Here are the statistics that may help current and future parents of all racial and ethnic groups rethink parenting.
Some of Amy Chua’s critics claimed that her “old world” style of parenting leads to mental illness for her daughters and explaines the high suicide rate among Asians/Chinese (which isn’t true).
Before accusing Chua, those critics should have done some research.
According to Child Trends Databank, among males, suicide rates in 2003 (in America) were highest among the following:
Native American (24.7 per 100,000)
Non-Hispanic whites (13.3 per 100,000) – CAUCASIANS (about twice that of Asian-Americans)
Hispanics at 9.2 per 100,000
Asians at 6.7 per 100,000
Blacks at 6.6 per 100,000
Among females:
Native Americans had the highest rate of suicide at 9.0 per 100,000
Non-Hispanic whites at 3.0 per 100,000 – CAUCASIANS
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. writing in Psychology Today explains Why Chinese Mothers Really are Superior (On Average). “It’s not stereotyping when it’s right.… Asian Americans have the lowest self-esteem of any ethnic group in the U.S., but achieve the best academic performance (and, among adults, the lowest unemployment rate).…
“On average,” Dr. Twenge says, “Asian parents use more discipline and insist upon hard work more than Western parents. And on average, their kids do better….
“Children are not the rulers of the household. Parents do have to insist on hard work, because kids left to their own devices too often squander their time and energy on video games, TV, texting, and Facebook (as statistics for the average American child show).”
America has a population over 300 million. Asian-Americans are less than 5% of that population at about 14 million.
However, statistics and facts prove that Asian-American parents (on average) practice the Old Testement methods of parenting when compared to all other ethnic groups and the results are sobering.
For the rest of this eight-part series, we shall see statistics supporting the average Asian-American parent as superior.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
The obsessive Politically Correct, self-esteem driven parent held sway over how most Americans raised children.
Now, thanks to Amy Chua, there is a wakeup call to many future and current parents. Critics have accused Amy Chua of child abuse, being a narcissist, a liar, a backstabber, a psychopath, etc.
Amy Chua was also attacked for daring to say Chinese mothers were superior to the soft American parent.
In fact, Amy Chua was parenting as the Old Testament advises except for the spanking (she never mentions in her memoir that she spanked her children).
Maybe Chua should have spanked her younger daughter Lulu because she was rude, insulting and rebellious. Maybe she should have used soap and washed out Lulu’s mouth.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
To discover how far the average parent in the US has gone to pamper the average child, the March 2011 Bulletin for AARP provided some disturbing statistics.
In Pampering Our Kids, AARP said, “When boomers finally became parents, they wanted nothing but the best for the little ones, driving sales for infants, toddlers and preschoolers to more than 17 billion a year.”
In addition,Money Management Works said, “Teen spending is playing a bigger and bigger role in the U.S. economy. Teenagers have money and they are spending it.… Despite the recession, 75% of teens are receiving the same or more spending money this year than last year.
“Clothing accounts for the biggest chunk of spending by teens, at 34%. Entertainment places second, at 22%, and food is third, at 16%.
“In a 2007 article by marketingvox, according to Packaged Facts, teen spending was $189.7 billion in 2006 and will be $208.7 billion by 2011. This is despite a 3% decline in the 12-17-year-old population over the same time period.”
Studies and statistics show that 80% of American parents (way above average) never attend a parent-teacher conference during the time their child is in kindergarten through twelfth grade (public schools).
This change in parenting also resulted in statistics describing today’s average American child and teen spending about 10 hours daily having fun watching TV, playing video games, social networking on Facebook, hanging out with other teens at the mall, or sending endless text messages to friends.
Politeness among the average American child and teen was out and rudeness was in. The old adage of the child “to be seen and not heard” was as good as dead for the average parent.
However, Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says, “‘Seen but not heard’ is not the best model for parenting children. On the other hand, it is infinitely superior to the abdication of adult authority that marks the current age.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
In the 1960s, Political Correctness in partnership with the unproven theory of soft, obsessive self-esteem driven parents rewrote the rulebook for parenting in America resulting today in the “average” American parent that talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day.
Out went the soap that was once used to wash the mouths of vulgar children and teens leading to the common use of the “F” word in almost every spoken sentence.
In addition, spanking (corporal punishment) was all but outlawed and identified as child abuse by many.
However, Religious Tolerancesays, “Corporal punishment is strongly recommended in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament).
Most of the biblical quotations advocating corporal punishment of children appear in the book of Proverbs.
“The phrase “spare the rod and spoil the child” is often incorrectly attributed to the Christian Bible. It does not appear there. It was first written in a poem by Samuel Butler in 1664.”
