BostonBob sent this heart warming story of educational success to me. It seemed to leave a few facts out, so I went to the Patterson NJ School District website to fill in the gaps.
http://www.paterson.k12.nj.us/departments/business-services/user-friendly-budget-15.pdf
Here are the facts:
- There are 24,400 full time students in their schools.
- That would make approximately 4,000 students eligible to take the SAT exam. Only 19 students scored high enough on the SAT exam to get into college.
- The budget for the Patterson School District is $592 million. That is $24,000 per student.
So after spending approximately $280,000 per student over 12 years, this educational example of excellence produces 19 kids who are capable of attending college.
The liberal control freaks immediately say they need more teachers. They have 1,845 worthless union teachers who have proven their incompetence based upon results. That is a ratio of 13 students to 1 teacher. Sorry folks, that isn’t a major workload. These teachers are costing the taxpayer $100,000 per year with benefits. This doesn’t include their gold plated pension plans. What is the liberal solution? More money and more teachers.
How do the moron administrators respond to their utter and complete failure?
They stop using SAT scores as a measurement of student success. Maybe they consider not getting shot or staying out of prison as the true measure of success in Patterson. It certainly isn’t knowing your daddy.
Well fuck me dead. That’s brilliant. Maybe they should convince universities throughout the country to ignore SAT scores and allow every Patterson moron who can’t spell CAT to enter their institution of learning.
Only 19 Paterson Students Ready For College
Posted: Dec 01, 2014 10:43 AM EST Updated: Dec 01, 2014 10:43 AM EST
Thanks for filling in the blanks Admin. To add insult to injury if you look at the school calendar for Paterson the teachers are required to work 185 days. That works out to 37, 5 day work weeks. So lets throw in some weekend and evening work correcting papers and planning, that still works out to 15 weeks off. I’m sure you get at least that much time off Admin.
Bob.
Government schools are a pay check and handsome pension plan for teachers / administrators / maintenance people / bus drivers / bus mechanics.
After that, they attempt to teach students.
Obviously, the government has been in charge of this type of ‘factory’ education for over 100 years. They refuse to address the fact that after failing so many students, that their approach is not working.
Here in Minneapolis (where it’s 95% white) – we always need to have a coon for a superintendent. Some of the past coons have stolen, misused assets, misused assistants. Doesn’t matter – just get another coon. You will find all the supers in major cities to be coons. Which leads me to the conclusion that government schools are some sort of coon camp with weak pathetic white coon sympathizer jr. wardens (teachers).
One thing that is incorrect in the article – a 1200 will get you into most any state college.
Those aren’t days Bob their half or 3/4 days.
In at 8AM out at 2PM hour for lunch in the teacher cafeteria, study halls etc.
Don’t forget snow days and sick days, substitute teachers another great racket, and field trips where our beloved educators spend the days at a museum or a zoo with the kiddies.
“That would make approximately 4,000 students eligible to take the SAT exam. Only 19 students scored high enough on the SAT exam to get into college.”
You have to be eligible (meet specified academic standards) before you can take the SAT. Yes? How many students in the Paterson secondary schools were ineligible for this exam? Did this story of failure just go from bad to much worse?
Tenure is the correct spelling for the meaning expressed, and not tenor.
I think anyone in their Junior or Senior year can take the SAT. Maybe even Sophomores.
Dutchman is showing his age.
1,200 when it was two parts would get you into most colleges.
It’s now three parts and the total is 2,400.
I live in NJ (monmouth county) part of that statistic that is left out is in nj each town is supposed to pay for their own schools via property taxes since Patterson has seen the flight of good families the tax base is pretty low ,so it counts on “surburban towns to pay for their schools .That’s the real reason for our highest in country property taxes .Democrats have given away the state to the gimmie crowd and the surburban taxpayers pay dearly .My property tax is 27K ..another 2 years and I’m gone
HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT
@Admin: “Dutchman is showing his age. 1,200 when it was two parts would get you into most colleges. It’s now three parts and the total is 2,400. ”
I didn’t know there was an Eubonics part?
