It is most reasonable to think that today’s corporatocracy would be 100% behind the most favorite ed reform trend — using testing and “public” education, aka charter schools vs other institutions to sort offspring — because it quite naturally fits into their world view of humanity.

Corporate philanthropies such as the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and others financed the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., the center of American eugenics research from 1910 to 1940. During those years, an extensive amount of data on Americans was collected and organized, much driven by the threatening immigrant trends of those years. It is a well-accepted fact that America’s eugenics movement influenced Hitler’s thinking.

This all might sound bizarre, but it is really quite mainstream to those who are sufficiently well-read. Learn more about the history of that era at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/. This site is sponsored by a program of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a division of the National Institutes of Health.

Yet another reason to be concerned and vigilant with the current ed reform movement, and the motives of the people who are pushing and funding it (Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Michael Bloomberg in NYC, the Walton Family Foundation, Dell Foundation, etc.).

“… no one is going to put bad kids from bad families in expensive private schools or in Charter Schools where you have to jump through hoops to gain admission. Where the bad kids will end up is dropped off at the nearest public school, and not just any school either, it will be that public school that is forced to service the bad neighborhoods where bad parents want to live.

So it is the public school teachers – union members all – that get to deal with Frankenstein Jr. …

So I don’t blame the teachers for the bad reading and math scores and I don’t want teachers to be paid based largely on the performance of the kiddies.”

I wouldn’t put it quite this way about teachers, either:

“To do so ensures that any teacher with an ounce of self respect and self preservation will refuse to work with certain (guess who?) people.”

…but I WOULD restate the general point — paying teachers based on their students’ performance certainly does motivate them to shun the most challenging students.

Saint Paul’s Episcopal School here in Oakland had several students with ADHD, severe learning disabilities, extremely gifted and with post-traumatic stress syndrome. And there were able to deal with all of them – Each one of the eight students that I know personally have all moved on to different private schools or into the public schools within the past two years.

Please don’t get me wrong; Saint Paul’s is a very, very good school for the 70% of the students in the middle – not the lower end learners and certainly not the upper end learners – the middle learners without emotional issues.

And no one is going to put bad kids from bad families in expensive private schools or in Charter Schools where you have to jump through hoops to gain admission. Where the bad kids will end up is dropped off at the nearest public school, and not just any school either, it will be that public school that is forced to service the bad neighborhoods where bad parents want to live.

So it is the public school teachers – union members all – that get to deal with Frankenstein Jr. Frank will proceed to turn life at the High School into a disfunctional chaos given an environment of indiscipline where he and his female counterparts cannot be stopped or controlled.

So I don’t blame the teachers for the bad reading and math scores and I don’t want teachers to be paid based largely on the performance of the kiddies. To do so ensures that any teacher with an ounce of self respect and self preservation will refuse to work with certain (guess who?) people. I want the administrators to create a system of schools where performing students are segregated into schools that advance their interests and the lesser students are put on different campuses and programs that advance their interests – which is in no way college prep. Frank Jr can be put to good work. After you break him.

I was just filing away old documents and came across SAT scores for someone I’m particularly proud of. He got a 420 verbal and 390 math in 2005. He now makes in excess of $80k a year as a state licenced skilled medical technician. Those scores were before he got medical attention for hyperactivity – and getting the medical care is a story in itself. He had real difficulty finishing high school. He did vocational school and started working. Now he has his own place and is able to pay on his educational loans and live better than all of his high school friends. This is what vocational counseling, testing, a good psychiatrist & a Rx plan, a lawyer and a boot in the rear can do. A similar story involves a foster child who wound up becoming a surgical technician – after military training in operating room technical services. He was taken away by the recruiter to boot camp 3 days after graduation and stayed in for 10 years with advanced training. He now works in a hospital in Southern CA. Another person I have followed for over 12 years was living in the bushes in SF once. He has a purchased home, a wife and child and has held his current job for 4 years or more. It took 6 months of Antabuse and years of rehab and AA meetings to get him to this point in life. He will never be safe, but he’s working and not homeless. I have a couple of other people I could mention in the bay area who look like a million bucks but if you could access their rap sheets you would have seen drug/alcohol problems out of the teen years that landed them in long jail terms and rehab. Now they are in corporate america in 200K+ range.

So I’m not ready to write off anybody. I know what can be done with people who don’t seem to have so much. It’s too bad about the adult ed decision that started this thread. But if the secondary schools are given the needed free hand in dealing with the students needs and not catering to some state fantasy about everybody going to UC Berkeley we could have a lot less poverty and a lot more security for the less gifted public school kids. Even kids who have their parents traits of aggression, dope/alcohol and short attention spans can be put to some use. But probably with less algebra and more driver’s training, more sex ed and less geography, (much) more work study programs and less foreign language, more food sciences and less Chemistry.

The public schools are where these people (left side of the bell curve) are going to be set straight or consigned to the gutter. They are not private school material. The public schools are crucial to the well being of the proletariat and the maintenance of the middle class. Without the public schools turning out the larger numbers of middle class the private schools output is not enough to sustain the demographic of lower, middle and upper class occupation and earners we have had across the 20th Century to provide political/economic stability in the USA.

We really don’t want to turn the USA into another Mexico. In any way. What we are doing in the schools – failing to make the proles ready for military, industry or higher education, takes us closer to it.

