tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post2432943296472364967..comments2024-03-28T11:19:26.338-05:00Comments on Jackson Jambalaya: Majority-black public school districts spend more per student, waste more money, get worse gradesKingfishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comBlogger80125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-90307261298323169232016-04-19T03:39:41.651-05:002016-04-19T03:39:41.651-05:00The student-teacher ratio is a little misleading. ...The student-teacher ratio is a little misleading. It looks like each district has an average ratio around 14, but the kind of class matters significantly. For example, a senior chemistry class in a smaller district may have only 8 students. While the middle school science class in the same district may have 32. This was the case in the district I worked for. STR was high in classes not state tested, the majority of classes. But, it was very low in state tested classes and advanced classes.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-58698038031503382752015-01-11T01:18:54.624-06:002015-01-11T01:18:54.624-06:00Dec 27 @ 10:50 Sorry, but facts are stubborn thing...Dec 27 @ 10:50 Sorry, but facts are stubborn things.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-77136219280128945362015-01-11T00:50:38.003-06:002015-01-11T00:50:38.003-06:00refute one fact I've posted.refute one fact I've posted. Kingfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-60289531308855742292014-12-27T10:50:39.328-06:002014-12-27T10:50:39.328-06:00"We report, you decide."
Based on the t..."We report, you decide."<br /><br />Based on the title of the article, you already decided, unfairly and unbalanced.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01910738966156778202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-58705675007564322632012-12-13T08:44:55.114-06:002012-12-13T08:44:55.114-06:0010:16 brings up Vo-Tech. Every school district has...10:16 brings up Vo-Tech. Every school district has access to Vo-Tech. It is also a requirement (law) that the network of Vo-Tech departments also enroll home-schooled and private-schooled students who wish to attend. Years ago, the State network of 'Junior Colleges' functioned more as Vo-Tech than four year college feeder programs. Please educate yourself by calling any school administrator or community college president and asking them to schedule a tour of the program for you. It's no longer about teaching boys in 'shop' how to make something out of tin that will pick up pecans. <br /><br />Also, to correct the poster who suggested that students who can't make the requisite grades should be channeled into a vocational program.....college is not simply for people who made good grades. Nor is vo-tech for students who make poor ones. Shadowfaxnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-46521912545431743642012-12-12T20:54:47.208-06:002012-12-12T20:54:47.208-06:00A few years back (around 5 years ago) St Andrew...A few years back (around 5 years ago) St Andrew's was on the list of the top 100 feeder schools for Harvard College. 3 (Maybe 4) years ago 3 of their 72 seniors got into Harvard.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-85913091735988671782012-12-12T18:47:25.526-06:002012-12-12T18:47:25.526-06:00KF, you should also look at how our private school...<i>KF, you should also look at how our private schools are rated nationally. One way is to find out what numerical weight they are given by universities...particularly those out of state.</i><br /><br />LMAO ... You must be a numbskull ... Exponentially more students gain entrance each year to Ivy League schools, as an example, than those from Mississippi's public school system.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-46226339021000457972012-12-12T17:31:31.035-06:002012-12-12T17:31:31.035-06:00It's not the money but how it's spent.
