As the country struggles to pay billions for three wars, states continue to shutdown basic services and programs. Chicago this week joined other jurisdictions in dropping writing as part of the standardized exam for students to save $2.4 million a year. It is not clear if children will be given lessons on the oral tradition of story telling and refreshers in cave drawing.
Schools Superintendent Christopher Koch explained, orally, that “writing is one of the most expensive things to assess.” Oregon and Missouri also recently cut writing from exams. This is part of a broader rollback on school programs and resources that could prove disastrous for this country.
With writing ability already falling in our country, such decisions accelerate our decline as a competitive educational system.
While other countries are investing heavily in producing highly educated and productive students, we are cutting whole grades to allow us to keep spending on more important things. The inevitable result is that our population will become less and less viable in the modern economy — a nation of consumers without a productivity to match our appetite.
Source: WLS
Buddha:
Sorry to see you go. Family always comes first and I would expected no less from you or any of our other regulars. Stop by any time and put in the two cents that always seems worth a million.
Ave atque vale!
Elaine,
OT, Have you seen Wynton Marsalis’s ABZ? Absolutely great book of poems. My son and I occasionally sit down, read a poem, and then listen to the musician it was about.
Roco,
So, if upward mobility is the sign of a free society, what exactly does it say that some of those socialist nations in Europe have more relative economic mobility than us?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456
http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%20Dream%20Report.pdf
well, if war is the most important thing, do we really need to know how to read and write?
Karl Marxist Freidrich:
I second kderosa’s assessment of your mental state and would add you are probably lazy as well. What with your statement about people only managing to stay in the same socioeconomic level they were born into.
I know many people who were born poor and now reside in the middle class, upper middle class and the low end of millionaires and I know at least one person who was born in the middle class and is now a multi-millionaire.
They all have 3 things in common; ambition, hard work and some native intelligence (they are not super smart but probably have more than average intelligence).
That only happens in free societies with a capitalistic system. Marxism usually appeals to underachievers who want something for nothing or losers who through lack of ability and ambition fail to achieve.
Roco,
Apology accepted.
I don’t know where you went to college or when you went to college. The great majority of teachers I worked with were intelligent, well-read, well-informed, and topnotch classroom practioners. I also taught a lot of extremely bright education students at Boston University. I should note that although I taught at the BU School of Education, I had students in my children’s literature course who majored in other subject areas–computer science, psychology, pre-med, business, English.
@KF
“kderosa: No offense but you’re fucking stupid.”
A thin-skinned lefty. That’s a bad combo.
“That 4% is comprised mostly of criminal leeches, bankster parasites, cowardly draft dodgers, perfidious war profiteers, government subsidized agribusinesses & Big Oil with a mix of degenerate speculators, The rest earned their money the old fashioned way — they inherited it.”
And crazy too.
@Elaine, the macaroni collages would have been part of the education course curriculum.
[@karl Friedrich, no offense, it sounds like there is a simple reeason why you aren’t part of that top 4%.]
kderosa: No offense but you’re fucking stupid.
That 4% is comprised mostly of criminal leeches, bankster parasites, cowardly draft dodgers, perfidious war profiteers, government subsidized agribusinesses & Big Oil with a mix of degenerate speculators, The rest earned their money the old fashioned way — they inherited it.
A big redistribution of that stolen money is in store for your future. You can count on it. Heads will roll!
Roco: You talk so well out of your ass that you ought to compete with Zamfir on the butt flute.
Being a “soft” science, sociology (as opposed to, say, physics) has a tricky time pinning down hard stubborn facts, however, one of the most consistent facts social science has demonstrated beyond dispute is that for the overwhelming majority in America the class you’re born into is the class you die in so save the Horatio Alger mythology for right wing blowhards who don’t know shit from fat meat.