The Gaming Den

mean_liar wrote:Thank your for finally defining your parameters.

The issue you're looking for is charter schools.

How is that a logical issue and not a religious issue.

Why do conservatives want charter schools? Because they hate that pesky first amendment preventing them from using schools for religious indoctrination.

It's entirely emotion based. "Mean Liberals are banning God from Schools! Don't you want schools that are going to make your kids God fearing."

I mean, no one with any brains at all believes that charter schools instead of public schools will create a better education system.

EDIT: Except if your definition of better schools is "less learning and more godding" in which case, see how you are all about the religion.

Actually, conservatives have pretty much abandoned charter schools as it turns out they can't use them to pick and choose students and lessons. Hence focusing on vouchers and private schools instead.

Charter schools have some benefit, but only if they cannot pick their students from the cream of public schools.

-Crissa

First, charter schools are significantly outperforming public schools, at least in MA. Maybe it's different in your neck of the woods but I doubt it; at a minimum they're on par.

Second, they can be religious but not all, not even most actually are. For example, here are the charter schools local to me:

http://charterschoolsboston.com/

The majority aren't religiously-affiliated and they were founded to employ non-orthodox teaching methods as well as enjoy a freer hand with internal governance and hiring and rewards practices.

...Right, 'charter' schools do 'better' when they get to spend taxpayer dollars and don't have to teach pesky low-income, from broken families, or handicapped students.

Also, not all conservatives are religious, either. A majority say they are, but only a minority actually practice that.

Being able to discriminate is far more important to conservatives. Match that 'performance' of those schools vs the public school norm and control for demographic, and you'd probably see that many don't actually do better.

Abandoning other kids for your kid? That's prime conservative territory.

-Crissa

Kaelik wrote:I mean, no one with any brains at all believes that charter schools instead of public schools will create a better education system.

I believe you're smarter than this. The comparison between charter and public schools currently finds a raftload of reasons to allow charter schools. You're allowing your hate for religion show your ignorance of the subject.

When you expand to private, faith-based schools you have something to rant about. But those aren't charter schools.

The 2008 GOP platform says...

"We support choice in education for all families, especially those with children trapped in dangerous and failing schools, whether through charter schools, vouchers or tax credits for attending faith-based or other non-public schools, or the option of home schooling."


Now, that doesn't really go into policy a LOT but it does a little. If a parent wants their child to attend a private school and we know roughly how much their taxes were to go to finance that child's public education, then I have no problem with a less-than-100% tax credit for that child's parents to allow them to spend that money at a private institution.

On its face that seems a logical position to take: parents should be able to practice their religion insofar as it includes their children without government interference even including pulling them from schools they find religiously intolerable. As long as the state gets a cut and a little more per-capita spending on the other students then it seems to be a win-win.


...


I did find this as well:

"Domestic Disaster Response

Americans hit by disaster must never again feel abandoned by their government. The Katrina disaster taught a painful lesson: The federal government’s system for responding to a natural calamity needs a radical overhaul. We recognize the need for a natural disaster insurance policy."

Seems logical to me.

Crissa wrote:...Right, 'charter' schools do 'better' when they get to spend taxpayer dollars and don't have to teach pesky low-income, from broken families, or handicapped students.

In my experience, those are exactly the kids that charter schools deal with - and they do a much better job than traditional schooling because they teach completely differently.

mean_liar wrote:First, charter schools are significantly outperforming public schools, at least in MA. Maybe it's different in your neck of the woods but I doubt it; at a minimum they're on par.

Yes, and I'm sure that they are. Just like I'm sure that the Yale Law Graduates outperform North Central Upper 12th College of Law Degrees Graduates.

But that's because:
1) Charters schools have significantly more money per pupil than public schools.
2) Charter school students always come from one of two groups: a) Rich people (and rich people kids outperform poor people kids on average), b) Poor people who have proven to be very interested in education.
3) Charter schools are rare, and not the default. They also often don't have busing. That means that for a child to go to a charter school, the parent must:
a) Have investigated the schools around, and thought about where he/she wants her/his child to go.
b) Be willing to take the extra work to meet with the Charter school officials, and pursue the option.
c) be willing to drive their kid to school.
So only students with involved parents end up going to charter schools. And you know who else generally outperforms? Children who have involved parents.

