sad indictment of the level of teaching already in place in Kansas. It will take more than votes to change that.
The problem is that government has decided it should be in charge of education. The sub-standard performance of these schools while we are forced to pay for it is the first clue that something is wrong. All this hoopla about the standards in one science course that is a small symptom of a much larger problem.
It is so amusing to watch the big government left-wing get all worked up over this one thing.
You wanted government schools? You got them, and everything that goes with it.
What is wrong with teaching both sides of the issue? Nothing! That’s right nothing. Both were taught in Kansas schools for years and it allowed the students to make up their minds on what they believed. It made for a better rounded person when they were able to debate both sides of an issue instead of just being told what to believe.
There are not “two sides of the issue” when it comes to science. It is either science or religion. Either belief is OK, but religion has no place in the science classroom. period. It doesn’t matter what 72% of the population (I presume that number comes from the poll of 500 some people) believe the creation story is a plausible explanation for the geological and biological history of this planet. The ignorance of the populace does not make their views correct just because we live in a democracy. We are doing our children a dis-service by teaching them content that is not the standard in the competitive world.
I don’t believe that in much of the 20th century that creationism was taught in Kansas public schools. Proof of that would be elusive, I would think.
The problem with teaching the alternatives to evolution, is that this flies in the face of what the majority of biologists in this country maintain about the theory of evolution. Some right wing nut jobs’ disagreement with the theory not-withstanding, evolution has consistently held up in accounting for the data of species change over time. Period.
I find it amusing that so many who contend that public schools can’t do anything right, want public schools teaching religion? If that wasn’t so pathetic, it would be quite comical.
DD……………..you are correct, this whole thing is comical.
Following Rhonda’s logic, if a new state BOE is elected that re-institutes evolution as the inarguable, untouchable Truth, local school districts that are in favor of teaching alternatives can so so if wish. OK.
Outlander, don’t you get it? There are no science “alternatives” to teaching evolution. Anything else is religion and that will never be allowed in PUBLIC schools.
“…evolution as the inarguable, untouchable Truth, local school districts…”
Another amusing side-street diversion in this debate: religious dogmatists accusing evolution theorits as being dogmatic. Pot calling kettle a shade of grey. Too funny!
Evolution is not dogma, it works the best. Sorry if that bothers you.
Adophis: I may not “get it” from your viewpoint. From mine it you that doesn’t “get it”.
I really don’t have time this AM to get into an in depth discussion, but a THEORY should not be taught as the unassailable truth. Weak areas in a theory should be pointed out. That is all that is being asked.
Children should be encouraged to examine the evidence and think for themselves.
Outlander, there is no “my” viewpoint. I speak of science, you do not. Yes, evolution is a theory, as is gravity. Do you deny the existence of gravity? The only “weak points” in the evolution is what is the minds of you creationists. I guess the real question here is do we want our children to educated in science that is competitive in the global economy of now and in the future or do we want our children taught religion to take its place? Religion does have its place in one’s life, but it shouldn’t be taught in the science classroom.
STS – should we teach Harry Potter as science? I’m sure there are those who believe in such magic. How about the tooth fairy as dentistry?
I don’t care if they teach ID in science class as long as they hold it to the same standards as evolution, ie, prove it. If you can’t demonstrate it in a lab, it aint science. Let’s not make our kids any dumber than they already are.
The answer is simple, ID isn’t science. It is not a theory or even a hypothesis as ID is not testable, at least not testable by any means we currently or can even conceive of. A theory must be testable and accepted theories, including evolution, gravity, electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum theory, have been tested and have held after being tested. Also a theory must be able to be disproven, ID can’t be disproven because no matter what evidence is found otherwise a supporter of ID can say “well the designer just designed it that way.” The IDists in the BOE in Kansas are merely ignorant of what science really is and when called on their ignorance claim they are being insulted. One member of the KBOE referred to both ID and Evolution as “opinions.” Sorry that is wrong, ID is an opinion, evolution is a solid theory (more solid than the theory of gravity) which after 150 years no one has been able to disprove.
WakimI would agree with you, however we are dealing with the religious right, and in their limited minds, ID is the one and only thing that should be taught. You have to remember that a full 72% of kansans polled believed in teaching theories besides evolution.
I would disagree with DD on the teaching thing in this state. If it is true that 72% of those polled believe in ID, it does say something about the quality of teaching in this state. Evidently, the theory of evolution is not getting through to the students. If it was, this ID nonsense would fly out the window.
I have very little faith in the current crop of morons runing the KBOE getting voted out. And that in itself bodes unwell for the students in Kansas.
We should alao teach that PI, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, equals three rather than 3.14159 …
After all, that IS in the Bible.
Ben,
Actually, it is not something the Bible teaches, it is rudimentary explanation and description. It was not meant to be an exact blueprint.
Of course it is not going to stop you from taking whatever you can to make your case, even if you have to manipulate it to do it.
10 cubits across, 30 cubits all around …
Yes, Nathan, I agree that it is “not meant to be an exact blueprint” – just as other ’scientific’ descriptions in the Bible.
The ID group did a good job of raising the non-existing point that evolution was a theory under attack by reputable scientists — which in fact is not the case.
What pollsters found on the evolution question is that when people believe a theory is under attack and may not be useful, they naturally think alternatives should be taught.
So, Walker, I think the 72% figure comes about from people being misled on the subject. Not an excuse, but misleading does work — as attested to by many recent examples.
I read on a different thread on this blog that the same people who were behind ID were behind the Swift Boat Vet campaign. I will have to see what I can find out about that.
XXX: This horse has been beat to death, but one quick comment. The theory of Darwinian evolution cannot be proven. Yes, I know 9 out of 10 dentists agree…
ID also cannot be proven. You can make educated guesses. But evidence is subject to interpretation. That is where the human element with it’s own biases comes in.
It’s fine to teach the theory of evolution. But why imply to public school kids that it is unassailable fact by failing to mention its problems? What is scientific about that?
Outlander evolution is a theory. It is backed by verified facts. It has stood up to the scrutiny of peer review. It makes predictions that can be used to further verify its validity.
On the other hand ID is a hypothesis. Not backed by any facts, evidence or the like. If you believe it then it is pure faith, not science.
That is the difference between the two and that is why ID should not be taught in public schools. If you want you kid taught ID take them to church.
Outlander, do you mean that Darwinian evolution hasn’t been proven, or cannot be proven?
I agree it’s impossible to prove ID, but I believe it is possible to prove evolution, theoretically at least.
Evolution could be proved, but ID can *never* be proved.
ID can’t be proved because it relies in whole or in part on a supernatural explanation for biological phenomena. Needless to say, supernatural causes cannot be replicated. ID therefore falls outside the application of the scientific method.
DD,Good points. I suppose intelligent people are easily misled, as is the case with the current administration. But I would also hope that intelligent people would question so-called “experts” who attempt to shed a bad light on what are regarded as irrefutable theories, as evolution is. Obviously, if you are correct in your assumption, that is not the case in Kansas.
Makes one wonder what, exactly, the average IQ is in the state.
Kitzmiller v. Dover makes the whole “Intelligent Design” garbage moot.
Read the entire ruling at:http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/news/2005/PA/316_praise_for_the_emkitzmiller_12_22_2005.asp
If you want the creationist version of the origin of life taught, it will have to be done some place other than a public school.
JM,
The average IQ for Kansas is just over 102.http://www.isteve.com/IQhoax.htm
V.L.R.B!!!
“But I would also hope that intelligent people would question so-called “experts” who attempt to shed a bad light on what are regarded as irrefutable theories, as evolution is.”
WalKer: Is any theory “irrefutable”? It sounds to me as if you are defending something sacred, which makes my point.
Evolution as a theory is scientifically useful in that it can make predictions and can be used to modify plants and animals. Both selective breeding and genetic engineering use the techniques of evolution.
Stalin’s version of science (Lysenko) preached the opposite. The attempts to practice that ’science’ was a contributing factor in Soviet agriculture failures.
Outlander:
“WalKer: Is any theory “irrefutable”? It sounds to me as if you are defending something sacred, which makes my point.”
What point IS IT you are trying to make?
I wonder if there are any polling numbers about the religious, ideological, etc. break down in Kansas. I think people in our state are more open to the idea of ID because of the predominance of conservative Christian values.
A theory is a framework for understanding reality and I would contend that theories can never be unequivocally proven. The preponderance of evidence supports the theory of evolution which is what makes it useful. Useful as a theory and a framework for understanding reality (as opposed to understanding the mystic or spiritual – subjects for another field of endeavor).
ID does not even rise to the standard of a hypothesis. It can not be made falsifiable. ID is a matter of faith, not science. (Wish I had a dime for every time I wrote that sentence).
Ben: As a scientist, you know that Darwinian (macro) evolution is a different subject than selective breeding and genetic engineering. That is what is disingenuous about arguments that Kansas students are missing out on scientific education if they don’t buy into Darwinian evolution.
If you can, please provide an example of a practical application of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Even though you did not ask me, Out, would the evolution of bird flu have any practical importance in your life – if not now – in the near future?
an understanding of genetic drift aids greatly in developing effective anti-viral medicines.
Now, if you really want to stand by your principles, maybe you ought to turn down those bird flu vaccinations.
Kansas students would be missing out if they weren’t taught evolution. Fear not……..the professional ethics of the Science Educators in Kansas make sure evolution and REAL science is taught to our children. Any Science Educator who advocates teaching any of the creationist fairy-tales should be removed from the profession.
flike: Darwinian theory cannot be proven because it relies on observation and interpretation of old evidence. It is removed in time. That’s it. It cannot be tested in a lab. In that way it is like ID. No one was around to observe what happened.
Here we are, advanced in the biological sciences and we can’t duplicate the life creating processes that supposedly happened at random.
Out – macro is the culmination of numerous micro steps. Thus the tools of Macro are the same as those of Micro. The fossil record then shows various prior species over billions of years.
Of course, I cannot disprove magical Creation: The world and everything in it was created last night at Midnight (Greenwich Mean Time). We were created with all of our memories intact. Worst of all, I was created with memories of doing the dishes and picking up my dirty clothes last night. However, the sink was created full of dirty dishes and dirty clothes all over the floor.
Nobody can DISPROVE that “theory”; perhaps IT should be taught.
Outlander is tirelessly providing us with falsehoods tonight. There is a text in the WSU library with descriptions of over 300 experimental studies demonstrating the action of natural selection in natural environments. Darwinian evolution is more than what Out is claiming. I will post the name of the book, author, call number, etc. But will do so later.
Out, Please give up while your behind. I starting to feel sorry for ya.
A very approachable book I would highly recommend, for those who are interested in getting the real story on evolution is:
_The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time_ by Jonathan Weiner – published in 1994. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It soundly lays to rest the great amount of misinformation that is spread today about evolution.
a link to an amazon page describing the above book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067973337X/103-4657998-6501419?v=glance&n=283155
Outlander, evolution doesn’t deal with “life creating processes.”
Darwin’s theory is a theory of species origination, not life origination.
You’re conflating Darwin’s theory with your religion’s views on human origination for purposes of your own.
Just curious: are you arguing that evolution is not something currently happening? You seem to feel that “evolution is in the past.” Is this an accurate view of your opinion?
flike, Of course evolution occurs today. Intraspecies evolution such as the famous finches that Darwin observed.
BTW, what was Darwin’s view of the origin of life?
DD: I really don’t think that Darwin’s theories contemplated viruses, since he didn’t know they existed.
But to the extent you are able to apply Darwinian theory to evolution of viruses, I will grant you that point.
And to those who would like to balance their reading with a counter-part to the book DD recommmended: “Darwin on Trial” by Phillip Johnson.
I don’t remember, Outlander. Is Darwin’s theory of the origin of life relevant to his theory of species origination?
Is this a quiz?
Because if it is then I’ll need to study. :(
Why would Darwin be on trial and by whom? I would surmise the criticism comes from the creationists.
“But to the extent you are able to apply Darwinian theory to evolution of viruses, I will grant you that point.”
Thank you. I would hate to see any creationists succumb to the bird flu.
Charles Darwin did not have a good understanding of genetics at all. Gregor Mendel wrote to him about his findings with peas, but there was never an indication that Darwin read or understood Mendel’s work.
Findings in the field of genetics has suppoprted and augmented the theory of evolution. Evolution has been able to accomodate and expand on data over time — a sign of a good theory.
And, heartlander, I know what Kuhn said about theories accomodating and expanding to too great an extent.
This is what I get for working outside all day.
Among the things you must discredit if you pursue Intelligent Design taught as a counter to Darwinian evloution:
You have to discredit carbon dating and thus understood atomic theory.
You have to explain the dinosaurs.
You have to discredit the KT boundary (a sedimentary layer in geology composed that shows evdence of eridium which is not commonly found on Earth) and the crater found in the Yucatan peninsula that jibes with it.
You have to explain or dispute the finding of coal and petroleum in strata of geology. These are organically (carbon) based resources which cannot result in less thanmillions of years of “cooking” under tremendous pressure.
ID is not science it is religion. Some argue that evolution is “religion”. Fine. I can provide proof of my religion and I just did. Can you show me God or answer the dscrepancies with the 6000 year old interpreatation of creation?
An irony here – I cannot recall the name but a lot of the pioneering work on genetics was carried out by a monk.
Yes Ben, Gregor Mendel – see my post above. He discovered dominant and recessive traits in his study of pea plants. Darwin had no clue about these very basic genetic mechanisms.
But as promised yesterday here is the reference to the biology book which documents over 300 experiments in natural selections. Experiments that have hypotheses, data analysis, etc., i.e. real science – all spurred by Darwin’s construct of natural selection.
Main Author: Endler, John A., 1947-Title: Natural selection in the wild / John A. Endler.Published: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1986.Description: xiii, 336 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.Series: Monographs in population biology ; 21Subject Headings: Natural selection.
——————————————————————————–
Database: Wichita State University Libraries CatalogLocation: Ablah(A-LC on Floor3)(LD-QE on Floor2)(QH-ZA on LowerLevel)Call Number: QH375 .E53 1986
Bottom Line: Don’t believe the misinformation campaign of IDers that Darwinian theory is only speculative and requires faith – it does not. The theory has facilitated scientific work and plenty of it.
I would have to do more research, but my belief is that Darwin’s theory of evolution is completely silent on the subject of the origins of life. I believe the origins arguments are a straw man built by creationists to tear down.
Instead of “The Origin of Species”, Darwin’s book would have been more aptly named, “The Emergence of Species.” Only MHO.
Yes, Kansas high schools should continue to teach basic biology of which some percentage (70%??) is based on evolution of the species as recognized by Mr. Darwin on his almost accidental but fortunate trip to the south Pacific, prior to the Civil War.
Criticisms of the basic premises should be taken up in later college level courses by those students who pursue this line of studies. My interest was in engineering back in my high school and post high school years so this wasn’t my interest at that time in my life.
However, that said, I personally have an issue with the use of the term “intelligent design” or “I.D” as a replacement for the term “creationism.” The arguments should be made between evolution and creationism.
As much as the terms “I.D.” and intelligent design are used, I haven’t seen a definition of I.D. that satisfies me.
To me I.D. should refer to the philosophy of the beginning of our universe and our solar system. In other words, what came before the “big bang”? In my opinion, most likely there was a previous universe or universes and the “big bang” was an on-going cataclysmic event that might have involved “intelligent design” but can’t be explained at this time.
A few additional comments to add to the rather thorough debunking of ID here.
First, scientific theories are NEVER proven. As the axiom goes, proof is for mathematics and alcohol.
Acience only continuously tries to disprove theories. Ironically enough, real science has been trying to do that for the last 150+ years with the theory of evolution.
Secondly, evolution is a fact AND a theory. The fact is that it occurs and we have seen it many times, both in lab conditions and in nature. The theory of evolution attempts to explain the processes, just like the theory of gravity tries to explain the processes of the fact of gravity.
Life origins, the field of science known as abiogenesis, is a separate, but related, field. It is a common creationist tactic to say ‘look, you can’t explain this, therefore your whole theory is wrong!!’
Nothing could be further from the truth (note the small ‘t’). Science, unlike religion, doesn’t claim to have all the answers. It’s all about the quest for those answers.
Biology is complex…it’s a difficult science. If you really want to understand what you’re critisizing, I highly recommend trying to understand it first.
And for our resident creationist: If micro evolution is ok, and macro evolution is impossible. Please reference the relevant peer reviewed literature demonstrating the science abd methodology wherein the process that prevents small changes from adding up is documented.
The strawman macro/micro thing is equivalent to asserting that it is impossible to walk across the US, simply because it would take 8 million steps.
Cheers.
“Evolution” is an elastic term with meanings including everything from minor changes within species, to the theory of common descent. Thus it becomes difficult to argue against “evolution” because everyone can observe changes occurring within species. I have a friend who believed in common descent “evolution” in man based on what could be demonstrated in dog breeding. That’s just confusion. It is not the same thing.
Of course, we can’t observe one species becoming another. You would think that science could easily make that distinction if it wanted, but to do so would make it easier for people to discern what makes sense and not have to swallow the whole ball of wax.
But back to my original question, posted earlier:
“It’s fine to teach the theory of evolution (there’s that word again-with multiple meanings). But why imply to public school kids that it is unassailable fact by failing to mention its problems? What is scientific about that?”
“It’s fine to teach the theory of evolution (there’s that word again-with multiple meanings). But why imply to public school kids that it is unassailable fact by failing to mention its problems? What is scientific about that?”
OK with me, so long as we also include the fact that ID is a matter of faith (and NOT science), better discussed in religion classes, or Sunday School.
Agree, or not?
Yes, I understand, Out, you’re not interested in facts, only faith. Which is perfectly okay with me, but do your bidding elsewhere – not in public schools. I believe that many churches could accomodate you.
DD..Are we to believe then that The Drake Equation is a religious document, and the SETI Institute is just a big church?ID is alive and well in the scientific community is it not?I am not a proponent of teaching creation in public school, but I see nothing wrong with continuing the search for more information about evolution.
Yes, I understand, Out, you’re not interested in facts, only faith.
DD: Resorting to that already are we? Have I mentioned one thing about faith in my arguments? I am interested in the facts, and you should be too. The facts are that Darwinists treat legitimate scientific criticisms of their theory as heresy. Their basic answer to criticism is “what is your alternative”, while they continue to try to pound square pegs into a round hole.
Some of you don’t get the debate. Why should a large number of Kansans, perhaps a majority, not want their kids to be taught Darwinian evolution?
THINK. The biologists specify a proposition. Millions of Americans reject the proposition. WHY?
If you say, “Well, they’re just stupid and ignorant,”, THEN PUT YOURSELVES IN THEIR SHOES IN HEARING THIS PROPOSITION. How would you like to be called “stupid and ignorant”?
One of the earliest outgrowths of Darwinism was Eugenics. According to this theory, hinterland people’s who migrated to cities were NOT FIT TO SURVIVE. We can say they carry too many Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon genes, which are obsolete.
Because, the anti-ID people are fundamentally saying, “Anyone who opposes Darwinism is STUPID. Such as all the people who elected the pro-ID BOE candidates.”
So, if you are anti-ID, are you willing to confront your pro-ID voting friends who voted for a pro-ID BOE majority, and say, “YOU ARE REALLY STUPID. YOUR LINEAGE NEEDS TO DIE.” Go ahead, don’t be afraid to do this. If you say, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings, I just want them to die, so that the worldview will be what I accept, without their having a say” that’s an interesting perspective.
