Comments on: Believing in Education as Cure-all

By: james pizelo

james pizelo — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:09:00 +0000

RE: ColdFoot and Doug Noon
I work at a private Jesuit High School and even though we are private about 30% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunches. We have a suition system called fair share, in a nutshell tuition is based on family income. It isn’t a perfect system but it does give us some socio-economic diversity that rivals the local public schools. Within our province, we are considered the blue collar school of the Jesuits. Even in this economic time we are seeing high numbers applying to our school. Obviously we receive students for many reasons– religion, academic excellence, and one that has become a rather significant reason the No Child Left Behind Act. As a private school we an an entry exam therefore we are exempt from the standardized state test that students are required to take in order to graduate. More and more parents in our area are opting to register their students in a private institution to bypass the state standardized testing. We believe in rigor– 98% of our students go onto a four year college after graduation– but we also practice what the Jesuits call “cura personalis” which is caring for the whole of the person. We have many students who come from dysfunctional and broken homes as well as students who come from well to do families who have available to them all the means possible and are well taken care of; where they are on the spectrum has no bearing on developing in them a sense of accomplishment and self-worth. It doesn’t matter if these students can create a Power Point project or post to a blog. Students graduate from our school with the knowledge that people care about them. This is action that reverberates througout our community as students become alumni.

Did I mention we have an association? Technically not a union but we do have representatives that negotiate for our wages and benefits as well as other issues– the same issues that any school whether private or public share. Our salary is at the 98% of the public schools within our state so we are by no means in it for the wage. What keeps us is the closeness and support of the community and the privilege of working with such wonderful students. To say unions are the problem in education is simply ingnorance. It is the unions and associations that maintain the balance between faculty and administration. The bearing on the actual students learning is inconsequential.

By: Schools as Scapegoats « Education and Class

Schools as Scapegoats « Education and Class — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:26:39 +0000

[...] 8, 2008 Thanks to Doug over at Borderland for the tip to Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein’s excellent article Schools as [...]

By: Doug Noon

Doug Noon — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:31:40 +0000

Seems to me that simply asserting, “Schools are the problem. Teacher’s UNIONS are a significant part of that problem…,” without evidence or rationale, is about as weak an argument as anyone could possibly make. What’s the point of having a such a discussion? It’s pointless.

By: coldfoot

coldfoot — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:57:28 +0000

You gotta be kidding me. They couldn’t do a study comparing union schools with non-union schools?

To get the results they wanted they had to make up some phoney criteria of “strongly teacher unionized” states? Then make a big deal of better performance on certain tests?

By: Doug Noon

Doug Noon — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:50:15 +0000

Coldfoot, re. teacher unions:

In "Do Teacher Unions Hinder Educational Performance? Lessons Learned from State SAT and ACT Scores," researchers Brian Powell, Lala Carr Steelman, and Robert M. Carini compared states that are strongly teacher unionized with those that are not and found a clear link between teacher unions and higher state performance on certain standardized tests. This pattern holds even when other factors such as family income, parental education, gender, geographic region, and race are considered.