This video shows both the wrong and right way to spank a child.
Instead, Proverbs 13:24 says, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes (diligently).”
Proverbs 19:18 says, “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.”
Proverbs 22:15 says, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.”
Proverbs 23:13 says, “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.”
Proverbs 23:14 says, “Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell (Shoel).”
Proverbs 29:15 says, “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself brengeth his mother to shame.”
The Old Testament was the oldest parenting guide in the Western world and was used for several thousand years until the 1960s.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
In a recent March 2011, 60 Minute segment, Katie Couric reported on an experimental New York City charter school founded on the idea that paying teachers $125,000 annually would attract the best people for the job and make a difference.
The principal’s name was Zeke Venderhoek. The students were mostly African American and Hispanic and almost all came from poor families. The teachers often put in 80 to 90 hour weeks.
When the fifth graders from Venderhoek’s charter school took the New York State Math and Reading Exam, the results revealed that on average the public schools in the district scored better than the charter school.
At the conclusion of 60 Minutes, Venderhoek said one year wasn’t enough to show improvement.
Halt!
Wait a minute!
I taught in public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) in a barrio with multi-generation, Latino street gangs, and often worked 60 to 100 hour weeks. From my classroom doorway, I witnessed a drive by shooting one year. Another year, in the evening when I was working late, a student was gunned down outside my room next to the school gate as he was leaving the campus.
However, over the years, district records revealed that my students often outperformed all other student in the district at the same grade level on standardized tests with improved writing skills. District administration said the records showed this to be true year after year and I did not teach in a charter school.
In the early 1980s, one African-American mother with a seventh grade, twelve-year-old daughter came to me. The mother was upset because the previous year’s standardized test scores said her daughter was reading several years behind grade level.
I told the mother the only way that would change was for her to turn off the TV and spend time with her daughter every evening and on weekends making sure her daughter did the homework, studied for tests and quizzes and read at least one hour or more every night seven days a week with a discussion before bedtime about what had been read. If there were questions, call me.
By the end of the year, that student’s literacy level had improved five years. That mother made the difference, and my mother did the same thing for me when I was in grade school. Without my mother’s effort at home, I would not be able to read today.
Why couldn’t Venderhoek’s Charter School show similar results?
The answer may be found from a 2009 Stanford University Charter School study that discovered only 17% of almost 5,000 nationwide charter school delivered on the promise that they would succeed where public schools often failed.
Seventeen percent is a FAILING grade and many of these charter schools had smaller class sizes, longer school years and days with stricter behavior codes with school uniforms.
In fact, students that did not perform could be sent back to the public schools, which is something private school may also do.
When will the country wake up and hold parents and students responsible to turn off the TV, shut down the Internet, study, do homework and read? Teachers cannot do it alone.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
If I had a dollar for every time a district administrator or a high school principal said educating a child was a partnership between the teacher, the child and the parent, I’d have a few thousand dollars.
The problem is that the average American parent is not part of that partnership.
How can that average parent be a partner working together with the teachers if the parent talks to his child less than five minutes a day? That’s what surveys and studies show us.
In fact, the average child of the average parent plays an average of 10 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, social networking on sites such as Facebook or sending out hundreds of text messages a day.
Jean M. Twenge, Ph. D., writes in Psychology Today that Narcissism is on the rise among individuals and in American culture, and says, “Our American obsession with self-esteem has not made us any more successful, and has probably made us less successful. Believing in yourself is not enough; you have to work hard. In trying to make our children happy in the short term, we may undermine the skills they need in the long term. Telling children how great they are does no good if they don’t actually develop skills.”
We need to change that average so a decade from now we read that the average parent doesn’t mention self-esteem anymore and talks to his or her child more than thirty minutes a day while the fun and games of an average American child doesn’t happen until after homework, studying and reading a book.
Dr. Twenge was right when she said, “You have to work hard.” Now, we have to get the average American parent to pay attention.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Before I comment on what a friend—who is still in the classroom teaching—wrote in a recent e-mail about the district he/she teaches in, I want to mention my own thirty years as a teacher [1975 – 2005] as a way to establish that I know what I’m talking about.
During my early years in the classroom, many of my seventh and eighth grade students won half the poetry awards in a state-wide contest in California. The award ceremonies were held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
The poems that won came out of a workshop I developed, and that success led me to develop a short-story writing workshop where two of my eighth-grade students one-year ended up published in a special edition of a Los Angeles Times Magazine that showcased maybe twenty or thirty short stories out of more than 10,000 submitted from schools in Los Angeles County.