Science education isn’t based on a “democratic vote” heartlander.Oh, the ID people (and anyone who denies evolution) ARE stupid and ignorant.
Your RW fundamentalist colors are showing again (very BRIGHTLY)!
My dear young Apophis, actually it is. Somebody puts forth an idea, such as cold fusion. Many people study it. If a majority of scientists reject a new theory, then it is temporarily rejected. (Some scientists get more votes than others.)
But here is what you are saying, “Science isn’t determined by MOST people, it is determined by LEADING ‘EXPERTS’.” Like your mom or dad is a teacher, and you want them to be an “expert”.
But science isn’t about dogma, it is about wildnerness exploration. Let me suggest a few books you may not have read, if as a young adult, you really want to be enlightened about science. If you don’t then go back to your videogames.
Or try reading MIT professor Thomas Kugn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Stanford Professor and Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin’s “A Different Universe”, and John Barry’s “The Great Influenza”.
And also tell all the pro-ID people you know personally, “You are STUPID AND IGNORANT”. And if some of them beat you up, and drag you from a pick up-truck and you die, then that’s Darwinian evolution, isn’t it—you weren’t evolved enough to procreate successfully.
Also, my dear young Apophis, you should write a book to make you independent of your parents, titled “How I Convinced My Parents To Let Me Keep My Bedroom In Their House, After I Graduated from College.” It should be inspirational for failures of Darwinian evolution,
heartlander……I think I know a bit more about Science Education than you think I do. The populace does not have the right to determine a curriculum course that is a detriment to a child’s education. This is what imposing the ID nonsense into the Science classroom would be. Of course, this is all moot since Kitzmiller v. Dover decided that ID is creationism and cannot be taught in public schools. Deal with it son.
I am very confident my beliefs and if one of my friends were to start spouting ID/Creationist crap, I would tell them that they are STUPID and IGNORANT. I do not live in fear of physical violence as you must. I can, if necessary, take care of myself.
You fundies just can’t handle the truth, evolution is SCIENCE and ID is religion. Your religious dogma will never be tolerated in the public school classroom no matter how much you and the Christian Taliban screech.
Apophis,
Science in a government school is ’science by democracy’. Those in political power determine the standards and curriculum. That is what begot this mess in the first place. Rhonda started this thread by stating that most school districts will ignore the state BOE. She offered no source for her information, so it’s hardly a fact. However, common sense says that the people who elected the state board are the same voters in the local school board elections as well. You shouldn’t think for a minute that the local BOE is are any different than their counterpart at the state level.
If we removed the government control of primary education in this country, then everybody could be happy with the biology course offered at ‘their school’. Until we do that this issue will continue to be a distraction from the real problems in education.
Apophis,You are very confident in your “BELIEFS”? I find that very funny coming from someone who is trashing “religious dogma”….
As I mentioned before, go and Google the SETI Institute, and then tell us that ID is not science. And don’t forget to tell the scientists at the SETI Institute that they are STUPID and IGNORANT………
I find it fascinating that Apophis accused me of being an “elitist” a few weeks ago, but now he says that science isn’t democratic. By this he clearly means it belongs to “experts”. That’s a very elitist statement, I think most readers would agree. It looks to me like Apophis is engaging in what psychologists call “transference”, which is attributing one’s own personality traits to OTHERS.
Actually the whole public K-12 system is based on a process begun in the 1920’s to convince everyone that educators are “experts” and the education of children should be left to “experts”. As if humanity hasn’t been able to raise and educate its own children for millennia. This is an extremely elitist position. It is pure hubris.
For example, most teachers are drawn from the lower half of the college-student pool. Those who go to traditional universities, such as KU, get more B’s and C’s than A’s in non-ed-school academic liberal arts and science courses. Most future teachers take remedial algebra in college, instead of calculus to fulfill their math requirement.
But these mediocre minds take a semester of educational psychology, and suddenly they are “experts” in the inner workings of young minds. A SEMESTER! Is there any reader here, who is not a teacher, who can look back at his or her college experience and judge, for any semester course he or she took, “That course made me an expert”?
We see incredible delusion on the part of educators. I attribute it to education’s peculiar attractiveness to people who have authoritarian personalities. They LIKE telling other people what to do. Since they do not have the capacity to achieve this in adult-adult relationships, they choose to exercise their odd personality bent on children, who have no choice but to put up with it.
The system perversely punishes children who have the perspicacious insight to realize that they are under the rule of quite odd people, and are not willing to put up with oppression.
The K-12 system is pathologic. It is designed to inculcate passivity and obedience. In Wichita, as in other communities, probably 10% of kids should be skipped at least one grade, 5% two grades, and 1% three grades. In the real world, you promote people according to their talents and work ethics. In the larger economy you don’t hold talent and effort back. But schools do. This is quintessentially stupid and ignorant behavior. It is ingraining a false, “unreal” perspective in children.
Is this a problem? Ask any employer of young people. The majority of hires don’t know how to check their own work and correct their own errors: they think SOMEBODY ABOVE THEM is supposed to do this. This stems directly from the school modus of assigning work that is graded by teachers, but the teachers do not give additional corrective assignments, such as, rewriting “B” and “C”-grade essays to achieve “A” level final drafts, or assigning additional math problems of the types a student has gotten wrong, to give the student a clear understanding of the nature of the problems, and the correct methods of their solution. Schools aren’t interested in inculcating mastery. This is why NCLB is a major problem for them. It is imposing 100% proficiency performance demands that schools were never designed previously to achieve. They could have been so designed, but they weren’t. In fact they evaded learning-assessment accountability by inflating student grades. In 1959, struggling-in-math Sally got a “C-” in algebra. Today, struggling-in-math Britney gets a “B”. That’s why Britney has to take “college algebra”– she didn’t get algebra the first time. She received a “B” for severe confusion. It is why the average KU freshman has what used to be 11th grade composition skills for college-track students. It is why the taxpayer is paying double costs for education: high school costs, and remedial high-school-level courses’ costs in our universities. This is totally wasteful of young talent and public money. Who could run a business this way, and expect to succeed?
Given these remarkable failures, it would be not just unwarranted, but utterly foolish for the public to buy into K-12 educators’ contention that they are experts.
heartlander…………..your determination to shut down public (what YOU call government) schools is not going to happen. The RW wackos who get elected to whatever BOE is not the same as put a question on the ballot for the general public to decide like: “Should ID be taught as real science to our children”. That type of stupidity can never happen. If you want a school for yourself, raise the funds and start one. You’re not getting tax dollars to do it.
kansassam……..my BELIEFS are that science (in addition to anything else taught in the public schools)and religion be kept separate. I believe the US Constitution backs this BELIEF up rather well. If you think I am trashing religious dogma, power to you! You can believe in whatever you want as long as you do not try to force it on anyone else.I also DID read through the SETI Institute article I would presume you are referring to about receiving a signal from space being most likely generated by an “intelligent source”. Give me a break………You creationists are grasping at straws now, Equating a signal from space coming from a civilization with similar or more advanced technology does NOT give credence to the belief that your “God” constructed the DNA molecule. Another typical RW trait: Situational Science. Take the facts and try to twist them around to serve your purposes.
heartlander………….were you a failure in school? Is this why you go on and on and on about public schools? Your hate is obvious. I have a son-in-law who was a failure in public schools and babbles on the same way you do.
Yes, you are an “Elitist” when it comes to the distribution of wealth. Spending public tax dollars to fund your pet school would be elitist because you wouldn’t let a low achieving student from a impoverished home into your school.
You think you are the expert and have all of the answers, but you are not an expert and do not have many answers. What you spew is RW rhetoric.
Apophis..I do not force my beliefs on anyone, but it does appear that you would like to force your beliefs on others. I am NOT a proponent of teaching Creation in public school.. they would only get it wrong! But who are YOU to tell me how my tax dollars will be spent? Seems you only have just as many votes as I do… 1. You are old enough to vote aren’t you?About SETI… I did not mention God… they obviously are not searching for God but they are searching for an answer to the apparent intelligence found in the universe.
kansassam……..what of my beliefs am I trying to personally force on anyone? I support the NSES (National Science Education Standards) because this organization is the foremost authority on what our children need to know about science.I support the Constitution of the United States that does not allow state sponsored religion. Many in this country see the inclusion of a particular creationist story into the public educational system as just that.
As to your comment as to “….who are YOU to tell me how my tax dollars will be spent?”, I am a taxpaying citizen as well and I DO VOTE. Are you familiar with the Preamble to the US Constitution? Let’s look at this part: “… promote the general Welfare,”. A public education system is part of the “general Welfare”. Are you familiar with the Constitution of the State of Kansas? Article Six, Section 1: “Schools and related institutions and activities. The legislature shall provide for intellectual, educational, vocational and scientific improvement by establishing and maintaining public schools, educational institutions an d related activities which may be organized and changed in such manner as may be provided by law.”This is how I form MY BELIEF system, how do you form yours?
Since you have of course taken the entire SETI view on ID out of context, I will include the final and summarizing paragraph from the article: ” In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed. Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.”
Notice the are seeking”artificiality” in EM collected from deep space.
I take it kansassam that you too are a member of that far right sect of the Kansas Republican party who seeks to impose their moral “values” on the rest of us.
Actually, I am an observer. We all have experiences. In 7th grade I was in the first track in a public school, in which nearly all the students’ fathers, if not mothers, had bachelor’s degrees. As a young scientist, I took a metal shop class as an elective. After two weeks, the teacher said, “You should be in 8th grade metal shop II.” His advisement was well-intentioned, as he wanted to challenge me more. But shop II was offered at a different time, and conflicted with the gifted program schedule.
My assigned “counselor”, instead of warning me of this problem, mindlessly processed the shop teacher’s request to move me up, and rearranged my schedule. I then got to see what “first track” classes were like, i.e. classes designed primarily for future teachers college-tier attendees. Not good. These classes were undereducating students.
Anyway, I went to a Catholic high school. I got to play varsity football and ran track. I worked in the photo lab for yearbook. I was president of the French club. At the far larger public school these things would not have been possible because my talents in these things weren’t that great.
What you don’t understand, as a public-school product, is that private schools give kids opportunities to participate in team activities that are extremely valuable. It’s too bad that your experience creates blinders, but you can’t help it.
BTW, I made National Merit Finalist, National Honor Society, and was listed in “Who’s Who Among American High School Students”. Maybe these things would have happened in the public high school, maybe not.
Funny thing too, I went to a highly respected public university. My private high school education did a pretty good job of preparing me to earn a “B” average. To get an “A” average, I had to learn how to study vigorously, something that neither my local public high school, nor my parochial school taught. For example, there were three students from my 6th-7th grade gifted classes who were “A” average students in high school (3.7-3.9 GPA)–this was well-before grade inflation was seen–but “B” (2.9-3.3) average students at the university. Were there “A” public high school students who hit the pad running and earned “A” averages as freshmen? Yes. They went to affluent suburban high schools–this predated court-ordered busing and laws that disallowed affluent suburbs’ citizens from providing extraordinary funding of their own local public schools.
On grade inflation, some teachers blame parents who say, “You can’t give my daughter a D, it will ruin her college prospects.” Right. Like the parent is thinking, “I want meaningless inflated grades now, so that my daughter can flunk out, or take remedial high school work in college.” In Kansas, all public universities had open admissions until a few years ago, and even now the standard is a joke: An ACT of 21 (major hs remediation needed) or a C average in core subjects.
The real issue is parents expressed concern that their children who received low grades weren’t learning. Instead of honestly responding, “Look, our system is designed to sort people. Our ‘A’ students are very bright AND very hard working. Our ‘B’ students are bright and hard working (or very bright but cruising). Our ‘C’ students are generally bright, but not hard-working. (’C’ was “satisfactory”, but undistinguished.) Your daughter needs to work harder.” or “We present a an information base in class, but don’t have the resources to work individually with students when they don’t get what we have presented. You should hire a private tutor.”
So instead of confronting parents, or admitting the system’s incompleteness, the teachers took the “easy way out” and just puffed up grades. This imposed a significant cost: it foisted high school completion duties onto the universities’ shoulders. Have the grade-inflators admitted a serious error in taking the easy path of least resistance in dealing with low grades that accurately reflected student performance? Have they apologized for increasing the costs of education by making university students take remedial hs courses? If you don’t confess your errors, you can’t correct them.
Teachers’ teaching loads are too high. Who’s fault is this? In part the teachers unions. Given offers of limited budget increases, the choice presented is always, do you want smaller / fewer classes at your current salary and benies level, or do you want larger/more classes with a pay increase? Teachers take the latter, and then say they are overloaded. Of course they are overloaded–no high school teacher can do a sound teaching job with 150 students–but who made the choice, “I’ll compromise my professional performance for a bigger paycheck”?
In most private schools in this region, teachers accept LESS MONEY in order to have lower student loads. The public teachers may resent the implied threat that this service-focused ethic poses to their own positions, but when vouchers and charters become norms–which will not happen here for another 25-30 years, so today’s teachers will not be affected — the reasons for these developments will be self-evident to the public.
BTW I’m so “RW” that I made campaign contributions to Howard Dean and Todd Tiahrt’s Democratic opponent. I voted for Reagan. But I also voted for McGovern, Carter (1976) and Clinton. Also Ralph Nader. If Kansas had a chance of giving Gore a majority, I probably would have voted for him.
It’s sort of sad that Apophis’s worldview is so narrow that all he can do is throw labels at people, particularly when the labels have no factual foundation. “You agree with me means you’re good; you disagree with me means you’re a Right Wing Wacko.”
I hope for children’s sake that Apophis is not a teacher, because they deserve something different from daily propaganda sessions delivered by someone who has a simplistic worldview in which anything that doesn’t correspond to his preconceived categorical boxes gets stuffed into one of them anyway. Sort of like, “I have a round hole and a square hole; I don’t admit the existence of triangular, hexagonal or elliptical blocks, because they are actually either circular or square. Everybody knows this.”
Apophis…Wrong again dude… you keep making bad assumptions. Most of the bloggers here know me better than that. You.. you will learn.You don’t need to explain the constitution to me… I learned all about it in all those poli-sci classes when I was pre-law. I probably know a little more about Public Welfare than you think.As for my belief system.. I believe in Jesus Christ and I try to model my life after His example. I am far from ashamed of that fact!
Speaking of the Constitution, my home-schooled teenagers read The Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, as well as biographies of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, each of them several hundred pages long. Imprints in their library included Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Virgina and Stanford.
I seriously doubt that Apophis’s high school U.S. history class assigned these illuminating documents that provide a deep understanding of the experiences of the former colonists, the ideas and political forces that wrought the Constitution.I would suggest that the library in whatever school Apophis attended probably didn’t even HAVE these books, because most public high schools assume that most of their students lack the intellectual maturity and knowledge-thirst to tackle such works, and according to the mass-education algorithms, if only a small number of students possess the capacity, they are welcome to go to the WSU library, if they have the requisite transportation. If they don’t, that’s their problem, not the school’s.
kansassam,
you may be making an erroneous assumption:
“You..you will learn.”
some people can’t learn, when it requires a deep self-examination, and questioning themselves, “Why do I believe what I believe? Is it possible that some of my deepest-held worldview suppositions are wrong? What is the EVIDENCE, here, ALL THE EVIDENCE? I am going to strive to be objective.” None of us can do it completely, but some people can’t do it at all. Apophis shows strong signs of being in the latter category. That’s why he has called me a Right Wing Wacko, and “RW” repeatedly, even though the evidence says to any rational, deeply-thinking person who has considered my posts, that this cannot possibly be true.
heartlander..Well.. I will withhold any indictment on Apophis’ education because I will not assume to know that much about him/her. I do agree that the Federalist Papers, etc. are probably beyond being teachable in a public classroom.
All in all, what I really wonder, is if all of those blasting ID and the school board decision have even read the new standards. I have studied them carefully, and I do NOT know how they think that the standards abandon evolution for ID… They DO allow for more critical thinking, but ID is never mentioned.. not once.
This is NOT a pipe…..
heartlander..”you may be making an erroneous assumption:”
Dangit’ I TRY not to make assumptions about other bloggers…….. Well, I was called the same things… RW, fundie.. the common stuff..
It may well be that many of our older posts were before Apophis joined the blog family!
KFG…
looks like poop…smells like poop…tastes like poop….
Sure glad I didn’t STEP IN THAT!!
LOL…………..
So sam and heck…. you consider being called a fundamentalist an insult?
You consider being called a right winger an insult?
Funny, I thought those were words you all claimed.
KFG…I am pretty much a fundamentalist and conservative. I am not an extremist, which is what I believe a FUNDIE and RW are referring to. But I think you knew that already….
kansassam, you claim not to know how others can “think that the standards abandon evolution for ID.”
I haven’t read the standards, but it was widely reported that the KBOE redefined science to include supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. It was also widely assumed that the natural phenomena in question dealt explicitly with vertebrate biology, human biology specifically.
Has this been falsely reported?
If true, then I’m thinking that redefining science for the scientists everywhere by adding supernatural independent variables might just help your understanding in this area (think the Flying Spaghetti Monster is responsible for humankind’s intrinsic spirituality or, equivalently, ID).
If true, then it’s really not that difficult.
There is an enormous range of science that doesn’t require a belief in Darwinian evolution, including physics, chemistry, computer science, materials science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, mathematics, medicine, agricultural science (the latter both involve biology), et al.
Kansas schools can teach evolution with or without mentioning ID, and it doesn’t change one fact: science education in Kansas is abysmal. This is because Kansans don’t perceive the value of training people to be scientific and engineering researchers. Next-door Colorado has federal research facilities working in advanced physics and climatology, in addition to two research universities, one of which receives 3 times as much federal science and engineering research funding as KU and KSU combined (CU Boulder), another of which receives as much funding as KU and KSU (combined). The University of New Mexico receives as much as KU and KSU combined, and the state is home to two DOE National Laboratories, despite being a largely rural-agrarian state with a smaller population than Kansas.
Next-door Missouri has Washington University in St. Louis, which although private, gets 3 times as much federal research funding, most of it for biomedical research, as KU and KSU combined.
All these states have strong science-dependent industries. Kansas doesn’t have such. Kansas could develop them, as other smaller-population, agrarian-heritage states like Utah, Oregon, Arizona have done, and as Iowa and Oklahoma are working on, but the strategic vision is lacking.
Construction is probably the most important locally-controlled industry in this city. But Wichita State doesn’t even have a civil engineering department. That’s sad.
Aviation is the most important outsider-owned industry whose payroll keeps Wichita’s economy from imploding. But most of the higher-level engineering managers have been recruited from elsewhere. They aren’t graduates of WSU’s aerospace engineering program. Is this important? Yes, because when pressure mounts to further outsource and offshore aircraft assembly, you don’t have a native-born and locally-educated aviation leadership corps doing everything they can to keep the jobs in Wichita. Wichita’s economy is not their problem. If headquarters wants to send them to China to set up and oversee plants there, that’s okay with them. If they resisted, they know they would be replaced by people who supported the relocation.
flike..I made an error… it DOES mention ID a time or two….
You can read for yourself and decide what it means:
http://www.ksde.org/outcomes/scstdworkingdoc7122005.pdf
PS. the Colorado university that gets as much federal research funding as KU and KSU combined is Colorado State University.
Interestingly, Colorado’s population was smaller than Kansas’s until 1971. Kansas is slated to lose a Congressman. This does not bode well for Kansas.