The ostensible goal is to impart knowledge to the kiddies, which is indisputably an epic failure from top to bottom.
The REAL goal, however, is to enlarge the union, funnel dues to politicians in exchange for those gold-plated pension plans and cushy tenured positions – all of it paid for by victimizing the private sector.
A side benefit is ensuring that the students graduate as ignorant dolts, because independent thinkers would question the racket that is our government school system.
To recap: we get bent over year after year for an increasingly costly system guaranteed to produce functional illiterates while immunizing the educational bureaucracy from it corruption and ineptitude.
Thank you, progressives. Your system is working brilliantly…for you.
The stats you gave Admin are wrong….the figure of 19 is actually 99….the error is due to Common Core Math done by the school’s administration.
Hi! Let’s talk IQ, one of my favorite subjects. I know you folks love it when I do that.
Study after study puts the IQ of blacks in the US somewhere around or south of 85 on average.
If that is true, you immediately eliminate around 75% of them from being able to handle college, no matter what. Those folks cannot even spell SAT, much less take the exam.
Now imagine you were an outlier – say in the top 10 per cent of that group with an IQ of 110+. You have the intelligence to go to college, but you have spent your entire life around dolts, criminals, miscreants. Your chances of college have plummeted.
Seems to me they need to target the bright kids at a young age, and focus on them. Nothing they will or can do will make the others college ready.
That is of course politically incorrect. All kids are equal, now aren’t they, and if you throw enough money at the problem you can create a bunch of Einsteins. That is a bunch of crap.
Even trying to get the majority through high school is overly ambitious. That half with IQs of 85 and under need to be given alternate pathways – life skills, service skills, etc. formal high school education simply is beyond them, and it is like trying to teach a pig to dance.
But I suppose I am just racist.
Dutchman – they also changed the scaling, so a 1976 score of 600 on a test is equivalent to around 700 today. The kids were doing worse and worse, so they needed to cover up that little factoid by changing the scoring system.
Loopy, don’t voice that unPC opinion in public.Keep it to yourself or you may be forced to sell the family totem pole just to keep your wigwam warm this winter .,,jus’ sayin’.
Disgraced scientist James Watson puts DNA Nobel Prize up for auction, will donate part of the proceeds
James Watson helped discover DNA, but the former head of the Cold Spring Harbor Lab on Long Island had to resign in 2007 after suggesting blacks are less intelligent. By selling his Nobel Prize and other historic artifacts, Watson hopes to ‘do my part in keeping the academic world an environment where great ideas and decency prevail.’
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/disgraced-scientist-james-watson-auctions-dna-nobel-prize-article-1.2029838
Institutions, like school districts…. what has your experience told you about them?
1. Aren’t they set up to most benefit those who control and work for them.
2. Aren’t institutional goals and/or practices ones that usually aren’t in the best interest of their members.
For point #1, see Bostonbob and Golden Oxen’s comment above. Or, recall my comment to an earlier post about state retirees whose yearly pension benefits are between 91% and 216% of their final year’s salary.
For point #2, just recall Administrator’s posts over the years about Catholic priests and the church establishment. Or, consider US foreign and local policies which disregard citizen values and interests.
Oh, and back to another point made in the post and comments above,
3. If institutions can’t meet goals announced or expected of them, the institutions define down the standards. Example: what Administrator wrote for this post.
Flash – unlike Watson, I own my business as opposed to work for someone. And even if my customers became outraged and pulled their business, it would not bother me. Quite the contrary – it would be a blessing.
The only thing really tying me to the yoke right now is a general sense of obligation to the world at large and my long-term employees in particular. And the world at large part is fading fast. Even the feeling of obligation to my long-termers is not what it was, as many, if not most of those, have settled into a routine, where they are no longer my best employees despite them being the best paid, but rather are riding out the time to their retirements. And so they are burning goodwill at a fast pace.