KF...It's not the money but how it's spent.<br /><br />KF, you should also look at how our private schools are rated nationally. One way is to find out what numerical weight they are given by universities...particularly those out of state. <br /><br />Since we don't attract teachers from out of state, you might want to look at how our education depts. at our universities are rated nationally.<br /><br />You might want to look at what courses are required and what the required reading lists are here compared to those in states with high performance levels like Maryland.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-32668561066275174792012-12-12T14:50:33.486-06:002012-12-12T14:50:33.486-06:00You can't fix stupid by throwing money at it!!...You can't fix stupid by throwing money at it!!! The Mississippi Legislature should have learned that by now! "Fully fund public education" is the same old tired song we hear every year! Do you see the level of education improving in Mississippi - NO! A good start would be to have a "house cleaning" over at the MS Department of Education - get some people in there who truly care about the education of the children of MS and not their salaries and the "top heavy" administration in the public school system - NO, the legislature will not make any demands on the MDE because they are afraid of "hurting their little feelings" - "their feelings be damned!" I, for one, am getting very tired of them pissing off my tax dollars with no positive results to show for it - especially since my children were educated in the private school system that I paid for as well!!!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-17321595866150523232012-12-12T12:41:37.179-06:002012-12-12T12:41:37.179-06:00People need to realize that charter schools and vo...<i>People need to realize that charter schools and vouchers should be a part of improving education in Mississippi, but they are not the solution to solving Mississippi's educational system. </i><br /><br />Show us where anyone here @ <i>JJ</i> has claimed that charters and vouchers would be <i>the</i> solution.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-60955436787642829032012-12-12T12:35:04.310-06:002012-12-12T12:35:04.310-06:00People need to realize that charter schools and vo...People need to realize that charter schools and vouchers should be a part of improving education in Mississippi, but they are not the solution to solving Mississippi's educational system. You can add charter schools and vouchers, but there will still be students attending these F and D districts and having the same issues that lead to their poor scores. This state needs a comprehensive early childhood program because if you don't get students taught at the kindergarten level in today's world, then you are headed for failure.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-26723596647743973432012-12-12T10:46:23.787-06:002012-12-12T10:46:23.787-06:00Damn, I failed to notice this when you first poste...Damn, I failed to notice this when you first posted it.<br /><br />I would have posed a few questions to Michael VanVeckhoven:<br /><br />1. Is he the same Michael VanVeckhoven that occupies a seat on the Board of the Meridian Public School District?<br /><br />2. Are the inept bafoon administrators at MPSD still calling the cops on kids for talking in class?<br /><br />3. Did MPSD's administrators waste so much of Meridian PD's time that the Chief had to issue a memo to officers instructing them not to respond to those idiotic calls, and only to go to the school if the call involved a felony, weapon or drugs?<br /><br />4. Does MPSD really have a "Meridian Public School District Police Department," as alleged by the Justice Department?<br /><br />5. Why on Earth would a school district the size of Meridian have its own little police department?<br /><br />6. How much does the school district's chief of police and 3 officers cost taxpayers each year?<br /><br />7. Considering that the school district has its own band of jack booted government thugs to keep the kids in line, why was the school continuously calling Meridian PD to handle routine, minor discipline problems?<br /><br />8. Is pissing away public funds and using law enforcement to cover for the ineptitude of school administrators part of the "realities of public education" you were talking about?Curt Crowleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15704349341530572678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-17489540105225302692012-12-06T14:56:39.286-06:002012-12-06T14:56:39.286-06:00Tell you what, since you don't want to argue f...Tell you what, since you don't want to argue facts but tell stories, lets see how well your dealership does if you have only two salesmen and 3 receptionists, 5 finance people, two janitors, and four managers. All that overhead, all those people, and hardly anyone selling cars. I wonder what will happen to production. Kingfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-69920176939561099942012-12-06T10:16:20.855-06:002012-12-06T10:16:20.855-06:00Just a few ideas to get us going in a better direc...Just a few ideas to get us going in a better direction:<br /><br />#1 consolidate school districts - merge our administration and implement massive attrition (this should help with the top heavy problem)<br /><br />#2 charter schools - time to give this a shot, it has been shown to be successful in other states<br /><br />#3 vo-tech - This is the dark horse that should be given some consideration. We need to have a plan on what to do with the students that have little chance of going to college. We need to utilize our education system to train students. Equip them with knowledge of a trade, so that we can all have a brighter future. If some are incapable of hitting the books, lets teach them a trade.