That was back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, over the years, I developed most of my own curriculum to teach English and writing that I used successfully for decades.
In the 1990s, when I taught journalism and was the advisor of a high-school newspaper—in addition to teaching four periods of English—my journalism students won national and international recognition for their work. In fact, you can read about it here. Just click on the next link to see what the Rowland Heights Highlander had to say: Extra! Nogales newspaper a five-time winner
In the late 1990’s, a vice principal told a room full of English teachers at the high school where I taught that my students outperformed—by a large margin—the students of every English teacher in the district at the same grade level when it came to writing. At another meeting, another VP would mention that my students—year after year—always showed gains, on average, on annual standardized tests.
I was a tough, no-nonsense teacher who often created his own curriculum units and that included getting ideas from other teachers who I worked with. Some of my best teaching methods were learned from other veteran teacher like my friend.
My friend, who is still teaching—with nearly 30 years of experience—is not happy with his/her school district. I’m deliberately avoiding revealing who he/she is, because I’ve seen what happens to teachers who break the omerta of an American public school district, and I have also been a victim—it shouldn’t be a secret that school districts in America hate bad press.
I’m not saying that the administrators in my friend’s school district will make his/her life miserable if they discover who he/she is but having been a teacher for thirty years, I don’t want to take any chances, because I’ve seen the lives of teachers destroyed by administrators and/or elected school board members.
Public school teachers have due process rights, but they do not have tenure.
A vice principal at the high school where I taught for sixteen of those thirty years, once told me—even with all that I had accomplished as a teacher—that because I was an outspoken critic of what I saw as poor leadership in the school district where I taught, that my name was on a black list, and she had been told to find a way to get rid of me. She didn’t do much to get rid of me and lost her job at the end of the school year.
One trick used to force teachers out of education is to assign them five-different classrooms with five-different subjects to teach. For example, instead of teaching five, tenth-grade English classes in the same room, each class would be different, so the teacher would have five different lesson plans to work on in addition to rushing to a different classroom every period.
In fact, I knew one teacher who had her teaching day split between two high schools several miles apart with a half-hour window to drive from the first high school to the second one after teaching three classes in the morning to teach two classes in the afternoon. And she was assigned to five different classrooms. That tactic worked, because she quit and left that district to find work elsewhere.
As you may see, it is a myth that public school teachers have total job protection known as tenure.
Back to my old friend who wrote in his/her email, “Regarding curriculum, I just attended a depressing workshop. The three-day workshop was about the new Common Core Standards (CCS). The first two days of the workshop were good. I learned about why the CCS was developed, and I also learned more about the CCS in the primary grade levels. It’s worthwhile to know what standards your students were exposed to earlier in their educational career.
This is an ad from the company that developed and sells Synced Solution
“However, on the third day of the workshop, I discovered that my district signed up for a software program called Synced Solution. Synced Solution maps out the daily standards for every day of the school year. Then, our teacher grade level teams mapped out the objectives for every day of the school year. Synced Solution represents the first step in lock-step teaching; moreover, my district [meaning elected school board members and district administrators] thinks it represents the Holy Grail of teaching.”
“My colleagues and I still have some control over the short stories we want to cover with our students but not when we teach them. Synced Solution even has us doing a full-day of teaching on the first day of school when I am telling my students where to sit (seating chart), taking my students on a room tour, and having them interview each other. I do class building on the first two-days of school, which this new program does not account for. Also, I cover a lot of grammar in my class, which is mostly absent from this program.”
My friend’s e-mail went on: “I feel like teaching has become ALL science-based. Education officials [elected school board members and district level administrators] forget that teaching is 50% of an art-form and 50% science. This curriculum does not allow me time to conduct classroom debates, infuse my curriculum with health science-based activities and articles, and to teach grammar in a systematic way …
“I think the Synced Solution software program would be good for a first-time teacher. New teachers could use the guidance and structure, but I resent it. I think there has to be more flexibility. For example, I think the program should say which standards should be covered on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis.
“My district wants to script my teaching; also, my district can now see if I am covering the standards using its timeline. We will have unit tests, and there is an area in the software program that we are supposed to check off (checking off the objectives and standards).
“The other teachers and I concurred that this software program will add at least an hour to our teaching day. Instead of technology assisting us, it is making our jobs even more cumbersome. Synced Solution is very cumbersome to navigate.
Teleparent is a program that teachers want and need. Who teaches students? Who makes the most phone calls to parents?
“I would rather have my school bring back TeleParent. I don’t know if you ever had this automated phone program when you were teaching [I didn’t], but we had it for two years, and then my school took it away.
