Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Across the United States politicians believe that they have found the answer to improving schools.  They have endorsed and used a variety of techniques, which they believe will revitalized a failing of state-run schools.  Bobbie Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and a potential presidential candidate in 2016 believes that vouchers and charter schools, in his low performing state, will do just that.  But Judge Timothy Kelley of State District Court ruled that the way in which the state finances its new voucher program violates the state Constitution, as it relies on money intended in “plain and unambiguous” terms solely for public schools.

The voucher program, on the other hand, is already under way: about 5,000 of Louisiana’s 556,000 students are participating.

In a statement, Governor Jindal called the decision “wrongheaded and a travesty for parents across Louisiana” and vowed to appeal. But if it survives appeal, the state court’s decision would make things far messier for a governor who is widely believed to have aspirations for national office, and who made education reform a centerpiece of his second-term agenda.

Voucher opponents in some other states have successfully argued that vouchers violate constitutional bans on money going to religious schools, while others have contended that redirecting more to private schools would leave the public education system inadequately financed.

The law at the center of the debate, which was passed last March, includes more than just a voucher system: it also significantly broadens and streamlines the process of establishing charter schools and creates a program in which students can take courses from online providers with state money.

But if the State Supreme Court were to agree with the district judge and find that arrangement unconstitutional, money for vouchers would have to be appropriated as a separate line item each year, with all of the political complications, year-to-year uncertainty and budget squabbling that would entail.

What is certain is that there will be more arguments on the issue to come, in both the courts and in the state legislature. It is certainly not as potentially problematic for the program as a decision that vouchers violate a standing court order on desegregation, as a federal judge ruled last week in regard to such an order in one Louisiana parish.

Taking money from under-funded, poorly-performing public schools and giving it, in the form of vouchers to privately-run, and in some cases, unaccountable charter schools is wrong.  Just as giving public monies to private schools is wrong.  The damage done to public education and the vast majority of students doesn’t make sense to me.

 

There is a brewing political and court fight over whether public dollars should be  used to pay for school vouchers to help parents pay for private schools.  There are valid arguments on both sides.

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, estimates about 212,000 students are using vouchers.  The group says that that is us from 36,000 students in 2000.

A number of states (Washington, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida, Virginia and Louisiana) currently use vouchers.  In the state of Washington, the state Supreme Court heard a challenge to the state law which provides vouchers work on average more than $4,000 a year to low-and-middle income families.

Opponents of vouchers say that public school monies are being taken away for public schools and are being given to religious-based private schools which violate the separation of church and state.

Many private schools are exempt from the terms of NCLB and Race for The Top so that their test results do not necessarily indicate improved test scores.

Poor school performance is directly correlated with poverty.  According to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, of Cambridge Massachusetts,  who sorted all New York City middle schools by their 8th grade results on the NY State English/language arts examinations,  the schools which scored the lowest in the poorest neighborhoods of Harlem, the South Bronx and central Brooklyn.  the study calculated that doubling the share of “highly educated” – master’s degrees + 30 or more hours of training – could result in a 600 percent increase in the chances of a black or Hispanic student scoring at the top level of those examinations.

The data are there.  Why do our politicians avoid the obvious?  Is it easier for them to blame the victims rather than fixing the problems?

Three million children in America take drugs for problems in focusing their attention.  Are these drugs really helping children or are we merely numbing them down?

In the past 30 years there has been an increase of twenty times the prescription of drugs for attention-deficit disorder according to Dr. L. Alan Sroufe, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development.  Dr. Sroufe insists that “Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term but when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems.  The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.  The drugs enhance the ability to concentrate, especially on tasks that are not inherently interesting or when one is fatigued or bored, but they don’t improve learning abilities.  More importantly, the effects of stimulants on children with attention problems fade after prolonged use.  Children develop a tolerance to the drug and this its efficiency disappears.”

Putting children on drugs does nothing to change the causes of attention-deficit disorder but merely masks the effects.  Can we cure attention-deficit disorder?  By covering up the disease through drugs prevents us from seeking solutions.  Drugs allow everyone – politicians, doctors, teachers and parents off of the hook.

 

 

The following material was gathered by Morgan House whose latest e-book, 50 Years in the Making: The Great Recession and Its Aftermath is available on your iPad, Kindle, on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

1.    The unemployment rate for men is 8.4%. For married men, it’s 4.9%.

2.    The unemployment rate for college graduates is 3.9%. For high school dropouts, it’s 13%.

3.    According to The New York Times: “From 2001 to 2011, state and local financing per [college] student declined by 24 percent nationally.”

4.    Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the United States as the 24th least-corrupt country in the world, just behind Qatar and ahead of Uruguay.

5.    China’s labor force grew by 145 million from 1990 to 2008. The entire U.S. labor force today is 156 million.

6.    From 1929 to 1932, the total amount of money paid out in wages fell by 60%, according to historian Frederick Lewis Allen. By contrast, from 2007-2009, total American wages fell less than 5%. What we experienced in recent years was nothing close to the Great Depression.

