I would love to hear the excuse why this is. I can almost promise the excuse will be they are underfunded.

Now I do not know how it works in NY, but in my state the more students they pass the more tax money they get. I know other states have caught school teachers cheating for the kids to pass. Have a independent group come in and do the end of the year test without the school having any pretest answers getting to the teachers or administrators. The school must have zero involvement of handling any of the testing. Make them really show us they are doing their job.

#15
Mine is from CBS reporting and they are not a Conservative news group, so CBS got it wrong too. Also is there no truth to schools are on purpose cutting corners to get more kids passed for money tax money? This is by far not the only time this type of news has been reported about schools doing so.

#11 | Posted by ClownShack
Really the evidence says other wise.

If you do that from administering the test through reporting the results, sure. But who's paying for it? You have to pay teachers for their work days.

#21 | Posted by pragmatist

It will be just have to be a work day off for the teachers or they could easily rotate the classes that will be taking the test through out the week. Much like they way they did it at my HS for the ASVAB test. It is the best way to prove if the students are really learning everything they need to. The way its done now is like having a person who damaged your car in a accident be the one you pay to fix your car.

Why not just spend more money on education? That's the emphasis of the Obama Administration. Well, how much is "more"? And where is the evidence that greater funding enhances test scores? Much of what Washington is now doing involves ties between Democrats and teachers' unions. It's a financial well that is never full. Just a few more billion dollars, the educators and politicos declare, and...and what?

It should be apparent that much of the problem facing high school teachers is social, economic, and moral. What can a teacher or a school do, for example, about students from broken homes, living in poverty, and swallowed up by the anti-intellectualism displayed in the media and by their peers? How can you raise the achievement levels of people who may well lack the basic intelligence to succeed in class? What can be done with those who would rather work off campus than study?

Increase teacher pay? Build larger, technologically sophisticated schools? Offer smaller classes? Inflate grades and lower academic standards to build student self-esteem? Harass or fire teachers who are not popular or whose students are not passing tests? Set state and national achievement goals? It has all been tried, and the results are abysmal.

Stephanie Banchero of the Wall Street Journal wrote recently, "there is still no solid evidence on how best to boost achievement." I would omit the word "best".

Where's your CATO institute study indicating the less money to schools will improve education?

#24 | Posted by rstybeach11

It shows the excuse that tossing more money into the education pot has not worked at all to raise academia scores as the teacher unions and other have claimed it would. We need to stop wasting tax payer money by tossing more money at it when they have not even figured out what the problem is. Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Reform, said, "If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true."

Choice works, and government monopolies don't. How much more evidence do we need? Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student -- more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice?

I would have omitted "can't read" from the thread's headline, but I don't have a conservative bias against Bloomberg and his education policies either, so.......

#31 | Posted by rstybeach11

Don't blame me for all the spelling errors of the reporter, so I am supposed to fix all the spelling errors and grammar. I have enough problems with my damn phone screwing this up for me. Also no conservative would ever consider Bloomberg to be a conservative or his news agency. Look at his record his votes to the left every single time, the guy just has a R next to his name means nothing much like the D. They are all one in the same.

#39 | Posted by ClownShack

We are not talking about private school, this is whole discussion is about the public schools and they MASSIVE FUNDING THEY GET.

The most obvious discrepancy between public and private schools comes down to cold, hard cash. The good news for parents is that public schools cannot charge tuition. The bad news is that public schools are complicated, often underfunded operations influenced by political winds and shortfalls. Financed through federal, state, and local taxes, public schools are part of a larger school system, which functions as a part of the government and must follow the rules and regulations set by politicians.

In contrast, private schools must generate their own funding, which typically comes from a variety of sources: tuition; private grants; and fundraising from parents, alumni, and other community members. (Ever wonder why private schools celebrate Grandparent's Day and public schools don't?) If the school is associated with a religious group, the local branch may provide an important source of funding as well.

For parents this quickly translates into the bad news: high tuition costs and sometimes an exhausting work calendar of parent-sponsored fundraisers. According to the National Association of Independent Schools, the median tuition for their member private day schools in 2008-2009 in the United States was $17,441. Tuition for boarding schools was close to $37,017. (Of the 28,384 private schools in the United States, about 1,050 are affiliated with the NAIS. Average tuition for nonmember schools is substantially less: Day schools charge $10,841 and boarding schools $23,448.)

Parochial schools are even more affordable. The National Catholic Educational Association reports that the mean tuition for parish elementary schools is $2,607 and $6,906 for the freshman year of secondary school. (Thank you, Pope Benedict XVI!)

The potential benefits of private schools accrue from their independence. Private schools do not receive tax revenues, so they do not have to follow the same sorts of regulations and bureaucratic processes that govern (and sometimes hinder) public schools. This allows many private schools to be highly specialized, offering differentiated learning, advanced curriculum, or programs geared toward specific religious beliefs. There are exceptions to such generalizations -- charter and magnet schools are increasingly common public schools that often have a special educational focus or theme.

Sorry forgot the link

#45 | Posted by pragmatist

It works for private schools but as it is now it will never work for the big government public schools. Simply because of that 11K spent goes to the public school SYSTEM and it gets to spend those funds at will and does not have to go to that student. The money from private school that do costs more because the private schools do not have the forced financial backing like the public schools do.

Also unlike the public schools the money the parents pay go just for their child and cant be used for other students and other pet projects. A private school is very much self contain and parents have the best control of how their money is spent unlike public school where they have ZERO CONTROL of how the public schools can spend their tax dollars. If a parent can take their money to another school and those funds that school needs to stay open like a business, it is in the schools best interest to make sure they give the kids the best education they can.

