Re: [Phys-L] US schools

[Ze'ev Wurman <zeev@ieee.org>]

On 7/16/2012 10:00 AM, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
> > For example:  Suppose you are under contract to deliver widgets
> > to General Motors, or to deliver soft-drink syrup to McDonald's.
> > The buyer wants the stuff fully up to specifications, and exactly
> > on time.  Now suppose that due to a flood or whatever, you are
> > unable to obtain the components and ingredients you need.  If
> > you fail to make the delivery, there will be severe sanctions.
> > You could easily go bankrupt.  Real-world businesses worry about
> > this all the time.  The contract forces you to worry about it,
> > because as bad as your losses might be, the buyer's losses are
> > even greater, if you fail to make the delivery.
>
> Incompetent attorneys here -- I though contracts include outs due to "acts of 'god'".

Acts of God are just a fraction of what can go wrong for a 
manufacturer/supplier. Organizational and individual incompetence and/or 
mismanagement are much more frequent contributors to breaching 
contracts. Ask Boeing and its Dreamliner planners.

On 2012, Jul 16, , at 08:18, John Denker wrote:
> > On 07/10/2012 02:49 PM, Ze'ev Wurman wrote:
> >
> > > Education as a welfare for the society *at large* is mostly a 20th
> > > century construct in this country.
> > a) Even if it were true, it would be irrelevant.
> > -- Spacetime is a 20th-century construct; that doesn't  mean it is
> >   a bad idea.
> > -- Similarly, antibiotics such as penicillin etc. are a 20th-century
> >   construct; that doesn't mean they are a bad idea.
> > -- And so forth.
> >
> > b) It's not true anyway.  Horace Mann (1796 – 1859) would have
> > been amused to learn that public education was a "20th-century
> > construct."
> >     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann
> >
> > c) Calling it "welfare" is nothing but name-calling.  It is not an
> > acceptable substitute for actual evidence or reasoning.
>
> thank-you.
>
> I was going to point out much earlier from Germany.
>
> <...>

Perhaps I could have called it "education as a right" rather than 
"education as a welfare" but my intent was to stress the forced aspect 
that removes responsibility from the recipient, and "welfare" captures 
it better than "right." Please note I was explicitly limiting the 
discussion to THIS country, rather to Europe. In this country mandatory 
public education came to being only around the turn of the 20th century 
(even if some localities experimented with it earlier), and I find this 
fact important -- it shows that we have successfully established a great 
country without it, and I find arguments that such system is perforce 
needed to support a modern nation-state not convincing. Strongly 
centralized public mandatory education system is not in our national 
bloodstream, so to speak. Examples of successful Western-European modern 
nation-states without mandatory K-12 attendance (e.g., Finland with only 
K-9), and without centralized command and control of school, such as 
Sweden, Belgium, Holland, etc., were intended to demonstrate the 
feasibility of decentralization, not to indicate the precise template to 
emulate.

---------------

Another point, JD mentioned that "Don't tell me typical charter schools 
are required to serve all comers. There are innumerable ways they can 
get around such requirements, and there is overwhelming statistical 
evidence that they do so.  (Again there is an obvious exception for 
chartered-by-the-district schools.)"

A lot of charter school data can be found here:

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cse.asp

The most recent charter NCES authorization data I could find is pretty 
dated (2003, indicator 28, here: 
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2005095 ) and shows 51% 
of public charters were chartered by the school district (28% by state, 
16% by IHEs). Newer 2011 non-government data 
<http://www.qualitycharters.org/images/stories/pdfs/publications/nacsa2011_state_of_charter_school_authorizing.pdf> 
shows similar 52% authorized by districts. But could it be that JD's 
assumption is flawed to begin with? It seems easier for small groups of 
special interests to hijack a school chartered by a district than by a 
state. The available 2003 data seems to indicate that at-risk population 
composes a much higher fraction at institutions chartered by the state 
rather than by the districts.

I don't have better data but I'd suggest that making sweeping 
generalizations about charters is foolhardy. Charter schools are 
anything but "typical" and it's worth delving into the data before 
jumping to "obvious" conclusions.

--------------

In any case, I thought that this thread has exhausted itself on this 
list ... some participants seemed to have lost their sanity (or, at 
least, manners) when faced with social science data that collided with 
their preconceived notions. Perhaps we should stop?

Ze'ev