You must be very talented, to be able to earn so much respect from me while being unable to read or write.

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Ok the U.S. Education is to craps...we've known this for a pretty long ass time. Especially when u can go to rish towns and see high schools that look like mansions and in poor nieghbor hoods thier school look like corner stores. It fits into the whole capatalist theme. Hey if a person is driven enough he can make a gun out of sticks so if a person is really aimed to make it in life they'll make make it no questions asked.

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"You just bleed there and think about what you've done!"

I think thats a bit of a general statement. My school building is the newest and most advanced high school design in the county but its the neighborhood school of a low income area. As far as funding goes, I think that more of it tends to go to schools in low income neightborhoods (as a portion of an individual districts funding). Problems only really arise when schools from different districts are compared, since there are regulations that are in place to make sure that all schools in the same district are of relatively similar quality (in terms of the costs for actually building the school and stuff). But nothing to my knowledge requires that one wealthy school district shares its funds with one that is poorly funded.


Either way, high schools in my opinion should be the lowest funded level of public education, and more needs to be spent on elementary and middle schools to get kids more interested in learning, that way when they get to high school they have a motivation to want to learn (or at the very least motivated to listen and try to remember). The best way to set up kids for success is to make them want to learn and to teach them how, and that is something that just isnt being done enough, a lot of it relies on the parents though, which is the problem. I would say parents are a key source of the problems with education, its not always something they can control, but there are plenty that could be doing more to prepare their kids for education while they are still young.

thats not a general statement and it has nothing to do with the income of neigborhood it mostly depends on the taxes of the city. I live in one of the richest cities in massachussets but they have the worst cariculum for thier high school students. They have basic classes, not enough book, a run down building, and on top of that the don't have much choices for electives either. The 2 towns next to mine are Milton and Weymoth. Weymoth high is known for it''s lunch room that looks better than cheese cake factory and Milton high school has facilities that will put any YMCA and Boys And Girls club to shame. For my town it's a choice not to put that much money to the high school but for alot of other ones they don't really have a choice. As for my statement being general i'll agree i wasn't that specific but there is no argument that highschools in different areas are obviously much different.

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"You just bleed there and think about what you've done!"

School funding rules probably vary by state, but in Idaho, the primary source is local property taxes, which have to be approved by voters. A district with lower property values will probably have lower property tax revenues & thus less money to work with (it also depends on number of taxable properties & tax rates, not just property values). However, as I've said before, you can't just look at the amount of money, you also have to look at how well it's spent.

Where I went to HS, the main buildings were brick but the parts that got painted (railings, door frames, etc.) were always a bit funky because the school would buy up paint that was left over from other projects, color mixed wrong, etc. at a discount instead of getting paint at full price. That kind of mind-set (go for off-price, less fancy stuff on things that don't really matter to education) can go a long way towards providing a better education than funding levels might lead one to expect.

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

A few days ago, a girl asked me why the rain doesn't just fly off into space because there isn't any gravity up there.

Enough said.

Edit: For perspective, we're both seniors in high school. One of the best high schools in the state.

Babelfish Translation -
My school has some cool new metal-detectors.

Money isn't the only thing that causes problems though. Oftentimes it's policy that ruins everything. Something that comes to mind is at my highschool, they recently banned mp3 players and cellphones from being in sight or in use. I'm not here to rant about my stance on it (although I do think it was a bad decision). Tthe point is that something as seemingly small as saying "No music or texting" can lead to big changes, for better or worse. New security staff were hired to help enforce the rule, teachers were forced to stand outside their classroom door during the break periods, to enforce the rules in the hall, instead of doing something productive in their rooms (and faced disciplinary punishment if they did not enforce the rule in class as well), some people were suspended, or had property of theirs confiscated (and in the process, damaged), grades were manipulated, blah, blah, blah. Some school simply don't think through all of the consequences of their changes to policy and regulation.

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Yes, there are policy problems like that. I can see why they would do that, but it's better for teachers to be doing work their free periods, I agree.

The problem is that the US school system is so decentralized and localized, you cannot fairly sum it all up. There are some amazing public school districts and some that are very inadequate. In this case, do you blame the country? No. Not at all.