7.    China’s working-age population is expected to shrink by more than 200 million between now and 2050. The U.S.’ is expected to rise by 47 million.

8.    According to author Charles Murray, just 3% of American couples both had a college degree in 1960. By 2010, 25% did.

9.    If state, local, and federal employment followed the same trend from 2008 through today as it did from 2005-2008, the unemployment rate would be 6.5% instead of 8.2%.

10. In Russia, 0.00007% of the population (100 people) controls 20% of the wealth.

11. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, Americans give Hugo Chavez a 9% approval rating — the exact same as they gave Congress last fall.

12. For the 2012-2013 fiscal year, California will spend $8.7 billion on prisons and $4.8 billion on its UC and state college systems.

13. Boeing (NYSE: BA  ) accounts for almost 2% of all U.S. exports.

14. North Dakota has 0.7 unemployed people for each available job opening.

15. Because of its one-child policy, China’s labor force will start to decline in 2016.

16. The U.S. makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but a third of the world’s spending on pharmaceuticals, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare.

17. Since December 2007, male employment has fallen 4.7%. Female employment fell just about half that amount, 2.7%

18. According to writer Dan Gross: “The United States produced about as much output in the third quarter of 2011 as it did in the third quarter of 2007, albeit with about 6 million fewer workers on the payroll.”

19. PCs outsold Macs by nearly 60-to-1 in 2004. Last year, the ratio was closer to 20-to-1, according to analyst Horace Dediu.

20. If you earn minimum wage, you’ll need to work 923 hours to pay for a year at an average public four-year college. In 1980, it took 254 hours.

21. According to a study by the Dallas Federal Reserve, foreign-born citizens made up 14% of the labor force in 2002, yet accounted for 51% of total jobs growth from 1996-2002.

22. Forty percent of kids raised in a family in the top income quintile stay there as adults, and 40% of those born into the lowest quintile remain there. Only 8% of those raised in the top quintile drop to the lowest quintile as adults, according to the Pew Economic Mobility Project.

23. According to a report by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, just over half of students who enroll in a four-year college receive a bachelor’s degree within six years.

24. Five of every six American families earn more than their respective parents did, according to the Pew Economic Mobility Project.

25. Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumder has shown that incomes among brothers are more correlated than height or weight.

26. Ten percent of Medicare recipients who received hospital care made up 64% of the program’s hospital spending in 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal.

27. According to a Rutgers survey based on a nationwide sampling, only 51% of those who have graduated college since 2006 are now employed full time. Twenty percent are in graduate school. The rest€¦

28. As a percentage of GDP, government spending was higher in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan than it will be this fiscal year (23.5% vs. 23.3%, respectively), according to data by the Tax Policy Center.

29. More government jobs were eliminated on net in 2010 than in any other year since at least 1939. As a percentage of government workers, the decline was the largest since 1947.

30. According to Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois, the added weight carried by vehicles due to obesity in America consumes an additional 938 million gallons of gasoline a year.

31. The median American family’s net worth fell to $77,300 in 2010 from $126,400 in 2007, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance. That erased nearly two decades of accumulated wealth.

32. According to UCLA: “Only 3.1 percent of the world’s children live in the United States, but U.S. families buy more than 40 percent of the toys consumed globally.”

33. Delaware, a famous business haven, has more corporations than people — 945,000 to 897,000, according to The New York Times. One office building in Wilmington is home to more than a quarter-million registered businesses.

34. According to Manpower’s 2012 Talent Shortage Survey, 49% of U.S. businesses report difficulty filling available job openings.

35. According to U.S. News & World Report, the average law student graduates with more than $100,000 in student loans. According to the American Bar Association, just over half of those who graduated law school in 2011 have full-time jobs that require a law degree.

36. Only 52% of American families say they were able to save anything in 2010, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance.

37. Adjusted for inflation, the median average hourly wage was lower in 2011 than it was in 2001.

38. “In 2010, 6.0 percent of families reported that their spending usually exceeds their income,” according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance.

39. Five years ago, coal provided about half the nation’s electricity. Today, it’s about one-third. Natural gas’ share during that time rose from 21% to 30%, according to the Energy Information Agency.

40. Since 1968, the U.S. population has increased from 200 million to 314 million, and federal government employees have declined from 2.9 million to 2.8 million.

41. According to The New York Times: “In the last five years, the United States and Canada combined have become the fastest-growing sources of new oil supplies around the world, overtaking producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia.”

42. As of June 2011, 32% of American homes were cellphone only, up from 17.5% in 2008, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

43. In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest U.S. banks earned an average of 100 times what a typical household made. By 2007, more than 500 times.

44. America is home to less than 5% of the world’s population, but nearly a quarter of its prisoners.

45. According Dartmouth political scientist Dean Lacy, states that receive more federal government spending than they contribute in tax revenue tend to support Republican candidates, who typically vow to cut spending.

46. After new bank regulations go into effect, JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM  ) says 70% of customers with less than $100,000 in deposits or investments will be unprofitable for the bank.

