Atlas Shrugged: The Movie

[Bananafish]

Some have argued that the financial crisis was caused by government regulation.

hehehahah

[sdhonda]

I kid you not:

http://reason.com/archives/2009/06/19/t ... l-deregula

[Bananafish]

Remember, there aren't really free market regulators to keep people honest when dealing with bad money.

i read this a while ago but i remember it being a fairly good article!

also you'll literally be laughed out of the U.S political climate if you even suggest that an unregulated free market is fallible or immoral :3

e: Hahahahaha. Reason.com oh my god ahaha just by the name of the website i can tell exactly what it is that is amazing

[Bananafish]

oh look two articles on public schools and both essentially champion charter schools what a surprise

[sdhonda]

also you'll literally be laughed out of the U.S political climate if you even suggest that an unregulated free market is fallible or immoral :3

Types the man who's first reaction to notions he objects to is... laughter.

[Bananafish]

the bp oil spill: a direct result of too much government interference??? you decide!!

[sdhonda]

Where did that even come fr-

[Bananafish]

i thought you posted that article as a joke but now i'm not sure :\

[Wolfenbarg]

Remember, there aren't really free market regulators to keep people honest when dealing with bad money.

i read this a while ago but i remember it being a fairly good article!

also you'll literally be laughed out of the U.S political climate if you even suggest that an unregulated free market is fallible or immoral :3

e: Hahahahaha. Reason.com oh my god ahaha just by the name of the website i can tell exactly what it is that is amazing

Um...? The US political climate was all about increasing and balancing regulation until 9/11 hit. The reason the Federal Reserve started championing cheap credit in the first place was to counter the absolute stand-still that New York came to. The rest of the chips fell into place afterwards due to a market that was stagnant. Just look up corporate taxation policies and you'll realize that we are not a deregulated market, and not even the so-called conservatives think it should be.

oh look two articles on public schools and both essentially champion charter schools what a surprise

Charter schools at least have a response to the education problem. Most people are clamoring for more money, even though comparatively we spend more money with less results. Charter schools are a chance to use the same money in a different ways. Only about 20% of charters are considered successful, but considering the rate schools are failing in the US, that's better than nothing. Also, if a charter is bad, it goes away. If a normal school is bad, we throw more money at it so they can build Olympic sized swimming pools.

EDIT:

I kid you not:

http://reason.com/archives/2009/06/19/t ... l-deregula

Okay, I just read it. Some of its points were spot on. The government was essentially insuring the quality of these investment vehicles. The Federal Reserve is seen as the country's prime example, as it is illegal for them to lose their triple A status as a credit agency (so much for that). Since they were buying and selling so many of these investment vehicles, it promoting the buying and selling of sub-primes and CFOs to organizations domestic and abroad. Had they not been involved, the issue wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it was. However, that isn't to say that they were the only ones at fault. Lenders still went wild, and people were also more than willing to turn any form of collateral into an ATM.

Still an interesting article. You can't pin the blame on just one side though. Everyone was high on the money machine.

[Tycherin]

*snip*

oh look two articles on public schools and both essentially champion charter schools what a surprise

Charter schools at least have a response to the education problem. Most people are clamoring for more money, even though comparatively we spend more money with less results. Charter schools are a chance to use the same money in a different ways. Only about 20% of charters are considered successful, but considering the rate schools are failing in the US, that's better than nothing. Also, if a charter is bad, it goes away. If a normal school is bad, we throw more money at it so they can build Olympic sized swimming pools.

Agreed and agreed. Although I'm not positive on the 20% figure there (source?), it almost doesn't matter. A 20% success rate is much better than many comparable industries, not the least of which is public schools. I'd be interested to see how success is measured for something like that, because chances are that public schools - on average - don't do too well themselves. It's this whole trend of teaching tests, not learning material- but I digress...

The part about throwing money at them is dead on. Sometimes additional funding is helpful (ok, frequently), but when the basic model is flawed (for the individual school, not necessarily the system as a whole), not so much.

[Wolfenbarg]

*snip*

oh look two articles on public schools and both essentially champion charter schools what a surprise

Charter schools at least have a response to the education problem. Most people are clamoring for more money, even though comparatively we spend more money with less results. Charter schools are a chance to use the same money in a different ways. Only about 20% of charters are considered successful, but considering the rate schools are failing in the US, that's better than nothing. Also, if a charter is bad, it goes away. If a normal school is bad, we throw more money at it so they can build Olympic sized swimming pools.