And you know what. Charter schools outperform more here than in the UK, and that's because Charter schools are better supported and encouraged at the UK, and are therefore more prevalent and less rare as a choice.

And that's the point. The more you support charter schools, the less charter schools outperform, because those advantages that have nothing to do with how they teach or administer and everything to do with how their students are selected become less and less of factors.

And then you get to 100% charter schools, and no one cares, because charter schools can't avoid teaching stupid kids with shitty parents, so they have the exact same statistics as the public schools they replaced.

Maj wrote::confused:

In my experience, those are exactly the kids that charter schools deal with - and they do a much better job than traditional schooling because they teach completely differently.

Charter schools pull resources away from other schools. This isn't just 'there are a limited number of teachers' thing, this is flat plain: If you have $100K dollars to teach 1000 kids, and then split off 100 kids at 200 a pop, there are now 900 kids that only have $88 each instead of $100.

Second point, if they pick and choose students, of course their results will be better. Rich kids do better in school, period. Non-handicapped kids. Etc. The charter school doesn't have to deal with these problems.

When you account for the demographics, most charter or private schools don't do better on any result.

In other words, while some individuals may do better, more individuals will do worse, the majority don't have a difference in outcome.

-Crissa

All that aside, Kaelik - though some of it, especially as it regards your remark on funding, is incorrect - wouldn't that still mean that supporting charter schools is a logical conclusion to reach?


...

Crissa wrote:...Right, 'charter' schools do 'better' when they get to spend taxpayer dollars and don't have to teach pesky low-income, from broken families, or handicapped students.

Actually, charter schools (at least in MA) accept students on a lottery basis, and you have to actually live in the city to enter that lottery: no suburban exiles. They also cater to students with special needs. There's no other limitation to admission: no cost, no tests, nothing. Most of the students are actually from low-income families since that's who actually lives in Boston - the rich kids are all going to private schools for $10k a year anyway.

Their egalitarianism is one of their founding principles, and the vast majority were founded locally in order to fill the gap created by terrible public schools.

mean_liar wrote:All that aside, Kaelik - though some of it, especially as it regards your remark on funding, is incorrect - wouldn't that still mean that supporting charter schools is a logical conclusion to reach?

1) No, I'm not wrong about funding.
2) How is it a logical conclusion to reach?

I mean, I guess if one of your premises is: "students who's parents are unable, unwilling, or don't care enough to help their children out deserve worse access to education than people who's parents care."

But that's a pretty dumb fucking premise, and not one you could actually get 50% of anyone to agree with.

mean_liar wrote:Actually, charter schools (at least in MA) accept students on a lottery basis, and you have to actually live in the city to enter that lottery: no suburban exiles. They also cater to students with special needs. There's no other limitation to admission: no cost, no tests, nothing. Most of the students are actually from low-income families since that's who actually lives in Boston - the rich kids are all going to private schools for $10k a year anyway.

Their egalitarianism is one of their founding principles, and the vast majority were founded locally in order to fill the gap created by terrible public schools.

You forgot the most important part, which is that the parent must 1) Research local schools and decide to attempt to enroll their student (and wait for a response before making important decision, which requires the economic flexibility of the well off).
2) Be willing and able to ensure the student makes it to school on time themselves without access to public busses.
2)

mean_liar wrote:All that aside, Kaelik - though some of it, especially as it regards your remark on funding, is incorrect - wouldn't that still mean that supporting charter schools is a logical conclusion to reach?

To expand on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#Funding

It appears that if charter schools aren't significantly cheaper, they're around equal in terms of state funding.

If charter schools' advantage disappears once they're ubiquitous, well... I suppose at that point we ought to consider finding something better. In the mean time it sounds good.

