Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
Understandable, but you can't buy an education. I've been in private schools that were worse than public schools. Per-pupil expenditures are a factor, but they really reflect a combination of the willingness of the state and the affluence of the state. Since per capita incomes in the Northeast are nearly double those of the Deep South, it is only to be expected that per-pupil expenditures would be similar in ratio.These included such positive attributes as per-pupil expenditures,
Different areas have different graduation requirements. I know a few students at my high school who failed senior English because they didn't finish a paper that was twice as long as the Federal college requirement for a 4-year degree.public high school graduation rates,
Which has been shown to have precisely zero effect on academic standings in studies.average class size,
Do they examine non-English reading proficiency for immigrant students? I went to a school that was ~60% non-immigrant, and we had everything from the typical (in Florida) Puerto Rican and Cuban to Chinese, Philippino, Kenyan, Norwegian...or do they just measure English proficiency, which would be higher in states like Vermont, which have very few non-native US people?student reading
Agreed. Math is mostly universal (although a teacher of mine from Europe was taught a different way of writing division problems; I helped her learn the "American" way so she could get her teacher's certificate)and math proficiency,
How does this differ from class size?and pupil-teacher ratios.
Did they measure only drop-outs, or did they count transfers, also? My senior class had a roughly 10% drop-out rate, but we had nearly 50% if you include students that transferred in or out. Both suck, but the latter is much worse than the formerStates received negative points for high drop-out rates
I'll agree with this one, though it would have to be on an incidents per capita basis, since some school systems are much larger than others.and physical violence.
Hey, at least it wasn't Orange County. No high school had over 79% pass the writing on the FCAT, although our reading was average, and our math 1 point below state average, though scores varied from 262-330 on the reading and 290-341 on the math (302 was average for reading and 320 for math). The year I took it we were above average on both.phong wrote:That's one problem: FL's DOE tends to waste money a lot. Like buying computers all the damn time. IMHO, they really should concentrate first on basic education then start adding more computers and such. (Says the person who went here.)
BattleTech for SilCoreStanley Hauerwas wrote:[W]hy is it that no one is angry at the inequality of income in this country? I mean, the inequality of income is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Why isn’t that ever an issue of politics? Because you don’t live in a democracy. You live in a plutocracy. Money rules.
None taken. After all, it's only good-natured ribbing.Glocksman wrote:No offense guys, but I wouldn't want to live in NJ or MD (unless Carroll County seceded from MD and joined Pennsylvania).
Simple not all schools use one teacher one classroom, I know several schools were it might be a class-size of 35 but there will be 5 teachers for that classquote:
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and pupil-teacher ratios.
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How does this differ from class size?
Right. The most common multiple-instructor classes are humanities courses, where there are two teachers.Mr Bean wrote:Simple not all schools use one teacher one classroom, I know several schools were it might be a class-size of 35 but there will be 5 teachers for that classquote:
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and pupil-teacher ratios.
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How does this differ from class size?
(either by design or do to school overcrowding)
You can't necessarily make a great school system by throwing money at it, but you can fuck up a school system by starving it of cash. It's still an important criterion.The Dark wrote:Understandable, but you can't buy an education.
If the only difficulty is length, that doesn't mean shit. If one area has a very low high school graduation rate while another one has a high graduation rate, are you saying that this should be ignored?Different areas have different graduation requirements. I know a few students at my high school who failed senior English because they didn't finish a paper that was twice as long as the Federal college requirement for a 4-year degree.public high school graduation rates,
Interesting. Could you please cite these studies? Are you saying that kids derive zero benefit from greater individual attention?Which has been shown to have precisely zero effect on academic standings in studies.average class size,
Ummmm, who gives a fuck whether kids can read some language other than English? In order to function in this society, you have to be able to read English.Do they examine non-English reading proficiency for immigrant students? I went to a school that was ~60% non-immigrant, and we had everything from the typical (in Florida) Puerto Rican and Cuban to Chinese, Philippino, Kenyan, Norwegian...or do they just measure English proficiency, which would be higher in states like Vermont, which have very few non-native US people?student reading
They said they were talking about dropout rates; it seems reasonable to assume they meant dropout rates. Do you have some vested interest in attacking the rankings?Did they measure only drop-outs, or did they count transfers, also?States received negative points for high drop-out rates
Ermm.. hold up. How can you say class size has no effect on it? The larger a class is, the more teachers there must be. Coming from a place that has been in dire need of math teachers my entire high school education, I think class size has one helluva lot to do with it. At some point, you're going to have so many kids that you won't have enough teachers.The Dark wrote:Which has been shown to have precisely zero effect on academic standings in studies.
Actually, some places are stupid enough to count transfers as dropouts. That's what he's getting at; sometimes you have to know whether it includes transfers or not.Darth Wong wrote:They said they were talking about dropout rates; it seems reasonable to assume they meant dropout rates. Do you have some vested interest in attacking the rankings?
Just driving up the Turnpike doesn't give you a good impression of the state. Draw a line from New York to Philadelphia, and anything with about forty miles of that line is going to be nothing but subdivisions and strip malls, but away from that there's still a lot of rural areas (the far northwest is all rugged, rolling hills and the far southeast is mile after mile of pine forest).MKSheppard wrote:jersey's motto "Garden state", is a bad joke, Hotfoot. The entire stateHotfoot wrote: Tut tut Shep, no need to advertise your state's lower ranking so blatantly.
is full of strip malls, mile after mile, along with Toxic waste
Pinellas is actually one of the better school districts in Florida for whatever reason. Across the Bay, Hillsborough doesn't seem to have as good a reputation (at USF, a lot of students from the Hillsborough system seem envious of Pinellas County's school system).The Dark wrote:No high school had over 79% pass the writing on the FCAT, although our reading was average, and our math 1 point below state average, though scores varied from 262-330 on the reading and 290-341 on the math (302 was average for reading and 320 for math). The year I took it we were above average on both.