Agreed and agreed. Although I'm not positive on the 20% figure there (source?), it almost doesn't matter. A 20% success rate is much better than many comparable industries, not the least of which is public schools. I'd be interested to see how success is measured for something like that, because chances are that public schools - on average - don't do too well themselves. It's this whole trend of teaching tests, not learning material- but I digress...

The part about throwing money at them is dead on. Sometimes additional funding is helpful (ok, frequently), but when the basic model is flawed (for the individual school, not necessarily the system as a whole), not so much.

That was a number I remember reading in an article against charters a while back. I'll have to get back to you on the source.

The money problem is all about how they're spending it, even at the college level. If I gave my college 50 million dollars, they'd expand the parking lot, build a new cafeteria, put a nifty sign out front, redo the roofing and ceilings, expand the gun range, and possibly build a pool. The last thing on their list would be paying teachers or considering bonuses for quality work. If it's like that at the college level, what many people agree works quite well, then you can imagine how bad it is at the public school level.

Schools too often are told that they are not for profit institutions, but when given money they try to get incentives to make students come to their schools, because students mean money. With that model, they become for profit with the complete opposite focus of what they should. A school should have the highest graduation rate and highest preparedness level when entering universities, not new computer labs to teach kids with brand new computers what we could have done with XP machines made in 2003. If I remember correctly, Finland uses a system similar to vouchers where the money follows the student. Schools compete to get students by having the best programs, not just the best crap. It's publicly funded and follows a model that I'm surprised we didn't come up with, considering how it follows American principles so dearly. But hey, what does Finland know?

[empath]

[Tycherin]

Fun story about that picture, Wikipedia now lists different statistics for that war. For example, it says that Finland had 32 tanks, not just 30. Those two tanks make the difference between a twentyfold advantage and... wait, no, still a twentyfold advantage. Ok, Finland is awesome.

[Master Gunner]

Here, the annual maintenance budget for all the 200 schools in the province is...roughly $10,000. Obviously, I have no idea how school's work elsewhere, but around here we don't throw more money at schools. We take money away, then give a lesser amount back in a different form dressed up so it appears the government is giving the schools more money. As to the comparative effectiveness of public schools, I don't know, well, anything about charter schools, but remember that public schools have to take in everyone in their area, and are by and large managed by people that have no business being involved in education (the politicians, appointees, and career bureaucrats provincially, and those promoted out of schools for incompetence at the district level). Given the conditions they have to operate under, they generally do a damn good job educating people. Private schools may have better-educated graduates, but they get to pick and choose who they let in, in the first place.

[Bananafish]

Schools too often are told that they are not for profit institutions, but when given money they try to get incentives to make students come to their schools, because students mean money. With that model, they become for profit with the complete opposite focus of what they should. A school should have the highest graduation rate and highest preparedness level when entering universities, not new computer labs to teach kids with brand new computers what we could have done with XP machines made in 2003.

can you please give me any data or statistics that supports what you're saying thank you (schools buying Olympic pools, etc). i am having trouble finding information on public school expenditures so idk

[Tycherin]

Here, the annual maintenance budget for all the 200 schools in the province is...roughly $10,000. Obviously, I have no idea how school's work elsewhere, but around here we don't throw more money at schools. We take money away, then give a lesser amount back in a different form dressed up so it appears the government is giving the schools more money. As to the comparative effectiveness of public schools, I don't know, well, anything about charter schools, but remember that public schools have to take in everyone in their area, and are by and large managed by people that have no business being involved in education (the politicians, appointees, and career bureaucrats provincially, and those promoted out of schools for incompetence at the district level). Given the conditions they have to operate under, they generally do a damn good job educating people. Private schools may have better-educated graduates, but they get to pick and choose who they let in, in the first place.

Here in the States, the standard solution is to throw more money. As for the thing about taking everyone, different places handle charter schools differently. However, charter schools are still technically public schools, and must also take everyone equally. Generally, you can opt out of your assigned school into a charter school by filling out a form and winning the lottery (the school lottery, not the lottery lottery). Charter schools are generally not as well funded as normal public schools, so that means that the rich (or upper middle class) people tend to actually avoid them unless they really think it will give them a better education. Because of the opt-in system, there are actually many people from disadvantaged homes who use it to avoid going to crappy inner-city schools and instead set their kids up for college. The end result of this is that charter schools actually often get less desirable students.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#United_States):

Early critics feared that charter schools would lure the highest performing and most gifted students from centrally-administered public schools. Instead, charter schools have tended to attract low income, minority, and low performing students.

