See? Finnish Schools *Do* Care

Like most people who are very concerned with the state of public education and the intelligence of the population in general, I am absolutely fascinated with the Finnish model of grade school education.

Finnish schools *do* care about money and about competition, same as Americans even though they don’t want to admit it.  Actually perhaps not so same, because they deploy it much more effectively than we do.  Finns implement these attributes systemically from the get-go, while Americans do not.  Finns establish, and enforce, all rules from the inception of educational strategy of that fine nation.

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The Finnish make sure to select only intelligent highly-qualified teachers -- from the get-go.
"A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country."  (Emphasis mine.)  Erm, that sounds an awful lot like competition to me.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

Here in America, anyone can be a teacher.  THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.  We need to face facts.  People are not created equal.  Intelligence is not distributed equally across the playing field.  Not all people have the innate skills necessary to be good teachers.  And not all people are equally capable of being larned' how to develop into good teachers.

Unfortunately this fact that is staring us right in the face is not acknowledged.  It is actively, purposely ignored in the public sphere so as not to risk offending anyone.  Ignoring this fact can and does have disastrous consequences, one of them being that marginally intelligent people can enter the teaching profession.

Any mediocre high school student can be accepted into and complete a bachelor degree program in education.  More rigorous fields of study such as the SMET degrees, tend to weed out mediocre students.  The smart high school students tend to pursue college degrees in science, math, engineering, technology, rather than going into education.

And then only AFTER a teacher has been drafted into the profession and released out into the field are they critiqued on their abilities.  Only AFTER they have already been inducted and hired into a position are they assessed on their ability to do the job.

America is trying to correct for this by proposing merit pay for the good ones, no reward for the bad ones.  That's a start, I guess, but those are rather aftermarket, after-escrow measures.

Well, sigh, if you had just hired good teachers in the first place, then you wouldn't have to worry about weeding out the bad from the good.  You would know that they are ALL good because that's whom you let into the profession.

Finns take care of this by *making sure they get good teachers in the first place.*  They don't wait until _after_ someone starts teaching to see if they are a good teacher or not.

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Well, the only reason merit pay in the US is even brought up is to acknowledge the fact that there are both good and bad teachers in the first place.  It is supposed to bring to light the discrepancies in teaching ability between different teachers.

Not all teachers across the board are created equal.  Many are really talented and caring individuals.  Many are crap.

And yes, money does help.  Of course it does.  We are all aware that the vast majority of armchair pundits say that money does not help one iota -- and they are dead wrong.  "Schools shouldn't focus on resources...  In fact, schools that poured in more resources actually got worse results."
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/everything-you-know-about-education-is-wrong/249722/
Acch, quit with that bull.  The Finns *start off* with giving the teachers money.

The only thing is that an important question needs to be addressed:  What kind of money?  Are all money expenditures created equal?  No, they are not.  Spending money on STUFF does not make a school better.  If a laser overhead projector is sitting in the corner of the classroom, it won't do a damn thing for the students if the teacher doesn’t know how to explain algebra.

However, spending the money by giving it directly to the teacher, you know, paying a good teacher for the job she is doing -- this does help.  This is exactly what the Finnish do.  They give ALL teachers good pay.

The Finnish seem to have arrived at some conclusions that don't seem very accurate.  "Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education."  Yes, there are certain topics that we Americans are more comfortable talking about as compared to other topics.  But the Sahlberg guy is mistaken on what that specific topic is.  He is under the impression that Americans are uncomfortable talking about equality.  "And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable."  Still here.

Erm, that is not correct.

Americans love to give lip service to how we are all equal.  Spouting empty platitudes about equality, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal," "United we stand," "One nation under dollar, with liberty and justice for dollar," and the ilk.

Americans are also very comfortable talking about competition and how it is good for the soul.  What you need to understand is that this talk of competition being a good motivator is inextricably linked to the American love for “equality.”  The very New World notion of equality is precisely the *reason* that we are okay with talking about competition.

The reasoning for this follows thusly:  because we are all created equal, therefore we are on an automatic level playing field.  We have been given equal strengths and abilities and qualities.  Therefore everyone has potential to achieve their greatest dreams.

If anyone does NOT achieve their dreams, this is not because they do not have the innate ability or skill, or because the contest is unfair.  It is because they chose not to have strength of character; it is because they are lazy, slacker, not hard-working, and it is their own fault.  With equality as a supposed driving concept behind commerce, economy, job opportunities, and general welfare, America is not afraid to let someone fall.  Because if someone does fall, that means they brought it upon themselves.

The fact remains that Americans keep saying aloud that all humans on this planet are created equal and have equal potential, all of which is naive hogwash.  99.999 percent of Americans are possibly in denial of the fact that people are most certainly NOT created equal, and if any of us does think this, we dare not state this fact out loud.  This is because thinking this, much less stating it boldly out loud, is unpatriotic, and oddly enough it is also un-liberal, i.e., un-politically correct.