Well.. interesting.. considering here in New Mexico, we've got Univ. of NM (which is one of the best Medical schools in the country), NM Tech (a very good tech school), Sandia Nat'l Labs, Los Alamos Nat'l Labs, among various other things.. And yet NM is the lowest on the list.Nathan F wrote:Oh, and there is the little fact that Tennessee is home to the national laboratory at Oak Ridge and the largest USAF research facility in the east, Arnold AFB, which is also home to the University of Tennessee Space Institute.
And then Alabama has the Redstone Arsenal and then all the NASA installations at Huntsville.verilon wrote:Well.. interesting.. considering here in New Mexico, we've got Univ. of NM (which is one of the best Medical schools in the country), NM Tech (a very good tech school), Sandia Nat'l Labs, Los Alamos Nat'l Labs, among various other things.. And yet NM is the lowest on the list.Nathan F wrote:Oh, and there is the little fact that Tennessee is home to the national laboratory at Oak Ridge and the largest USAF research facility in the east, Arnold AFB, which is also home to the University of Tennessee Space Institute.
~ver
True, I agree. My point is that there should be no surprise that the South has a lower per-capita expenditure, since it has a lower per-capita income. After the Civil War, it took 100 years for per-capita incomes (adjusted for inflation) to return to pre-Civil War levels. Given that the ratio has remained roughly equal, the South is essentially in a 1903 economy right now.Darth Wong wrote:You can't necessarily make a great school system by throwing money at it, but you can fuck up a school system by starving it of cash. It's still an important criterion.The Dark wrote:Understandable, but you can't buy an education.
Cato.org did an analysis showing that 15% of studies show impreovement, 72% no change, and 13% a decline in ability when class size decreases. Statistically, class size appears to be insignificant. The US's average class size (23) is smaller than South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan (49, 36, and 44 respectively). Admittedly, the article is from 1999, but I don't recall any earth-shattering revelations in class size research in the last 4 years. There was also a study I referenced for a speech last year finding that the only influence on average MCAS scores was family income; that class size, race, gender, ethnicity, public vs private, none mattered in the end. For the SAT, College Board studies show that on average, every $10,000 of family income will raise overall scores 30 points (although they don't publicize this for obvious reasons).Interesting. Could you please cite these studies? Are you saying that kids derive zero benefit from greater individual attention?Which has been shown to have precisely zero effect on academic standings in studies.average class size,
Not in South Florida. Spanish is more important there. It also marks poorly against states with high immigration levels, since students who move into the region from out of the country and enroll the day before the test (i.e. never took a class in the US) are required to take the exams. This should hurt states like New York, California, Texas, and Florida.Ummmm, who gives a fuck whether kids can read some language other than English? In order to function in this society, you have to be able to read English.Do they examine non-English reading proficiency for immigrant students? I went to a school that was ~60% non-immigrant, and we had everything from the typical (in Florida) Puerto Rican and Cuban to Chinese, Philippino, Kenyan, Norwegian...or do they just measure English proficiency, which would be higher in states like Vermont, which have very few non-native US people?student reading
They said they were talking about dropout rates; it seems reasonable to assume they meant dropout rates. Do you have some vested interest in attacking the rankings?[/quote][/quote]No, but I've seen statistics that include transfers as dropouts. After working with some local media people and seeing how they work, I don't trust statistics without a full explanation of how they were derived. They're far too easy to manipulate.Did they measure only drop-outs, or did they count transfers, also?States received negative points for high drop-out rates
BattleTech for SilCoreStanley Hauerwas wrote:[W]hy is it that no one is angry at the inequality of income in this country? I mean, the inequality of income is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Why isn’t that ever an issue of politics? Because you don’t live in a democracy. You live in a plutocracy. Money rules.
The site doesn't work.phongn wrote:Pinellas is actually one of the better school districts in Florida for whatever reason. Across the Bay, Hillsborough doesn't seem to have as good a reputation (at USF, a lot of students from the Hillsborough system seem envious of Pinellas County's school system).
Illuminatus goes to this school, which is apparently one of the top schools in the nation (as my brother likes to annoy me with); yet we have other schools (cough...Dixie Hollins...cough) that do poorly. It's strange.
Not my school!Chardok wrote:I'm in Florida (40th)....this state didn't wasn't always full of dumbasses who'd rather be delinquents and fuckwads who shoot out streetsigns...Damn, when I went to school in florida, we seemed to be on the cutting edge. there were nice classrooms, several Apple IIE's in every classroom...*sigh* we've really gone downhill.....
Palm Harbor University High Schoolphongn wrote:Illuminatus goes to this school, which is apparently one of the top schools in the nation (as my brother likes to annoy me with); yet we have other schools (cough...Dixie Hollins...cough) that do poorly. It's strange.
Don't people say the same thing about the US in general? How although we rank behind 20-something countries in test scores, but our universities are among the best in the world, or something like that.Silver Paladin wrote:The thing is though, having a HS graduation doesn't mean jack in today's society. You really need to have a college education. Sure Montana might have a better K-12 system than California, but can it really compare with the Undergraduate/Graduate schools California fields like CalTech, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, etc.?
Thanks, had a brain fart there. I fixed it in my original post.Illuminatus Primus wrote:Fixed the link.
And now with School Choice*, living in the former PHUHS school zone is no longer a guaruntee that you can go there!Of course, the vast majority white yuppie demographic helps. Lansbrook, Innisbrook, East Lake Woodlands...all very nice upper middle class neighborhoods, complete with golf courses, fancy new houses, and even ponds...