Sure, heartlander, all that science doesn’t require a “belief” in evolution.
You miss the point, though. All of science requires a belief in the scientific method.
Why should young Kansans be taught ideas about evolution that are outside the scientific method?
Why should ID get a leg up? Doesn’t such a politically injected leg up dilute the emphasis on the scientific method? And isn’t diluting the emphasis on the scientific method EXTREMELY harmful to all the practical applications of science you listed?
Of course it does and of course it is. It only makes sense if you, kansassam, and other Kansans are supporting ID (aka, “criticisms of Darwinian evolution,” wink wink) because you feel that teaching young Kansas students about Christianity’s current flava is impossible UNLESS evolution is ignored.
Thanks for the link, kansassam.
I’d write Hank’s usual sign-off, but its obnoxiousness would hide the real sentiment behind it – from me for you, that is.
That didn’t work out as planned, unfortunately. Trying to say that I appreciate your postings here, despite disagreeing with much of what you write.
Great post flike. And sam, you are not extreme by YOUR standards. Many of the rest of us would not agree by OUR standards.
Some days flike sure sounds like dd.
Are you sure you guys were not twins separated at birth?
crap, still off plan.
Hank likes to close with something like “still love ya.”
I would have, but the gregariousness therein would hide the real appreciation I have for your stuff (ok, obnoxiousness was polemic, sue me).
Oops, I meant to say “great post flike”.
flike, thanks for the help.
I understand the scientific method, as I began learning it as a child. Not in school, but on my own. I spent several thousand after-school hours doing science between the ages of 5 and 18. I started out by collecting insects, frogs, salamanders, toads, lizards and snakes, and learning taxonomy.
I used a Christmas-cash gift to buy a microscope at age 9. I learned the importance of replicating preps to achieve consistent observations. This later served me well, for example, when at age 19, I was invited to prepare specimens for electron microscopy, and then observe the results of my work, which were commended by the Ph.D. plant pathologist under whom I worked.
I had an amazing fourth grade teacher who taught me about aerodynamics. I built a small balsa glider from scratch, incorporating the principles he taught me. First hand-launched flight: 200 feet. My teacher was an expert in science, and I was a serious student.
Back when I was a kid toy stores sold amazing chemistry sets. “Gee, this alcohol burner heats glass tubing hot enough to bend it. This is COOL.” Today, it’s “too dangerous” to let 10 year olds play with fire. I had to settle for a Smithsonian micro-chemistry set for MY CHILDREN. Lame. NASCO wouldn’t let me order ANY chemicals, since I wasn’t working in a school. Humanity knows far more chemistry today than 50 years ago, but American kids who want to know chemistry learn LESS chemistry. That’s why America must IMPORT chemists.
In college, I learned how to keep detailed notebooks, to formally statistically analyze experimental data, to construct advanced apparati, test them using standards, and perform experiments. I learned how to use research libraries to obtain all the information that was published on a subject. I worked in the lab of a young scientist who later became world-renowned as a biotech pioneer.
After college, I conducted novel experiments and obtained results that were accepted internationally. When published reports seemed insufficient, I contacted researchers for advisement. I once called Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yallow, who gave me invaluable advisement. I also obtained radio-labeled 14C and 3H vitamin B-6 that a professor in another institution custom-synthesized, and devised a new experimental use for them. I sought guidance in cross-linking proteins artificially, and a researcher offered to do this for me, which represented my first independent collaboration–at age 22.
I learned how to perform fiberoptic bronchoscopy by first doing it on myself.
I’ve done a lot of science.
In the 1970’s philospher Karl Popper proposed that science attempted to falsify theories. This occurs sometimes (cold fusion is an example), but MOST OF THE TIME, science seeks to CONFIRM and extend. It is only when attempts to replicate experiments and/or to conduct logical-correlary experiments fail, that theories are discarded. Darwinism is nowhere near the experimental-testing stage. It is still dependent on preexistent-sample observation and analysis, which is really natural history, not modern experimental science. Put a fish into a lab, and transform its progeny into amphibians, and then you have an experimental system that supports “macro evolution”. Or put simple organic chemicals into an experimental apparatus and create self-replicating RNA or proteins, and then you have an origin of life experimental system. We have none of the above.
If you want to be serious about teaching the scientific method, then you have to give exceptionally-scientifically-talented youngsters 10+ hours of lab and field training per week. Name for me a Wichita school, either public or private, that does this.
When WSU faculty proposed a new math-and-science academy, they were thinking of training exceptionally gifted-in-math-and-science students. Training future leaders. The local Superintendent and BOE torpedoed the proposal.
Education-degree students who want to teach secondary science are disallowed from doing the 20+ hour/week senior science projects that the best bio, chem and physics-degree students work on. This is why I have proposed a 6-year dual-degree program for science teachers. You can’t learn science if your last science course is a junior-year level survey course.
How about schools’ hiring retired university faculty, doctors and engineers to teach AP bio, chem and physics C courses. No teaching credential required. Required: 90% of enrolled students who pass pre-entrance exams score 4 or 5 on the AP test, and students give their teacher a “9″ or better average end-of-course grade on a 0-10 scale. This is a scientific formula for evaluating teachers.
Before WWII high school teachers were traditional-university graduates who had liberal arts and science degrees. Normal school/teachers colleges were responsible solely for training K-8th grade teachers. In the 1960’s, high school teacher training was given to teachers colleges and schools of education within traditional universities, and their administrators determined curricula for future high school teachers. They botched the job, not because they wanted to, but because he job was beyond their understanding. Or, to be more clear, when high school was devised to prepare students for university study, it was soundly realized that schools needed former university students as teachers. When terminal education was reset from 8th grade to 12th as an objective for the vast majority of students, that’s what transpired. The college-preparation framework of the old high school was lost. Not overnight. In the early 1960’s most high school teachers had bachelor’s degrees in academic subjects. But they retired, and by the 1980’s, they were in a minority. Today, they can only be found in significant numbers in private schools, and in majority numbers in a minority of private schools.
We could resurrect the old construct, but it would have to be through charter schools, because the unionists demand solidarity. Traditional university-degreed persons don’t fit into this group.
Apophis said that charter schools aren’t “public schools”. Of course he is wrong. What he means is, “Charter schools aren’t the kind of public schools I think of.”
That’s akin to saying, “The University of Michigan isn’t a public university because it operates differently from Western Michigan University (originally a normal school for 8th grade graduates). The University of Illinois is not a public university because it operates differently from Southern Illinois University (originally a normal school). The University of North Carolina is not a public university, because its admission requirements are higher than those of Eastern Carolina University (originally a normal school).The University of Wisconsin-Madison is not a public university because its admissions requirements are higher than those of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (originally a normal school). The University of California is not a public school because its admissions requirements are higher than those of California State University (originally a normal school). The University of Kansas IS a public university because dunderhead hicks made its admissions requirements identical to those for former normal schools Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University and Pittsburg State University, originally established to educate students who completed 8th grade. Today, more than 4 out of 10 University of Kansas entrants drop out of KU without receiving their bachelor’s degree. THAT’S a “public” university in the eyes of some people.
KU’s founders had Ivy League degrees. They wanted to establish a public university that could hold its own against Ivy-grad-staffed public universities in Wisconsin, California and Michigan.
Today’s KU chancellor earned community-college-instructor degrees including a National Defense Education Act-funded 3-year “mini Ph.D” at Kent State University for juco instructors. This was straight from a bachelor’s degree program at the University of Omaha, a then-municipal university for students who couldn’t handle a University of Nebraska courseload. KU’s chancellor, born in Iowa was arguably not qualified to get into a KU Ph.D. program in the early 1960’s. Now he leads the institution. That’s a really sorry institutional “evolution”. If Apophis thinks this is appropriate, he’s ignorant.
“…It is only when attempts to replicate experiments and/or to conduct logical-correlary experiments fail, that theories are discarded. Darwinism is nowhere near the experimental-testing stage. It is still dependent on preexistent-sample observation and analysis, which is really natural history, not modern experimental science. [...]“Posted by: heartlander | June 14, 2006 at 04:02 PM
heartlander, let’s for the sake of argument assume that Karl Popper has the last word on the scientific method.
Would I be accurate in summing up your argument against teaching Darwinian “macro” evolution by writing that you think it currently falls outside the scientific method?
That it falls outside the scientific method because of poor, perhaps impossible, experiment design?
And therefore, because Darwinian evolution hasn’t yet been tested enough to “break” the theory, that ID, as a theory of life origination, is validly comparable to Darwinian evolution, as a theory of species emergence (origination)?
You seem to consistently advocate a kind of wide-open, wide-eyed approach to learning where all ideas are valid and everything’s on the table, i.e., learning as brainstorming. So for you as both a scientist and an educator, throwing ID “out there” with Darwinian evolution is not only ok but actually an improved way to learn science.
If this is accurate, then you must know that my next question is this. Surely you would lend equally valid weight to the FSM or Big Aliens or Martians or whatever as you assign to ID – which is also the very same weight assigned to Darwinian evolution.
Because as you know if we as citizens give ID the jumpstart that perhaps you but definitely many others, including the KBOE, wish, then surely we must lend that jumpstart to any old I in the ID, or be seen to favor religion in the classroom. Note that this would be religion placed on an equal footing with the I’s of the FSM and Big Aliens. Buddha at the very least would be an I on equal footing with the Christian God. Any kid with half a brain could ask questions that would have the old HS biology class talking about flying spaghetti monsters creating the human foot for hours on end.
In other words, science as farce.
Correct?
By the way, not to criticize at all because you’re a wonderful writer, but do you do executive summaries? If so please consider doing so!
A few years ago there was a flap about a Piper High teacher, Christine Pelton’s, giving “F’s” to 9th-grade biology students who “plagiarized” reports because they research matters on the Internet, but gave no attributions to their sources. Parents complained about the “F’s”. The parents were right. Ms. Pelton was WRONG. Why? Look at textbooks. Do they contain footnotes or endnotes that disclose their information sources? No. So students tried to EMULATE their books’ information-without-attribution formats. Did this deserve “F’s”? Only in the mind of an incompetent, screwed up teacher.
When I was in 6th grade, my teacher assigned a 10-page research-based paper. He never said, “cite your information sources. He accused me of “plagiarism”. I didn’t know that this word meant, so I had to look it up in a dictionary. Had I been exposed to textbooks that had properly-attributing footnotes and endnotes, of course I would have written the paper with attributions, because I was a diligent student. How many 6th graders write to the government of Puerto Rico seeking information?
But I couldn’t DO THINGS NOBODY TAUGHT ME. Same for the Piper High students, who diligently used the Internet, and provided the primary information that the teacher wanted. Her principal supported her, but HE WAS WRONG. So she told the press that she was going to open a pre-school. Too bad for the young children, if any parents signed them up.
KFG..Awwww… geee, and I thought we understood each other…. I’m so sad…. NOT.. I am used to it…
I have been on your side so many times and all you ever do is trash me… I hate to have to admit to Nathan that he might be right about you.. you will never be civil to anyone who claims to be a Christian. That’s really sad because I DO know how to polka!
Seriously.. I am not extreme by any standards.. and I don’t really care if you will accept that or not.. but I’ll keep my sense of humor and maybe even come to the WE gathering and hug everybody!! LOL…
Actually Sir Francis Crick posed the idea of “alien seeding” of life on earth, because of the absolute failure of origin-of-life experiments I attended one of Sir Francis’s lectures, which he gave to my class.
A Wichita interschool (middle-school) contest asked, “Name the British scientist who discovered DNA” which has been shown repeatedly on channel 20. The “correct” answer: “Francis Crick”. Nice hinterland public-education ignorance. DNA was discovered in the 19th century. Avery Oswald and colleagues proved that DNA was the “genetic stuff” in 1944. Francis Crick and James Watson used Rosalind Frranklin’s exquisite x-ray diffraction photographs and established that DNA had a double-helical structure in 1953–without coauthoring Dr. Franklin for her work without which Mssrs. Crick and Watson had zero idea of DNA’s structure.
Anyway, the “correct” academic-competition answer was vetted by Wichita science teachers, who proved their abject ignorance of the history of molecular biology. The “correct” answer, created by public Kansas science teachers was abjectly WRONG. Nice “science” teaching here.
flike,
“Of course it does and of course it is. It only makes sense if you, kansassam, and other Kansans are supporting ID (aka, “criticisms of Darwinian evolution,” wink wink) because you feel that teaching young Kansas students about Christianity’s current flava is impossible UNLESS evolution is ignored.”
How can evolution be ignored? Much of the theory has scientific support. Some of it is weak.Just for the record, I have never proposed that ID be taught in public school. I do believe that kids should understand the complexity of life and where the evidence is weak, so they know where research needs to be done.People tend to “make stuff up” and what bothers me most is that the person on the street, like me, doesn’t know what has hard evidence to support it, and what is just another “brontosaurus”…
It has become so much more about “politics” than “science”, that noone knows who to believe anymore!
Dear flike, may I suggest that you go to WSU and read some scientific reports. Read the abstracts only if you choose. But scientific reports, including introductions, materials and methods, conclusions, and deductions, are LONG. My wife just asked me to go through a half-dozen papers on treating newborns with vitamin A. Before reading the papers, she gave me a summary. Her position sounded totally reasonable. But then after I read the papers in full, I had to strongly disagree with her, because she didn’t have a full understanding of the reports. She was unhappy at first with my conclusions, but gradually understood a larger picture. I am an analyst. I can’t help it. Give me scientific information in the fields that I know, and I can tell you the sound things in reports and the “holes”. Stochastic evolution has “holes”. I am not concluding that these mean the theory is wrong. I only oppose dogma. Dogma is for the weak-minded.
Apophis has labeled me a “Right Wing Wacko”. Too bad for him that I have mostly voted for democrats and greens in the last 20 years. His theory about me has “holes”. Big ones. Apophis is a dogmatist. Too bad for him. Reality is more complicated than he wants to contemplate.
“How can evolution be ignored? Much of the theory has scientific support. Some of it is weak.”Posted by: kansassam | June 14, 2006 at 05:22 PM
Sorry sam, it’s not evolution I meant but the teaching of evolution.Some conservatives think that teaching evolution “gets in the way” of teaching young people about Christianity. heartlander has written something similar on this site.
If I understand correctly, the theory goes something like this. IF Kansas can get students to set aside the (perhaps false) idea that all life began due to pure chance (what heartlander calls stochastic evolution) then the idea that all life began at the hand of God can take root in these young minds.
Many conservatives think that inculcating Christianity in young minds yields a long-lived tool in one’s psychic toolbelt. They say though that experiencing being born again is impossible for some young people because for them the knowledge of stochastic evolution acts prophylactically.
Evolution, then, acts as a kind of Roundup on the young mind’s seedbed. If ways to discount evolution while teaching human biology can be found, then the odds of giving young people the very valuable tool of Christianity are drastically increased.
And hey, it’s got holes and currently can’t be proven conclusively, so what’s the harm? Not only that, but what engineer ever needed to know about evolution to make a sprocket?
I don’t subscribe to this theory, but I’ve heard others who do. heartlander in particular has sketched out something very similar (but to be fair it may have been mere thinking aloud on heartlander’s part because if memory serves this post was followed closely by one claiming that s/he prefers to write freely, when the muse is present, and let the chips fall where they may – s/he’s big enough to admit a mistake).
It’s the _knowledge of_ evolution that acts like Roundup, not evolution itself. Because what I wrote is just silly.
*sigh*
Where’s the dadgum edit button on this website anyway?!?
Re:
“Some conservatives think that teaching evolution “gets in the way” of teaching young people about Christianity. heartlander has written something similar on this site.”
I never said anything remotely approaching this. But never mind. If some Kansans promote ID, they get ridiculed. At least they get attention. If they don’t promote ID, Kansans are ignored as irrelevent. It’s a nasty curse, as Kansans lose either way.
Here is a suggestion: Make Kansas native, Nobel Laureate Jack Kilby superintendent of public instruction. He knows science. He understands economically productive science. He doesn’t have a political self-advancing agenda.
heartlander……………sorry I missed out on your diatribes through the day yesterday (NOT). I was a bit occupied doing things away from the computer. Where do you copy/paste all of your crap from? I also do not see how you can legitimately label me as “dogmatic”? Well, this is a free country and I suppose that is your right even though it is nonsense. You see, you spend all of your time pontificating about garbage on a website and doing nothing in the real world.
I am not impressed that you have been “blogging” for a long time, doesn’t impress me. You have a warped view of how public education should be handled and I suppose that is typical of your type. The fact is, you are not going to change the way things are in public education. That is going to come within the public education structure. All you do is brag about how better prepared for life you think your home-schooled children were/are. The things you propose do not allow for an equitable public education and are therefore not appropriate. I guess that is a main point in this entire discussion. You are not going to change the course main-stream science has taken in regards to evolution either. It doesn’t matter how ignorant the populace is about it, evolution is here to stay.
You are an angry man heartlander, your ideas are extreme. I wonder what legitimate label that puts on you?
Evolution makes sense. We see societal evolution, technological evolution, climatic evolution, including critical events that cause major shifts in short periods.
Does this necessarily imply random forces at work? No. Statisticians have long understood that group phenomena they measure as probabilistic may be comprised of individual deterministic events. Robert Laughlin has discussed this as well with respect to sub-atomic physics.
Isaac Newton theorized that God set the planets in motion around the sun. Would it be “against science” to mention this in an 8th grade physical science class? Newton’s principles of gravity, mass, inertia, momentum and energy, as well as his calculus, laid the foundation for the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
In the past twenty years, serious research studies performed at leading universities have examined the effects of faith and prayer on human health and longevity, as well as post-surgical and post-cancer-treatment outcomes. Some people might not say “that’s not science, because it examines religious issues.” Such individuals are anti-scientific. These studies have utilized universally-accepted statistical-epidemiological methods. They have been published in peer-reviewed journals whose referees are university medical school, public health school and psychology department faculty members whose own research is traditional. These are highly-educated, OPEN-MINDED people.
Human evolutionary dogma has some anti-scientific aspects. How many of us have seen textbook drawings of the evolution of humans from apes? They show a progressive loss of hair in the later stages. What scientific evidence is there for this progression? ZERO. It’s completely the product of an ARTIST’S IMAGINATION. So why was it put into biology textbooks? To advance an ideological agenda. It didn’t matter if it had no scientific evidentiary foundation, kids were supposed to receive indoctrination.
I remember in the early 90’s having an epiphany looking at photos of “Lucy”, the then oldest proposed hominid. What struck me was that over 80% of her “skeleton” was comprised of brown resin, made in the lab by technicians who followed artists’ renderings of what “Lucy” “should” look like. Her “reconstructed” cranium consisted of five small fossilized bone pieces that were bridged by much larger areas of resin. It was impossible for the anthropologists to determine “Lucy’s” cranial size, so they just winged it and created a cranial cavity whose size suited their desire to present it as larger than apes’ but smalller than modern humans’. The only other skull piece was a mandible (jaw). Nevertheless, the artistic anthropologists invented a complete skull, including an ape-like maxilla, and eye and ear sockets that suited their artistic sensibility.
“Lucy” had several rib pieces that the anthropologists decided to construct into 5 rib pairs. But humans and apes have 12 rib pairs. Only five vertebral bodies were found. But humans have 32 vertebrae.
Why is this important? Because Johanson and colleagues decided that she was “3 1/2 feet tall”. But you can’t scientifically size her without a nearly- complete vertebral column.
