Jackson Jambalaya

This elitist, statist, goofball - Dr. Wright, says it's good that they look at enrollment numbers but it's also important to look at what the schools are doing (loosely quoting). No shit.

Great timing on this KF. Thanks. Folks saying you can get a great education in the public schools. Those folks are thinking locally. A good school in Mississippi means nothing outside of Mississippi. How do the universities compare outside of Mississippi?

D's get degrees

Respectfully, I'm not sure that Dr. Wright or the MDE Board are the real goofballs here. However, some of our high-office elected officials clearly are.

We're collectively failing in the effort to properly educate our kids. The traditional definition of insanity seems to apply here -- "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results...".

More and more parents aren't doing their job with the kids, elected folks want to throw more money at the same lame educational approaches that will just get us more debt, and nobody seems willing to take on a wholesale revamp of the educational environment and approach from the districts down to every school.

The most important words in this article are " we hope the leadership in our state and communities will make decisions that will provide better opportunities for students"...unfortunately, Wright added " to take advanced placement courses " only.

Our state government and our communities could not have done more to assure that we were dead bottom if that had been their goal!

The first job of those responsible for educating our children is to educate themselves on how that can best be accomplished! And, then they must educate the ordinary voter!

Our citizens had best face the fact that when " our house" is falling apart, it's going to cost more to fix it than it would had we taken good care of it over the years ! We best look honestly at our role not doing our required maintenance when it would have been less expensive to fix!

If we want to fix education and not have the lack of an educated work base affect our future, it starts with all of us looking in the mirror!

I done went to jackkson scools an I think I learnt a lot of good things!!!

D's might get a degree but what about getting a job? Come on, so many can't spell, read or speak. But they have a degree. How do our public schools rank in the country?

What a revelation! I would never have guessed such a sad state of educational affairs in this State.

I'm so glad these people exist to come along and point out the complete obvious.

It all goes to shit after they learn their colors.

Better oppose common core because clearly our curriculum is already top notch.

8:02 am is clearly part of the problem we have.

He believes that we can't do anything about public education when the system is dominated by Blacks.

If he were well educated, he would know that schools in predominately black or poor districts in other states rated much higher. He would compare our private schools to those in other states as well.

When whites dominated the governing systems in Mississippi, he'd know we weren't rating highly then either!


He never asks himself why so many of our brightest young people leave the state and never come back. Could it be, in part, that they've seen that many who have and tried to improve things are criticized by the peanut gallery rather than universally welcomed? Or is it just that being bright and well educated is not only not valued here but regarded with suspicion by both races?

People that haven't bothered to educate themselves on an issue should really listen and read rather than talk and write!

Smart people know what they don't know!

Now what we need to do is let a Hinds County Chancery judge fix this by allowing him/her to dictate where funds go throughout the state......
chirp chirp chirp

maybe D stands for Dyn-O-MITE

Prejudice is a great short term strategy for those who want to gain or retain power and/or profit from cheap labor.

It sells to those who are insecure and fear trying to increase their competition or need to look down on others to feel good about themselves.

As a long term strategy is it awful and we are seeing the proof of that.

Poor people have more children for a number of reasons so one certainty is that they will eventually outnumber those in power and rebel ( Rome, France, Russia , South Africa to name the obvious among many).

The other long term consequences are either oligarchy followed by economic decline as the privileged can't sustain the economic system alone.

So again , you end up with chaos and conflict.

But, who gives a damn about our descendants and the future when it's all about us and we are too immature to postpone short term benefits for long term gains?

Actually most of those revolutions have started when the intellectual or commercial classes are frozen out of government and demand power.

Especially Rome. One party represented the landed aristocracy. One party represented the knights (the business/commercial class). That was the rub on the civil wars. The head count (poor people) never really gained anything. No right to vote. No political power, no nothing although they were used and bribed to fight the battles as soldiers.

You'd do better to use Plato's cycle of governments.

"He would compare our private schools to those in other states as well."

St. Andrew's is ranked #18 in the nation. That means at least 32 states do not have a private school as good as SA (some states may have more than one school ranked higher than SA).

I'm pretty happy to be in that quintile, especially compared to how our public schools rank nationally.

Common Core is a good theory, designed to make inter-state comparisons of school performance possible, but at least the math portions are being executed abysmally (you can google for sample math questions and acceptable "answers"). Right now the only valid comparison to compare students from different states are the ACT & SAT scores, which are really only measurements of college preparedness, not job readiness. The cutoff for the ACT National Merit Finalist designation is lower in Mississippi than 49 other states (top 1% in each state), showing how we rate in that category as well.