...and then further reading indicates that their national results are spotty. In MA they're doing very well; nationally, not so. Interesting.

I'm beginning to think my perception of charter schools is skewed - Boston appears to be on the higher-performing end of the curve, probably because of its proximity to Harvard and MIT's Education grad schools.

For example, travel in Boston is trivial due to the subway system. If you're living in Boston, getting anywhere in Boston isn't a big deal - no need for busing or anything. However, I'm not sure why there's an assumption that charter schools don't provide busing - at least in MA they still have to ( http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/tech_advisory/07_2.html ).

The wiki article mentions that the pressure of a local charter school actually improves the students' standardized testing performance at surrounding public schools.

Also, in MA kids that attempt but fail to get into charter schools are outperformed by those that succeed, so it's more than just "motivated students + parents" at work.

...in the end you have an alternative method of schooling that, at worst, is equal to the current system. Not only that, but in well-implemented areas it has large advantages.

Supporting that appears logical.

These schools primarily cater to low-income students... I don't know where the idea that they're for rich kids, or even middle-class, comes from.

Did you read your own link?

Charter school income per pupil = per pupil federal aid + donations + laws passed to grant more aid.

Public school Aid = per pupil federal aid + (1/number of pupils)property taxes.

One of those is larger than the other.

And once again, Charter schools are not at worst equal, they are at best equal, and at worse, they are shittholes or terror where children are brainwashed.

Any school which spends even a second talking about god when it could be educating, and that's most of them, is wasting peoples time and money.

Where does that god thing come from? Seriously, the vast majority of these are non-denominational.

Also, the article:

"In August 2005, a national report of charter school finance undertaken by the Thomas B. Fordam Institute, a pro-charter group,[17] found that across 16 states and the District of Columbia — which collectively enroll 84 percent of the nation’s one million charter school students — charter schools receive about 22 percent less in per-pupil public funding than the district schools that surround them, a difference of about $1,800. For a typical charter school of 250 students, that amounts to about $450,000 per year. The study asserts that the funding gap is wider in most of twenty-seven urban school districts studied, where it amounts to $2,200 per student, and that in cities like San Diego and Atlanta, charters receive 40% less than traditional public schools."

"A 2008 study that looked at charter school funding in all 40 charter states and the District of Columbia found that charter students are funded on average at 61 cents compared to every dollar for their district peers, with charter funding averaging $6,585 per pupil compared to $10,771 per pupil at conventional district public schools"

"Without federal funding, private funding, and "other income", DC charter schools received slightly more on average ($8,725 versus $8,676 per pupil), but that funding was more concentrated in the better funded charter schools (as seen by the median DC charter school funding of $7,940 per pupil)"

The one dissenting study the Wiki article quotes doesn't have any figures that I saw ( http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n34.html ).


If people want to donate to schools, that's awesome - and decent policy, considering that ultimately all the state really cares about it is how much its costing them. Who cares if they get donations? The big thing is bang for the public buck.

Kaelik wrote:Why do conservatives want charter schools? Because they hate that pesky first amendment preventing them from using schools for religious indoctrination.

No, if they wanted religious schools they would have religious schools.

Why do conservatrives want charter schools? I would have thought that was intitutively obvious to the casual observer. I'll explain slowly and I promise I won't mention religion again.

Public schools are controlled by teacher's unions.
Conservatives don't like unions
(Unless they are conservative unions and ... I won't go there)
Charter schools aren't controlled by teacher's unions.

Charter schools also give some illusion of "free market" to a basic monopoly system of lower education where the school you are forced to go to is solely based on where you live. The idea is that they do better whcih goads the other school to do better to compete for the resource of good students.

In theory the combination of charter schools and declining student populations causes a free market economy to develop the best possible education system.

That's why conservatives like charter schools.

Like I said, lottery charter schools (as I said, schools that can't choose their students) are beneficial, by lifting the burden off of geographical public schools.

But as I later pointed out, giving more money to the charter schools hurts the public schools.