“Lucy” by the way, was arbitrarily decided to be a “female”. There is no evidence whatsoever for this. You need multiple specimens of various ages, including complete pelvii to reasonably determine the sex of a specific specimen. “Lucy” had a single pelvic bone, which did was absolutely indeterminate as to his or her gender.
But Johanson at all were not interested in scientific accuracy, he wanted PUBLICITY. So he invented a sex and gave the fossil a “name” (he said that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was playing in his head, a song about an LSD trip).
This wasn’t science, it was salesmanship. Which is why Johanson is now at “party school” Arizona State, rather than UC Berkeley or any other preeminent research university.
More recent finds, putatively older than “Lucy” have even fewer individual-specimen fossilized bones. This has not stopped promoters from creating artistic visions of what the whole-animal species “looked like”, hair and all.
The “Lucy” project was undertaken by a group headquartered in Berkeley, lead by Dr. Donald Johanson, whose members were NOT University of California professors, they were private-enterprisers.
They did their dig under the authorization of “Dr.” Richard Leakey, who controls access to a prime fossil-hunting section of the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa. Leakey, the son of missionary/self-taught anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, finished secondary school in England.
Leakey’s doctorate is honorary. But he titles himself “Doctor Leakey”. I saw PBS News Hour anchorman Jim Lehrer receive an honorary doctorate this weekend at my son’s college’s graduation ceremony in New Hampshire. If anyone calls Lehrer “Doctor Lehrer”, I’m sure he will chuckle. Honorary doctorate degree recipients don’t seek to be called “Doctor” any more than honorary law degree recipients try to take up legal practice, unless they are cranks, or else they have already earned doctorates and law degrees.
The proposition that humans evolved from apes occurred in the 19th century–before there was ANY EVIDENCE suggesting this. Pure scientific reason would advise us that today’s humans and today’s apes may represent descent from a species that had larger brains than any humans today. I’m not saying this happened, only that the extant evidence is every bit as supportive of this theory as it is of the prevailing theory. For dinosaurs, we have tens of thousands of specimens, including nearly-complete ones. For early so-called hominids, there are only tens, and none of them is anywhere near close to a nearly-complete skeleton. So, why do students hear only one-half of the scientifically reasonable possibilities? This is indoctrination, not science education.
Ridiculous copy/paste heartlander.
This kind of crap will not change my mind nor anyone else. You are obviously indoctrinated in the ID nonsense. If you want to believe a “God” is responsible for everything that happens in the universe, that is fine. It is not you place to impose that mindset on others.
I do actually pity you.
My dear Apophis,
Sometimes there ARE NO LABELS to put on people. For instance, KFG grew up on a farm. But she’s a lesbian. My grandmother and great aunt ran their own dairy farm without a man to lead them. My heritage is half Methodist, half Jewish. Kansassam is a Christian who wants his children to learn how to THINK for themselves. How do you put labels on these?
You can’t. If you insist on doing this, you are just perpetuating your own ignorance.
You wrote:
“you are not going to change the way things are in public education. That is going to come within the public education structure.
If you were right, then railroad leaders and horse-drawn-carriage builders would have changed transportation. But you are wrong. NEWCOMERS build automobiles. NEWCOMBERS built an interstaete highway system to enable truckers to replace trains for most cargo-hauling duties. NEWCOMBERS also invented cargo-and-passenger-hauling airplanes to leave railroads in the dust.
As far as your comment, ” [change] is going to come within the public education structure,” goes, let’s look at the leading universities that do research and train leaders for public education:
According to U.S. News and World Report, the top six graduate-traiing, research ed schools are:
1. Harvard (private)2. Stanford (private)3. UCLA (public)4. Teachers College, affiliated with Columbia (private)4T. Vanderbilt University (private)6. Pennsylvania (private)
Why are private schools dominating PUBLIC education? Why did private Teachers College supply the leaders of Emporia Normal School, and the KU School of Education nearly a century ago?
Are you clueless? Mass public education was invented to serve the ambitions of private-sector capitalists. Today, the top schools of education that are leading public education’s course are PRIVATE.
Now, anybody who can THINK must ask, why are PRIVATE universities today dominating PUBLIC education research and leadership training?
When public teachers are given a choice: Smaller classes and less income/benefits, or larger classes and more personal income/benefits, most teachers choose the latter. Too bad for students.This ethos isn’t going to be changed internally. Outsiders will reinvent education for the 21st century. You may not like it, but that’s just the way it is. You can exercise rear-guard defense actions to forstall the inevitable, and probably you will succeed for the benefit of this generation of Kansas teachers. But ultimately, the world will move beyond you. You can’t evolve to meet a drastically changing environment, so you go the way of the dinosaurs. You will be the last of your kind.
heartlander……..you wrote:”When public teachers are given a choice: Smaller classes and less income/benefits, or larger classes and more personal income/benefits, most teachers choose the latter. Too bad for students.”What is wrong with choosing the later?
You are just ignorant heartlander. Type (rather, copy/paste) all the anti public education you want, it’s not going to change a thing. YOU have no ability to make the changes you propose. YOU are irrelevant.
PS. You and thousands of other Wichita teachers could have supported the public charter math-and-science academy to train leaders for Wichita’s 21st century economy. Why were you AWOL?
If your thinking is, “I don’t want to see Wichita’s most-gifted children receiving a ’special’ education, I think that capitalists who received special educations elsewhere and now live in distant cities like Chicago, Ontario Canada, and Providence Rhode Island are obligated to provide well-paying jobs to Wichitans and the young adults who migrate to Wichita from the rural zone, to make dollars flow into this community to support me and other Wichitans,” where do you get this notion? You can lobby Topeka for more school funding for Wichita, but what is your proposal to prevent the local economy’s implosion?
Really, tell me what your proposal is. I’ve given you mine: special leadership-grooming education programs for Wichita’s most-gifted students and 21st century research programs at WSU. So, if you are THINKING, present YOUR proposal.
PPS. I’m not bragging about playing varsity football and track, working on the yearbook, and presiding over the French club, in a small parochical school, because frankly, I wasn’t that good. But I got great experience, such as you don’t have to be 240 pounds to protect your quarterback, or run a 1:55 in the 800 in a small-school league. You can learn from excellent coaches.
Did you enjoy experiences like these in public high school? Were you asked as a student in a university to be a member of an administration-and-senior-faculty-run task force to redevelop university facilities for the FUTURE?
If you don’t CARE about Wichita’s future, but all you can think of is getting more money from Topeka to marginally improve Wichita’s obsolete education system, then you are obsolete. We are never going to return to an era in which a high school grad could serve in the military, get a job at Boeing and use his GI Bill benefits to purchase a house for his new family. We aren’t going to return to an era of union strength that makes distant-headquartered industrial corporations treat Wichita workers as partners. The world has changed. It is going to change even more. Childhood education must be REINVENTED for a DIFFERENT economy.
heartlander……………your assumptions are just absurd……..blow it out your RW ass.
Apophis, your style of argument is quite convincing! Good for you!
Yes good for you Ap. You haven’t proposed one constructive suggestion for redesigning Industrial Age schools to serve a Postindustrial Age society’s needs. You’re suggestion since you got here, is to persuade Topeka to give Wichita an additional $75 million. So, what would you like to see this money used for? List some specific projects. For example, do you want to see more computers? The Oklahoma school district has one desktop workstation for every 2.5 students. Wichita has one for every classroom. Could you support an initiative to buy laptops and set up a community-wide free-access WiFi system, as other cities are doing, so that kids can use computers to learn after school, such as researching for reports, accessing math-help sites, and the like?
You need to understand that schools’ mission isn’t to provide termination-proof 30-year employment for teachers, it is to prepare children for adult life, through the acquisition of skills that can support them. If you can achieve both goals, that’s great. But you give highest priority to the former, because that is putting the horse inside the carriage.
Schools serve the FUTURE, not the present. So, what do you think Wichita’s economy is going to be based on when today’s students are working adults in 20 years? What sectors will provide major employment opportunities? What skills will they demand? Most importantly, what sectors will capture outside-world-source dollars, without which the city cannot support local-dollar-recirculation enterprises, from retail to healthcare?
DD suggested ceramics-based industries. I suggested nanotech. Figure that in the 15 years the aviation companies will progressively outsource more and more component assembly to Third World nations. Then some of these nations, particularly China, will demand–and receive–the opportunity to build whole planes.They’ve already gotten the engineering and Vo-Tech training infrastructure under development to achieve this goal, among many modern industrialization plans.
So by the 2030 or so, Wichita’s aircraft plants will be empty. The vast space should be useable. But for what enterprises?
Now, if you say, “I don’t have any idea, no one does,” that’s not adequate. If you highly educate Wichita’s brightest young minds, THEY will develop ideas for Wichita’s future survival, and even long-term prosperity. It isn’t today’s public educators’ job to envision tomorrow’s economy, but it is their job to empower today’s young people to do the envisioning when they are adults, and use their creativity, energy and ambition to turn their visions into reality. These will create jobs and enterprise opportunites for other people. They will build and support charitable institutions as well.
Education is not going to be reinvented by the public education system. Why not? First, it is too large and bureaucratic. In times of rapid change, small organizations and individuals are much more nimble, and they are able to adjust as needed to rapid change. Large, bureaucratic institutions just fall further and further behind.
Two, the education establishment is comprised of people who are, in the vast majority, risk-averse. Most teachers are women. Women seek security. When high school and college counselors, and teachers themselves talk with potential future-teacher candidates, they “sell” the profession as: nearly complete job security, superb health benefits, annual time-of-service-based pay increases–no risk of pay reduction if you stay in a given district–and the reasonable ability to retire with a good pension anytime after age 55, leaving many “good” years to enjoy life after retirement.
The problem: during times of monumental change, people must take personal risks. If they don’t want to proactively undertake risks, then other risks will be imposed on them, more likely with higher adversity consequences. So, to reinvent education, which must be done through diverse experiments that throw old-economy-based paradigms out the window, people involved in the experiments must have risk-taking temperaments.
For example, it is clear to growing numbers of people that math should be taught 2 hours a day. In recent middle-school MATHCOUNTS competition, Lexington, KY Magnet School has walked away from the rest of the competition in a 20-state consortium that includes Kansas. This is a public magnet school. Wichita’s only placing schools have been Collegiate and TIS, albeit ranking nowhere near Lexington Magnet. Lexington Magnet uses 2-hour math classes. Not to remediate, but to train the city’s brightest young minds.
Science education must do similarly. We might envision vocational and artisan-training classes having similar effects on the composition of the teaching corps.
What this implies is that something has to give. Perhaps social studies should be taught for fewer years. This might be feared to put many social studies teachers out of work. They might have to find other careers. That’s a risk of an innovative, SMART experiment designed for the 21st-century technology-underpinned economy.
If teachers unions say, “You’re not going to do that, we have to protect our teachers’ jobs,” that is a highly counterproductive attitude, in terms of students, communities and the nation’s future. Furthermore, the change may not even problematic. We have a burgeoning wave of teacher retirements coming up. So attrition could very well avoid the need for terminations. The only thing the ed schools will have to do is produce fewer social studies teachers.
Many Kansans have a tendency to let the outside world do the initial experiments, promulgate things that work, and then be late adopters. But this doesn’t work. It’s like watching a “risky” new IPO stock like Google take off, keep climbing, climbing and climbing, and then one buys it, just as the value plateaus.
The late adopter is picking up old ideas that are no longer innovative, while the outside word is doing new experiments and promulgating new innovations that work better.
When you DO experiments long enough, you get a sense of what will work, and are able to be positively innovative. When other people do experiments you become able to judge in advance whether their experiments have promise, and should be tried by you.
We are undergoing an economic shift that is as monumental as the transformation of the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. You didn’t need any kind of formal education in the first age, as children learned what they needed to know working in the fields and home.
You needed an economy-fitting formal education system for the second. But this system doesn’t fit the Postindustrial Age. Tell General Motors to convert its business to software design. Some of its people could do this; the vast, vast majority could not. Xerox set up the Palo Alto Research Center, which created the first Windows system, as well as the mouse. Xerox was in a position to lead the PC revolution. The company supported this amazing technological research. But corporate didn’t know what to do with it. It went over their heads.
Bill Gates bought proto-DOS from a Seattle wizard. He and his friends modified it. They were willing to sell it outright to IBM and work exclusively for IBM. IBM execs were preoccupied with an anti-trust complaint due to the company’s near-monopoly on mainframes. They just didn’t have time to think about PC’s. So Gates et al. went away to work with other companies. Then a few years later, IBM expressed interest. But now Gates didn’t feel he had to sell MS-DOS away, instead he retained ownership and sold MS-DOS license to IBM. The company tried to do PC’s but was overrun by smaller, more nimble manufacturers. This was, up until that time, the most computer-savvy corporation on the planet. IBM could have done well EVOLVING into PC production in a slower-advancing era, but it couldn’t keep up with extremely rapid REVOLUTIONARY changes.
The math-and-science academy proposal’s failure was interesting. Why was it shot down? The proposing professors were PUBLIC teachers (retired). It was to be a PUBLIC school. But because PROFESSORS would run things, it threatened the poor, insecure K-12 educators, who felt that they would become “second class citizens” in their “own” school system. So to salve their insecurities, brilliant kids’ futures had to be sacrificed.
heartlander………….I tire of the endless discourse with you that always goes back to the same thing, bashing the public education system.I think this little piece of anti- public education garbage hits the nail on the head in regards to you: “If teachers unions say, “You’re not going to do that, we have to protect our teachers’ jobs,” that is a highly counterproductive attitude, in terms of students, communities and the nation’s future. Furthermore, the change may not even problematic. We have a burgeoning wave of teacher retirements coming up. So attrition could very well avoid the need for terminations. The only thing the ed schools will have to do is produce fewer social studies teachers.” I especially find the “need for terminations” quite amusing. Are you planning to revoke due process rights from these teachers? I thought due process was one of those key concepts in the Constitution? Since these teachers are not privately employed, why wouldn’t they be entitled to due process? I also wonder where this nonsense about Social Studies teachers is coming from? I can guarantee you that I do not teach this subject. You seem to have an intense hatred towards these particular teachers.
heartlander………..you also keep coming back to this mysterious Science-Math Academy that I presume was some idea that WSU had some time in the past. Any consortium like that would be negotiated by the Administration of USD 259 and not the teachers. To my knowledge, the representative teacher organization in Wichita was part of no discussion about this mysterious “Academy”. Your argument is sunk again.
The whole point of this thread was about the insane Science Standards that the State BOE is trying to force on our children. You, as usual, have strayed from this. The business/tech. ideas you have do have merit, but what company would want to invest in Kansas when the Science being taught to our children is not what mainstream science requires?
Face it heartlander, you are an extremist and your ideas will not become part of the public school process no matter how much you type (or copy/paste as I see) on a BLOG. Slam on the teachers all you want, you’re not going to have any effect on them. Your rantings and ravings only show how ill informed you are about the profession.
Here is an interesting link:
http://www.hhmi.org/grants/reports/awards/main
Under “Program” click “Undergraduate Science Education” Then select “state name” (peruse as many as you want, or click “ALL STATES”.
This is a database of Howard Hughes Medical Institute grants that support bachelor’s program science education, chiefly in biology, most often for undergraduate honors research projects’ support. The grants are mostly between $1.5 and 2.2 million dollars. HHMI is a private organization, but its recipients are both private and public higher-education institutions.
Notable findings:
In the past five years, the following states have received funding:
Northeast- Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C.
Not funded: Rhode Island, Vermont
South-Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee
Not funded: Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia
(Due to recent restructuing of U Kentucky into a modern research university, still in progress, HHMI funding is likely to occur within the next several years.)
Southwest-Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas
Not funded-none
Pacific-California, Oregon, Washington
Not funded-Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada
Rocky Mountain- Colorado, Montana, Utah
Not funded-Idaho, Wyoming
Midwest-Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin
Not funded-Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota
Let us analyze some numbers:
States with SMALLER POPULATIONS THAN KANSAS (2.69 Million) in 2000 Census that received HHMI science education funding:
Delaware 0.8M, Maine 1.3M, Montana 0.9M, New Hampshire 1.2M, New Mexico 1.8 M, Utah 1.8M, Arkansas 2.67M
States with LARGER POPULATIONS THAN KANSAS that did NOT RECEIVE HHMI science education funding:
Kentucky 4.0 M, Mississippi 2.8 M
Populations of states that did NOT RECEIVE HHMI funding:
Wyoming 0.5M, Alaska 0.6M, North Dakota 0.6M, Vermont 0.6M, South Dakota 0.8M, Rhode Island 1.0M, Idaho 1.2M, Hawaii 1.2M, Nebraska 1.7M, West Virginia 1.8M, Nevada 2.0M, Kansas 2.7M, Mississippi 2.8M, Kentucky 4.0M
Median state population of NON-FUNDED states:
1.1 million (Rhode Island, Idaho)
States with TWO or more MSA’s of >500,000 population that were NOT HHMI funded:
Kansas
The Largest Incorporated-City populations in non-funded states in the 2000 Census, ranked by population:
Las Vegas 478kOmaha 390Honolulu 372Wichita 344Lexington-Fayette KY 260Anchorage AK 260Providence RI 193Boise ID 186Jackson MS 184Sioux Falls SD 124Fargo ND 91Cheyenne WY 53Charleston WV 53Burlington VT 38
Median-population largest city in Non-funded states: 190k (Prov. RI, Boise ID)
Las Vegas is a special case for two reasons: In 1970 its population was 126k, which was less than half of Wichita’s (277). In 1990, Las Vega’s population (256) was less than Wichita’s 1970 population. It is growing faster than any city in America. Secondly, its primary industry is tourism. It does not have any major production industries (except tourist-facilities construction).
Honolulu’s primary industry is also tourism. It has no other major industries except agriculture, chiefly sugar cane, pineapples and coffee.
This leaves Nebraska and Kansas as two states that have Top 50-population-ranked (by population) cities and diversified productive industries but no HHMI funding. However, Kansas is the ONLY state with TWO or more MSA’s of greater than >500,000 population (Kansas City MSA, Kansas part, and Wichita MSA) that has not received HHMI funding.
Per capita 2000 income of states with populations between 1.5-3.5M that received HHMI funding:
Connecticut $40.6k, Oregon 28.3, Iowa 26.7,Utah 23.9, Oklahoma 23.5, New Mexico 22.3, Arkansas 22.2.
Median state per capita personal income: $23.9kKansas 27.8, Nebraska 27.8, West Virginia 21.9, Mississippi 20.9
Median per capita personal income: $24.8k
We note that Kansas and Nebraska have the highest per capita incomes of the non-funded states, and their per capita incomes are substantially above the FUNDED STATES’ median.(Assuming an average household size of ca. 3.3, the income differential is substantial, $13k per household)
These data reveal that it is NOT that Kansas cannot afford to develop advanced university research that involves undergraduates working in labs, meriting HHMI funding, it is that Kansans need to wake up to the national concensus that training bright young minds in science research is essential.
Furthermore, because Kansas has TWO MSAs with more than a half-million people each, and only 30% of the population is categorized as “rural”, and because the rural zone is being depopulated, with migration to the two large urban-suburban centers, and there is also an inexorably dropping rural-population percentage, Kansas cannot conceive of itself as a “rural” state anymore. By 2020 only 1 out of 4 Kansans will be rural. 3 out of 4 will be urban. This is what the education system must realize and respond to.