47. According to John Cawley of Cornell and Chad Meyerhoefer of Lehigh University, obese people incur annual medical costs $2,741 higher than non-obese people, or almost $200 billion nationwide.

48. Many talk about how much we import from China, but few discuss how much we sell to them. Exports from the U.S. to China were $19.2 billion in 2001, and $104 billion in 2011.

49. According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, 80% of all income growth from 1980 to 2005 went to the top 1% of wage earners.

50. From 1970 to 2012, median household income increased at one-tenth the rate it did from 1949-1979.

51. Among high school seniors who scored more than 700 on the math and verbal portions of the SATs (a very high score), 87% have at least one parent with a college degree. Fifty-six percent have a parent with a graduate degree, according to author Charles Murray.

52.  America is aging. Older workers (age 55+) are about to overtake younger workers (age 25-34) for the first time.

I found this information fascinating and believe that students in the middle and high schools will as well. Much of the information contradicts the information supplied by the media.

A report from the Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion indicated that a middle-income family with a child born in 2011 will spend about $235,000 in child-related expenses from birth through age 17. That is an increase of 3.5 percent from 2010. The estimate includes the cost of transportation, child care, education, food, clothing, health care and miscellaneous expenses.

Families in the urban Northeast will have the highest child-rearing expenses, followed by those in the urban West and Midwest. Those living in the urban South and rural areas will have the lowest costs.

I do not believe that most children are aware of these numbers.  With children choosing to get pregnant, they should be informed of these costs.

The National Indian Education Study 2011 indicates that more attention needs to be given to the education of elementary and junior high school American Indian and Alaska Native students.

The reading scores for fourth and eighth grade AI/AN students showed virtually no change from 2005 to 2011. Fourth-grade AI/AN students scored 19 points lower in comparison to non-AI/AN students who participated in the NAEP (Black, Hispanic, White, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, and students of two or more races). In grade eight reading, the gap was 13 points.

For mathematics, grade four AI/AN students’ scores were virtually unchanged from 2005 and 2009, while scores for all other grade four students went up. The gap between the two groups was 16 points, larger than the gap in 2005, when it was 12 points. The grade eight mathematics results were pretty much the same: AI/AN students’ scores were unchanged, while non-Native students scored higher. The gap in scores between the two groups was 19 points, while in 2005 it was 15 points.

Eighth-grade students eligible for the National School Lunch Program (which gives free or reduced-cost school lunches to kids) scored 23 points lower in reading and 20 points lower in math than students who were not eligible. Eligibility for the program is used as a rough indicator of income. Students who qualify for the program generally come from lower-income families than those who do not. In 2011, 72 percent of fourth-grade AI/AN students participating in the reading portion of the NAEP qualified for the school lunch program, compared with 66 percent in 2009 and 65 percent in 2005.

A huge majority of AI/AN students taking the NAEP attend public schools (89 percent at grade four, 92 percent at grade eight). Fifty percent of fourth graders and 44 percent of eighth graders attend high-density schools, those in which there are more than 25 percent AI/AN students. Students attending low-density schools (less than 25 percent AI/AN students) performed best on the NAEP; those in BIE schools performed the worst. A higher percentage of children attending high-density public schools were eligible for the free lunch program (83 percent of fourth graders and 78 percent of eighth graders) than those attending low-density schools (62 percent of fourth graders and 57 percent of eighth

American Indian & Alaskan Native Student dropout rates are among the highest in the nation.  There are direct correlations between dropout rates and poverty and yet, as a nation, we choose to ignore these correlations.  If we wish to improve our nation’s test scores and graduation rates politicians on the local, state and federal level need to provide additional services, teachers and funding to those schools and students who need the most help.  Politically, politicians shy away from providing the greatest assistance to the ones who need the most.

Recently in New York City in a highly competitive, prestigious public school, seventy students were involved in the use of smartphone-enabled cheating. The cheating involved several state exams and was uncovered after a cellphone was confiscated from a 16-year-old junior during a citywide language exam. Cellphones are not permitted in city schools, and when officials looked into the student’s phone, they found a trail of text messages, including photos of test pages, that suggested pupils had been sharing information about state Regents exams while they were taking them.

Sixty-nine students had received the messages and responded to them.  All of the students will have to retake the exams, and the one whose phone was confiscated, who was said to be at the center of the cheating network, faces possible suspension and may have to transfer to another school by fall, the department said. Four other students involved in the cheating could also face suspension, a spokeswoman said.

Cheating on tests has been around since schools have been around.  But modern technology has made it easier to do so. Officials in Houston uncovered widespread cheating on an English final exam by students at a well-regarded school.  Hundreds of students were believed to be involved, and 60 were disciplined. An SAT cheating scandal on Long Island last year, in which test takers used fake IDs to impersonate other students, led to nationwide changes in the way college admissions exams are administered.

There is a great deal of pressure being exerted on students to succeed in order to get into “good” college.  But that is not an excuse.  What has been an on-going problem is that high-test scores have become the emphasis rather than valuing learning.