Its all white peoples fault! I wonder how many would qualify for the military.
Why is public education in the United States a mess while it seems to work just fine in Germany and Japan? Is the problem really teachers unions? I’m pretty sure they have those in Germany and Japan too. Is the problem pensions for teachers? I’m pretty sure they have those in Germany and Japan too.
What’s the difference? I think there is a hint in the article when they quote one of the students who took the SAT and enrolled in college: “Just last summer, my friend and teammate, he was shot and killed that summer and that really affected me,” he said.
I think that’s the big difference. Japan and Germany are not besieged by a bloodbath of violence. Students can actually focus on their studies. The fabric of the community is much tighter. Teachers get support from the parents. The community buys into the principle that education is important and the key to social mobility.
That is completely lacking in many communities in the United States.
Go on and blame “liberal teachers” if you must, but that’s not going to do anything to solve a problem that runs much deeper.
Bobbo – you are a buffoon.
Germany is 0.7% black.
US is 14% black.
Germany is 0.5% Hispanic.
US is 17% Hispanic (no speaka da Eenglish – gee, I wonder if that may be a problem).
Your fucking conclusion is that the education problem is because of violence. (Re the violence, check out the stats above). Are you some kinda idiot or what?
And re Japan, they are 100% Japanese, more or less.
So what’s the problem llpoh? Is it the students or is it the teachers?
Brazil – you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. A lot of teachers are not good, and that is an understatement.
But it is ridiculous to think that if you pour enough money into a system you will be able to turn folks with IQs of under 85 into college able students. It is not going to happen.
College is not a place for everyone, nor should it be. It really should be a place for those capable of advanced education, and not everyone is so capable.
So the whole structure needs to change, and instead of going down the same old road, that $24k a year should be used to actually provide skills that the individual is capable of obtaining. Some will only be capable of wielding a broom, while some may be capable of advanced physics. The idea that throwing money at a cohort with an average IQ of 85 and turning that cohort into college ready students is never going to work.
It serves the teacher’s purposes to get everyone to believe that more money is the answer. More money is not the answer – they are already spending far too much. The answer is an entirely different system, which caters to actual differences in the students and does not try to do what is impossible.
“The answer (to a better educational system) is an entirely different system, which caters to actual differences in the students and does not try to do what is impossible.”
—-Llpoh
Correct. Except that system actually existed many generations ago here in the U.S. It recognized that many, if not most, students were not suitable college material based on their 1-8 grade performance (kindergarten was then a pay-as-you-go privilege).
Those ill-suited children were then focused into simpler math and English courses and a heavy dose of technical training courses, to include apprentices at local businesses. The college-material kids took a heavy dose of advanced math, literature, science, foreign language and the like.
It worked fairly well for everyone, but it did build cliques. Not tension-filled or hateful cliques, but cliques nonetheless. Overall, I would recommend a return to that system. Not perfect, but it worked well. Really, really well.
Ilpoh, the argument in the main article was that the problem is “liberal teachers”. My point was that the problem is not the teachers, and never has been. The problems run a lot deeper than that. You call me a buffoon, but apart from the personal insult, it looks like you agree with me on that point.
The U.S. has spent a ridiculous amount of money training the Iraqi army and the Afghan army, yet the results have been horrendous. What is the problem? Were our army sergeants too “liberal”? The idea is laughable.
You are right that we should be suspicious of teachers who say we just need to throw more money at the problem. I agree with you that will not work. Why? Because the problems go deeper than the teacher.
And you are wrong about the violence, by the way. Violence is a major distraction from learning. Is it the only problem? I never suggested it was. I only cited that example and a quotation from the text of the main article to illustrate the point that the problem is not “liberal teachers.”
Now to you care to withdraw the insult and carry on a civil conversation?
Sss, that system only worked when we were a nation of producers. That blue collar employment that system needs to feed into was sent to mexico and china by bill clinton. Question is, now that these people have no potential future, what are we going to do with them? Not everybody can cut bill gates’ grasd.
