Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Betsy DeVos Proves How Incredibly Stupid She Is During Hearing" video.

  1. They're a joke in part because of the push for privatized education. Privatized education does not improve accountability, outcomes, or transparency. Even the WSJ (in March 2018, iirc) ran a story about how privatized, voucher schools had the overall the exact same levels of outcomes according to standardized testing as public schools. Some private schools did better, but only because they took in fewer voucher students and thereby had a larger private-voucher ratio, which means that had more revenue from private students (whose parents pay the full amount) and fewer losses from voucher students (whose voucher may only be half of the tuition). Students in well-funded, private schools don't do better because the structure of private school is radically different. They apply the same "banking model" of education as public schools. They do better because the school is well-funded. How can public schools ever function adequately if they're constantly being strip-mined of their resources for the benefit of private schools? Don't think private schools devote most of their resources to education; in many cases, their administration has ridiculously high salaries. We know public education can work. It does so in many European countries. Take Finland. They attribute the success of their comprehensive education program in part to the absence of private schools, which steal resources from public school students and create an unhelpful atmosphere of competition over cooperation. Education shouldn't be a business. It's a public good. It isn't for individual improvement, but for the benefit of the community. Everyone benefits when we're all educated and taught to think critically.
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  2. Judging by how many times she repeated it, it's one of the few words she knows.
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  3. 1) Too few Democrats in the Senate. 2) Mike Pence's tie-breaking vote. Or were you asking in the abstract?
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  4. Friendship in this case is spelled d-o-n-a-t-i-o-n-s.
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  5. In their minds, most people don't need to be educated; they need to be productive, efficient, and obedient. You can risk educating people in college and grad school, to a certain degree, because by that point most of them have bought into the legitimacy of the system.
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  6. Airport Runway I was on board with you until you got into that dysgenic pressure nonsense. I think you're also oversimplifying the problem by reducing it to overspending (according to one metric, of many).
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  7. Let's dispel once and for all this fiction that Betsy DeVos doesn't know what she's doing; she knows exactly what she's doing.
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  8. Marco Rubio callback? Anyone? Has it really been that long?
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  9. "I'm not sure I agree with that" is the new "I do not recall."
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  10. Nothing's going to save the system quite like bailing out. That's not DeVos's agenda AT ALL.
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  11. I think education reflects the larger socio-politico-economic system. And I think the content of that education, which you pointed out, also matches that. We live in a capitalist, hierarchical society, and our schools reflect that. Quality of education is measured by accountability, efficiency, so-called objective measures, and the amount of money spent. Teachers are seen as authorities who disseminate standardized knowledge to more or less passive receptacles. I don't think you can have an educational system that respects children's intelligence without radically changing the structure and social meaning of education, turning children from a means to an end into ends in and of themselves. As Bakunin said, "Children do not belong to their parents [or teachers in this case], but to themselves and to their future liberty." Kindness and love are necessary, but they are inadequate within the current framework. It'd be like trying to solve climate change through individual choices. Again, they're nice, and can be awakening, but they won't solve the problem. If you somehow managed to change the current framework, without altering anything else, into something more libertarian, like Finland's comprehensive education or the Modern School proposed and effected by Ferrer, no child would grow up to embrace our capitalist, hierarchical, competitive, atomized, consumerist society. The problem is that you can't abstract something like education from everything else. The economy, healthcare, education, law enforcement, government—they're all intricately connected. I don't think you can meaningfully change one without changing the others.
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