And terminating Adult Ed does not harm the core mission of preparing the adolescents for military, industry or higher ed. That’s why the Adult Ed had to go and the superintendent is doing what must be done.

“BAD kiddies … really do have a genetic problem that (unimpeded) impairs functioning so much they get institutionalized.”

I don’t really feel qualified to explore these issues. Many cite post-traumatic stress disorder and/or the general toxic effects of a violent environment that fosters an oppositional attitude toward law-abiding good-citizen behavior. Some academics who study school achievement cite high levels of lead poisoning in low-income urban neighborhoods.

My basic point, though, is that private schools do not get the credit for the fact that their students are less likely to fall into this category.

The problem we are having with the future Pelican Bay kiddies is that they are BAD kiddies. They really do have a genetic problem that (unimpeded) impairs functioning so much they get institutionalized. Pelican Bay and CDCR are really nuthouses. You can be a criminal and not allow yourself to get caught and given a long sentences. I see (relatively) few successful criminals and I see mainly disfunctional screwups revolving in and out of CDCR all their lives.

The lifers have a certain profile that tends to have an early onset. We don’t typically see someone who is making a normal adjustment in life, and at age 30 does his first armed robbery in front of a camera and goes to prison for a long time. Child criminals in court have an extrordinarily high rate of Dx for mental illness (personality disorder, etc). They are the bulk of our lifetime frequent flyers.

Nobody is going to waste the money paying to put these misbegotten kids in private school. In some way everybody understands they are going to be institutionalized – or have a high probability of that. They are as a rule fatherless boys. That is also a reflection of their lineage since abandoning your kids is a marker for the same psych issues. (As in bio-Dad &/or Mommy were ASPD, Alcoholic, unable to read, had issues etc.)

Think of it as evolution in action.

All of this has nothing to do with privilege. More likely bad reproduction and indiscipline.

Our public schools previously would take in all comers and by imposing discipline, conformity and compliance with authority, would train more people to pass into mainstream life. The troubled lines would still have their issues with alcoholism or whatever, but they would do so from the vantage point of being employable in the formative stages of their lives. This is what we have carefully removed.

Now our schools don’t give a fig about making the kids employable or ready to work at age 18. The current crop are not exactly housebroken at age 18. The experience they would get at say, Heald Business College (dressing and grooming for work while in class, diction, manners and protocol enforced, etc) is no longer taught in any way in urban high schools.

Instead our schools waste money with unwanted college prep classes for people with zero college potential while cutting driver’s ed and training (among other classes) which is far more important to the proletariat.

Your focus on privilege is a big part of your insistence that the poor are just like you and me. They are not. The difference goes as far as how the brain is wired. You feel that because we can all wear the same shirts and pants we are equal and the same. I can imagine where you got that notion. Of course your kids did OK. Now look at the OUSD reading avg scores at 10th grade.

Without the structure and discipline our public schools used to impose on the lower class they are devolving into a permanent growing underclass with less social mobility than ever known in the USA history. This road to hell is paved with the good intentions of the equality dreamers.

By not forcefully imposing structure and discipline on the lower class we have allowed them to evolve off into their own language, dress, mores, and “culture” which they do enforce on each other and grow geometrically. They should never have been allowed such freedom in the formative years.

Paying for this decline in productivity will break the USA to (run the high risk of having) a Weimar Republic episode which will be followed by a National Socialist regime.

You have your own well behaved kids and their immediate friends – you feel the way you do. I see crashed literacy scores in LAUSD and OUSD, growing mortality and institutionalization rates, bastardy rates, and unemployment rates – and I have my position. When I sound off on the notion of cutting Adult Ed to maintain core functions these are my thoughts. I’d cut further to protect driver’s ed and vocational training also.

Brave New World

Both of them were aware of the fact that *correlation does not equal causation* by the end of middle school — urban public middle school — and that’s the key principle that you’re missing, Nextset.

The kids who are likely to end up at Pelican Bay are less likely to go to private school (despite my tongue-in-cheek, though true and valid, example). It’s not that private school would keep them from winding up at Pelican Bay, or that public school that would make them more likely to wind up there. It’s that privilege — which is a key factor in steering a kid toward private school — is also a key factor in making a kid less likely to wind up at Pelican Bay.

That’s one reason my twin example is kind of telling, since the kids are equally privileged.

Gosh, I’m not trying to say Private and Charter kids are not mentally ill, addicted, Liberal or Musically inclined. They can be all those things. But they can probably read and write and will be statistically less likely to end up in Pelican Bay or dead by 35.

On the other hand, those who start urban public schools or are still attending at 9th grade have a different set of stats even more so if they are black or brown. Start with their likelihood to be able to read and write. Then the stat to get a high school diploma and a 4 year college degree. There are other stats like getting HIV and a felony conviction – again these differ wildly depending on using stats for whites, asians, blacks or hispanics.

So I return to my point. The Brave New World has the lives of the population increasingly set by the circumstances of birth (reinforced and compounded by the schools). With like associating with like. Before the great society in CA – say Los Angeles and the other large urban schools – there was more social mobility.

The reason for having our public schools is to have this social mobility. In our devotion to political correctness and comfort we are not making our public school products durable and socially mobile. If they are black we are making them prematurely dead. If their own “culture” is involved it’s not like the schools fight it.

Back to thread. When we select what to cut we have to remember the mission priority. I put forth the notion that we may want to keep driver’s ed and dump college prep – make tradeoffs such as this. You can make a living if you can drive.