And having them take public money and be religious? Seriously uncool. I'm not sure how to deal with it... Admittedly, it's okay that schools teach what the parents want, but that marginalizes those who cannot afford such benefits.

My sister went to one, in an already better school district. This district got nearly a hundred dollars per student more than the one I attended. This isn't fair, and while I'm okay with charter schools, I'm not okay with the imbalance of opportunities between districts. My county never participated in the level of activities which leads to national things. My sister's district? National Little League Champions.

-Crissa

FrankTrollman wrote:...until you realize that the people in question were being subjected to nuisance FOI requests. Literally dozens of them a week for the same shit, stuff that had already been surrendered or denied by a court. Requests by the same people.

Thats not an issue the scientists even need to know about, much less are required to do anything for. People like me run the email compliance software, process FOI requests and hand back the results. Half the point is that the potentially accused don't even need to be told that an FOI data collection is even occurring.

Now I'm probably pretty extreme as far as FOI laws go, mostly because I work for an ex-police state government. People who fuck with that process at all are undermining the rule of law in the worst possible way. "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis." This quote (which I can't verify since wikileaks is still down) is not a joke.

I expect my side of any debate to uphold record keeping and transparency principles. Partly because they're right, partly because pulling bullshit stunts is like strawmanning your own argument.

Technically, they're not even required to record the emails of these guys.

That's how nuisance these requests are.

-Crissa

Draco_Argentum wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:...until you realize that the people in question were being subjected to nuisance FOI requests. Literally dozens of them a week for the same shit, stuff that had already been surrendered or denied by a court. Requests by the same people.

Thats not an issue the scientists even need to know about, much less are required to do anything for. People like me run the email compliance software, process FOI requests and hand back the results. Half the point is that the potentially accused don't even need to be told that an FOI data collection is even occurring.

This is demonstrably not how it works in East Anglia. Possibly because this is England and not Australia. But mostly I am going to say that it's because the entire CRU has a staff of 30 people and the FOI requests included private fucking personal emails.

So whatever the fuck you feel about the FOI act in general, can you not begin to see that perhaps it can be used as a tool of harassment? And yes, in this case it totally is.

Now I'm probably pretty extreme as far as FOI laws go, mostly because I work for an ex-police state government. People who fuck with that process at all are undermining the rule of law in the worst possible way. "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis." This quote (which I can't verify since wikileaks is still down) is not a joke.

Personally, I think it's kind of funny. And since they didn't actually do that, any accusation of wrong dong is laughable. A private email could talk about shooting Hispanics or eating babies - without a solid context to show that it was ever a serious plan, and without any actual action on that front, there's no wrong doing.

Bottom line: dealing with several spurious FOI requests in a day is time consuming and as fucking annoying as it is of course intended to be. And no matter what anyone suggested doing (in seriousness or in jest), if no one actually did anything wrong, then no one did anything wrong!

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:This is demonstrably not how it works in East Anglia. Possibly because this is England and not Australia. But mostly I am going to say that it's because the entire CRU has a staff of 30 people and the FOI requests included private fucking personal emails.

When I put the allegation to Professor Jones that the hacked e-mails suggested he had supported deleting e-mails in breach of FOI, he said: "We haven't deleted any emails. I delete my own personal emails a year at a time regardless of subject as I have too many, but the university still has the emails." (ref)

Taking this at face value since it makes the CRU look good, you're wrong, Frank. The UEA runs the email system in question, not the CRU itself. So no, the scientists shouldn't have to handle requests about their email.

UEA wrote:The publication of a selection of stolen data is the latest example of a sustained and, in some instances, a vexatious campaign which may have been designed to distract from reasoned debate about the nature of the urgent action which world governments must consider to mitigate, and adapt to, climate change. We are committed to furthering this debate despite being faced with difficult circumstances related to a criminal breach of our security systems and our concern to protect colleagues from the more extreme behaviour of some who have responded in irrational and unpleasant ways to the publication of personal information.

Its publicised and given every denialist fool easy ammunition. The problem with trying to avoid an FOI is that it makes you look bad, and thats all the wankers needed to start a huge scandal about it. So they've failed their own goal.