Now, personally I am fine with competition even thought I quite vocally do not believe any myths about equality.  People have different levels of skills, of strengths, of natural god-given talents.  This is a simple fact.  And I am fine with that.  Whatever gives a person a competitive edge in education, industry, the job market, innovation, is fine by me.

If someone is best suited for a job, whether it is a result of education or of inherent ability, then that is the person that should do the job.  I personally am excellent at biomedical engineering.  If you ever need a dinosaur cobbled together from scattered pieces of amphibian DNA, I’m your gal.  Or if you need a painting of an incredibly realistic rendition of a person, a still life, a building, etc., you can count on me.    However I could not compose a symphony or any musical arrangement to save my life.  And athletic ability?  Hahahaha, oh I'm wiping the tears of mirth from my eyes, that's a good one; I'll have to tell that one to my allergy doctor.

If the Finnish were truly at home with the idea of equality, then why would they have to strive so hard to force the *system* to ensure equality for everyone?  Answer me that.

Shouldn't they rather be comfortable with letting everyone stand or fall on their own merits?  Methinks the European doth protest too much.  And it seems that Finns have the same affliction with talk that Americans have, except they have it on opposite nodes.  They believe that people are unequal, but they are uncomfortable talking about it out loud and would rather make sure that everyone gets equal results.  Whereas Americans believe that people are equal, so they force competition.

Anyway, getting back to what Americans are and are not uncomfortable talking about in public.  I'll tell you what Americans are uncomfortable talking about in public.  They are uncomfortable with head-on facing the fact that people are NOT created equal.  They are uncomfortable facing the fact that all the grade school education in the world will not offset a child's family, home life, and immediate surrounding community that simply do not care about formal education.

To conclude, Finns have excellent public education because they are doing everything right.  Here is another great article.  They are doing everything that they do not want to admit to doing right -- competition and money.  They are doing everything that the primitive, trying-desperately-to seem-sophisticated-and-ludicrously-failing Americans can't seem to get right.

"Cheaters" Movie w Jeff Daniels c.2000

I finally got a chance to watch this movie recently.  The "Cheaters" movie about the teacher who helps his students cheat at a regional academic decathlon is based on a true story, like many of the inspirational teacher films.  I won’t tell you where on the internets I found it, because invariably some corporate suck-up is going to cry “ohnoes copyright infringement teh poor megacorporations!”

First of all, I absolutely love this movie.  I love everything about it, from the conflict that the kids faced in the beginning, to the insurmountable obstacles they had to put up with, to the teacher's dilemma, the teacher's decision to do what he had to do to help those kids.  And I can tell you that if I were that teacher, I probably would have done the exact same thing.

But I think we could stand a more thorough analysis of the movie.  It needs to be pointed out that this was a very subtle demonstration of determinism, and this needs to be acknowledged.  This film was not quite as egalitarian, level the playing field, give-them-a-fair-shake as it made itself out to be.

Study the academic team more carefully.  All you have to do is look at them.  And then pan out and study the demographics of that high school as a whole.  What do you see?  Did no one else notice that the high school was predominantly poor and black, and yet the academic team was all poor and white?

In the beginning of the film, the Jeff Daniels' teacher character was saying that they should pare through the entire high school and find the select group of kids that have the highest IQs.  Or highest SAT scores, something like that.  They decided that they should, you know, pick the ones that actually stood a fighting chance to win any kind of academic competition.  And guess what-- they mostly turned out to be white.  I am assuming they did not have a whole lot of Asians at that school.

In a recruitment meeting that was held in the beginning of the movie, there were originally a few black kids that passed muster.  If they were invited to the meeting, that indicated they did in fact have higher IQs than the average student body, same as the white kids did.  However, as soon as Jeff Daniels uttered the phrase "hard work," they were out the door.

At some sort of school district conference in the movie, Jeff Daniels' character brought up some thought-provoking points.  There was a rival school that always participated in the academic competition every year.  Somehow they always managed to win, place, or show, and not by cheating.  Daniels remarked that that school was a private school that operated within the public school system.

Hmm...  That is an interesting way of putting it.  What does it mean?  The points made about safety and violence vis a vis public schools v. private schools are legitimate points.