Bobbo – welcome to TBP! Trial by fire is the way around here.
Nice, reasoned response. I hate that.
I withdraw previous comment. Don’t let it go to your head. We love a good fight around here, but we love reason and intelligence too.
Violence is a problem. For yucks you might look up the studies on correlation between intelligence and violence.
We keep trying to drive square pegs into round holes. It is not working.
SSS – nice comments. Yes, it used to work. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line people decided that college is the answer to every educational question.
People would be far happier if their pegs and holes were more appropriately matched.
Bobbo – the reason I went after you is that no way you can correlate a society with little ethnic and cultural and social diversity with the US. Those single culture countries have enormous advantages, if the culture is one that values education. Such as Asia, N Europe, Germany.
It might be of very significant relevance to extend all the above observations to the US Military – Army, Air and Sea.
Certainly the Commissioned Ranks should (UST)have pretty competent individuals, but what about the NCO / “Private Soldier” category of personnel – where the vast bulk of the available personnel reside.
We KNOW that a certain favoured group have relatively poorer discipline / delayed gratification / time management / forward planning skills to others, and there are many of this subset in all three Branches.
So – presumably the best-equipped military (at least if spending is considered), but how reliable are the personnel – especially those “at the coalface” who are the real ones with “the finger on the trigger” especially under significant pressure – the sort of pressure a Lad War against Russia may produce?
When just ONE “unintended slip” could have Global “unplanned consequences”, the Western / NATO game in Ukraine becomes far more dangerous, doesn’t it . . . . .
Like trying to teach a bar of soap. I don’t blame the teachers, although they certainly don’t need any more of them. It’s just that if education doesn’t start at home, if it isn’t honored, well, good luck with that.
llpoh -Flash – unlike Watson, I own my business as opposed to work for someone.
I knew that, but I needed a thread to dump a story on the repercussions on a scientist career for actually revealing reality exposed by hard data…because science is whatever the PC pukes say it is…e.g global warming….diversity is our strength .
And ,remember kids, in Uncle Sammy’s brave new PC world, gender is not a biological reality.You were not born male or female , but assigned those roles by a bigoted society.And Uncle Sammy will prove this so by allowing those tormented gender confused souls that no longer want to be thought of as women to become Rangers.
I would love to attend this first coed Ranger school , with video camera in hand…history will be made…in the annals of slap-schtik comedy.
Ranger School PT Test May Be Top Obstacle for Females
Female soldiers hoping to attend the first-ever, co-ed class of U.S. Army Ranger School have a much better chance of completing the grueling, two-month course if they prepare for what faces them in the first week, according to Ranger School officials.
Ranger School is a punishing ordeal designed to push combat leaders, both officers and sergeants, to their mental and physical limits. About half of all candidates fail to earn the coveted, gold and black Ranger tab.
In January, Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno are expected to make a decision whether to allow females to attend the historically male-only, infantry course.
If approved, the Ranger Course Assessment will be open to all women in the grades E-4 through O-4 whose end term of service, or ETS, is no earlier than Oct. 1, 2016.
The effort is a result of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s January 2013 directive that all services open combat-arms roles to women that so far have been reserved for men. The services have until 2016 to make this happen.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/11/28/ranger-school-pt-test-may-be-top-obstacle-for-females.html?ESRC=army.nl
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Gender is neutral and IQ’s irrelevant to financial and academic success. Welcome to the Brave New World of ignoring reality. After all the clean articulate community organizer is doing such a swell job at ruining…er, I meant running the Republic.
IQ tests are the best predictors we have for academic success. If we are going to invest public money, collected by armed tax collectors, we are entitled to ask that the money be well spent: which is to say that if we are going to invest in an expensive public education, the money ought to go to someone who will learn something from that expensive experience. By law we cannot use race in selecting the individuals in whom we will invest. We really shouldn’t even know what their race is.