<br /><br />Eliminate the bloat at the top and apply the savings towards providing our children the skills to get a J O B.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-73602139279780346252012-12-06T08:12:39.033-06:002012-12-06T08:12:39.033-06:00If that is the result here in MS, I guess you can ...If that is the result here in MS, I guess you can say with some certainty MS is f-Ed any direction you go, it is a failing of inbred expectations and will take generations of enlightenment for any real change to take hold.KaptKangaroohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04205368935149517936noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-91201707055137979582012-12-06T04:38:32.144-06:002012-12-06T04:38:32.144-06:00Kangaroo envisions a number of things that were po...Kangaroo envisions a number of things that were popular federal-state programs during the eighties and nineties. <br /><br />Regarding 'teaching adults to fill out job applications' and requiring certain things as a requisite to receiving unemployment insurance, consider this: Millions of dollars were spent on adult literacy classes across this state. More millions were spent providing Job Search classes. The state was blanketed with federal dollars. Community Based Organizations popped up overnight in every town in this state to rake in a share of the money. Requests for Proposals went out like wildfire and Proposals came in by the bucket-load. Planning and Development Districts pumped out more cash than Exxon pumps oil. It's nothing new. <br /><br />Congress would extend the unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks and along would come additional requirements to attend Job Search Skills Training classes. How to prepare a resume. How to go on an interview. Where to find job leads. Who not to take with you. How to dress. How to get up in the morning. <br /><br />Literacy programs were everywhere and all of it was 'free'. All one had to do was sign up, get out of bed and attend. In some cases attendance was required. <br /><br />Now we are anxious to blame lack of educational progress on bad situations at home. And we moan about parents not being able to assist their kids in the learning experience. And we pine for programs to assist the parents. But, when we had them, they soon disappeared as failures. What did we blame the failure of all those other programs on? <br /><br />The incentive to achieve has to outweigh the incentive to fail. In a nation of children, Santa Claus will win every time. The federal government has been Santa Claus for decades. The number of children (all of us) holding out our hands to the man in the red suit grows daily. <br /><br />Meanwhile, single mothers of single mothers in Canton can't wait for their babies to drop out of high school and get a minimum wage job so they can bring some money home to momma. They view graduation as delaying by two years that flow of additional cash. What difference does it make, they opine; she's going to work at the same place after high school as she would if she dropped out in tenth grade. Shadowfaxnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-61446585257212975772012-12-05T19:52:42.340-06:002012-12-05T19:52:42.340-06:00George Elementary, Jackson MS. Poverty Percentage:...George Elementary, Jackson MS. Poverty Percentage: 95%. A rating.<br /><br />McWillie Elementary: 69% Poverty. A rating. <br /><br />JPS spends less than $10,000 per student. <br /><br />Kingfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-80054412805189164312012-12-05T17:13:23.780-06:002012-12-05T17:13:23.780-06:00The discussion of how to fix schools is meaningles...The discussion of how to fix schools is meaningless until we figure out a way to fix parents. It's not the government's responsibility to instill values in our children. How many generations of kids have been born since the Great Society? Each has become more dependent on government. Is it any wonder that they're not so hot at parenting, that their kids continue in the cycle that they learned from their own mothers and grandmothers? And it's not a problem peculiar to blacks in the inner city. Whites and Hispanics are no different - it's hard to pull yourself out of poverty if that's all your family has ever known. There have been and will continue to be individuals who will find a way to break out of it, but by and large it's a problem that can't be solved.billhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04212014163842522498noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-50229445272949406392012-12-05T17:06:16.599-06:002012-12-05T17:06:16.599-06:00Let me see EAD, I took stats in college and surviv...Let me see EAD, I took stats in college and survived Dr. Cox's Genetics class at Mississippi College. Kingfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-33607919251754386362012-12-05T15:35:56.722-06:002012-12-05T15:35:56.722-06:00Fish, you didn't lie. It's a fact that mos...Fish, you didn't lie. It's a fact that most of the poor in MS are black, and it's a fact that it is more expensive to educate the poor than it is the affluent. So, no, you didn't lie.Michaelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-42922891730834695092012-12-05T15:28:45.847-06:002012-12-05T15:28:45.847-06:00Kingfish, I agree that there's not that big a ...Kingfish, I agree that there's not that big a difference between a student-teacher ratio of 14 and one of 16. What I'm trying to caution you about is that there's also not necessarily a big difference between a teacher/employee ratio of 45 and one of 50. Ratios will fool you every time, especially when we're talking about districts with a couple hundred employees where that 5-point spread represents 10 people.