Sometimes the goal is to slow down work. For example, if your budget is for a year but the project only takes 6 months, sometimes people add extra hurdles that look good to outsiders but slow down work enough so they get paid for the full time.
If a project ends 6 months early it's entirely possible to not get paid as much.
> Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
Thats an interesting way of saying that charter schools get better results.
Given the set of high-ability students, it does seem that charter schools have better results.
There's an attitude that everybody should do poorly together, and that's better than anybody succeeding. Like a bucket of crabs, each clawing at the others trying to get out and pulling them back in that keeps the poor, doing poorly. And well-meaning ivory-tower types fuel the culture with idealistic 'fairness' arguments.
Charter schools like elite colleges gain 90% of their reputation from rejecting average or below students. There is variation among school quality adjusting for incoming students, however that exists for both normal and charter schools with many charter schools preforming worse than expected and many public schools preforming far above expectations.
However, if you want to support the value of some institution or approach it's really easy to ignore this fact and create biased research.
Citation? Its not about reputation (irrelevant) but accomplishment. And in the OP case, we're talking about one school helping one demographic. I wish this new school all the best luck in helping these kids.
Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools.https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vo...
And are charter schools about reading and math? Cherry picking results is easy to show whatever you like.
Charter schools are about - whatever each is constituted to be about. Like you can't go to a hardware store and grab a random tool and rate it on how well it drills holes. You shouldn't rate charter schools on your favorite metric. Some are about upper-class folk raising their kids with better music and art appreciation. Others are about escaping backward school boards. Sometimes they are in areas so backward, that the charter school still underperforms the national average. But if its an improvement for that area, its an improvement.
The "sacrifices" involved in any decision here are actual children too.
For example for me specialization couldn't come too early. Specializing even at age 12 would have been fine. Everything else could have fallen by the wayside, I only was interested in and good at exactly one thing and only at University did I finally meet anybody who actually challenged me, only there did I find specialisations within the specialisation that were all attractive. In some ways the last 3-4 years of school were just waiting.
For plenty of other kids they got all the way to an undergraduate degree in some general subject area they didn't care about, still with no clear idea what they were about, no real direction, forcing them to specialize earlier would have hurt them severely by cutting off options.
Without fairly intensive Chemistry (and preferably some Biology) by age sixteen, you are not going to become a good medical doctor. Without putting many hours a week into mathematics (not just enough to grasp a vaguely analytical subject like engineering, serious fundamental mathematics) by age eighteen you are never going to become a serious mathematician. And sucks to be you if, aged twenty-five, you at last find out you are a natural with a basketball, or at soccer, or dozens of other sports which require peak physical performance that's unattainable in middle age.
All our options here suck, somewhere a kid will be betrayed by whatever happens, if they're able to specialise, some of them will pick wrong and regret it. No fault to them, just bad luck. If they can't specialise the mandatory general achievement will prevent some of the most talented in specific fields from ever achieving what was possible.
I have no recommendation here, just commiserations.
There are plenty of short term advantages to specialization. But, diminishing returns generally apply and the standard public school curriculum is a relatively low bar. So, IMO we should generally stick with them, but after that the sky's the limit.
That said, you have a good point that some fields really do require a lot of early work. I just think they should be added as supplement not simply replacing the foundations of a good education.
Yes, due to an unfair advantage. As per the text you quoted:
> charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
so if I'm an engaged and interested parent, and I want my child to succeed, looks like charter schools are the correct answer about where to send my kids.
But the question of "where should I send _my_ kids" should be considered separately from "how should education in this country as a whole be structured."
You have to distinguish between the macro and micro. Another example is college. If my nephew asked me whether he should go to college, I'd say, definitely do that, if you can afford it. But on a macro level, college in the US has kind of become scam and we have to do something about it.
Not necessarily. Charter schools do much better if you measure just output, but are frequently quite average once you control for their advantageous population.
It depends how much you weigh “Does the charter school actually teach my child better than a public school”(statistically, no, and they might even teach worse!) and also “do I care about exposing my child to people they’re different from”(ie. Avoiding them being stuck in a bubble) and also “am I unable to find another environment for intellectual pursuits”(clubs, extracurriculars, etc. when I was young there were definitely after-school schooling available for smart kids, and at school you can stay late for science teachers to teach you more science).
An individual parent’s incentives do tend to point in this direction, if their metric for success as a parent doesn’t include being exposed to children whose family’s aren’t as successful.
But when taken to an extreme, this leads to exclusive areas and excluded people.
The real question is whether they get results that are as much better as they should be, since they are selecting students up front. I suspect that picking your inputs at a very young age is more about marketing and capturing money than it is about true ability to perform.
Either that, or it is simply a follow on of the fact that parents with money, free time, and high levels of education tend to have students that do well in school. The school may make no difference at all if the kids learn a lot at home.
there have been about a dozen new hires at my work, each of them getting a new mac book and accessories to develop on.
multiply that by all of the new hires across the country and some of the lowest unemployment numbers in years and you've got a good set up for apple's hardware division to make a ton of sales last quarter.