There will be a plethora of well-paying urban and suburban jobs in the 21st century American economy. But cities and states must invest not just more money, but deep thought, time and wisdom in their education systems to capture these jobs. These jobs aren’t just going to come “automatically” to states that perpetuate Industrial Age-modeled education because their leaders conclude that this is what they know how to do very well, having done it for more than a century, and it is the easiest thing to continue doing.
Kentucky is moving forward. The University of Kentucky hired a native-son MIT Ph.D., and former Hughes Vice President as its new president. Several hundred million dollars are slated to be used to build state-of-the-art research facilities and to headhunt top-notch scientists and engineers from other states. Mississippi may never be able to fit into the 21st century economy. Tiny North Dakota, whose largest city has only 91,000 people (smaller than Overland Park 150,000, Kansas City 147,000, Topeka 122,00, and Olathe 93,000), is depopulating and will probably not be able to find a way to fit into the 21st century economy. Tiny South Dakota, whose largest city has only 124,000 people, may not either. Neither of these states even has a true research university, as the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities serves this function for them.
Kansas and Nebraska have opportunities and resources to lay 21st-century-economy foundations in education and research. They need to wake up. This is especially true for Kansas, which has 1 million more people than Nebraska.
Wichita has been given an extra chance, due to the boom in aircraft construction, with Boeing’s suddenly grabbing a huge share of the 2006-2012 airliner market, leaving Airbus flat on its back. But this boon to Wichita will not last forever. As the money pours in, investments in Wichita’s future must be made, and that means in education and research.
heartlander – when I ran for legislature back in 1994 the issue I wanted to discuss was post-secondary education. In particular I have been concerned with bringing together the area’s 4 Community Colleges with Vo-Tech to provide for that ‘middle area’ of employment.
Unfortunately, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was abortion and gay issues. Supporters of my opponent (the good Christians at Godarchy) claimed that I was running on a ‘gay rights’ agenda because I was closet gay. Les Donovan never publically disavowed their lies. (and my wife of now 35 years was a bit surprised). As long as this sort of thing so dominates our political landscape we will never make progress on the real issues facing our state.
Ben, OMG, they were at it already about god, guns and gays in 1994? It took a little longer for texans to swallow the pitcher of kookaide.
Yikes. I knew you ran, but didnt realize it was so long ago. Damn, their stealthiness and swift boating has been going on for a long time. And kansas is just NOW waking up to it?
“Here kansas voters, have another shot of soma a la Brave New World.”
Thomas Frank is so shamefully and woefully correct about the voters in this state. They will always vote against their own interests if they just get that ol’ time religion on social issues.
And if you need an example, look no further than the success of the kansas koulter girls.
Kansas…as gullible as you think.
My dear Apophis,
UAW President Ron Gettlefinger gave the troops a difficult, but accurate assessment of the U.S. auto industry on Monday, telling his men and women that they are going to have to accept substantial, permanent cuts in their healthcare benefits (i.e. they will have to shoulder greater personal costs for healthcare). The UAW once had 1.7 million members. Now it has 600,000, and that number will continue to shrink.Gettlefinger told them that this isn’t a temporary setback that can be ridden out, it is an unavoidable long-term future.
Why? Because GM has a primary duty not to give its union members the middle-class lifestyles of their predecessors, but to make cars that are priced at levels that induce the public to buy them. If GM doesn’t do this, the company will go belly up and NO UAW members will have jobs, incomes and benefits.
You can email Lou Heldman and ask him about the New York Herald, one of America’s great “people’s” newspapers a half-century ago. In order to survive, the Herald’s leadership told the union that it must go to labor-saving automated printing machines in the 1960’s. The union stonewalled, threatening to strike and wreak havoc on an already financially-struggling company. So management capitulated. But the paper into the red, publishing papers for more money than it could charge. It had to close its doors a few years after the original proposal. Instead of 30% of the union members losing their jobs, 100% of them did. Along with hundreds of journalists, secretaries, custodians, loading-dock workers, truck drivers and home-delivery boys. The union got what it wanted–short term. And wrought a terrible aftermath price for its own printmen and a lot of other people.
More than half of all Americans now have retirement investments in stocks. Their investments will become worthless if the companies they are invested in sell goods and services at a profit. If this means that the companies must either cut labor costs here, or go overseas, then that’s what has to be done to provide everyday Americans with retirement nest eggs. Teachers’ retirement portfolios have these investments. Do you think they want to see their investments disintegrate?
A half century ago 40% of the nation’s workers were unionized and 10% of Americans owned stocks. That ratio has been nearly reversed. A strange thing, but it is reality. The world has changed.
Teachers didn’t invent unions. They followed their blue-collar industrial brothers. For example, meatpackers guided the creation of the nation’s first or second teachers union in Chicago in the 1920’s. Teachers adopted the industrial-worker collectivism paradigm. But over the past 30 years, the industrial-sector collectivism model on which teacher unionization was founded has itself shriveled. But teachers want to maintain it for themselves. What these means is that their own mindset, originally appropriate for their grandmothers to the society in which they worked, is now an anachronism.
We both know a lot of smart people. Most of them know how to individually negotiate payraises, or find better jobs if their bosses don’t give them satisfaction. Do you think teachers are incapable of doing this? If so, why?
The unionists who believe collective bargaining is essential can only have one or more of three reasons for this belief, that I can think of:
1. Teachers don’t have adult-adult negotiating skills. If so, this is a problem, because their students MUST acquire these vital skills in this century’s economy.
2. The administrators are scheming devils who don’t have the teachers’ interests at heart, so they only become reasonable in negotiation when overpowered by mass-action, albeit by proxy.
3. The public is at fault for holding teachers down by being insufficiently sensitive to the teachers’ wants and needs. But with unionization, political campaign aid, including providing laundered taxpayer’s money (originally paid as teacher salaries, then pooled into union dues warchests), that can be used to elect, not to say “buy”, teacher-friendly politicians who listen to the teachers more than the rest of the public.
In this situation, teachers’ wants get met, as do those of the Chambers of Commerce, the out-of-state corporations that provide so many needed jobs for everyday Kansans that Kansans can’t create for themselves, and other groups that can put large sums of money on the campaign tables, while most members of the Kansas population are ignored, since their public schools never taught them, much less encouraged them, to organize for themselves, pool money, lobby and pay candidates of their choices to run for office.
Which of these best alternatives explains the need, in your mind, for continuing teacher unionization? Or do you have another rationale?
I was driving through the outback the other night trying to find a get a news and weather report. What sounded like one turned out to be a Christian station, that announced Yoga induces a hypnotic state that enables demons to come into one.
Aren’t a lot of Christian Yoga-Pilates gals gonna get a big surprise?
But you can’t blame Kansans, I think the show is produced in Texas. ; )
Yikes heartlander, I cant tell if you are pro union or anti union or somewhere in between.
My long take? (the uninterested should feel free to scroll past)
There used to be a social and business contract between “the companies” and “the workers”. Company/labor for short.
The unions would deliver good quality, productive, dependable labor, and the company would pay them fairly, treat them fairly, and provide the tools and facilities they needed for maximum productivity.
Somewhere that contract was broken. Not enough bandwidth to explain that.
Fast forward to my experience with AT&T, CWA, and IBEW.
When judge greene broke up AT&T and ushered in competition, the company didnt know how to market it’s ass out of a wet paper bag.
They were built as a utility and a monopoly, and rates were determined by formulas that actually rewarded them for keeping more (read unnecessary) people on the payroll. The unions loved it, the company loved it, everyone was happy.
Cue music.
Then came competition, for which they were ALL woefully unprepared. CWA didnt know crap about providing labor in new job titles in a competitive environment. IBEW was better, coming from mfg, but still not sure how to deal with the new competitive environment at ma bell.
The only thing EVERYONE knew for sure, was that technology and competition meant they couldnt guarentee numbers of jobs in job titles anymore without going broke. And as you noted, having layoffs of 100% instead of 50% in network ops and 80% in operator services.
I know. I closed down the operator services in Wichita in the late 80’s.
Morty Bahr, the prez of CWA at the time, bargained, in 1986, for a training and education package for his union members. He gave away title security in exchange for the biggest education benefit package in history.
Smart guy. He realized that in the information age, true employment security did not lie in jobs or job titles. True employment security lies in skills that reside inside the individual that would make them employable inside or outside of AT&T.
Morty left a $20 million legacy to his members that sent them to school (college, trade, private, etc) for as long as they wanted and for whatever they wanted.
You want to be a nurse? Fine, we’ll pay for it? You want to be a digital tech instead of analog? Fine, we’ll pay for it.
I had a guy I sent to school for equine health and then massage therapy school and then to business classes. Why? He was getting laid off as a tech and started a biz massaging race horses.
He could buy and sell both of us now. Ask him about employment security. And I have tech friends there now that started out as analog wire stringers. They went to class on their time and the company dime.
Sorry for the length here, but we trained operators in Cheyenne to be marketing people when their facility closed. Actually, the workers chose it and we just facilititated it. They closed one friday as operators and opened the next monday as marketers.
They were empowered to do more than punch a clock. They were empowered to create their own jobs. We just provided the resources.
Unions these days negotiate benefits like this routinely, but it was very innovative in the 80’s.
No one should be asking us to create jobs that match their skills. The entire community is well served when we help skill and re-skill workers to match the jobs being created. Or we help them be entrepreneurs.
Win-win. Imagine that. Go union!
Damn girl, you must type fast!
I talk even faster….. hehehe
Wellll, ….hon.(with a slow drawl)I been in Kanass a looooong time.(long pause)Don’t reckon I can listen……that fast.
Teachers do not need to justify the existence of their professional organizations. You just hate these organizations because they work to not allow wackos like you to manipulate the public education system. The teacher professional organizations (what YOU call a union) are here to stay! Belittle them all you will, label them as leeches, it matters NOT.
You are obviously anti-union and that is just another of your pathetic qualities. Unions are what made the middle class of this country in the twentieth century. Again, I do pity you heartlander.
Overall, I’m pro-union. I have union members in my family. Their unions serve a beneficial purpose. For example nurses unions don’t just fight for better wages and benefits, they fight for protecting patients, e.g. when hospital administrators try to pressure them to carry too many patients and compromise patients’ welfare, or cover temporarily in units that are outside nurses’ fields of expertise, to shave costs. The carpenters in the AFL get time-and-a-half working more than 40 hours, and double-time working 48 hours. That’s absolutely reasonable. Given a 168 hour week, when you go from 40 hours to 60 hours working, YOUR REST TIME IS DECREASED by 20 hours. That takes a toll on the body. Do enough of it, and it may shortern your working lifetime. So it merits extra compensation.
In grad schools you have some young people who are being groomed to be future professors, and a lot of young people who are being abused as cheap lab techs and library gofers, whom faculty KNOW aren’t going to be future researchers. I support their unionization. Sadly the Supreme Court held that Yale, which is to say all private research universities receiving federal monies, can prohibit grad-student unionization.
There is a difference between using unionization to ensure decent working conditions and incomes, and fight abuse than using union dues to encourage power-lust for small cliques of union leaders. Like the ones who fly first class and stay in 4-star hotels, which the rank-and-file members don’t get to do. This is a form of hierarchism that tries to emulate “the other side”. It has bought into establishment’s paradigm.
In schools, what has happened is that teachers have been sucked into a scheme that discredits them. Smaller student loads or more money. Take the money. If teachers had self-respect AND respect for their students, they would strike for smaller classes AND more personal income. They could do this. By striking they would disrupt the lives of parents of kids who are suddenly staying home, waking the parents up.
The risk would be, the public would look at how much teachers earn per hour, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates to be $37/hour for a national mean, and parents would get mad at teachers, since the vast majority of parents don’t earn nearly this much.
Do I think $37/hr is too much? I think it is too little. The caveat is, it is too little for the real job that needs to be done, but isn’t being done. Let’s look at per-student costs for each teacher. If a teacher is earning $37/hour and 30 students in a class get 55 minutes of teaching in that hour, then the per-student expenditure is $1.13 per student-hour.
This is really, really lame. Is it the taxpayers’ fault? It is, if that’s what they want for their kids. You don’t know how much money I gave up to home-school. You don’t know how much time I spent, and how much money I have given up to give a local private-school student individualized instruction. I have only done these things to “experiment”. But the test is, do the experiments WORK?
Yes. Give students expert instruction by someone who is willing to self-sacrifice, and give them HARD ASSIGNMENTS, and TIME to work on them. There is so much in our education system here that is designed to achieve some nebulous mean, that f—- TALENT.
When Apophis speaks, his or her mind is unidimensional. When I first answered, I was trying to reach him or her. Now, I am using our dialect to reach OTHER people. Apophis CAN’T GROW. He or she is like a sunflower in late August: my sun is waning; I’ll just drop the seeds that I can.
Some of you may wonder why Apophis and I are antagonists. It stems from his first post in which he expressed great ideas. But then he said I was misinformed.
The problem? The ideas he expressed as HIS OWN were exactly the ideas I had expressed earlier. I don’t mind being copycatted in which people express my ideas as their own. I do this by not properly attributing my ideas to others whose ideas I have heard and read. A lot of people do this. Two excellent historians, the late Stephen Ambrose, and Harvard prof. Doris Goodwin were found to have plagiarized. Not for promoting bad ideas, but for not giving credit to the ideas’ originators. But every non-footnoted or end-noted TEXTBOOK does this.
What was deeply pernicious, even evil about Apophis’s first posting was that he mimicked my earlier statements, ENDORSING THEM but NOT ATTRIBUTING THEM TO ME, FOLLOWED IMMEDIATELY by calling ME “MISINFORMED”. Which had the effect of saying, “Here are MY ideas, Heartlander is misinformed,” which had the connotation that I didn’t believe THE IDEAS THAT I HAD EXPRESSED, AND BELIEVED IN.
I don’t like someone adopting my position, and accusing me of having a very different position. It’s okay, though, I am learning the tactics of a devious, dishonest individual.
Raise your hands you bloggers. Do you agree with everything I say? Nevermind, I know how to count to zero. Read, and DIGEST. I am not trying to develop a loyal followership. On evolution, go for it. Take kids up to the KU museum of paleontology. Have them learn that Kansas was once a sea. I saw, as a 12-year old, a rock strata that had clam fossils. Then I went to a desert and saw fish fossils. Amazing experiences. Does this mean there was intelligent design? No. Does it mean there WASN’T intelligent design. No. I’ve seen a lot of dinosaur fossils. ‘Cause I travel a lot. Do they arbitrarily mean intelligent design occurred? No. Do they arbitrarily mean that stochastic (chance-based) evolution occurred? No. (For those who put my “stochastic” terminology in quotations, GET A RESEARCH UNIVERSITY CATALOGUE. Stochastic phenomena, like Markov Chains. READ a DICTIONARY. Go to the Internet to understand the definition.)
I am not a dogmatist. Apophis is. So are a lot of right wingers. They are people who can’t admit, “I don’t know everything. I don’t know everything that is IMPORTANT.” Here is me: I think I have some answers to questions, but now I have to face these NEW questions that I don’t know how to answer. Time for exploration.” Apophis’s idea of “educating” young people doesn’t reach this point. But it is right for SOME kids, maybe A LOT of kids: learning is EXPLORING.
I have this child whom I sent to a top-10 ranked university. In his first two years, he was on track to earn Phi Beta Kappa. But then he decided to EXPLORE. His GPA dropped off. At his graduation he inroduced me to students from FOUR DIFFERENT CONTINENTS.
“Okay, you’ve made connections with people I couldn’t have conceived of doing at your age.”
The future is not what we oldsters conceive. It is what young people conceive. Is Apophis interested in giving young people something he/she cannot conceive? I am not getting that impression. But it is just my personal intuitive “read”. How about the rest of you?
Where are all you bloggers. Skewer everything I say. Agree with part of what I say, and disargree with part of what I say. Do NOT agree with everything I say, because that’s not my appointed task. I just want to read your ideas, and communicate.
Global geography lesson. Suppose that are an oilman like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. You want to get a handle on oil supplies on behalf of your handlers. Iraq has $10 trillion in oil supplies. But suppose you also want to control oil flow from the Caspian Sea, which means you have to tranport it to a docking area. What other country, after you have pacified Iraq, do you need to “manage”? Look at your globe. (Hint, it is another country whose name begins with an “I”.)
So, if all you can conceive of is oil-flow control, where do you want to start your sabe-rattling? (Hint, Secy of State Condoleeza Rice was on the board of Chevron, so she is an oil-industry lackey too, Who has she talked about recently?)
heartlander……first of all I never “copycatted” any of your ideas. If you expressed something similar in another blog, so the hell what? I am in no way obligated to go back through every posting you have ever made on this blog to see what you have said.
You are still very misinformed and you the hell are YOU labeling ME as a dogmatist? You also THINK you know my philosophy of education. Sadly you do not. I do know yours: take money form the public education system and channel it into schemes that may or may not be educationally sound. You talk a big talk, but that is all it is.
You are anti-union, period. You make it sound as if teachers are only in it for the money. Now that is one funny joke. “Smaller class sizes or more pay”………..that smacks of anti-public education right there. DON’T EDUCATORS HAVE THE RIGHT TO A COMPETITIVE, MIDDLE CLASS LIVING TOO? Asinine comments like: “using union dues to encourage power-lust for small cliques of union leaders” only shows your ignorance of the teachers’ professional organizations.
OMG, you are one pathetic individual.
Apophis’s misunderstandings are reasonable. The public teachers in my family were in my grandparents’ generation. One taught in a one-room rural grammar school for several years, teaching kids whose parents were farmers who had 8th grade educations, then got married and left the profession, another started in a community school in a prosperous community whose parents included a substantial number of high school graduates, and some college graduates and professionals. Another was a high school music teacher.
Like many teachers since then, they pushed their children to go further than they did. Not all of the progeny did this in my family, as some chose to undertake LESS former education than their parents had, but SOME went further.
Apophis represents a later entry to higher education. This is common in Kansas. Wichita’s last mayor was the first in his family to go to college–his parents had 8th grade educations. Ex-gubernatorial candidate Tim Schallenburger’s formal education stopped at community college.
I have the advantage of undertaking years of communication with people who began their teaching careers in the era of Calvin Coolidge. They were THERE when teachers unions first formed. I had conversations not only with my family elders, but with their friends who were teachers, as well.
They were all members of the middle class. Why should I think that teachers should NOT enjoy middle-class livings? This would be an absurd proposition.
As far as my making it “sound” as if “teachers are only in it for the money,” this may be true to a hearer who is tone deaf. What I said was that teachers, through their collective-bargaining representatives, have errantly accepted faustian bargains. A proposal is made: Do you want smaller classes, or higher incomes? If teachers and their representatives were more confident, they would say, “We aren’t accepting an either/or proposition. We need both. We really don’t want to strike, but we’ll do what we have to do here…”
The problem is, teachers have allowed the party on the other side of the table to foist teaching conditions on teachers that compromise teachers’ professional performance. Higher student loads mean less teacher attention to individual students.
Higher student loads have been accompanied by corporation-manufactured tests substituting for teacher-composed tests. With less time not only to compose tests, but to grade tests, teachers have allowed multiple-choice (including two-choice True/False), and one-word fill-in tests to become the norm in most classrooms.