I do remember that at the middle school I attended, the students were incredibly violent.  This was due to the particular neighborhoods in that school's zoning district.  We had fights break out almost every week, we had bomb threats every month.  This was ameliorated a bit once I got to high school.  The reason for this, and I stand by this firmly, was that the zoning guidelines were very different from those of middle school.  The zoning districts that the high school covered in the town simply did not overlap the poor neighborhoods as much.  (The poverty-stricken, crime-riddled, drug-infested, teen-pregnancy-and-other-illegitimate-pregnancies-with multiple-odd-combinations-of male-and-female-parent-addled.  Most of the high school kids from these types of environments were shunted off to the other high school in town.)  Yeah, the place was crawling with violent ghetto types.  But you know what?  I got over it, I am currently working on my Ph.D. in biochemistry, and those people that got into fights are probably all dead now, due to gang-related warfare or something.

My high school mostly served upper-middle class white families.  (There were very few Asians in the town I where I went to high school.  Otherwise, undoubtedly they too would have attended my high school.)  Remarkably, it seemed that the vast majority of fairly affluent parents simply sent their children to this high school in their district, rather than pay for private school.  Looking back on it now, I realize that this was a short [blunt] miracle that these parents sent their kids to this public school, which effectively elevated the educational standards for all involved.  These were the kids that, in any other town in the US, their parents surely would have sent them to private school and gladly paid the steep tuition.  Just somehow, in this particular town, there were a sizable number of upper-middle class families.  Enough so that if all of them sent their kids to public school, there would be a large enough upper-middle class population so that it would at its core, essentially turn the public school into a private school.

I've been saying this for a long time.  The school in and of itself does not matter nearly as much as the community as a whole.  The socioeconomic makeup of the entire community, i.e., school district, strongly influences the performance of the school.  For example, a school could set high academic standards.  But those standards will not counterbalance the negative effects if the majority of students come from drug-addled home life.  If a large percentage of students come from violent homes with no structure, let alone love, that creates a bad school district.  A bad school district has little to do with the school itself.  The community makes an impact.  If the community members have resources, then the school will receive resources.

So did the cheating help out the kids that entered the academic competition after all?  Yes.  It DID help them out, but only to the extent that they had actual potential and could help themselves out.

See this movie.  Rent it, look for it on the internets, borrow it from a friend, access this movie however you can.  And relish the experience.

Worse than Racism

Necessity is the mother of invention, for better or for worse

This will sound

What with all the liberal nutbags diluting the word racism, screeching and screaming and misusing the word anytime they see something they mildly disagree with.  Unfortunately they are taking away its true meaning.  They are taking away the word's power, which is NOT AT ALL like taking away the power of a derogatory word like the n-word (don't look at me like that, I'm not black.)

A word like racism is supposed to call out true injustice wherever it lurks.  A word like racism is supposed to ___

With this word being thrown around like cheap confetti, it essentially renders it meaningless.  You have to pay for your food.  That’s racism!  You have to have the minimum qualifications and skills to be hired for a job.  That’s racism!  Teenagers should not be having sex, but if they do, at least use birth control so these juveniles with bad judgment don’t reproduce.  That's racism!  Stop selling drugs.  That's racism!  Study for your SATs.  That's racism!

No doubt, real racism does truly exist.  Job discrimination, education discrimination, apathy and ignorance from law enforcement.  Inaction, frozenness, carelessness.

But those are not the worst crimes that black people fall prey to.  The world is a sick, filthy, vile, nasty place.  And there are evils terrors far worse than those trivial petty irritations that befall people of color from time to time.  Lynching is but one.  Hate crimes.

I'm not even going to bother writing them all down.  I think 99.999% of the people reading this know exactly all the things I am talking about.

We need a word beyond just "racism" to describe things that are actual crimes against blacks and other people of color.  "R-A-C-I-S-M," like I said, is so watered down that it does not mean much anymore.  So I truly feel that it does not really apply to many situations in which an actual violation of human rights has occurred.

There are actual violations of someone's right to bodily autonomy.

"Racism" is not accurate enough.  It is not serious enough.  It does not truly convey the sick, soulless, depravity of any moral fiber that would have to be prerequisite to committing those atrocious acts.  These are crimes against humanity, crimes against nature.

Race and Class- More Media Myths Swallowed by the Public

I realize that a lot of the statements I will make in this essay might be taken as presumptuous or even inflammatory.  But please exercise patience as you read it, and please try to keep the hate mail to a minimum.
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I do not know from whither in the world this notion originated that upper-class black men tend to marry white women.

Any and all conservative blacks in civic and political arenas are all married to other black people.  Middle- or upper-class black women are all married to black men, and middle- or upper-class black men are all married to black women.

These socially conservative (within reason) blacks come from a middle-class or higher background, therefore they know that other middle- and upper-class black people do exist.  These men don't need to hook up with a white woman to validate their existence, or to validate their self-worth, or to prove to the outside world that they are movin’ on up.

I am positive that the fact that some black men marry or "hook up" with white women is proof those selfsame blacks came from a very lower-class poverty, minimally-educated background.  This is not blind opinion; this is a fact that I have observed over and over again.

