Cameron's Big Society

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

And more often than not the teachers have been beaten down by having to deal with asshat disruptive students on day in day out basis. Relocate those teachers to a motivated group of kids and you have a completely different dynamic as DoY describes above.

[Snotty]

The use of private and public school is confusing me, as they mean the same thing.

Public/Private vs State is the split. Except I went to a state grammar, which the left lot also wanted to get rid of.

Why bother? we are just pissing into the wind at this place these days

[Cort Haus]

My mother is about to retire as a teacher at the end of this term, and she has been a great teacher throughout (this is not just family honour I'm defending: she used to teach at my school, but in a different year to mine), but ultimately the rating of teachers by results depends on which kids they get. A great teacher can raise the grades of awful kids by a level, but an awful teacher can sit back and do nothing, because great kids can teach themselves if they read properly (and don't spend all their spare time on Civ sites). League tables are worthless rating teachers because they don't take into account what they begin with. After all, you can't polish a turd....

That's why CVA scores (Context Value Added) can be useful for schools. They take into account what it has to work with and what improvements they managed.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Not knowing the methodlogy of the context value added and its scoring, I would still be suspect that the value added (in terms of raw grade level incremental improvement) for a disruptive set of students would be equivalent to that of a more orderly set of students. OTOH it at least makes an attempt.

[Heraclitus]

Not race, not IQ, but rather family involvement.

JM

High IQ parents tend to be involved with their kids education.
Low IQ parents aren't.

[N35t0r]

Heh. I went to one of the most expensive schools in the country, and I can tell you that some high-IQ parents really don't give a damn (or, actually, that they believe that paying a ****load of cash is the best thing they can do, and that they don't need to do anything else).

And you end up with kids stabbing other kids with compasses, or parents coming to school with their lawyers, arguing that their kid should indeed pass that year because he fulfilled all the requrements stated in whichever piece of paper. Intelligence

Then there are friends of my little sister whose parents complain that their kids are given too much homework. And, you know, they have to sit down with their kids to do it, and that's not what they pay the school for, you know?

[Kidlicious]

This is also true. And disruptive students are a big negative also.

That's why they need to be kicked out. School choice is the answer. People just have it wrong. The students don't need to be able to choose the school. That won't work. The schools need to choose the students.

[Hauldren Collider]

Like TJ

[Cort Haus]

That's why they need to be kicked out. School choice is the answer. People just have it wrong. The students don't need to be able to choose the school. That won't work. The schools need to choose the students.

Yeah, and the government should publish League Tables for parents.

That way the schools only get good kids, and all the crap ones can be ... I dunno ... shot, or thrown off a mountain or something. Result - better schools!