And therein lies the problem. There is no single item in any IQ test that identifies the race of the person taking that test. Any such item, if there ever were any, has long since been eliminated. You may look at IQ tests until you are blue in the face and you won’t find the “racial code” items, because they are not there. A lot of very smart people have worked hard to see to that.
But IQ tests do predict academic success. And the University of Washington developed a Grade Prediction Program that did much more. I worked on it as a graduate student. The experiment was paid for by Navy Research.
Basically, for all incoming freshmen, we took measures of almost anything you can think of that might affect academic grades, and recorded the grades those students achieved in four years of instruction at the University of Washington. We recorded high school class rank, and grades in high school subject areas. We gave batteries of tests to the incoming freshmen. We took ratings and estimates from counselors (which were not easy to get because counselors are not accustomed to making numerical estimates, and sure enough, they weren’t much use in the final predictions). We even threw in height and weight. We did not record race, religion, national origin, or socio-economic status.
All this stuff went into a huge matrix, one line of a couple of dozen predictors for each student. Then over time we built another matrix, one line of grade results for each person. This whole thing then went into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0 to 0.99; actually I think the highest predictor item was about 0.8, which was IQ. Many of the predictors were near enough to zero that it could reasonably be concluded that they could be eliminated. There were one or two predictors that correlated highly with some fields of study and not at all with others; the formula was adjusted for that so these predictors were only used in prediction of relevant academic areas.
And lo! After a few years of taking results and honing the prediction equations, every incoming freshman was given a grade prediction for a number of academic area. Be a math major and you will be an A student, but you will flunk out of biology. Actually, of course, that would be a rare result: people who were predicted to be A students in any area were likely to have higher predictions for other areas. An A prediction in engineering would very likely to be accompanied by an A prediction as an education major. Of course an prediction of an A average in Education was not necessarily accompanied by the prediction of an A in anything else.
The program was successful, but it is no longer used, because the average grades predicted for Black and Hispanic students was lower than the average grades predicted for White students. There was no single item in any test that identified the race of the student, but those who set out to prove this thesis managed to find that out.
And that, I put it to you, is the reason that the mean differences in IQ test scores among the races is important.
If you want to invest your education resources in those who will learn the most – and therefore, presumably, earn enough to keep the economy growing, thus justifying the investment of tax resources in education, you must use tests that include IQ tests to select who will go into engineering, who into education, who into sociology, and who ought to go to junior college and learn some salable skills. But if you do this, then you will find that the numbers of those predicted to have high success will include more Ashkenazi Jews. North Asian, and American Whites, than their average presence in the population, and fewer Hispanics and Blacks; while the numbers of those advised to get out of the university and go to junior college or into apprenticeship will include fewer Whites, Asians and Jews, and more Hispanics and Blacks. That is an inevitable result. There is no way to “correct for it. The IQ factor is always important in any prediction of academic success.
I’m pretty confident you could: not fire a single teacher, but instead eliminate the school board and the phone book size set of conflicting laws that govern “public education” and instead put the teachers entirely in charge of their own school and the situation would turn around so fast it would make your head spin. Even at half the spending per student, the school campuses would quickly look like, say Dartmouth instead of the typical jail they look like now.
But people who get out to vote love politicians who want more layers of bureaucracy to “improve” education.
Mike Moskos-put the teachers entirely in charge of their own school and the situation would turn around so fast it would make your head spin
….or continue to cater to the mob expecting the ass canker that is public education to clear up on it’s own.
Diversity be our strength.
@LLOPH – “The answer is an entirely different system, which caters to actual differences in the students and does not try to do what is impossible.”
+1,000 !
“The future belongs to those who know where they belong.” – Divergent movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-eWg-HpoVc
Follow up:
66 School Officials in Paterson make at least $125,000.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/02/just-19-paterson-nj-kids-are-college-ready-but-66-school-officials-make-at-least-125000/
Bob.