<br /><br />Ratios are relationships of two numbers, which is why you can't compare them directly. You can change the teacher/employee ratio either by decreasing the number of teachers or increasing the number of non-teachers. You can't tell just from looking at the ratio whether one school district has fewer teachers or more non-teachers. <br /><br />To put it another way, the teacher/employee ratio tells you how many teachers there are for every non-teacher employee, not how many teachers there are. A teacher/employee ratio of 50% says that there is 1 teacher for every 1 employee, while 40% says that there are 0.67 teachers for every employee. However, that doesn't actually tell you which one has fewer teachers, unless you also know the number of teachers and the size of the population. It's just how the math works. A district with 45% teachers can have the EXACT SAME NUMBER of teachers as one with 50% teachers, if the latter has more non-teacher staff. The 45% district could easily raise its teacher/employee ratio to 50% by firing 10 classroom aides. That might bring its spending down, but it's not going to do a thing to improve education of the kids in that district, unless those funds are redirected elsewhere. <br /><br />It's worthwhile to look at the teacher/employee ratio in the context of overall spending, and I've never argued otherwise. However, it simply does not and cannot prove that some districts hire *fewer* teachers than others, as you repeatedly assert in your original post. It's just the wrong statistic to do that, without relating it back to something concrete like the raw numbers of teachers and the size of the student population. The data says instead that there's parity on the number of teachers across the board, and that some districts have additional non-teacher employees. We can ask why that's so, and who those employees are and whether they benefit students, but those are different questions from the correlation you were originally trying to make with teacher/employee ratios.<br /><br />(Have I mentioned that I think all math curricula should be required to focus heavily on practical statistics? Having a basic understanding of statistics and probabilities is so much more important than, say, trigonometry. )EABhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14086387967692442908noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-32809929399966178232012-12-05T15:13:35.347-06:002012-12-05T15:13:35.347-06:00I lied?
Oooooooooooooooook. I lied?<br /><br />Oooooooooooooooook. Kingfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-89023021847858407342012-12-05T15:07:47.206-06:002012-12-05T15:07:47.206-06:00My fellow Meridianite, you misjudge me greatly. I...My fellow Meridianite, you misjudge me greatly. I have no plans of running for a higher office, nor have I ever alluded to such a thing. <br /><br />When our schools are unfairly attacked with lies, I will defend them. Our public schools graduated me and currently educate 91% of Mississippi's children, and I make no apologies for setting the facts straight when our schools are misrepresented in any way. <br /><br />Obviously, I have offended you. I am truly sorry for this and it is never my intention to offend, although I am certainly guilty of meeting fire with fire more often than I should. <br /><br />I humbly and sincerely ask that you contact me so that we can sit down face-to-face and, perhaps, better understand one another.<br /><br />I pray that you find forgiveness and that you accept my offer, and I wish you a peaceful and joyful holiday season.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Michaelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-15905587271469233432012-12-05T14:42:38.183-06:002012-12-05T14:42:38.183-06:00I am not disputing one bit what you said about par...I am not disputing one bit what you said about parenting. If you've read this blog for a long time, you've read my earlier post about the unwed birthrates. Translates into performance at school. Hence why you are seeing some schools around the country to long school days. Either the school can raise them, the parent can raise them when she has time to do it or is able to, or cares enough to, or the streets, MTV, and the iphone can do it. <br /><br />What is more troubling is the leaders who defend this status quo. Kingfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06184990110961727404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2447438783001404385.post-36178651751383028922012-12-05T14:35:57.347-06:002012-12-05T14:35:57.347-06:00I hate to burst all of your bubbles, but it has ab...I hate to burst all of your bubbles, but it has absolutely nothing to do about public education. My wife, a teacher, can tell you within the first week of school what kids have a solid 2-parent home or at a minimum a parent at home who cares.<br /><br />That alone makes a substantial amount of the difference in success and failure. Unfortunately the black "families" have nearly ceased to exist, thus the fallout.<br /><br />That being said, it also validates KF's points that throwing money at problems won't fix it and plenty of school(and other government entities) have a propensity to waste money employing people who are incompetent...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com