These are not sound tests in the classroom.Why? Because it requires DIFFERENT information processing in students’ brains to recognize and choose correct answers put in front of them, than to organize information in a way that enables them to lucidly exposit knowledge. The former requires a lot less study time. It does not require higher-level mental information organization. It is highly compatible with the practice of “cramming”, which is not a sound study regimen, and is highly detrimental to those students who go on to university study.
More students per teacher = “more efficient” methods of dealing with these students. “More efficient” is antithetical to more-effective methods of instilling knowledge in the next generation.
It has become clarified that Apophis has a limited agenda. Get more money from Topeka. Use unionization to give teachers that money. Transforming the educational system to enable children to succeed in the 21st century economy? Not on his agenda.
Apophis does not understand that schools have no tenable mission if they do not prepare young minds to be productive adults, which in this century includes training young minds to be facile in an environment of rapid change. Regimens that inculcate tolerance of tedium, corresponding to future tedious jobs, are obsolete.
The Industrial Age was an evolutionary step in humankind’s progress. It was not the last step. An educational system exquisitely designed to produce workers for an industrial economy cannot be the last step in education.
What is the last step in education? There is none, unless GWB triggers Armageddon and Jesus comes back. But what if Jesus doesn’t come back? Then the next generation will have to live with the world their elders leave them.
What we have to do is work on educational ideas that enable our children to prosper in a world that is different from that in which we grew up. Experiments are necessary.
I attended a public university that was different from what most people can conceive. I attended lectures delivered by people who THINK DIFFERENT. One guest lecturer talked about his trips to the Amazon, and the Yanomamo tribe. This was a society that could not CONCEIVE of ICE. It could not conceive of OCEANS. It could not conceive of craggy peaks. All of which could be found a mere 500 miles from where they lived–a few hours away by plane flight.
This society, and other indigenous Amazonian societies, will probably not survive. Just like the Native American societies of the Great Plains did not survive. Their genes will, but not their inventions, because the inventions are not useful in a dramatically changed environment. Inventions created to enable survival stopped working. In the case of the Plains Indians, whites realized they could not directly defeat the Indians in warrior-to-warrior battle. So they ruthlessly slaughtered millions of bison, not for meat to feed Euro-Americans, but to deprive the natives of their essential sustenance, and starve them into capitulation. There are Indians today who are doing well in an economy that their ancestors could not have conceived of. Their lives, relative to their ancestors’, represents transformation, not micro-change. Reinvention.
Public schools are not designed to enable their operators to transform them. Stepwise micro-changes are not going to work. Why? Because public education was designed to instill the trait of obedience to authority and tedium tolerance, which the industrialists wanted. There was a social contract that promised obedient workers long-term employment. Workers didn’t like tedium so they wanted shorter working hours. New social contract amendments gave them this, in exchange for higher productivity.
That contract is being shredded. Workers can do everything their employer instructs them to do, and then be terminated, because workers in Third World countries are able and willing to follow the same instructions for minuscule wages and benefits.
Highly honed skills’ utility depends upon the environment’s need for them. Teachers have highly-honed skills. But these skills are becoming less and less useful in a dramatically changing environment. It’s not the teachers’ fault, but they have been indoctrinated in ideas that were useful to the past economy’s operation, not this century’s.
If you could take someone from the early 18th century to an early 20th century urban multi-classroom, multi-grade school, he would say, “I don’t recognize this.” Why not? Because this was a new invention. If you could take someone from the early 20th century to an early 21st century school, he would recognize it immediately. If we could go to the early 22nd century, would we find places of childhood learning that we would immediately recognize? Very possibly not. If 19th century people could invent a revolutionary scheme for educating children, who would pontificate that 21st century people cannot do this as well? Are we less creative and intelligent than our ancestors? Did they have a can-do attitude that we lack? I don’t think so.
Apophis represents a certain thinking. Schools originally designed to serve industrial capitalists’ wants, now serve teachers’ wants. He wants to hold onto this. But the system is still industrial. The original controllers have abandoned it because they no longer need it. Unfortunately, children’s interests, which are society’s future interests, are not being served in industrial schools. I am certainly not going to lead a crusade like, “Tear down this wall, Mr. Brooks!” It is just going to happen over time. It’s evolution.
Drive by East High. It looks like an early 20th century factory. I have seen windowless schools elsewhere with razor-wire-topped cyclone fences bounding their perimeters to keep vandals out. They look like medium-security prisons. I recently drove through Vermont and saw big-windowed, airy multi-grade single-room schools. Plus a private school that from the outside looked like it could have been a 21st century software company headquarters.
Industrialism is migrating to the Third World, and industrial-concept schools will follow this exodus.
Here is an interesting excerpt from an innovative girls school in Vermont:
Getting Girls Involved in Math, Science and Computer ScienceWe traditionally think of math, science and computer science as the areas in which boys, not girls, excel. But current research suggests that’s not really an accurate perception and that girls have as much potential as boys in science and mathematics; it’s just a matter of when and how those subjects are taught.
In a traditional, co-ed educational environment both girls and boys focus on the same topics at the same time, building verbal, writing and language skills alongside math, science and technology skills. Unfortunately, boys’ and girls’ brains do not develop in the same way at the same time, according to ongoing research at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Michigan and scholars, physicians and psychologists around the world.
As it turns out, the areas of the brain responsible for analytical skills necessary for math and science develop faster in boys than girls, while the brain areas responsible for things like language, color and sensory perception develop more quickly in girls. As a result, elementary and middle school girls often struggle with math and science because they are asked to acquire skills and study material for which their brains are not ready, the study suggests. Likewise, boys often struggle with reading, English and social sciences for the same reason.
What’s more, research by Deborah Stipek, dean of education at Stanford University, suggests that by the age of 12 children have formed solid ideas about the subjects that they like and dislike – and those perceptions are extremely hard to change. Placed in context, that means girls forced to tackle challenging math, science and technology work before their brains are developmentally ready are not likely to perform as well as boys – and subsequently more likely to decide that they “don’t like” math or science before they’ve had a fair chance to explore their potential in those areas.
The ultimate “solution” to all this is still up for debate, but some educational specialists and researchers suggest changing school curriculums to better accommodate the different rates of biological development in girls and boys, while other suggest additional tutoring or work in girls’ or boys’ respective “challenge areas” – especially given the fact that the skills and abilities of both sexes do eventually equalize in all areas.
One more immediate option for parents who are anxious to give their daughter the best chance at realizing her full potential in all subject areas, including math, science and computer science, is to enroll her in a single-sex school. While single sex education was once considered a traditional and not always effective approach to schooling, it’s now viewed as an increasingly effective means of providing girls with an education that isn’t just rich in resources: it’s also developmentally appropriate.
Unlike co-ed schools, which are forced to balance the needs of both boys and girls, all-girl schools can focus exclusively on providing classroom environments, curriculum and teaching techniques specifically tailored to girls’ biological and emotional developmental patterns, helping them realize their potential as scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists (to name but a few) in the process.
Apophis may not be ready for this, but change starts in unexpected places.
Suppose that USD 259 used some of its new money to send 50 of our best teachers to “new idea” schools, both public and private, to learn what is going on in education in the outside world. Who would reject this proposal, if they want Wichita children to learn things that will prepare them for adulthood in the 21st century?
Apophis denies “copycatting” my ideas. This just means that without his realizing it, we have some ideas in common, which fact may mortify him, but he proved it to be true. I just didn’t like the fact that he implied that I rejected the very ideas I proposed and endorsed. I resented someone’s “morphing” me on paper into the OPPOSITE of what I was. Apparently he did this unintentionally, so I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.
He has, alas, totally mischaracterized me as a “Right Wing Wacko” AFTER reading many of my posts. This means that he is unable to absorb information in full. He has limited absorption capacities, constrained by strong biases.
Apophis has tunnel-vision on public education. “Public education” is defined in his mind as what exists. But public education is different. It is defined as as a system or systems that are funded chiefly, but not necessarily entirely, by tax revenues, established by a government entity, and regulated by such government entity. The government entity is, in turn, ultimately answerable to the public who does not receive tax money, but pays tax money, to make public education systems possible.
We can agree that the public is often negligent, but it can be awakened, for instance when its children who graduate from high school have to take minimum-wage jobs and live at home for extended periods of young adulthood because they cannot afford to support themselves, or they go to university and have to retake algebra, at their parents’ expense, AFTER receiving “B’s” in algebra from their high school teachers, or they go to KU and come home with their tails between their legs because they could not maintain a “C” average, despite having a “B” average in a putative college-track regimen in high school.
Some would like to think that a mass, compulsory publicly-financed education system invented in Germany in the 1830’s and transplanted here in the 1870’s, is a PERMANENT institution. Let’s do the math: 2006 – 1830 = 170. That’s two longish human lifetimes. 2006 – 1870 = 136. That’s two shortish human lifetimes. Does this suggest PERMANCE? I don’t think so.
Teacher unionization, by which I mean the formation of groups in which workers pay monthly monetary dues, and those who do not are harangued to do so, in which elected representatives take employment-contract demands to managers and say, “These things are what the teachers want,” is only 80 years old–one human lifetime. Does this suggest permanence? Not really.
Some people think that unions are inherently evil per se. I disagree. They serve utilitarian purposes in industrial and industrial-modeled organizations. Teachers originally unionized in the 1920’s as teaching began evolving from a short-term job for teenage girls who were given free or heavily-subsidized room and board in their parents’ homes or in the homes of affluent community leaders, into a long-term adult vocation in which income was used to support teachers’ families.
Does this imply that teaching per se implies the essentialness of unionization? No. Private school teachers are not unionized. In many small public schools teachers are not unionized. College and university professors are teachers. They are not unionized. We see individual teachers negotiate their own contracts in diverse circumstances. We see promotion based on ability and work-output. We see shortage-area staffing addressed by higher salaries than are paid to glut-area workers.
We see Filipina (women) teachers being imported because seniority-fixed salary scales here are a lot higher than in the Phillipines. We could get Americans to teach math, and science, but only by paying them non-seniority-fixed salaries, which proposition the teachers unions reject.
The union leaders SAY they only want EQUALITY, but in truth, the Filipina teachers are “second class citizens” on two counts: they have no seniority, and they are from the Third World.
Teachers are prejudiced. This is why substitute teachers are paid puny per diem wages that aren’t even close to the pro rata salaries and benefits of full-time teachers. This demeans the subs, and they know it, so they don’t work before class to study the lesson plans and teach well. They are not being paid to fill in “seamlessly”. They are paid “babysitting” wages. So that’s what they do.The full-time-teacher per diem income average is over $200. Ask Winston Brooks if this is paid to subs. Ask him if subs are paid HALF this.
Under unionization, teachers take “sick days” when they aren’t really sick. They take in-service days during school hours, which teachers didn’t do in my childhood days. So kids get “babysat”. These things do not represent a deep-seated commitment to children’s learning. Actually, they represent trashing kids.
Apophis has said ZERO about children’s learning. I have said a lot about it. We have different priorities.
Sorry 2006 – 1836 = 170
You have typed a lot heartlander but have said nothing constructive. As usual, you go on your usual diatribe degrading teachers who are dedicated to their profession. All you DO is blame, blame, blame. I have no need to type out MY ideas for strengthening public education for I am actually in the trenches, DOING SOMETHING about it.
If you have a problem with the way Winston Brooks And the local BOE run the Wichita Public Schools, deal with them. Do not turn the innovative and dedicated teachers into your bogeyman. The same is true for the various educators’ professional organizations, this just shows your ignorance.
I also find your generalizations about teachers disgraceful. To intimate that ALL teachers take “sick days” when they are not “sick” is just asinine. If you actually knew your head from your ass, you would know this is no where near the truth. I am Sure there are some teachers who do this, but in case you had not figured it out, the majority of teachers are women. A great many of these women have children. Their children get sick. Who is to care for these children while they are sick other than their parents? I guess you should get a law passed making it illegal for the children of teachers from getting sick form August-May. “In-Service” days are also not a favorite among teachers. Ask any teacher what they think about these days. Most would rather be with their students than sit through the usually bogus crap they are forced to listen to on these days.
heartlander………..here’s the bottom line: you are entitled to your opinion, this is the USA. It would be in YOUR best interest, so you don;t look like a RW whack-job, to actually have a clue what you are actually talking about when you make assertions about public education particular to Wichita. The educational process costs money. Some of that money needs to go into innovative (data supported, not your anecdotal nonsense) programs, facilities and technology. What you and your type overlook is that the biggest cost for public education is the cost of people. These people include teachers, paraprofessionals and administrators. To recruit the best and brightest, a competitive salary and fringe package must be available to bring the the best and brightest into the profession. Why would a college graduate with a degree in say, chemistry, be willing to work at a teacher starting at 34K when they can earn upwards of 80K in the private sector. That is just one example. Babbling on about the district being top heavy in administration is a non-stater as well. USD259 has 48,000+ students, a certain amount of administration is necessary. State studies has shown that the district isn’t as top heavy as many of its critics think it is. You really know nothing about the current state of affairs about the importation of teachers from the Philippines either. That recruitment venture was not made to bring in teachers that would work for less, but to fill in for the nationwide shortage of Math and Science teachers. The “union” has in no way opposed this move. The fact is that if these teachers work for USD 259, they will work under the Negotiated Agreement between the District and the Teachers. Oh, FYI, the District and Teachers are negotiating in a non-adversarial process known as “Interest Based Bargaining” currently. I suppose you have something cynical to type about this as well.
heartlander……………it is truly pathetic how narrow-minded you are. You are an egotistical person who shows obvious disdain towards public education and unions. You think your way is the only way, I think that pretty much makes YOU dogmatic. You trash me solely because I refuse to play the game YOUR way. I do pity you.
Ap, I didn’t SAY the teachers union opposed the importation of Filipinas. I SAID this scheme suits the union fine, because the new teachers will be happy to receive union scale salaries, which is a lot of money in their eyes, relative to teacher salaries in the Phillipines.
Whereas, to recruit Americans to solve the shortage of math and science teachers, schools would have to go to differential salary scales, which proposition the union rejects.
To wit, in the eyes of unionists, the proposition of having to compete within the American market for math and science talent, by paying that talent its American-market value would be terrible. A strange perspective.
So, schools are instead doing something not dissimilar from agribusinesses: importing CHEAP FOREIGN LABOR to do “jobs that Americans won’t do”, which is to say do jobs for lower pay than Americans will accept.
You may feel that what social studies and language arts teachers teach is every bit as valuable as what math and science teachers teach, so salaries must be equal.
But that’s not what society says. I have a friend who majored in psych. He works in a field in which personal interactions are essential. But he makes no bones about the fact that his engineering roommate was offered a $50,000 job right out of college, while the best starting job he himself could find paid $30,000. Math and science skills have exceptional valuation in our society. This is because our economy is fundamentally based on science and technology.
It isn’t just computers or high-tech bioengineered drugs. How do you get to work? How would you transform the metal ores into metals that are in your car’s body, engine, transmission, wheels and electronic systems? How would you transform petroleum into three fuels and several lubricants? How would you transform petroleum into the carpet at your feet? How do you make the plastic on your wall’s light switch? How are copper ingots made into wires? What is the latex chemical formula in the paint on your walls? How is brown wood transformed into white paper? How is this new gel-ink for pens made? How does an ATM machine work? How is it possible to send fresh produce from California and Florida to Kansas without spoilage? How is it possible to keep bread mold-free for two weeks after you buy it? How does a sewage system work, so that we don’t have to use outhouses? How is tapwater kept germ-free?
The Filipina teachers are college educated professionals, not uneducated grape pickers, but the fundamental principle for their importation is precisely the same–they are willing to work for salaries, insisted upon by social studies and language arts teachers, that American mathematicians and scientists reject because their time and expertise is WORTH A LOT MORE THAN THAT, according to the competitive open market.
There is one critical difference in the importation of teachers versus manual labor: In the private-sector importations, business OWNERS want the cheap labor. In the schools’ case, the PUBLIC EMPLOYEES do. No one has asked the owners of public schools, i.e. taxpayers, “Do you support paying math and science teachers higher salaries than social studies and language arts teachers, in order to get a fully qualified teacher into every science and math class?” If this question were posed, the majority of Americans would say, “Yes of course.”
The problem of public schools’ failing to hire qualified math and science teachers has been recognized for the past two decades, following the Second International Mathematics and Science Study (a test given to students in several dozen countries) in which American students did poorly. Not only that, they thought they were very skilled in math and science, while students in other countries who posted higher scores, gave themselves lower self-evaluations. Take-home lesson, American students had been led to believe they were good in math and science by their teachers (e.g. grade inflation), but were not.
This is a result of petty jealousy and immature conniving on the part of the social studies/language arts clique that doesn’t think math and science instruction are important. They don’t have to design and ensure the working properties of everyday products I named above. They just casually use these products without a moment’s consideration of the specialized thinking that created them.
Because you have not taken upper-division math and science courses, as well as upper-division social science and humanities courses, which I did, because I found them interesting, you do not understand that it is far easier to earn a social science or humanities degree than a math or science (or engineering) degree, with equivalent course grades being earned. Or maybe you are in denial.
The difference in difficulty is largely due to the fact that math, which is central to science, has its OWN UNIQUE LANGUAGE. This language is not taught properly in most high schools, so students who want to major in math, science or engineering have to learn it in 4 short years in college.
This requires intensive, prolonged study. You cannot learn college-level math or science by pre-exam cramming. This intensive study is worth a premium, which the open market willingly pays, a quite reasonable proposition that social studies and language arts teachers defiantly do not accept in public schools.
When schools say, “We really try to get qualified math and science teachers, but we just can’t find them,” that’s dishonest. They’re readily available. Consider, when a district and union each need legal counsel, do they say, “We need a good lawyer, but we can’t find one’?
Well, if they shopped for lawyers and said, “We’re willing to pay $50/hr, and no more,” OF COURSE they wouldn’t be able to find a qualified lawyer willing to work FOR THAT DEEP-DISCOUNT FEE.
So the educators are willing to pay open-market fees to American-educated lawyers who SERVE THE EDUCATORS. But not for American-educated math and science TEACHERS who would SERVE CHILDREN and society’s interests. Do you see the stark incongruity here in educators’ behavior?
So as a result, we are now “insourcing” teaching labor from the Third World to satisfy the prejudices and envy-resentment of the American educators(against potential American math and science teachers who would merit higher salaries). This immaturity-driven ANTI-PROFESSIONAL “game” is happening in PUBLIC SCHOOLS. AT TAXPAYER’S COST.
How good a teaching job will the new teachers do? First, we surmise that they must be certifiable, because if they were not, then hiring them wouldn’t solve anything, because we already have enough unqualified teachers in math and science classrooms. But will these new, qualified teachers be able to teach math and science properly within a system that has long been designed to teach math and science mediocrely to poorly?
We’ll see if these neophytes are empowered by their elders to fundamentally transform the system. Call me skeptical, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.
I don’t hate teachers, Apophis. I do reject a system that doesn’t work. I reject institutional stupidity. When my wife and I were young and undertaking medical training, we lived on resident stipends that paid us each about $25,000 in today’s dollars. We had to make monthly student loan payments. We also had two young children, one of whom needed full-time daycare. We really didn’t need the expense of private school tuition. But we bit the bullet and paid it. We lived in a small apartment and drove used subcompact cars.
Why did we do this? We had a very bright first grader who was arbitrarily excluded from a public gifted class because he had not attended kindergarten at the public school. (This school has won at least one U.S. Department of Education “Blue Ribbon” award.) The class size was set at 22 students, all seats were filled, and the principal would not make room for a 23rd student, even though he would have been one of the very brightest kids in the class. (He started reading at 4.)