[Bananafish]

You seem to have cut out the sentence prior to that stating that it is talking about Texas Charter schools and not charter schools in general i think this is what you meant to quote because it is less misleading

The state government of Texas approved the formation of charter schools in 1995. Early critics feared that charter schools would lure the highest performing and most gifted students from centrally-administered public schools. Instead, charter schools have tended to attract low income, minority, and low performing students.

e: The article that the wikipedia article cites actually continues on!

However, the disparity in the quality of education those children receive is wide. Texas charter schools are more likely than traditional public schools to earn state ratings at the very top and the very bottom of the scale.

This August, nearly 16 percent of Texas charter systems were deemed "unacceptable," compared with just 3 percent of traditional districts. Just 1.3 percent of traditional districts earned "exemplary" ratings, compared with 3 percent of charter systems.

A handful of charters made headlines for serious financial and academic concerns. Three former employees of the defunct Prepared Table Charter School in Houston were sentenced to prison last year for helping defraud the government of $6 million. The Gulf Shores Academy and Alphonso Crutch charter schools have owed the state as much as $10.6 million and $1.6 million, respectively.

[Tycherin]

When I read it, it seemed to me like those two sentences weren't connected, but after reading the article Wikipedia references there, they are talking specifically about Texas there. In fact, the newspaper they reference is a San Antonio newspaper. My point still stands, but I do stand corrected.

[Bananafish]

to whoever i was asking about public school expenditures I found this for 06-07.

TOTAL PUBLIC SCHOOL EXPENDITURES: $562.3 billion

Current Expenditures: $476.8 billion
Instruction: $290.7 billion
Student Services: $25.2 billion
Food Services: $18.1 billion
Enterprise Operations: $1.1 billion
Capital Outlay: $62.9 billion
Interest on School Debt: $14.7 billion
Other Current Expenditures: $7.8 billion

would the olympic sized swimming pool fall under 'other'?

[Bananafish]

oh look two articles on public schools and both essentially champion charter schools what a surprise

Charter schools at least have a response to the education problem. Most people are clamoring for more money, even though comparatively we spend more money with less results. Charter schools are a chance to use the same money in a different ways. Only about 20% of charters are considered successful, but considering the rate schools are failing in the US, that's better than nothing. Also, if a charter is bad, it goes away. If a normal school is bad, we throw more money at it so they can build Olympic sized swimming pools.

Sorry, it is worse than doing nothing!

The idea that a charter school that's inefficient will just die off is part of the free market mythos- that capitalism does not tolerate anything that's 'inefficient' which is why it is inherently self-regulating! The private organizations that are operating these schools will continue to do so even if they were abject failures because dismantling them would display that maybe the goal of educational institutes shouldnt be profit.

You seem to be saying that schools have a lot of funding but fail anyway but then what is causing them to fail? I think you're saying that its how they use this money? Or is it something like teachers unions are so strong and teachers are literally impossible to fire and they make $70k/year on average!

I'm also gonna assume since you're advocating for charter schools that you're familiar with the CREDO study which evaluated math tests in 5,000 charter schools across America. The study concluded that

-17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school

-37 percent were worse than the public school

-46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school.

During the early years of charter schools they were promoted as a way to end classroom segregation that resulted in part because of white flight which would dramatically lower the income tax derived for given towns/cities and resulted in minority students being trapped in mediocre public schooling systems suffering from a lack of funding and which are predominantly black or Hispanic. The suburbs which the white families 'escaped' to of course prospered and their children received good educations.

Charter schools were meant to alleviate this problem by allowing families that lived in these impoverished neighborhoods to choose different schools. The question is then, in the state which has had charter schools for longer than any other state in the US (Minnesota), the state where charter schools essentially began to fester how did they fare in preventing segregation?




http://www.irpumn.org/uls/resources/projects/2_Charter_Report_Final.pdf

Chart 2 shows that charter schools are also less integrated but I wanted to get the two main charts down, look at it yourself. I don't think I really have to get into why segregation is bad but just in case:

In the Twin Cities the poverty rate in non-white segregated schools was almost six times the poverty rate in predominantly white schools and more than two and a half times the poverty rate in integrated schools in 2008.High-poverty schools are associated with a wide range of negative educational and life outcomes, including low test scores, high dropout rates, low college attendance rates, low earnings later in life, and greater risk of being poor as adults.

http://www.irpumn.org/uls/resources/projects/2_Charter_Report_Final.pdf (Pg 7)

Another map literally shows white-segregated charter schools being predominantly located in "white suburban school districts" and non-white segregated schools mainly located in urban areas.