If not, that money can go to another school. Competition produces the very best schools since parents have full control over how their money is used to educate their kinds unlike public schools where they have none. Why would any public school try to better their education for the students when there is no threat of tax money leaving their school for another better school. Plain and simple, if every parent in the US got X amount of their tax dollars to use for their child to go to any school they wanted to send them too. You would see these schools turn around rather quickly. So instead of a school lying about how many kids passed that year they have to prove to the "parents" that their school is the best environment for them. If a school wants to make more money then they better be producing a great product for that "tax payer" to spend their voucher there with them. You would not see all the corruption of public schools you see now if parents had a choice of how their money was spent.

Public Schools get "massive funding"?

did you read the next paragraph you pasted?

"The bad news is that public schools are complicated, often underfunded operations"

Considering the importance of education they are massively underfunded.

#50 | Posted by ClownShack

Yes, the reasons individual school can become underfunded is because some fat cat bureaucrat can decide how much a school gets not the parents. The school system gets massive amounts of tax payer money in one giant pool that all of them have to draw from. Of course individual schools can be underfunded but the public school SYSTEM receives massive amount of cash where they get to decide how they spend our money. Look at all the pay raises they fat cat involved in dealing that money out get to themselves before any of that money gets to the students. Look at how much money is spent over a huge amount of people before it ever gets to a child, there is your problem. America spends over $500 billion a year on public elementary and secondary education in the United States. All three levels of government – federal, state, and local - contribute to education funding. States typically provide a little less than half of all elementary and secondary education funding. Local governments generally contribute about 44 percent of the total, and the federal government contributes about 10 percent of all direct expenditures. Look at everyone of those who have their hand in that money going into their own pocket before it ever reaches a student. Strip all the wast out of government involvement in schools and allows parents to take their tax money to a school they can choose you will see a improvement

Honestly no matter if your Liberal or Conservative commonsense is that less peoples hands involved in the decision process of how money will be spent on a student means there is more money for the student. Here is the major problem with a public school system we have today, we have 500 billion a year going to the system. Even the best of our big bureaucratic schools at all levels not only focus the minds of the young on the past, as Gilder notes, but focus their minds on those parts of the past that embody and justify the bureaucratic mind-set that is now the foundation of all such schools, as well as our big government, big businesses, and big foundations. Tens of thousands are involved in lining their pockets with money that should be going to your child.

In the past 45 years the United States has steadily increased its spending on gigantic education bureaucracies, so that today we spend more per student per year than any other major nation. (The education bureaucrats try desperately to deny this fact by comparing percentages of GNP spent on lower education, excluding college costs, which are so much higher in the United States, and so on. We do actually spend more of our GNP on education than most other industrialized countries; but, more important, because we have a higher GNP per capita, our spending per student is much higher.) A higher percentage of our young people attend college than is the case in any other major nation. But by all significant measures, the educational attainments of our average young people (not the creative ones who tune out the system and learn the test items on their own) has steadily declined, so that today they rank near the bottom among major nations.

Now take those same taxes you pay into a giant pool where everyone is fighting over for their share of a pie from lobbyist to Unions stealing those funds claiming they are doing their part for the Children. What further proof look at the heads of all these programs that due very little for our children but they are making off of hundreds of thousands of dollars off your kids backs for doing absolutely nothing. Parents have zero say how this money is spent and the monstrosity of people who get first dibs on your tax money well before it ever reaches a school. Yet people scream there is no money for our schools, no the reality is there is a ton of money for our schools but you have a massive bureaucratic mess of CORRUPT GREEDY OFFICIALS that steal the funds that are for your child.

Now fire all of those people that do nothing but bleed us dry and our kids suffer because of this. Private schools have a very thin layer of administration as a rule. Public schools mean well, but don't succeed at doing a superior job because bloated administration costs consume so much of their budgets. Less people digging into our tax money that we should be in control of, the free market is the best way to teach our kids.

For example, look at the continuing debate on school vouchers and background checks for private school teachers. Courts around the nation have upheld voucher plans. The school voucher issue is complex. The idea here is to give parents of children in public schools tuition vouchers which will help them pay for education at independent schools. You would think school choice for parents would be logical and necessary.Just give them the money and let them spend it where they will. Naturally politicians and other lobbyist who seek to protect the bloated, entrenched interests of the public education system are trying to attach all sorts of strings to the voucher proposal simple because it will destroy them completely. Why spend your tax money at a bloated government schools that has a massive budget and very little goes to your child or take it to where you have 100% control over the funds.

The parents will have control over this because they are the ones paying that individual school not the bloody government. Teachers would receive much higher pay for the work they do because the funds are not going to millions of other officials that do nothing. Private high school teachers usually have a first degree in their subject. A high percentage - 70-80% - will also have a masters degree and/or a terminal degree. When a private school dean of faculty and head of school hire teachers, they look for competence in and passion for the subject a candidate will teach. Then they review how the teacher actually teaches. Finally, they check out the three or more references from the candidate's previous teaching jobs to ensure that they are hiring the best candidate. Public school teachers make so much less because so many have stolen for the pool to fill their pockets before them. Teachers have zero incentive to do the right thing and the horrible teachers are extremely hard to remove because of the over reaching unions who make billions off of these teachers dues every year.

Private school teachers rarely have to worry about discipline. Students know that if they cause problems they will be dealt with swiftly and without recourse. A teacher who doesn't have to be a traffic cop can teach. Private teachers know they must perform to keep their job, they dont have the same protections of lobbyist making it near impossible to fire horrible teachers. Private schools will never keeps a bad teacher because why will parents give them their money for a school who has a worst rating over a better school.