So he was placed in a regular classroom, where he was given assignments, that were for him remedial.
I am sorry if you believe otherwise, but this was institutional stupidity. It is NOT the way to educate inquisitive, imaginative, bright young minds properly, when you shoehorn them into a bureaucratic blueprint that doesn’t care if it is trashing talent.
I later gave up a lucrative medical practice for an extended period to experimentally do home-education. There were no schools, either public or private, in our community that taught math and science well. Doing home-education posed risks, and sacrifices.
Why home-education? Here is something you are not aware of: the boundaries of science and technology are expanding at an incredible pace. To prepare students who are potentially capable of understanding and participating in this amazing phenomenon means that you must give them specialized math and science education EARLY.
Sending them to ordinary schools, public OR PRIVATE, and thinking they can learn what they need to become expert in math and science when they get to college is misinformed. It’s too late. They need a solid preexistent knowledge foundation. They need to be fluent in the language of mathematics when they arrive at college. They need to have trained visuo-spatial processing skills. They need to know how to exposit mathematical and scientific arguments. They need the study stamina to read mathematics and science texts, and absorb the subject matter, in 3-4 hour sittings.
Are there kids who learn mathematics and science well in regular schools? Yes, but not many. This is why we must import mathematicians, computer scientists, physical scientists, doctors and engineers. Moreover, the kids who do well have math-and-science-knowledgeable parents at home, and they are kids with extraordinary energy who do extra assignments that their parents give them.
In analogy, if you wanted to train a musician or a long-distance runner, you wouldn’t give that person 50-minute daily lessons and four hours of weekly after-school practice time as a youngster, and then expect that young person to be able to qualify for a university orchestra or track team. Talent development takes TIME. Kids could have that time, if it were not taken from them as it is by conventional schools, public AND PRIVATE.
My second son just graduated from cum laude from Dartmouth. He tutored minority students, in a college that fervently wanted these disadvantaged students to succeed.
Next month he’s going to Ethiopia to teach children of AIDS victims. He’s leaning toward studying architecture, which would be a great career fit for his artistic, mathematics and interpersonal skills. Architecture isn’t just drawing and calculating, it requires extensive communication with colleagues, clients and contractors, and often developers as well. My son has friends on four continents. He does things I couldn’t have imagined doing at his age.
Now, you can say that I haven’t done anything, if you wish to spout ignorance, but what young adults do strongly reflects what their parents have done for them.
For example, when my son took a summer calculus course at the University of Chicago at age 17, a 28-year old African-American reentry/premed student asked if he could tutor her. This was because he was an active discussant in class, and asked a lot of questions that clarified things for her. He asked me about the proposition. I said, “If it doesn’t interfere with your own studies, go for it.” Medicine is a helping profession. That’s what our family’s ethos is. The tutee got a “B”, which was enough to satisfy her premed requirement.
Seemingly small things, like home-schooling a child in a highly academically challenging manner, generates larger “cascade” effects, such as my son’s helping several other people succeed academically in America, and serving poor people in Africa. He’s not getting paid for this. His “compensation” will be an amazing experience, in which he will learn much and make new friends, that he will treasure for the rest of his life.
I have another son who’s going to college next year. I would have loved to see him go to the University of Washington, an awesome public research university, but he says he isn’t ready for a “big” school. So he had to choose between Washington U in St. Louis and Dartmouth, and his older brother talked him into the latter.
You may not think it is important to prepare kids for college interviews, and shape their extracurriculars for high-level university admission–and success, which is to say, giving them the tools to major in any fieldthat interests them, and not be dissuaded because some fields are too hard as a result of insufficient high school preparation. I DO think these things are important. I saw too many pre-med-hopeful friends get weeded out, and abandoning their dreams to become doctors. I almost didn’t make it either, but learned to study really hard and long.
So, I made sure that my kids would be able to tackle anything professors could throw at them.
I’ve also tutored other people’s children. I’ll bet you could get retired aviation engineers and WSU faculty to teach some great math and science courses. It’s a tragedy to waste these potential resources. So why not recruit them? To not do so represents institutional stupidity.
BTW I don’t think I am necessarily innately smarter than you are. But I do know that I’ve worked much harder than you ever will. You should try putting in a 14 hour day, then getting awakened at 1 AM to take care of a life-threatening injury, finish up at 4 AM and then get up at 7 AM to start another day of work. Try doing it hundreds of times. Try working 36 hours straight, with no days off, twice a week for four years of medical training. Something tells me you wouldn’t make it.
i.e. 36 hours-10 hours-10 hours-36 hours-10 hours-10 hours…with one to two weekend days a month off.
I’m not impressed with your claims heartlander. You know nothing of me, little less if I’m willing to put in 14 hour days. You know, many of the more “nasty” pieces of diatribe out of your mouth (fingers) is reminiscent of Ann Coulter’s venomous crap. BTW, both of my maternal grandparents were college grads.+. My parents both attended two years of college. All four children in my family are college graduates with two of us holding advanced degrees, so blow your assertions out of your ass heartlander. The changes you propose for public education aren’t going to happen because you and your type want them. Authentic changes will come from a paradigm shift in funding and from within the profession itself.
Ap, that was 14 hour morning-to-evening days FOLLOWED GETTING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT TO WORK, FOLLOWED BY 2 hours of sleep FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER morning-to-evening workday.
If your advanced degree is an M.Ed. that represents less academic knowledge than a KU cum laude CLAS bachelor’s recipient has.
You started out way behind the curve, as a confused high school student. That’s why you didn’t earn a traditional university degree.
You also work with adolescents all day, so you lack adult-adult communication skills. I learned to communicate with people of ages ranging from 2 to 90, of many ethnicities and cultures, levels of education ranging from high school dropouts to Ph.D.’s, and occupations ranging from tugboat drivers to FBI agents, as part of my professional life.
You haven’t had these experiences. You said I hadn’t made any constructive comments. I said secondary teachers need to earn 6-year dual bachelor’s degrees, in their academic field, and in education. If you want, substitute an academic field bachelor’s and an M.A.T.
Katie Haycock, a former teacher, and leader of the Education Trust, has said that when most teachers were asked in the ’60’s , “What percentage of students do you think are college material?” The answer was, “about 30%”. When the same question was asked in the late ’90’s the answer was “about 30%”.
You implied that I was anti-science education. Wrong. I had to learn and practice advanced science. Otherwise I would have injured and killed my patients. Moreover, I couldn’t have published research in the scientific literature if I didn’t understand science.
Now, when you can figure out how to make that answer “50%” or “60%”, then come back with some constructive suggestions. Otherwise you’re obsolete, but unfortunately you are taking kids down with you in your obsoleteness–you are forcing them to be obsolete.
It is clear that you suffer from linear thinking. That’s not linear-logical thinking. But it’s unidirectional. You obviously don’t know anything about science, because you don’t say anything that a scientifically-knowledgeable person would, unlike, say Ben Huie, who has many times.
You have a large knowledge base. But your knowledge base is becoming increasingly useless, just as the best warrior minds of the Persian army could not overcome the invasion of Alexander because what they knew, which had served them well for centuries, did not work against innovative fighting strategies and tactics they had never encountered. Their thinking was too rigid, fixated on old-style battlefield rules, which they were masters of. Uselessly.
Here is an example: do you let students keep their textbooks at the end of the year, or do you collect them. Good textbooks should serve as references for students to peruse to refresh their memories.
Wichita has been given many opportunities to revamp its education system. It has squandered them. Time is running out, and now change must proceed much more rapidly than if educators had made progressive changes earlier. For example, it was apparent to a few people in the 1970’s that personal computers would someday become household items and be highly useful in education. It was apparent to many people in the 1980’s that this was true. By that time small businesses were snapping them up. Educators here didn’t figure this out until the 1990’s and even then most teachers were technophobes. Every student today should have a personal computer, and Internet access at home. The public should pay for it.
Why? For many reasons. One in particular is that student-edition textbooks omit vital information contained in teacher-edition textbooks. That shaves textbook costs. But it prevents effective after-school study. So provide the information in computer form. That’s cheap. Teachers’ lectures can be recorded, and replayed by students to refresh themselves. BTW, if you want to propose these as your own ideas to other teachers and administrators, go for it. I didn’t invent them, but I recognize them to be outstanding ideas.
You can’t build a successful education system if you are far behind the curve. The future, i.e. the globalizing economy, has to be addressed by public schools, if they want to exist in the future.How many in-services or workshops have you taken on economic globalization? What have you read, and how are you applying it in your classroom? What courses are being taught to ed students on globalization, and its implications for American public education?
What ed school courses, inservices and workshops are being offered on the rapidly expanding frontiers of human knowledge, and measures in schools to address them?
These things may overwhelm you, but they are happening, and have to be dealt with.
PS. Do you know the etymology of the word “professional”? The word has been vulgarized to mean somebody who makes money in a particular field of endeavor. It originally meant “one who takes an oath”, or “one who makes a profession”, i.e. an oath. I took an oath at graduation. Did you?
The vast majority of doctors (doctor means “teacher” in Latin) are American Board of Medical Specialties certified. Are you National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certified? If not, why not? Oklahoma has ca. 30% more teachers than Kansas. But it has ca. 300% more NBPTS-certified teachers. That’s a problem for Kansas.
Earning NBPTS certification requires a lot of hard work, doesn’t it? If you exclude special-needs certification, Hays had as many NBPTS-certified teachers as Wichita three years ago. OKC District, the same size as Wichita, had four times as many as Wichita.
If you say, “Well Oklahoma provides greater financial incentives to encourage board certification than Kansas, and our teachers don’t get a sufficient financial reward to make it worthwhile,” that’s an ANTI-PROFESSIONAL attitude. But if money is what it takes to convince teachers to take up the hard work required to get board certified, how about lobbying Topeka and USD 259 administration to PAY the money?
Do you have a plan to get 50% of Wichita teachers under the age of 45 board certified by 2015, and 100% of teachers of all ages certified by 2025? If not, why not?
If you are afraid that too many would be feared to fail, that’s not good news for children, is it? Go to North Carolina and find out how they have been able to get more than 7000 teachers board certified, versus Kansas’s less than 200. This isn’t rocket science. If you are as smart as you want readers here to think you are, this is eminently doable.
More insults from Apophis. What a persuasive argument!
Thanks Steve. I had a life-changing public fourth grade teacher, inspirational science teachers in seventh and eigth grades, memorable (positive) second and third grade teachers, and a great seventh grade history teacher. I also earned my bachelor’s and medical degrees in public universities. I am NOT ANTI-PUBLIC EDUCATION.
I am ANTI -INDUSTRIAL-FACTORY-EMULATING PUBLIC EDUCATION because it was extremely well designed for the Industrial Age, but is now obsolete. I wish young men with high school diplomas could go into the military, come back and get $25/hour jobs (that’s what they got in the 1950’s at the aircraft plants, in today’s dollars) and buy new homes in their 20’s–and their wives didn’t even have to work, but could, if the family wanted “extras”. I’m not sexist, but what I mean is, I’d love to return to an era in which homeownership could be achieved by even one parent working, with a high school education.
But this isn’t going to happen. After WWII, Europe and Japan’s industrial base was decimated, not just factories, but their working-age male populaces. We won the war and commanded the world’s natural resources, making them cheap for industries to obtain. Our returning vets were battle-hardened. They forced the capitalists to give them a working-partnership relationship. Otherwise all hell could break loose. These crucial factors no longer exist. So a return to blue-collar middle-classdom is dead. I wish this were not so, but it is.
Most average Americans were not informed that in the wake of the Bretton Woods meeting, the World Bank was specifically created to foster industrial capacity development in the Third World. In the 1950’s, economists made a long term forecast that industrial jobs in America would diminish greatly in the last half of the 20th century. These things have come to pass.
Today’s children are not going to have lifetime job security. After WWII, employers and employees had a social contract. That’s been dissolved. So kids must undertake a fundamentally different kind of education than their parents and grandparents. I think that most can do this.
We need to train leadership that realizes, “I was given things by my community to enable me to succeed. I have an obligation to continue this process.”
I don’t believe in education “reform”, I believe in education reinvention. Mass public education was a novel invention. We can create a new education invention. We must do so, unless we want under-educated Americans to live at Third World levels, which wouldn’t bother many capitalists who would be happy living behind high walls, riding in chauffer-driven limos with bulletproof windows, and taking helicopters to work to protect themselves.
If we want to preserve a functioning middle class, which is not to say maintain its past employment venues, but a large majority of citizens that has a decent standard of living, and believes that America works for its benefit, education is a key matter. If we want to honor the elderly, and provide for their needs, American working-age people will have to earn sufficient incomes to support the retired generation. If we want a true democracy, we need to inspire children to believe in it, which does not occur when authoritarianism is drummed into their heads every day.
What makes an effective teacher? Not someone who thinks he has seen everything and knows exactly what his or her students need to learn.
What makes an effective teacher is someone who can look inside himself or herself, and say,
I know some things that people of past generations didn’t, I don’t know some things that they did know. You, my students, are going to learn things I cannot conceive of. Your knowledge will go beyond mine. But you will not know some things that I learned, either. Some things have greater lasting value than others. Some things are products of specific periods in history, and can be forgotten without ill effects.
The world is changing fast. You’re going to have to figure things out as individuals, and as members of humanity. I can give you some advisement, and I hope it is good, but you’ll confront things that I cannot predict or even understand. I wish I could give you all the answers you will ever need, but I can’t. I don’t even have all the answers that I need. Nobody does.
Always ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question, if you want to learn something.
There is no such thing as fixed knowledge in any field. When I went to med school, a wise Australian professor told us on our first day of class, “Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong. Unfortunately, we don’t know which half that is.” What he meant was that much of our current belief will be proved wrong in the future. So be skeptical, and keep an open mind. Evaluate evidence for yourselves. Use current knowledge if it works. If something more effective comes along, be willing to discard what you learned in the past.
In mathematics and science, you will read, and say, “I don’t get this.” Reread the text, and reread it again. You will have epiphanies: “Oh, NOW I get it.” This is part of the learning process.
When you write an essay, I will suggest corrections and have you rewrite it. This doesn’t mean you failed the first time. All writers have to rewrite. Over time, you will learn to read your first drafts, find things you want to change and rewrite your essays on your own.
Don’t be afraid to challenge me. I know a lot. But there is a lot more that I DON’T know than I know. I make mistakes. If you can’t follow what I am presenting, maybe I am not doing my presentation as well as I should. Or maybe I’ve made a mistake in a calculation, which is leading to confusion. Correct me if you think I have made a mistake. You may be right. If you are wrong, that’s fine. I am wrong sometimes too.
If you make a discovery, share it.
If you ask a question that I cannot answer, I’ll try to guide you to a source to find it. If I can’t do this, I’ll advise you to look on your own. Then report back what you have found.
Every good teacher LOVES being TAUGHT by his or her students.
One of the things I loved about home-education was NEGOTIATION. Last year my son was applying to college. I wanted him to study linear algebra. We were used to a morning math routine. He said, “Dad, I need to work on my college essays.” So, I said, “Okay, so figure out when you can study math.” And he did.
He got into the University of Colorado in November, the University of Washington in December, Washington University St. Louis in late March, and Dartmouth on April 1st. He got wait-listed at Harvey Mudd. He was rejected by Harvard, MIT, Duke, Princeton and Brown, but really enjoyed his interviews.
So, I’m proud of him, because he knew how to navigate, including devising his ownsenior year schedule, when his school peers were being subjected to OTHER PEOPLE’s imposed schedules. And he did very well in this, by any reasonable measure.
What would be the point of responding to your endless attacks on public education heartlander? You have your mind made up that all current teachers are worthless. You think you know EVERYTHING about me, you do not.1. I do not have a M.Ed., rather a MS.
2. Katie Haycock is on the Board of the RNC and therefore has no credibility.
3. I doubt if you actually have an MD as you claim and if you have published, prove it.
4. I doubt if too many people care of an old definition of “professional”. I do not.
5. There is a plan to offer incentives for teachers to become National Board Certified as I am.
6. I’d love to have all my students keep their textbooks every year, but administration pretty much frowns on that.
7. You are in no position to determine what an “effective” teacher is.
8. Do not presume that today’s educators are ignorant of our evolving global economy and the changes necessary to prepare our students to be competitive.
9. I do not need you to “educate” me about things you perceive I need to be educated about.
10. Don’t you have anything else to do? You sure seem to expend an enormous amount of energy trying to best me.
Give it your best shot heartlander.
What would be the point of responding to your endless attacks on public education heartlander? You have your mind made up that all current teachers are worthless. You think you know EVERYTHING about me, you do not.1. I do not have a M.Ed., rather a MS.
2. Katie Haycock is on the Board of the RNC and therefore has no credibility.
3. I doubt if you actually have an MD as you claim and if you have published, prove it.
4. I doubt if too many people care of an old definition of “professional”. I do not.
5. There is a plan to offer incentives for teachers to become National Board Certified as I am.
6. I’d love to have all my students keep their textbooks every year, but administration pretty much frowns on that.
7. You are in no position to determine what an “effective” teacher is.
8. Do not presume that today’s educators are ignorant of our evolving global economy and the changes necessary to prepare our students to be competitive.
9. I do not need you to “educate” me about things you perceive I need to be educated about.
10. Don’t you have anything else to do? You sure seem to expend an enormous amount of energy trying to best me.
Give it your best shot heartlander.
Original Steve, if I want any crap out of you…………………………………………………..
Let’s consider something noteworthy about school choice: public educators’ response to it.
They see it as a threat. They have consistently made the argument that given vouchers or charters, these would only be “fair” IF voucher-receiving schools and charters ACCEPT ANY AND ALL STUDENTS, as “public” schools must do.
The anti-voucher, anti-charter partisans have stated that absent this “fair” requirement, the voucher and charter schools would take away the “public” schools’ well-behaving, studious and otherwise desirable children and teenagers.
If this theory is true, it means that the very students that the “public” schools covet,WANT TO FLEE, if given a FREE CHOICE.
I am not being polemic here, I am being analytical. The public educators have let the cat out of the bag in specifying their primary objections to free educational choice.
The one thing they have not done, or encouraged the public to do is ask the $64 question, WHY would the students that the public educators covet, flee the public schools if given a choice?
Let’s dissect this. Suppose, hypothetically that ALL students want to leave. This would demonstrates a broad revulsion of public schools by students. Hence, we as a society better start talking with our young, listening to them and finding out why public schools revulse them. We fail to do so to their, and our society’s injury.
Now, suppose that charters and vouchers were to cherry pick the “good” students and send the undesirables back to the publics, which is what public educators have expressed fear of. Would this make it understandable why the public educators loath free-choice? Yes. They don’t want to be saddled with the hard-to-teach students exclusively.
But we still have to understand WHY the good students want to leave, and then stay in the free-choice schools as the public educators have told us (unwittingly) the students want to do. There is a powerful message here. It must not be ignored.
Although the public educators would directly deny that public schools do a poor job of educating good students, they’ve proven through their own statements that they recognize the good students view them to be doing a lousy job. Aha! These are vital witnesses.
So what is the public educators’ response? Is it, “These kids are dumb. They may be our brightest students, but they don’t have critical-reasoning skills. They can’t make rational judgments. They are incapable of making choices for themselves, as to where to attend school. Only we public educators have the wisdom and knowledge to make these choices for them. We want their head-count money from the state coffers.”?
