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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (66813)	1/18/2003 9:22:16 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It still befuddles me why the arguments, in the 70s, that spending money on education reduces other costs down the road--prisons, police, etc.--and provides more productive citizens, why that argument failed and keeps failing. This argument failed, IMO, for this reason, John. First, because just raising salaries from say, 40K to 60K a year, and jumping the administrators accordingly, will not improve the teaching in the schools. Second, there is no correlation between cost per pupil in the system and excellence in the Schools. Look at DC, and the total failure of the Kansas City experiment. You need to introduce accountability and responsibility into the system. Not gonna happen anytime soon. Between the Educational, Administrative, and Teachers Union Bureaucracies, and the refusal of the public to accept Vouchers, things are gonna have to get a lot worse before we can get a revolution that will make them better. Too bad. The kids and the country lose.

To: JohnM who wrote (66813)	1/18/2003 11:15:02 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Always surprising to find agreement with you Well, let me spoil it by saying I agree a bit with LindyBill as well. It is one thing to lower the bar on grades or SATs for someone who has offsetting virtues, such as being a community organizer, newspaper editor or athlete. It gets dicier when the somebody is just coming from Kentucky or is black. Are these to be treated as personal virtues, even if you desire diversity? They are just traits that the applicant cannot help. Dropping the bar for such traits lets everyone in the university know that blacks or Kentuckians are not likely to be as qualified as others for university life. This does favors to no one imo. This is why I favor affirmative action into remedial programs, and color-blindness into the the mainstream.