Plus, the school system is geared towards getting a post secondary education to gain a specialized skill for the work force. No one pays attention to where you went to high school. Plus, with the way university admissions work in the US, the top universities do accept students from public schools. For example, about 70% of MIT and Caltech's students come from public schools. The majority of students attending the really good universities come from public schools and do well later on.

Well my school actually has a similar policy with cell phones and MP3 players, but nobody ever does anything to enforce it, well they enforce the cell phones, and kids really dont listen to MP3 players in class, but I can listen to my MP3 player at lunch and have the principal walk by and he wont say anything. And there is one teacher I know that lets kids text in class since the last time he confiscated a kid's phone he couldnt get the student to stay awake in class.


Either way, I can agree that the way your school has gone about enforcing an otherwise relatively fair and rational rule is really quite a problem and with hiring people to enforce it...thats just stupid. IMO any policy like that shouldnt be forced to be enforced, the unlucky or less subtle students will get their stuff confiscated, and the lucky or sneakier students wont.

Well, one of the biggest problems I have with it (and any of the other 'reforms' my school went through between this year and last) is that the only reason it came into effect is that this new tool of a principal came along (named Mr. Comfort, of all things), and decided that the most successful school in the entire region was suddenly a den of rotten morals and anarchy. He scheduled weekly (I think it's weekly, I don't spend much time at the school myself) drug checks, complete with drug dogs running up and down the halls and everything, threatened to fire several of the best staff for teaching in an 'unconventional' manner (An english class where you go running once or twice a week instead of reading a book. Doesn't sound so bad to me.), and brought along his own personal gang-bang squad (the 'hired help' I mentioned earlier) that has no job but to roam the halls looking for people to bust. You would think that there was a school shooting every other week the way he treats that place.

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And you arent exaggerating any of that? That seems a little extreme considering your school was one of the best in the area. Nobody did anything to oppose him at all? I mean principals arent all powerful, you just have to take the battle to their terms.

That said Im really glad to finally be done with high school, but my school is going to go to hell next year once the state grades come in and my school is given a "D" for the sixth year in a row (stupid traditional students, literally). They will probably have to formally fire about 3/4 of the teaching staff (then rehire the majority of them), turn it into a state run private school (which I have no idea how that works), or rezone the school to take kids from smarter areas and put them in it. But its really all the counties fault anyways, since my school is the dumping grounds for the kids who get expelled from other schools. Around 1/5 of the traditional students are reading at under a 5th grade level, and doing math on an even lower level than that (one girl in my club sponor's class seriously thought that 2x2=22).

Either way the Magnet program there is going to go to hell along with the traditional program, since the traditional kids leech off the good standardized testing scores of the Magnet students, thus dragging everyone down. Its stupid, especially since the class rank of Magnet students there is only compared to other kids in the Magnet program, so they are like seperate schools, but not seperate schools.

It's one of those things you don't notice unless you pay attention. He didn't come marching into the school and announce "I am Mr. Comfort. I'd like you all to meet my personal Gang-Bang squad. They will be molesting you if they catch you doing anything that would be found inappropriate, like talking, walking, or breathing.

And everybody kind of went along with it, because our city seems to be in the middle of this anti-bad things rally. More so then normal, that is.

I'm looking past the surface. He really isn't some sort of wicked dictator, but he's way too Orwellian 1984 to be a principal.

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California's education system screwed me, and it'll screw my kids, too. End story.

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lolol. You know my old school did a lot of that too. Except , I think the only difference is mine actually needs it. Other than firing teachers that know how to get the job done, we had drug sniffing dogs and bag checks every couple of months. We had rent a cops too. It sounds harsh but before they did all that gang fights were an everyday occurrence. Your new principle is overreacting to something and I'm calling douchebaggery on him. You only call in the dogs when you know you've got a major problem.

Well, anyways rent a cops aren't always bad, and should oly be brought in to make a horrible situtation better again. But maybe I just feel that way because they'd been around since before I even got to middle school. because of them they made kids like me not be afraid of getting jumped or worse at school. Good luck with your douche of a principal.

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What district? I was lucky enough to be in one of the top 10 high schools in Northern California.

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