Currently, in Minnesota charter schools are exempt from the state’s desegregation rule that applies to other public schools. As a result, they do not participate in the state’s School District Integration Revenue Program, which distributed around $79 million in integration revenue funds to 80 school districts in 2005. At a bare minimum, charter schools, which are much more segregated than the region’s traditional public schools, should be subject to the same desegregation and integration standards as traditional public schools. Charters are, after all, public schools and receive tax-payer funding.

http://www.irpumn.org/uls/resources/projects/2_Charter_Report_Final.pdf (pg 49)

(Although the author does provide fair criticism if the Intergration Revenue Program and its failings etc, also bear in mind that other states will not be as segregated in fact some will be more integrated than public schools although the in the studies I've found that number seems to be about equal or only slightly higher at best))

Here is a UCLA report entited Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards

Performance

You already admitted that many charter schools dont actually show improvement rates (or do, rarely) but I personally feel I should look into this just for the sake of completeness.

A 2003 Brookings Institution study of charter performance in 10 states found that a third of the charter schools in Minnesota failed to perform adequately according to the state’s definition, compared to just 13 percent of all traditional public schools.

Tom Loveless, “Charter Schools: Achievement, Accountability, and the Role of Expertise,” (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 2003), Table 3-2, p. 31.

There is also a study by the Great Lakes Center (which covers Minnesota as well!) and here are their findings (which are not infallible the results of which can suffer from a variety of factors):

• Charter schools in the Great Lakes states are not currently outperforming
demographically similar, traditional public schools.
• The relatively youngest reforms in Indiana and Ohio have the lowest performance levels in the region.
• Illinois has the highest relative results, perhaps because some 15 percent of its charter schools have closed since 2000. When poorly performing schools are eliminated, aggregate results for the remaining schools rise.
• At the school level, a number of successful charter schools consistently perform better on their respective state assessments than predicted. This is true for only some 40 percent of the schools, however; 60 percent of the charter schools are performing more poorly than predicted

http://greatlakescenter.org/docs/Research/Miron_Charter_Achievement/Miron_Charter%20Achievement.pdf

I'd also like to defer to the CREDO study I mentioned earlier.

Teachers Are Lazy

Those Goddamn Teachers! With their insufferable unions and insistence on job security, it's literally impossible to fire the mediocre or outright terrible ones! If you watched the film Waiting for "Superman" this was probably the opinion running through your mind as you emerged from the theater, blinking at the sunlight in an enraged stupor from the 2hr propaganda piece you just witnessed. The film is wrong an absurd number of ways, too many to go into here i think.

Here in the States, the standard solution is to throw more money. As for the thing about taking everyone, different places handle charter schools differently. However, charter schools are still technically public schools, and must also take everyone equally.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind charter schools are actually incentivized to avoid accepting students that may drag down scores, public schools however are incapable of doing this- they have to accept the antisocial bully, the kids with learning disorders, etc. the logic of NCLB is apparently to defund schools that are doing poorly and to increase funding for schools that are doing well because literally the best thing to do for an already impoverished school is to rip out whatever remains of its heart.

For instance, Geoffrey Canada is a piece of shit. He operates the Harlem Childrens Zone (HCZ) and in 2007 Canada announced that he was basically 'phasing out' the Promise Academy middle school because their grades werent up to snuff. Obviously you could not do this in a public school. (note:Geoffrey Canada makes $400,000 a year))

Here is a NYBooks article which completely blasts the film as the pile of shit that it is, but it also makes mention of Finland's educational system which seems to be of interest! tbh i didnt have to waste my time writing all this, i could've probably just linked to that piece and been done with it.

Guggenheim ignored other clues that might have gotten in the way of a good story. While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force. His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students. Any Finnish educator will say that Finland improved its public education system not by privatizing its schools or constantly testing its students, but by investing in the preparation, support, and retention of excellent teachers. It achieved its present eminence not by systematically firing 5–10 percent of its teachers, but by patiently building for the future. Finland has a national curriculum, which is not restricted to the basic skills of reading and math, but includes the arts, sciences, history, foreign languages, and other subjects that are essential to a good, rounded education. Finland also strengthened its social welfare programs for children and families. Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system

If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring systems, and better working conditions. Guggenheim complains that only one in 2,500 teachers loses his or her teaching certificate, but fails to mention that 50 percent of those who enter teaching leave within five years, mostly because of poor working conditions, lack of adequate resources, and the stress of dealing with difficult children and disrespectful parents. Some who leave “fire themselves”; others were fired before they got tenure.

