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Tag Archives: National Center for Education Statistics

Comparing public school performance in the United States: Part 1 of 3

02 Jan

The public schools in the United States are often compared to the public schools of other nations but what about comparing them to the charter and private sector schools in the United States?

The forces that want to turn U.S. public education over to the private sector—while obviously fooling many and robbing working middle class Americans to pay the rich—have worked hard for decades to paint the public schools and millions of dedicated, hard-working teachers as failures, but those claims are far from the truth—a truth that is difficult to prove.

The reason for this is because state and federal governments do not monitor the charter or private schools as they do the public schools. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top focus on the public schools and ignore the others. For more information on private sector schools not being judged the same as the public schools, I suggest reading Comparing Private and Public School Test Scores from GreatSchools.org.

What’s at stake—more than one trillion annual tax payer dollars that funds public education nationwide. That means every ten years, those tax-payer dollars add up to more than $10 trillion. This money is one of the main reasons for the corporate attack on public schools.

To discover how the charter schools compare to the public schools, Stanford—a private sector university that is one of the top ranked universities in the world—conducted an in-depth study in 2009.

The study found that, on average, charter schools performed about the same or worse than traditional public schools. The Stanford study said that 46% of Charter schools were the same; 37% were worse [which means many public schools were better], but only 17% of the Charter schools were better.

The next study (public vs. private) was reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal government website.

The goal of the study was to examine differences in mean National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics scores between public and private schools when selected characteristics of students and/or schools were taken into account.

Among the student characteristics considered were gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, and identification as an English language learner. Among the school characteristics considered were school size and location, and composition of the student body and of the teaching staff.

For Catholic and Lutheran schools—for both reading and mathematics—the results were again similar to those based on all private schools.

For Conservative Christian schools, the average adjusted school mean in reading was not significantly different from that of public schools.

In mathematics, the average adjusted school mean for Conservative Christian schools was significantly lower than that of public schools.

Continued on January 3, 2014 in Comparing public school performance in the United States: Part 2

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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.

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Posted by on January 2, 2014 in American Public Schools, Education, government, media, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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Are we a Nation Eating and Drinking its Way to Idiocy – Part 2/2

18 Sep

To understand what too much sugar and not enough sleep might mean for a student’s ability to learn, I turned to the ehow.com: “According to a study published in the Food Nutrition Bulletin, children suffering from poor prenatal nutrition also showed reduced cognitive and motor skills, starting at about 6 months of age. The gap was noticeable at 12 months and began to widen as the children aged. This group of children eventually included an increased number of dropouts.”

Then the CDC reports: “Teenagers and young adults consume more sugar drinks than other age groups.

1. Non-Hispanic black children and adolescents consume more sugar drinks in relation to their overall diet than their Mexican-American counterparts. The high school dropout rate for blacks in 2010 was 8%. The percentages of black adults lacking basic literacy was 24%.

2. Mexican-American adults consume more than non-Hispanic white adults. The high school dropout rate for Hispanics/Latinos was 15.1%.  The percentages of adults lacking basic literacy was 44%.

3. For non-Hispanic Whites the high school dropout rate was 5.1%, and the percentage of adults lacking basic literacy was 7%.

4. Low-income persons consume more sugar drinks in relation to their overall diet than those with higher income.

5. The worse years of sugar consumption were ages 12 to 19.

6. Among boys aged 2–19, 70% consume sugar drinks on any given day

Conclusion: If we compare literacy levels and dropout rates to sugar consumption, we find a link. Yet, who is blamed for illiteracy and the dropout rate?

ANSWER: The public schools, teachers and the teacher unions.  The parents are seldom if ever blamed and the sugar industry keeps denying the science.

It is obvious that until most children eat a healthy diet and sleep at last nine hours a night, how can any honest, moral person accuse the schools and teachers of failing at their job?

Until America solves this problem so its children eat and drink healthy foods and fluids (think water), teachers cannot be held accountable for children learning. Of course, diet is not the only factor but it is a crucial factor. Sleep plays a factor. Watching too much TV is another link. In addition, being raised by a parent that does not or cannot read also has a big impact.

Meanwhile, too many parents, the media and politicians keep making schools and teachers the scapegoats by preaching the wrong conclusions.

Feeding children and teens processed sugar is child abuse and should be a crime punishable by life in prison with no parole.

Source of dropout rates: National Center for Education Statistics

Source of literacy rates: Education Nation.com

Discover how to Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap or return A Nation Eating and Drinking its Way to Idiocy – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

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Posted by on September 18, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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Revealing Uncouth Fraud One-Step at a time among Public Education’s Critics – Part 1/2

25 Sep

I started out looking for a list of countries that use standardized tests as the United States does. Eventually, I found what I wanted and that post will appear another time.

At first, what I found wasn’t what I was looking for but what I learned painted a different picture than the criticism that is often heaped on the public schools by those political/religious groups that want to change the education system in the US to fit their beliefs or achieve their agendas.

Since World War II, America’s public schools have been victimized by so-called expert fanatics that seem to know what is right for the schools. Each time one of these waves has arrived (Whole Language Approach to Learning and the Self-esteem movement are two examples), it resulted in disaster for many public schools.

I’m sure private school choice linked to the voucher initiative will prove the same and will solve nothing.  School Choice and the Voucher initiative that refuses to go away are just another unproven theory that will not achieve the desired results.

From Patty Inglish at Hub Pages, I discovered the TOP 5 REASONS MANY TEACHERS QUIT.  What I did was summarize what Patty Inglish wrote. If you want more details, visit her post at Hub Pages by clicking on the link in this paragraph.

“Many teachers quit because teaching is difficult and, to compound this circumstance, many school and school district administrations practice micromanagement and a lack of support that drives teachers away,” Inglish wrote. “The U.S. Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics Teacher Follow-up Survey shows these major self-reported reasons among 7,000 teachers and former teachers for why they quit or are likely to soon quit.”

The persons interviewed report “a constant battle with the administration”, including submitting weekly lesson plans for examination and approval…

[Note: I had to do this for one principal between 1986 and 1989. During that time, the school I was teaching at experienced a fifty-percent teacher turnover, and I also transferred to another school to escape this brute of a micromanager.]

Inglish says, “According to this recent report on teacher attrition by the National Center for Education Statistics, in teachers who quit and took non-education jobs, 64% did so to have more autonomy at work, without micromanagement.”

Continued on September 26, 2011 in Revealing Uncouth Fraud One-Step at a time among Public Education’s Critics – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on September 25, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, politics, Teaching

 

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