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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (789616)	6/13/2014 11:56:17 AM
From: koan	Respond to of 1577042

Well, did anything Bush and the neo cons tell us about Iraq turn out to be true? Are we better off now than when bush invaded? And what did we get for our trillions of dollars and all the killing? Bush and the neo cons had everything wrong!

To: koan who wrote (789616)	6/14/2014 5:28:48 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1577042

Hi koan; Re: "You probably think liberal teachers are bad ..."; Not true. I've had good teachers who were liberal. Re: "... and I think conservative teachers are bad ..."; In context, I'm not sure if you're talking about what I think you think or about what you think. Re: "... so neither of us should be able to decide. Let each school principle hire whom they want overseen by a local democratically elected school board."; The reason this doesn't happen in Illinois is because of the power of their heavily democratic teachers unions. Re: "Why not look at Texas high school graduation statistics."; (1) The usual liberal cop-out on schooling is to look at stuff like overall graduation statistics while ignoring the population that is being educated. Texas teaches some of the poorest students in the US. Of course they have results which are below the average of rich white kids living in Connecticut. But if you compare the results that Texas has with minorities to the results that Illinois has with minorities you will find that Texas kicks their ass. (2) Both political parties, and our more educated population as a whole, gets hung up on the wonders of education. The fact is that if you open up the want-ads of your local newspaper you will find that the majority of jobs advertised do not require anything beyond a high school education. The graduation rates would increase substantially if the schools taught anything that was useful to the kids who aren't going to go to college. The problem is worse than that. Our population now sends way too many kids to college. Of course there are no jobs for them. They will grow up disappointed in the fact that they didn't catch a hold of that golden job that they were promised in return for going to college. Those golden jobs were there for the graduates of the 60s and maybe the 70s but the colleges are now making too much product. And a lot of the product produced by colleges are completely useless for any job market. These are jobs in "communications" or "latin studies" where graduation demonstrates no great ability and the skills learned are minuscule. And the students getting these useless degrees are being saddled with huge debts. Hey, if they were able to grab on to that golden job they could pay off those debts but the truth is that our public colleges are now worse than the private schools (that are in the news for pumping too many students out with too few skills). Obama's solution to this is to arrange for the public to end up repaying those student loans. And the public will pay. But the result is that we will be taxing working class people in order to pay for the education of these faux scholars. The solution to low high school graduation rates is to have schools produce kids with useful skills. Kids are not all stupid; they know if they're not college material. And they know they're going to have to earn a living. What they should be learning is useful life skills like "how to start a small business", "how to do accounting", "how to touch type", "shipping and receiving", "what to do if you're arrested", "how to pay your taxes", "how to get a building permit", "how to hang sheet rock", "how to weld", "how to operate a fork lift", "how to manage a small store", "how to operate a wave solder machine", etc. Instead they get classes that basically are either pre-college or pre-faux-college-lite. The lower 50% of students don't need to take a class whose lesson basically amounts to "how to know for sure that you're going to flunk out of college". So they quit school, it's a total waste of time for them; the smarter ones get a GED. Obama's attempt to prop up higher education by having the public subsidize college loans (through the removal of the requirement that they be fully repaid) will not save higher education. Higher education is stunningly bloated. And its problem is similar to that of health care. Costs have zoomed because they're paid by 3rd parties. The unpaid student loans are just a smoke screen for more of the same. But subsidizing a bubble never works. And higher education knows this. Here's a book I was given by one of the physicists here: The Higher Education Bubble America is facing a higher education bubble. Like the housing bubble, it is the product of cheap credit coupled with popular expectations of ever-increasing returns on investment, and as with housing prices, the cheap credit has caused college tuitions to vastly outpace inflation and family incomes. Now this bubble is bursting. In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains the causes and effects of this bubble and the steps colleges and universities must take to ensure their survival. Many graduates are unable to secure employment sufficient to pay off their loans, which are usually not dischargeable in bankruptcy. As students become less willing to incur debt for education, colleges and universities will have to adapt to a new world of cost pressures and declining public support. amazon.com -- Carl