Tennessee getting ready to throw poor students under the bus.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

http://ec.libsyn.com/p/b/9/3/b930bc4df45dfdef/029AdamDrewShow.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d01ce8136d6c159af7d&c_id=5535407

i was listening to this, a good point was about how there needs to exist an equality of OPPORTUNITY, in which it doesnt matter if you are poor or a minority... but this differentiated from a view of everyone being EQUAL in the sense that not everyone has the cognitive abilities to go to college and should be given the chance of doing vocational training. im not fully on board with this, but sounds interesting.

what does disgust me is the ghost of the argument that parents are to blame and teachers being helpless martyrs... no, the least of our worries should be the parents when there are systemic deficiencies and failures in how education is structured... parents are just easy scapegoats

Equality of opportunity would maybe lead to more equality of aspirations and expectations, and the knock on effect might give more of a chance to smart poor people who have got the ability to have more hope, and not just give up. Inspiration from people around you has an effect on ambition, I think. I'm not sure to what degree though.

the part i meant that im sketchy on is the vocational training... here its a disaster because funds are getting slashed for higher education and redirected to pure vocational... that means that as a country we have given up on doing global quality science.

ah, gotcha. Slashing one in favour of the other actually means less opportunity, so I get why you are sketchy on it.

[navkat]

In the one sense, it's kinda nice I suppose they're trying to tie in failure to do well at school with wider consequences.

However, these consequences are idiotic and mean little in a school system that fails to support a variety of learning methods and styles to accomodate the needs of the students.

I mean, I'd happily pay someone to slap my students in the face with a dead fish every time they slept in and missed a mock exam, for example.

The problem is, we seem to have a culture in this country of punishing failure to overcome degradation and hardship with more degradation and hardship.

More obstacles and consequences are not going to vault these kids to the top. It's going to teach them to stay down.