S.C. deputy filmed slamming teen girl out of desk, dragging her away

Always make YF show his work...

First, this was an opinion piece in the NY Post.

Katharine B. Stevens is a research fellow in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Hmmmm.....

BBC NEWS | Americas | Battle of the Washington think tanks

On Tuesdays, the leading neo-conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, holds its "black coffee morning", a relatively sumptuous breakfast and talks by key Iraqi exiles as well as luminaries like Richard Perle, a leading hawk who is close to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

 

So you're saying her numbers are wrong, is that it? Or you're saying her numbers are right, but since it's her pointing to them they should be dismissed. Is that it? Or, perhaps, you're saying that you don't have the foggiest clue as to how to actually craft an argument.

 

You could find a shit-ton of them at Fox News. Is 95 percent too low?

 

Is this an argument or a discussion?

Are we arguing what's wrong with schools or discussing it?

If you want to discuss, like grown ups, I would suggest the biggest fix needed to our school system is how we have it structured.

Do away with attendance zones. Do away with bus service. That would save my school division $18.0 million right there. Buses are a lazy American thing. We don't need them; we want them.

Give students the option to take a technical track (vo-tech) or a college bound track after their sophomore year of school. Use the bus money to help retool these schools. One huge problem is we have students taking things that in no way interest them at all. By 15, you know if you want to work with your hands or with books and numbers.

You want your student out of an under-performing school? No problem. Your student just needs to qualify for another school. You cannot behave in your current school? No problem. You can be reassigned to a different school.

Instead of a student being "stuck" at their current high school, give them motivation to go someplace else or learn a different thing.

And we do have some vo-tech right now, but I would say that 30-40 percent of all students would like a vo-tech track, and we don't even come close to offering that.

 

This is why over the 10-year period I studied,

Ummmm.... yes. It's a biased study. I'm not going to ask the president of the NEA what a fair salary for teachers would be, either. It's called bias.

 

You'll have to forgive him, Rags. In addition to everything else that's wrong with his posts, his writing sucks ass, too. What he's trying to say is that someone from EPI would necessarily be biased in the matter of how difficult it is to fire a poorly performing teacher. Just as someone from the NEA would be biased in a discussion about what a fair teacher's salary would be.

How that bias would manifest itself in the simple calculation of a rate? And how 93Devil, with his long track record of analytical excellence, might have picked up on that bias? Well, inquiring minds sure do want to know.

 

OK, how about asking the President of the NEA the percentage of the NYC school teachers who were incompetent?

 

Anyone with bias looks at something subjectively. It's why no good writer, or poster, should ever use them as a source.

 

That is part of the problem. We don't have a good method in place for determining which teachers are good ones and which ones are not. In the absence of such a measure, some folks are happy to use whatever system is available and that tends to end up with standardized test scores playing a very large role. Finding any standardized measure may be impossible. As doctorquant posted, you will find teachers who are great in one environment and a poor fit in others. The level of competency is the same, but the situation has changed.

Even within individual schools, a standardized measure can fail. For example, Teacher A might have four sections of eighth-grade math and one extra help or enrichment class, but no special education students. Teacher B has five sections of eighth-grade math and three of those groups include special education students. If both teachers are exactly equal in competence, Teacher A is likely to have better results. Both teachers are impacted by factors beyond their control. The nature and number of issues the special ed students bring to the classroom is a factor. The quality of the special education services in the building is a factor. Not to mention the fact that both teacher are dealing with over 100 variables, the students themselves.