Given that you were in favour of hacking Palin's yahoo account you can't complain that these were private emails. They were using a business system subject to the Environmental Information Regulations, all use of it must be able to withstand public scrutiny. This is how it works when you sign on with an organisation that has FOI requirements. There is no free pass for personal email and the staff would have been forced to sign paperwork indicating that they accept and agree to this.

Further, the claim that suggesting a course of action is not wrong if you don't do it is a load of crap. There are plenty of criminal offenses related to planning to do something that you never get to actually do. In specific you're wrong because:

[url=http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/environmental_info_reg/detailed_specialist_guides/environmental_information_regulations_statutory_instrument_2004.pdf wrote:EIR[/url]]Offence of altering records with intent to prevent disclosure
19. - (1) Where -
(a) a request for environmental information has been made to a public authority under
regulation 5; and

(b) the applicant would have been entitled (subject to payment of any charge) to that
information in accordance with that regulation,
any person to whom this paragraph applies is guilty of an offence if he alters, defaces,
blocks, erases, destroys or conceals any record held by the public authority, with the
intention of preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of the
information to which the applicant would have been entitled.

It actually is an offense to delete data that is subject to a request. Asking people to violate a law is actually illegal. The quote requesting that is not phrased in a joking manner at all. Its phrased in typical office speak for 'please do something'. If it was, 'why don't we delete stuff to piss the denialists off' that would be a joke.You're reading a joke into it because you want their to be one.

Draco wrote: So no, the scientists shouldn't have to handle requests about their email.

What the fuck?

How do you get from "some other dude maintains the email server" to "a FOI Request dealing with a scientist's personal email and ongoing work can and even should be handled without consultation with, and thus effort by the scientist in question"? Seriously, what the fucking hell are you talking about? Some other dude manages the email server backups. Bully for him. But it would still be grossly irresponsible to hand over every fucking email with a specific key word or from a certain period without consultation with the people involved. Many of those emails contain copyrighted materials that they don't have redistribution rights for. And the people making these spurious requests know that.

And you know it too. Take a step back from your utopian hippie information anarchism for a moment and realize that, legally speaking, that we don't live in an informationally free society. That people do have privacy, that information is proprietary, and that many demands for disclosure are not in good faith.

And that people demanding to go through your laundry is an attack on your person and on your free time. And that it is in fact, an action performed with the full knowledge of that fact.

-Username17

Just to clarify my point here, since I don't like people to credit me with statements I didn't actually make.

The only thing I actually said was that stating that every right-wing (not the same thing as American Conservative) position is a religious belief is itself a religious statement, or at least something that sounds like an article of faith to me.

I'll give you an example of a right-wing position that is based on fact and numbers and not on emotions. I live in the province of Quebec, in Canada. It is easily the most left-wing jurisdiction of north america, one that can make California look like a right-wing nutjob's paradise. Trust me, you have to live here to understand. In Quebec we pretty much have a 100% public health system, where both the insurer and the provider is the provincial government. There are definitely good reasons for things to be this way, but there are also clear problems that derive from such a state of affairs, namely the fact that a lot of health problems are worsened, if not totally created by the waiting times that are the by-products of the government's mismanagement of the public system. A while ago, there were proposals to introduce a two-tier system where the public system would have been maintained and still financed by the population as a whole, but where citizens who were willing to pay could have had access to private insurances and clinics. There were also a lot of regulations that were proposed to insure that doctors, surgeons and nurses would still have to spend most of their working hours in the public system, thus both insuring the quality of the public system and facilitating the access to the public system to those that needed it.

It wasn't much of a surprise to me when public sector's trade unions and left wing parties alike mobilized against the new proposal on the sole argument that people should have access to the same health service, whatever their means to pay was. It didn't matter to them that everybody would have benefitted from such a system, since as I said the public system is badly mismanaged and inaccessible as it is right now.