If there was any form of lefist movement in the U.S it would be attempting to stop the spread of Charter schools, if the democrats cared one bit they would not allow the private sector to co-opt the teaching of our youth and strangle the life out of them with the long reach of neoliberalism. welp, okay sorry that's my post hope u enjoyed it

[Wolfenbarg]

Schools too often are told that they are not for profit institutions, but when given money they try to get incentives to make students come to their schools, because students mean money. With that model, they become for profit with the complete opposite focus of what they should. A school should have the highest graduation rate and highest preparedness level when entering universities, not new computer labs to teach kids with brand new computers what we could have done with XP machines made in 2003.

can you please give me any data or statistics that supports what you're saying thank you (schools buying Olympic pools, etc). i am having trouble finding information on public school expenditures so idk

The pools thing (which you seemed to have a blast running with) was mostly hyperbole. In an experiment back when they had the money to do so, some Kansas City schools were thrown a ridiculous sum of money, and rather than using it to improve educational standards, they used it as a way to improve infrastructure to give an incentive for people to go to their schools. One such way was building an Olympic size swimming pool. It was a huge leap in logic, and served as an example of how much our school systems waste money.

Let's just use the computers thing as an example. Right now it's impossible to get through many aspects in life without knowledge of computers, I get that. You know how my schools dealt with that problem? Well my elementary school built a half a million dollar computer lab in order to teach us the basics of using the Windows interface. Important skills, you know. Hell, in the city I live, they continue to throw out their old stock of computers and replace them with better and better machines, facilities, and staff to run them, but the upgrades have no practical value to a student. The internet and word processors work just as well on old machines as new ones.

Anyway, I seemed to have missed one major aspect that you picked up on. My examples only relate to areas that have respectable property values, and thus are well funded. I can't speak on solutions for poor areas or areas where schools are more likely to fail, I have no experience or knowledge in those fields. All I know is that every school I ever went to wasted so much money on crap attracting people to schools instead of hiring the best batch of teachers they could, and paying the best existing ones more.

[Jillers]

I just want to say, on the teacher thing:
My friend is a certified teacher, went to school for it, got her masters and everything.
It took over a year before she could get a job with the DoE, and when she did, it was a charter school in Brooklyn.
The school did not offer her resources to deal with the fact this this was her first actual position as a teacher. They did not help her when she was having problems with the" new system" of teaching they were introducing, and the only help they ever gave her, in a rowdy class that didn't want to bother to learn, was a parent helper.
Overwhelmed, overworked, and overstressed, she had a nervous breakdown and had to take a leave of absence.


Also Wolfenberg: I understand what you're talking about when you say that schools shouldn't waste their money on attracting people to go there, but excellent teachers don't sell, olympic-sized swimming pools do. If they can't get students to go there, they don't get money, and then those teachers don't have work. And who's to say that they didn't get the best teachers available to them at the time?
More questions on that: Did the school already have a pool and a swim team? If yes where were they practicing? What condition was the pool in? If not then I can certainly see the logic in getting one. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I can see the logic.
Do you have a link to this experiment? I'd like to read about it myself.

[Master Gunner]

Again, I know nothing about American schools, and can only speak from my experience with both sides of the Canadian schools I have dealt with. However odds are the public schools you went to had little to no control over the hiring and salary of their teachers. Here, at least, the unions negotiate very strict salary levels based on years of experience and level of education. The individual schools can't do anything to pay extra (assuming they somehow had the funds to do so) without bringing down the wrath of the union (although around here, admittedly, the "wrath of the union" would be laughable). The teacher's union negotiates salaries with the province/state instead. As for hiring, you often have to take what you can get. The number of teachers you can hire is dictated by the number of students, and if you don't have more students or a teacher retiring, you can't hire anyone new, and you it can be rather difficult to fire teachers, especially under the rational of just liking some new one better.

In the end, extra infrastructure is often the only thing the schools can spend money on. If they try to keep it for future maintenance or something, the government is likely to yank it back, so all they can do is spend it as fast as possible on infrastructure to attract more (particularly foreign) students, and better teachers for when they do have room (remember, the teachers also have some choice (well, sometimes) in where they go).

[empath]

That's another thing to remember - the more students a school has, the more teachers it is allotted. And the bigger its faculty, the better the odds of getting those valuable 'good teachers'.

Ergo, the swimming pool helps the school gain a better quality of instructor...indirectly.

[Alja-Markir]

...

So anyway... back to the movie...

~Alja~