They never saw anything positive emerging from the black culture while they were growing up.  Therefore they are now trying to distance themselves from that negative culture that they were swarmed by growing up.  Emotionally, geographically, in their choice of personal relationships.

They think the fact that they have now acquired a white woman is a sign that they have made progress.  This white woman is a status symbol, which brings me to another point.  Lower-class black men see women as pieces of property, as objects to acquire, as a form of gainful advancement in the social strata.  Owning a white woman is a symbol of affluence and success.

Whereas if they merely stuck to owning a black woman, well ya see, that is just a black woman, someone from the old neighborhood.  They would feel as though they have not attained their desired stratum that would imply they are moving on up.  Why in the world would they stick to a lower-net-worth black woman when they could trade up and obtain a higher-net-worth white woman?

Oh of course there is a quality scale, an appraisal gradient, sure.  Women are after all, mere objects to own and acquire like equivalent-weight pieces of meat, and to toss out as soon as you can afford a prettier better model.  These poor black men saw poor black girls and women while they were growing up in their difficult childhoods in harsh environments.  That's what they saw back when they were ghetto poor and in the projects.  Therefore there is no way that keeping one of these is satisfactory now that they have made it into the big leagues.  Obtaining a white woman is now in their grasp, it is a realistic feasible purchase.

I am telling you, I seen it and I know from whence I speak.  The black males I have observed that pursue white females almost always come from a degenerate, basal background.

I have NEVER, but only NEVER, with the exception of NEVER, oh wait I’m mistaken so sorry I do recall NEVER seen a black-man/white-woman relationship where the black man is anything but ghetto hood poor living in the government housing projects.  He is always wearing those gigantic pants that hang halfway down to the ground, big ghetto Fubu athletic shoes, some kind of tee shirt (point being that it is never a nice button-down shirt with a collar).  And there is the ever-present du-rag.

And I have NEVER, but only NEVER, with the exception of NEVER, oh wait I’m mistaken so sorry I do recall NEVER seen a middle-class or upper-class white woman in a relationship with a black man.  Any time I have seen a white woman in a relationship with a black man, she comes from a severe-redneck-beyond-just-the-working-class-whites, trailer-park, trailer-trash, poor poverty-stricken background.  She and the black guy possibly have gotten knocked up, casual like they do.  Usually they are NOT married.  At the most they are in a semi-declared semi-committed relationship.

You going to try to tell me that black athletes and musicians, in short, *entertainers* -- that since they marry white women, that this proves that upper-class black men always hook up with white women?

Guffaw.  I'm not buying it.  If they were so damn upper-class, then they would have planned for their futures better and would have pursued careers that have better longevity.  They would have pursued careers that are not mere entertainment, inconsequential trivial crap such as that.  They would have pursued careers that actually require intelligence.  They would have pursued careers wherein they would not be forced to be sidelined in the case of some physical injury.

Not to mention, careers that don't have OD-ing, coking out, etc. as a major threat.  Be honest now.  These rappers and football players -- how many of them truly come from a middle-class or upper-class background?  Did their parents graduate from high school?  Were their parents married?  Since before they were born?  Were their parents full-time employed in respectable jobs?  Even some sort of skilled labor is better than food stamps or unemployment cheques.

Some people might try to pipe up with the example of Sammy Davis Jr.  Yes, I will concur that he was an incredibly classy man who yep, was married to a white woman.  Yeah, well he was also Jewish.  Any other black Jewish people you know of?  I didn't think so.

Middle-class black people, on the other hand, know for a fact that other middle-class black people exist.  They do not feel the desire to separate themselves from black people, because there is no need to do so.  They come from that background, so they know that black people can be positive and optimistic for the future.  They know that there is nothing there to be ashamed of, nothing from which they need to detach themselves.  They know that positive ideals as well as high expectations for the culture can and do emerge from the black community.

Black teachers, college professors, student advisers, doctors, lawyers, civic leaders -- the men all marry black women.  And the black women who are educated professionals in those same fields all marry black men.

They see positive messages, they have good influences, they see encouragement, they come from a culture that has appreciation for achievement.  They were raised with much higher standards of living.  They came from a background that placed a lot of worth on stable home life, and on sustained, monogamous, long-term personal romantic relationships, i.e., marriage.  They were expected to have better attitudes towards life.  They see much higher expectations from people towards the young generation that is growing up.  They see people finishing and graduating from high school, they see people realistically expecting to attend college and complete a degree in a reasonable amount of time.  They see educated people with respected, esteemed jobs.

They were surrounded by a culture that valued education, post-secondary education, accomplishment, and respectable careers.  They grow up knowing that there is something better than the negative stereotypes that are seen on the six o'clock news.  They grow up knowing that there is something far better than that for themselves.