“TeleParent allowed me to contact a group of students having the same negative academic behavior.”
“For example, 20 students forget their textbook. I could just go through my class list on TeleParent and check off the names of students who forgot their textbook. Then, I could check off the reason for the phone call, Forgot textbook. Teleparent would contact my parents in their primary language (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, etc.).
“Also, it would use a different phone number so that my students would not know it was Teleparent; this prevented students from intercepting the corrective phone calls [which some students would do—believe me]. It exponentially increased my number of parent contacts. Negative classroom behaviors changed very quickly. Teleparent could easily raise the test scores for a high school. Every time my colleagues and I want a software program that makes our job easier, the district and/or my school rejects it. We wanted Turnitin.com, but my school refused.
Another valuable tool for teachers that teachers want.
“Turnitin.com is a powerful software program that detects plagiarism in essays and also in research papers. This software program would make my job so much easier. I would not have to hunt on the Internet to locate the research that a student copied into his paper.”
My friend teaches in the Chino Valley Unified School District.
I wrote back to my friend and said what was happening in his/her school district was nothing new. During my thirty years as a classroom teacher—especially after standardized testing became one of the gods of public education in the United States—what I call magic-pill programs like this Synced Solution thing came along and always promised to revolutionize education boosting the school’s standardized test scores.
And from my thirty years of experience, I can tell you that all of the magic pill programs teachers were often forced to use failed miserably—so bad that they often caused test scores to drop instead of increase—and a few years later these costly programs would be replaced by another magic-pill program.
I worked with some excellent principals and vice principals, but I do not have much praise for administrators who worked out of the district office.
In October 2000, The Los Angeles Times ran a piece about Education’s Failed Fads. The lead paragraph says, “Misguided and bumbled attempts to fix schools are nothing new, as education historian Diane Ravitch relates in painful detail in her new book, “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” (Simon & Schuster, $30). I recommend that you click on the LA Times link and read about all the failed education fads to see what I’m talking about.
It is obvious to me that Synced Solution is another fad that will fail mainly because a majority of the teachers were not allowed to be part of the final decision.
For example, there was the Whole Language Approach to teaching reading in the 1980s and 1990s—that supported the idea that children can and should learn to read text in the same easy, natural way that they learn to understand speech. But in Finland “reading instruction is intense in grades 1 and 2, and is uniformly based on teaching phonemic analysis and phoneme-grapheme conversions. Source: THE GLOBALIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL FADS AND FALLACIES
It was my experience that teacher generated programs worked best the same as many of the programs I developed for the almost six-thousand students that I taught over a thirty-year period. This is what teachers in Finland do and Finland has one of the best school systems in the world.
Reading: Finland was in 3rd place vs. the United States at 17th
Mathematics: Finland was in 6th place vs. the United States at 31st
Science: Finland was in 2nd place vs. the United States at 23rd
Synced Solutions is nothing more than another popular, politically correct fad supported by another elected school board to be implemented by administrators with no job protection in a do-as-your-told-or-else educational environment adding another nail in America’s mediocre public-education system.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
This question was about the time I was spending writing posts for one of my Blogs (I maintain four). To answer, I used how I managed my time as a teacher.
We have a need for the efficiency and worth of our efforts, don’t we?
If I ramble in my response, it is because of the comparative example I provide and there are far too many elements involved beyond the Blog.
It would take time to keep track of the time. Even after I finish meeting my goal each day, I still get e-mail alerts from the Blog when a comment is left and I return to reply. For me, it’s a survival process learned as a teacher. You take care of what needs taking care of at the instant it needs your attention.
When I was teaching, my workday started when I woke up at 4:00 AM to get ready to go to school. I would arrive at 6:00 AM when the gates were unlocked and have two hours to correct papers, prep and plan, record grades, etc. There were a hundred teachers on the staff at the high school where I taught. Less than five of us arrived soon after the custodial day staff unlocked the gates. About the same number of teachers arrived seconds before the first bell. Oh, how I hated bells. Most teachers arrived in between the early starters and the later arrivers.
During lunch, I stayed in my classroom with a “few” students often coming and going. Especially when I was the journalism advisor for the school paper. My editors would often arrive soon after I did and still be there when I left.
Some days, I would return home by midnight fortunate to get four hours of sleep. I had to leave my classroom because the custodians turned on the alarms, and so did the students that stayed late when I was the journalism adviser. And when I drove off, there would be two or three other teachers driving home too.
Every spare moment was spent correcting papers and I never finished. My workweeks often ran 100 hours a week with 25 of those hours in class teaching. The other 75 hours was spent correcting, prep, planning, parent contacts, attending meetings, etc. The public and politicians are so ignorant about what goes on in education it’s painful. The assumptions and solutions behind the Pollyanna Leave No Child Behind act are idiotic at best and I’m being polite.