So there you have it, we had a reasonable, right-of-center, logical proposition which was finally shot down by the irrational, emotional arguments of the left-wing lobby. Granted, the law finally passed but it was so diluted that pretty much nothing has changed since then and people still have to wait 12 hours (this is not a typo) on average in emergency rooms before being treated. We have operating rooms that are unused because of public mismanagement, even if surgeons are willing to work more hours.

I could also talk about education, where we have a 100% public education system (even our private schools have government subsidies), and we still manage to have a 34% dropout rate for boys of high school age. It costs us about 1000$-2000$CAN (depending on the faculty) to study in our universities, but they are so underfunded that classes are packed to full capacity and the universities are not able to hire enough professors to teach us.

I could go on and on. The american right-wing does not have a monopoly on irrational and emotional arguments.

The Vigilante wrote:Just to clarify my point here, since I don't like people to credit me with statements I didn't actually make.

The only thing I actually said was that stating that every right-wing (not the same thing as American Conservative) position is a religious belief is itself a religious statement, or at least something that sounds like an article of faith to me.

So you jumped into a discussion about American Politics because you were offended and afraid that a sweeping generalization being made about the arguments being made in American Politics might be seen to cast aspersions on you, despite the fact that you live in another country, where politics are different. News flash: when people talk about American Politics, they frequently talk about "Liberals" without any thought or care to mention that the "Liberal Party" of Australia is actually the Conservative party. Similarly, when we're talking about American Politics, and we talk about "Nationalist Policies" we are statistically unlikely to be talking about the Nationalist Front of Malaysia's policies.

So when you come in and start throwing around some example from local politics in Quebec, that's completely not a refutation of Kaelik's original statement. Indeed, you're talking about Local Quebec Politics, which I can't fact check. Because I don't care. And even my Canadian girl friend does not care. Because she's from BC, and does not know - or care - what the issues are in your local politics in Quebec.

-Username17

The Vigilante wrote:So there you have it, we had a reasonable, right-of-center, logical proposition which was finally shot down by the irrational, emotional arguments of the left-wing lobby. Granted, the law finally passed but it was so diluted that pretty much nothing has changed since then and people still have to wait 12 hours (this is not a typo) on average in emergency rooms before being treated. We have operating rooms that are unused because of public mismanagement, even if surgeons are willing to work more hours.

I have to ask about this, because it comes up a lot in health care discussions, but do ALL people have to spend 12 hours waiting in the emergency room? The people suffering strokes, heart attacks, and allergic reactions just have to put that shit on hold and buckle down in the waiting room for half a day? Or are the people subject to these wait times usually the ones that can wait and are thus, definitionally, not an emergency?

Where does this idea come from that you need to be able to pop into the ER to have something checked out and then bustle about the rest of your day because I have shit to do, goddamnit. You thought this medical emergency was serious enough to warrant a trip to the ER in the first place--you should realize that your plans are probably shot for the immediate future. Do people sometimes die in waiting rooms? Of course they do. But does that kill more people than not having medical care/access at all? Is the problem that it occassionally kills the "wrong" people, because such instances don't differentiate between the people that could have afforded better medical care--if only the evil gub'ment didn't stop them--and the people that couldn't have afforded care otherwise?

You say that the system would benefit if people could buy supplemental coverage that would be provided by the same doctors that currently provide the government coverage (though they'd have to work mostly for the government), right? How is that actually supposed to work, anyway? Do they get more compensation through this supplemental scheme, or do they get paid the same? If they're paid the same, why not just keep working in the public sector? If they're paid more, how much more? Would the new rules and bureaucracy cost more than simply raising the wages of medical workers?

Or is this just an exercise to create a way to cut in front of the hoi polloi? Would you consider a system that just cuts out all of the necessary additional bureaucracy and simply institutes a policy where a person could walk into an ER, throw down $500 and buy their way to the front of the line? People could get into bidding wars right there, if they felt it necessary, and your doctor could literally be bought out from under you in front of your face. That would be a way more honest system, as at least you'd have to look someone in the face when you told them that your economic prosperity made you more important than them, regardless of your relative medical needs.