...
but unfortunately, looking at their data, it looks like I was wrong: unit sales for macs fell by 13% compared to last year, and 9% compared to last quarter.
interesting.
Edit: downvotes because I made a prediction before looking at the reports then acknowledged I was wrong and didn't delete my post. Cool.
Windows is still something like 88% of the corporate computer market, with macOS at around 9%, last I checked. Most companies aren't purchasing Apple hardware for their employees.
Yeah, certainly they don't do it in Europe. I wonder how does it look in the US, I would imagine Macs are much more popular in corporations (?) and definitely startups.
If a private company squanders money through corrupt contracts, I have options. I can choose to withdraw my support for what they're doing and punish the company financially by selling their stock. I can short their stock, tell everyone "this company is wasting money on corrupt contracts" and profit from the market reaction. I can choose to buy products and services from a more efficient company that isn't dumping money to their cronies. I can set up my own company and compete with them.
If the government squanders money through corrupt practices, I have no opt-out. I can say "I'm not paying my taxes until you fix this corruption problem", but men with guns will lock me in a cage. If a sufficiently large proportion of the electorate support or ignore that corrupt government, they can just take money from my paycheck and give it to their cronies with impunity.
Corporate corruption is bad, but it is fundamentally different to government corruption.
1) You can liquidate, move and bring your wealth with you to a new jurisdiction that would love the capital infusion. You can start a political movement and gather grassroots support to install a less corrupt administration. You can become a revolutionary and fight the state.
There are options; you just don't like them.
The big issue with corruption isn't "what can Joe Q. Average do to stop it".
2) You can't punish a private company by putting together an activist short sell play - it's private, not public.
If a public company squanders money through poor dealings, you probably can't punish them either.
Bill Ackman might be a wee bit of a dick, but he's got a war chest larger than yours and he got his firm, Pershing Square, beat the fuck up exercising his 'options' against Herbalife, who he believed was engaging in corrupt dealings. Right or wrong, Carl Icahn hates Ackman for a lawsuit Ackman won against him and decided to throw piles of money into a short squeeze against Ackman's play.
I don't normally call out this type of post, as tit does not necessarily warrant tat. However, the previous poster did a good job laying down how things are supposed to work. I could point out that there are yearly ethics trainings at the Federal level at least that make it VERY clear that the type of behavior described IS, in fact, illegal and was made illegal due to it's prevalamce, and as far as I am aware, the laws forbidding this type of behavior apply equally across all three branches.
Note that does mean the practice of "taking a Representative to dinner" would also be an ethical violation at least, and possible anti-bribery statute violation at worst. I find the frequency with which I hear tales of this type of behavior most disturbing.
That sounds horrible. Start work at 6? So you have to get up at 5? Which means either going to bed at 9 or you're one of those types who can survive on minimal sleep. Starting work at 6 sounds like the most uncool job I can think of.
That's fine and cool if you have/love kids. I'm the opposite. Getting up at 5am to start work at 6am and being in bed for 9pm is the antipathies of cool for me!
On the other hand, I don’t have children but like having the rest of the day available, and it’s great to not necessarily be working when most businesses are open. I’d call that freedom pretty cool, especially if you’re in an area where that saves you commute time in rush hour.
I respect individuals who value time with their kids in addition to having a serious career. My father was too busy chasing C-suite positions and running Iron Man races to spend time with his six kids.
Antithesis. Of course. I'll edit my comment. I certainly respect those who choose to have kids but not something I ever planned or plan to do. Of course, now I'm in my mid 40s that ship, as far as I'm concerned, has sailed (not saying I couldn't father kids but no teenager wants a dad who is in the 50s/60s).
Yes. 9-5 is really more of a saying than legal truth. People who have to clock their hours usually work 8-5 with a one hour lunch, with some opting to take a half hour lunch and leave early / arrive late with manager approval.
Of course someone who has only worked salary without concern for billable time may never have experienced this. But even for salaried employees if your employment agreement says 40 hours, that does not include lunch breaks. Few employers in tech care because bean counting hours doesn't increase performance for creative types or knowledge workers.
his best and most important work is the Gulag Archipelago[0] and everyone should read it. Its an eye opener that shows how life under communism really is.
The general scholarly and scientific consensus is that the work is not rigorous, objective, or scientific. If you challenge this take it up with the scholars.
Funny how literature suddenly needs to be "rigorous, objective, scientific" when it criticizes communism, even though it's a first hand account written by a political prisoner.
Who's believing propaganda? I'm getting my info from several sources before I make up my mind, you apparently get yours from hearsay that says what you already want to belive. Am I missing something here?
There are lots of reasons to spend money on military technology, but absolute reduction in deaths by U.S. citizens is not a compelling one — there are just too many civilians who die in preventable ways as compared to military deaths.
I think it’s kind of a silly comparison, tbh. I’d like to see us spend more money on both civilian and military research. I suspect that the military spends plenty of money on shit that is less impactful in the long term than research, and military research also often advances civilian technology.
/s