Parents have to value and push for educational standards, and schools (i.e., administrators and teachers) have to be held accountable. All of this is politically unwieldy, so improvement is unlikely to happen. As long as low-skilled, poorly educated people in other countries are willing to work for one-tenth of what unskilled laborers here get, and the results are just as good, traditional low-skill jobs will continue to go overseas.

The answer is clearly more 10 year old foreign vehicles with "Fund MAEP" bumper stickers on them.

Follow the money. The Mississippi Department of Education and the overall education establishment is making tons of money off education: "professional development," testing contracts, big administrator salaries.

No one who actually works in education and pulls major strings wants to upset the status quo.

Major money that we put into education doesn't trickle down to classroom instruction.

Let's not forget that the average Mississippi inmate has a 6th grade education.

What can you do that is legal to support yourself and possibly some dependents if you can only read, write and do math on a 6th grade level?

Madison Central is a really good public school.

2:04.

I've always theorized that this is a big part of the problem.

I actually really want to look into this, but don't know where to start.

It would be interesting to see the money spent on testing contracts.

Any tips for how to look into all this?

Here's a question for ya: How many of the above posts were written by employees working in the SDE tower? My quess is five. Yours?

3:45
Comparing Madison Central to schools on Mississippi or the entire country? SA is 18 in the country. That includes Massachusetts, NY, Cali, Illinois. If we are the 50th state in education and Madison central is not the top in the 50th state (pass Christian is btw). I'm not saying MC is not a good school but it can't compare to one ranked nationally IMHO.

Such rankings include things like: Proximity to and availability of lab opportunities; Number of masters and PhD level instructors in the school system; Availability of visiting lecturer series associated with post secondary institutions; Proximity of field trip opportunities; Student/parent involvement in planning coursework; Methods of institutional record keeping; Availability of arts programs......on and on.

That's an excellent point? That makes St Andrews truly exceptional being just down the street from MC. It ranks higher than many excellent schools in NYC, DC and Los Angeles etc... Schools where presidents (Sidwell friends is 44), politicians, movie moguls are clamoring to send the kids are ranked lower than St Andrews. That's saying a lot being in Mississippi without so many of those things mentioned in close proximity.

One of the many reasons St. A is successful, IMO is that parents who send their kids there make sacrifices (no school bus, extremely high tuition, etc) so they are more personally invested in their child's education. They have to be willing to go out of their way to make sure their child gets to and from school every day and take on an additional financial burden.

When parents are committed to making sure kids do their homework and are interested in what their child is learning in school and make school seem like a privilege as opposed to just somewhere that's required, kids have a different attitude about learning.

If more parents in other schools were more involved and committed to their own child's education we would see improvement.

Some families in MS are barely getting by, both parents are working long hours to keep the lights on. Or maybe it's a single mom working two jobs. They may not be around to ensure that their child is completing homework and understands the material that's being covered in class. The parents themselves may have a negative attitude towards school or authority figures in general and that affects their children's performance in the classroom.

Poverty breeds poverty. There's no simple answer or easy fix for the problem.

The rankings below have been compiled on the basis of a number of factors. In terms of academic excellence, the schools on the following list maintain a superior level of instruction, quality relationships with top-tier colleges, and additional academic awards and honors.

Because diversity of the student body is integral to preparing students for living and working in a connected, global society, we factor this into our criteria for the rankings. The diversity of a student population, as well as opportunities to connect to the world, are telling factors of a school’s commitment to preparing its students for the world outside of the school environment.

The third aspect assessed for this listing consists of intangible factors, such as innovative degree programs in the arts, current student satisfaction with their high school, quality and experience of the faculty, or modern lab or athletic facilities. Also, we have striven for as much geographical diversity as is consistent with our other criteria.

They don't mention the (more than just a correlation) relationship of the schools ranked to their tuition costs. This is because of the flawed theory that money can buy intelligence. One can spend money and educate an apple all they want, but it will never become a dolphin. It's also due to the atheist that designed the rankings being less interested in quantifying the subject matter than generating a link-baiting scheme, much like his "50 best Atheists" list.

Good job SA. Promoting yourself based on the illegitimate ramblings of a devout atheist. Ironic.