I put one foot in front of the other foot and never stopped. When needed, I made phone calls to parents, which was every day, because there were always problems that needed fixing or at least the attempt to fix and the record keeping was a mountain to climb that never stopped growing. Every contact required a form to be filled out in triplicate. Every time a child caused a problem during class, another form had to be filled out in triplicate.
Marketing is both an exact and inexact science. The Blog is only one element of the marketing process. There’s the Websites for the books, and other social marketing like the conversation I’m involved in at LinkedIn about Obama’s national health care proposal, comments I leave at another site called the IAG, and other social Websites and blogs, answering E-mails that come often from friends, former colleagues from teaching, etc.
My books have also won honorable mentions at seven book festivals so far. Then there are the reviews from Book Review Blogs and Websites like the Midwest Book Review to Peeking between the Pages and the time I spend maintaining my Websites. The primary Website has more than fifty pages on it and I haven’t checked the links on many of those pages for more than a year—no time. I focus on the homepage and several others that are related to sales and promotion. Many of the pages are about China. I also read books and write reviews for a Website Blog called PODBRAM.
Then there is the saying that seems so true. “Half of marketing works and half doesn’t and we don’t know which half works.”
My goal is to learn as much as I can about all the elements of marketing and spend as much time working the methods as I can manage. Even though the Blog shows page views increasing and page views increasing at my Websites, there no way to pin down exactly which efforts are resulting in sales because I’m doing so much spread across a wide spectrum of the Internet.
As a teacher, we did study numbers. We tracked grades, test scores and results and altered lessons to focus on the skills and concepts that the majority of students were having problems with. We targeted students who were borderline and stopped by their desks often to make sure they understood what they were doing and were on task because our goal was to move them to the next level.
My work habits were honed razor sharp in the classroom and like so many teachers who taught as long as I did, I am an expert at what it takes to educate a child while struggling not to become a burned out hulk, which happens to some. Most parents, voters and politicians from both parties have no idea. They are fools who won’t listen to the experts but blame them instead.
Back to marketing. For me, it is a process and I don’t have time to keep track of the time spent on any one element.
Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution. Source: Fox News.com
I suspected the truth long ago.
Home schooling and the voucher movement both have the same goal—to control what children learn and think. That is called brainwashing. The Communist Chinese did it during Mao’s reign in China. The Communists in Russia did it too. So did the Nazi’s when Hitler ruled Germany.
A “liberal” education in the public schools and many private colleges teaches evolution and a wide range of subjects, which might be another reason to explain why the conservative media machine has spent decades turning the word “liberal” into an evil thing so people will start to distrust a nonbiased education. I’m not saying the American public education system is perfect, but it is better than having it controlled by the private sector.
Consider this. Conservatives claim that liberalteachers in the schools are biased and are teaching kids to be evil liberals, but at the same time they claim the majority of Americans are conservative.
I am conservative in most of my beliefs. How can that be if I had a liberal education? When I take one of those multiple choice tests to see where I stand on political issues, I always end up right of center but nowhere near the far right. I suspect most Americans are the same.
And that leads me to Wal-Mart.”The Walton Family’s support of the school voucher and charter schools movement is unparalleled in the United States. According to the 2006 Walton Family Foundation 990, the family gave over $48 million to individual charter schools and supporting institutions. Sam Walton once said, “I’d like to see an all-out revolution in education.” He proudly supported school-choice movements along with his son John.” Source: Walton Family Influence Take a look.
However, a study released in 2007 by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) found that students in public urban high schools perform, on average, just as well as those in private high schools.
When the report’s authors compared students of similar socioeconomic status at private, public and parochial high schools, they found that:
Achievement scores on reading, math, science and history were the same;
Students were equally likely to attend college whether they had graduated from a public or private school;
Young adults at age 26 were equally likely to report being satisfied with their jobs whether they had graduated from a public or private school;
Young adults at age 26 were equally likely to engage in civic activity whether they had graduated from a public or private school. Source: Education Portal.com
In another comparison from the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the Nation’s Report Card., we discover that Christopher and Sarah Theule Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Illinois, compared more than 340,000 students using math scores from the 2003 NAEP. The study found that after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, there is little difference between private and public school scores. Source: Great Schools.org
Administered by the U.S. Department of Education, the NAEP is given to students in grades 4, 8 and 12 in both private and public schools.
It seems that there are conservative like most of us, and then there are CONSERVATIVES like the Walton family.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 