We don’t know what the response is. We only know that the public educators have told us they harbor a strong belief that their good students want out of public education, and will flee IF GIVEN A FREE CHOICE. Maybe not all of them, but such a huge percentage that it will drastically alter the student-body makeup to overwhelmingly consist of hard-to-teach students.
The public educators’ theory deserves public attention. If it is correct–and we have no reason to believe that it isn’t–then parents and kids should confer not just individually, but in large-attendance conferences to let kids explain why they would leave public schools, if given a free choice, let adults listen to these young voices, and then collectively devise courses of action.
It is not the public educators’ prerogative to say, “You’re our slaves. You can’t leave, taking taxpayer money, even if the taxpayers are willing to pay for you to be educated elsewhere. It isn’t taxpayers’ choice to decide how to spend their own money. We public educators are authorized to use taxpayers’ money as WE see fit.”
This is mentally deranged thinking. No wonder good students want out.
Apophis would likely say, “See you’re showing your true colors. You want to destroy public education.” His limited litany is a broken record.
The truth is, I am only forwarding what students think. Unlike many teachers I talk to students about how THEY feel about school.
We should also consider the public educators’ prediction of good-student flight in another light. If they are aware that their good students don’t like being in public schools, which is to say in environments they would like to escape, why haven’t educators changed this environment?
Apophis says public education professionals will lead change. We can be reasonably certain that they won’t do this because they haven’t, despite being given decades of opportunity to do so. Moreover, most K-12 teachers are in the last third of their careers, and senior educators hold leadership positions. Change is never lead by middle-aged bureaucratic-institution fixtures who are inured to and invested in the old status quo.
What students do you talk to heartlander? I may sound like a broken record, but I do speak the truth. You and your kind DO want to gut public education. Your analysis that all of the “good” students want to or are now fleeing public schools is ludicrous. Again, you have to quantitative data to prove that assertion. You also have no quantitative data to support your assertions that teachers are not dedicated or incapable of change.Speaking of sounding like a broken record heartlander…………One thing you need to do in your mind is to separate actual classroom teachers who actually have contact with children from the group of Administrators and non-classroom (support) teachers. You act as if the teachers have much to say about the direction a district takes in reform. It is true that these people were once probably teachers, but they are know so far removed from the reality of the classroom that they can hardly be lumped into the same category as real teachers. Believe it or not there are a great percentage teachers out there who are trying to affect real change. Since you have spent little or no time in a real classroom, explaining these changes wouldn’t make sense to you. More likely, you would use any examples as a basis to belittle my personally and the profession in general (yes, PROFESSION……even if we didn’t take an oath).
Teachers are against vouchers and charter schools because they just aren’t what they are cracked up to be. Hard data shows no improvement in student learning at Charter Schools and the use of public tax dollars to fund religious schools borders on unconstitutional. You also know as well as I do that private schools will NEVER take students with behavioral problems or those with special needs (SPED). Stop layering blame on public education and look at reality, PUBLIC EDUCATION IS HERE TO STAY.
Apophis,
The point teachers have made is that they fear “good” students will flee public schools if someone else subsidizes free-choice education. You have to figure out the reason for this fear. We could speculate that it is unfounded hysteria, or a contrived false argument, but I have a feeling that the teachers are being honest on this matter: the loss of a few good students would be trivial, but the loss of a large number would inflict crisis in public schools, and the latter is believed by most teachers to be a likely outcome.
I have given you numerous suggestions to get public education moving. Go to 2-hour math classes for all students, using American and Filipina teachers. It’s worked in Lexington Magnet to generate superb math performance. Math mastery can carry over to improve student performance in other subjects.
Support differential pay for NBPTS-certified teachers, and encourage ALL teachers to try to get board certified, in staged progression. The more teachers you certify, demonstrating a strong commitment to professionalism, the more credibility you will gain.
Who says teachers “fear” any of this? That is just propaganda put out by you people who would take public tax dollars and give it to religious schools.
Some schools have gone to a type of schedule that gives a “double-block” for Math. There are pretty conclusive results that the attention span of adolescents doesn’t stay focused over that long a period of time. This not the “Lexington Magnet” here in Wichita. Before trying to impose a system on Wichita students, let’s look at a real comparison of the student demographics. and is there significant data to prove your point.
I guess the same thing can be said about your idea of a pay differential for National Board Certification. Right now, there is a stipend for those of us that have passed this process. I will not support anything else until conclusive, significant data shows that these teachers are truly superior. And…………I don’t think we (teachers) have any obligation whatsoever to achieve what YOU think is any level of “professionalism” Your opinion is moot. Our profession is regulated by the State of Kansas in a licensing process. As far as I know, YOU are not actually a part of that process.
Heartlander and Apophis, et al: I am enjoying this debate. You have each expertly taken opposing sides to important issues relating to teaching students in our Kansas public schools.
Your debate has gotten a little heated at times so I hope you can get past this if you should meet at the bloggers’ get-together this coming Thursday, presuming you will be attending, and I hope you both do.
I am very interested in your discussion points and I am trying to follow it fairly closely. I hope to re-read it this evening or later in the week, whenever time permits. I have hesitated to enter into the fray because I am more interested in the points and counter-points of your debate.
Education of Kansas students is vital and there are no easy answers in this effort. I don’t claim to know the answers but I do recognize a multitude of problems do exist in our education process.
I believe I saw a little blurb in this morning’s Wichita EAGLE saying that David Awbry was leaving the Kansas Board of Education. I wonder what that’s about and where he’s going next.
I will not be able to attend the “bloggers’s get-together” as I am obligated to already to attend a “meet the candidates” night at through the ICT-Hutch Labor Fed. I try to do my part in the political arena
For the Eagle office meeting, is it potluck or not?
With respect to board certification, either it connotes something worthwhile or it doesn’t.
We know that it requires teachers to submit portfolios including videos of their classroom presentations, and it requires them to take tests that are reportedly harder than Praxis II and other generic multiple-choice exams used by the states.
In my profession, medicine, a lot of doctors said, four decades ago that board certification was no measure of competence. But malpractice insurers had top-notch statisticians who found that non-board-certified doctors cost their companies a lot more money than board-certified doctors.
Board-certified doctors were imperfect performers, but they were statistically demonstrated to be better performers, as a group, than their non-BC counterparts, as a group, with respect to doing things that resulted in malpractice lawsuits leading to insurance payouts to injured plaintiffs. Both board-certified and non-board-certified doctors made mistakes, but non-board-certified doctors made mistakes statistically significantly more often.
This isn’t hard to understand: tests requiring demonstration of board-certifiable expertise go beyond tests required for basic state licensure. More-conscientious and studious professionals are more willing to be tested, and are more willing to study to pass board tests.
Let’s look at the NBPTS website for current numbers of board-certified teachers. My previous post was based on older information.
http://www.nbpts.org/nbct/nbctdir_bystate.cfm
Kansas has approximately 1% of the nation’s teachers. Nationally, there are 47513 board-certified teachers. So, if all things were equal, Kansas should have 475 board-certified teachers. Instead, it has 207. North Carolina has about twice as many teachers as Kansas. Does it have 400 board-certified teachers? No, North Carolina has 9809.Oklahoma doesn’t have 300% more board-certified teachers than Kansas, as my old research indicated, it now has 500% more.
These growing disparities are due to FACTS. Such as the fact that in 2004 & 2005, 58 teachers in Kansas were newly certified, versus 442 in Oklahoma.
Wichita has approximately 1% of Kansas’s teachers. Therefore, if all things were uniform, Wichita should have had 5-7 of Kansas’s 2004-2005 newly certified teachers. It had 3, one of whom was a PE teacher, and one of whom was a special-ed teacher. A lone middle-school English teacher received certification.
Aophis has trapped himself between a rock and a hard place. If he says that NBPTS certification has no proof of efficacy, he’s trapped himself, because NBPTS is A PUBLIC TEACHER’s CREATION. So he is saying, “We public teachers don’t know how to create a sound teacher-evaluation system.”
If he alternatively accepts that NBPTS, a product of public educators, is sound, then Kansas teachers are failing, according to standards established by the American public teaching profession.
Apophis is trapped. He’s like George Bush and company, who created specious arguments for invading Iraq, when the truth was, GWB’s masters wanted to control Middle East Oil. Apophis does not want a NEW EDUCATION PARADIGM for the 21st century. He just wants to milk the 19th-20th-century industrial age paradigm as long as he can. He has no interest in children’s futures. i.e. their 21st century adult lives.
Apophis is basically a dishonest individual. Have I ever given you any reason to believe I probably don’t have a doctor of medicine degree, as Apophis claims? Yeah, I do. So does my wife. We had to take RISKS in college, such as Get a 4.0 and there is no guarantee you will get into med school, even if you want to go to med school. (
I didn’t get a 4.0, but my wife did, and was rejected by 70% of the med schools she applied to.
I got a 3.5 and had to spend 2 years after college inventing a new blood substitute to get enthusiastic recs. from two surgical professors, during the peak of the Baby Boom generation, when 80% of pre-med-hopeful college freshmen were culled out in first-year chemistry, and 75% of the ones who made it through this gauntlet and were well-qualified, got rejected by med schools. I beat the odds.
Becoming a K-12 teacher isn’t like this. If you get a 2.75, and want to become a K-12 teacher YOU ARE IN. Guaranteed. The pathway is trivial.
Apophis has a trivial mind. He cannot comprehend that THE WORLD HAS CHANGED, and the things schools have taught and still teach are not going to produce a middle-class blue-collar workforce. Or maybe he realizes it, but doesn’t give a whit. He is going to have a nice retirement; the welfare of tomorrow’s generation is not his problem. Except he is partially responsible for creating this problem. He didn’t create it, but he dubmly bought into it. So he is in denial, because he doesn’t want to pay the consequences of his misguided actions imposed on other people’s kids.
I have given you all you need to know. Act with reason and wisdom. Good luck and God bless. If you have kids, figure out what THEY need. If you have nieces and nephews, or granchildren, think about THEM.
How am I “trapped” if I question if NBTS certification actually proves a teacher is superior to one who isn’t? Is your proof of “trapped” your inappropriate parallel between teachers and doctors (which you are not). Or, is it your assertion that the NBTS program is s public teacher’s creation. Neither proves your assertions. Give it up heartlander.
gee……….now heartlander is getting downright nasty. Me, dishonest? You again have no PROOF of that. What you do have proof about is that I find you a phony and a public education basher. You label me and other education professionals as horrible people because WE DO NOT FOLLOW WHAT YOU THINK EDUCATION SHOULD BE IN THE 21ST CENTURY. YOU label teachers as second class citizens who are only minimally prepared to educate today’s children, tomorrow’s leaders. You brag and gloat about claims that you cannot substantiate.
heartlander…………..you are acting like a child who does not get there own way. Of course, that is a trait of the RW. You are a typical fundamentalist who wants only to make the lives of themselves and their children better, to hell with the rest of society. Talk about being someone in denial heartlander.
Trivial mind? Now that is something YOU know from only reading posts on a blog. Get a grip heartlander!
Apophis, I don’t think we’ll ever connect. Maybe it’s because my maternal great-grandparents left their Iowa farm for California about the time yours arrived to Kansas, and my paternal great-grandparents were Chicago urbanites. I dunno.
My parents only knew what outhouses were from camping trips. It’s difficult for me to realize that thousands of Wichitans living today grew up without toilets.
I never knew life without television. LA, like New York, had television during the Dust Bowl years. CBS began building a network of TV stations in 1943. NBC and ABC were broadcasting nationally in 1949.
Even by Mid-Continent standards, Wichita has always been small-town-laggardly. Chicago started broadcasting TV in 1930 (NY/NJ 1928, LA 1930). Kansas City and Iowa City started broadcasting TV programs in 1933. Fort-Worth, St. Louis and Albuqueque got TV in 1948, rapidly followed by Omaha, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa in 1949. These stations opened in response to AT&T’s laying coaxial cable enabling real-time broadcasts of NYC network shows.
One city in Nebraska, two cities in Missouri and two cities in Oklahoma broadcast Truman’s second presidential term, the Eisenhower-Stevenson contest and the Korean War. Wichitans could only see these things delayed, in movie-house newsreels, because Kansas’s largest city did not get television until 1953.
One can ballyhoo Wichita being a “modern city”, but when you’re 12 years behind Iowa and Kansas City, 5 years behind Albuquerque, 4 years behind Birmingham, Alabama, Huntington, West Virginia, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and tied with Macon, Georgia, how “modern” is that, really?
Why does being a late-adopter matter?Kansans have their own pace. Slow. They’re not interested in the outside world. But they have to learn to be. Globalization is reality. Kansas has been shaped by globalization since Coronado explored in 1541. It has been owned by three nations, Spain, France and the United States.
Because of limited resources, Kansas cannot be self-sufficient, it can only exist via extensive trade with the outside world, essentially to this point exporting a far smaller range of products than it imports. Many of Kansas’s economically vital industries are vulnerable to offshoring.
Family farming, so central to many Kansans’ self-identity, doesn’t work here, but must be propped up with federal subsidies that will have to be terminated if the U.S. is to maintain and extend its world trade under the terms of WTO and GATT. Water supplies are diminishing rapidly as well. So how do you develop sustainable alternatives for rural Kansans? Or will they just have to move out, and let the bison return to forage?
Kansas exists because of technology. It is no accident that Kansas’s post-Civil War settlement coincided with the establishment of railroad service, versus other states that were able to be founded and survive before railroads arrived. It was economically infeasible to transport grain 200+ miles by oxen-drawn wagons to the Missouri River for barge transport, or for farmers to obtain farm equipment, building supplies, clothing/textiles, and other essential goods by such conveyances.
Kansans have always been in a depedency situation, unable to achieve autonomy or peer-level interdependence with advanced economies.
For example, the California Gold Rush attracted people from all around the world. They were hearty, adventurous go-getters. Wealthy easterners had visions of controlling this newly-acquired massively-resource-rich territory. But the new residents had other ideas. By brash fiat they drafted their own constitution and proposal for statehood in 1849, only a year after the U.S. acquired California. Delegates confidently went to Congress and let the government know that it could either admit California immediately, or the people would create (recreate actually) their own independent republic. Congress acquiesced. It had no good options. Californians took command of their land, and their own futures.
In stark contrast, the Great Plains states represent planned development conceived by, and largely controlled by the Eastern Establishment. A group of Boston investors sent an exploration party out to the Kansas Territory in 1854, and envisioned getting ownership of large land tracts, recruiting farmers from Europe who would purchase this land from the investors, to the investors’ profit, produce grain for Eastern mills to the investors’ profit, and buy Eastern-made industrial products, to the investors’ profit. And their scheme worked out very well, for them, albeit without much financial prosperity accruing to the Euro-Kansas farmer immigrants.
In essence the Eastern Establishment had the same dream for developing and controlling both California and Kansas. But they only succeeded in the latter state.
Why? To get to California between 1849 and 1869, people had to travel overland 2000 miles by wagon, horseback and walking, cross two major mountain ranges, and make it across several hundred miles of desert. That was a three month ordeal.
Or, they had to take a 15,000 mile journey around the sub-Antarctic Cape Horn, an extremely treacherous proposition.
Or they could take a shorter route with a Panama isthmus crossing, and risk tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever. And contend with ruthless bandits. Another dangerous proposition.
Eventually, the transcontinental railroad obviated these harrowing routes, but by then California was already 19 years old with a population of a half-million, the adult portion of whom were these intrepid, life-risk-taking souls.
Kansas settlement was entirely different. Anyone who could afford coach and rail fare in the late 1850’s could travel from Lawrence to St. Louis by stagecoach in four days, and from there to New York by rail in four days. With stayovers, the walking part was less than a half-mile.
Of course Kansas-bound farmers took slower routes with wagons, but even then, there were towns all along the way, and there were only rare occurrences of not passing through at least one town daily, where food, blacksmith services, oxen, horses and wagon repair parts were sold.
Of course, Kansans suffered great hardships AFTER getting here, mostly because they gullibly believed landshark-hype “Garden of Eden” pitches. Some concluded, “I’ve been deceived, I’m leaving.” Others, however felt, “Our ancestors toiled for centuries on others’ land. We get to own this land. It may not be great, but its ours.”
We now know that the Dust Bowl was a tragedy, in the Greek sense, because it was largely avoidable. Oil seekers had found water underground. Had Western Kansans tapped it, they could have kept their fields growing, as California farmers did to weather drought cycles. Had they practiced sound tillage, wind erosion could have been greatly mitigated.
We still see land use mismanagement here. Three years ago, driving through eastern Colorado and Nebraska during the drought, I saw fields left with stubble. The earth was protected. When I hit Kansas the landscape suddenly changed to dried-and-cracked mudscape. It was like, “You didn’t study, and learn your lesson, did you?”
Unfortunately foresight isn’t Kansans’ forte. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But if something is wearing thin, intervention is called for. In other words, why wait until something breaks, and then scamble to fix it in crisis? Kansans never did recover from the Great Depression on their own initiative. The Eastern Establishment, led by the patrician FDR, rescued them.
After WWII, Kansas colleges and universities massively expanded to provide tertiary education to ex-GI’s, most of whose fathers made livings with their hands and arms. As this wave petered out, in order to avoid shrinking, the institutions opened themselves to thousands of young non-GI men and women. This was a national phenomenon, and fundamentally changed America.
Two extraordinary chancellors at KU, Dean Malott and Frank Murphy, proposed going beyond this, and transforming KU into a first-tier research university, as the Universities of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and California already were, and as the Universities of Texas and Colorado were attempting to become (ultimately successfully).
Their compelling arguments fell on deaf legislators’ ears. “We have the best economy we’ve ever experienced without no dad-gummed REE-search university. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Too bad for Kansas. Jack Kilby had to go to Illinois to study electrical engineering. Then to Texas to apply his knowledge and creativity. Where he invented the integrated circuit, which now is calculated to generate $3 trillion annually to the world economy. Kansas could have had a fat piece of that. If you don’t think that could have been monumental, go down to Austin, where Mr. Kilby worked (at Texas Instruments) or to the Silicon Valley, where Iowa-native Robert Noyce, who independently invented the integrated circuit–on a silicon chip– co-founded Intel.
In Western Kansas, some crops are amenable to drip irrigation. It should have been implemented in the 1980’s, as in Israel earlier and California. Ultimately the water of the Ogallala Aquifer will be extremely valuable for urban/suburban uses. For example, the Imperial Irrigation District in the California desert is selling former farm irrigation water to San Diego.
So, the Ogallala resource should be preserved for the future. It took millions of years to accumulate. Using it up in several decades is unwise policy, particularly when, in the absence of a federal farm-welfare program, the current use is a money-losing proposition.
It may be time to begin working to convert from water-wasting cheap commodity grain production to water-conserving greenhouse production of high-value fresh produce. I can see the end of subsidies forcing farmers to sell their land and water rights to multinational corporations and billionaires who will then sell the water to cities, and/or supply Wal-Mart’s organics initiative with greenhouse produce.
To add to their profits, they’ll likely also develop windmill farms.
I think we need schools to be transformed, so that Kansas kids can think about things like this, and learn to control Kansas’s resources, and profit from them. If the big-money interests do this, will they provide jobs to Kansans, to tend the greenhouses and windmills? Perhaps. Or perhaps they’ll find it more profitable to hire low-wage immigrants.