re: Any takers for a discussion about “Marxian economics”?

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They were basically (and ironically) being indoctrinated. I was giving them information that they were receiving and were expected to be able to regurgitate it later.

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This is going to blow your mind, but the base level of education is being able to regurgitate facts.

You can’t progress to thinking critically about a topic until you know basic facts. We don’t start elementary students with Base 10 theory. They learn math facts.

Grammar -> Logic -> Rhetoric is undefeated.

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One of my biggest gripes about the education reformers is that their methods suck all the joy out of learning.

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Know what sucks the joy out of learning even more? Not being able to read.

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This is going to blow your mind, but the base level of education is being able to regurgitate facts.

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The ability to read and understand is the foundation for all education. In order to decode words or read fluently, a person has to be able to synthesize what they know about phonics. They aren't simply regurgitating facts or letter sounds in this case.

You are equating education with indoctrination.

lil chubbies googled some big words today

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You're producing assessment questions, but not the curriculum to help students build the capabilities to independently answer the assessment items correctly.

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One is never isolated from the other. Obviously, the history questions would need be associated with chapters on those eras. The geometry question assumes subject familiarity. Likewise, for the economics question etc.

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Project-based learning is expensive and messy.

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It depends. E.g., Science Fair work is straight-forward. Speaking personally, school academics were moderately challenging at best. With the Science Fair, History Fair, etc., I could pick a topic of interest, then take off at my own pace.

The biggest impediment to academic leveling is concern about makeup of the student population and stigma associated particularly with placement in the "slow classes."

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Teachers want students to “fall in love with (insert topic here.)” I always laughed at the English teacher doing 6 weeks on Shakespeare to a group of kids who had less than 1 in 3 kids reading on grade level.

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The vast majority of Americans cannot read Shakespeare, including well-educated members of this forum. Given I've seen directly how you reason through relatively simple texts, I would definitely include you in that group.

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he first goal (and almost only) goal of education is functional knowledge.

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Idiotic. Seems like you should hit Aristotle again.

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Agreed, but that doesn't mean government should run education.

Government may have a role in supporting education and ensuring that every citizen has access to it - not just opportunity, but actual access. However, I'd stop short of handing government the reins of the entire system.

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Yes. Friedman recognized that education is sufficiently vital to democratic stability to warrant state-mandated compulsory attendance. Yet, he simultaneously maintained that local communities should determine the precise threshold of subsidized education through channels of local democratic governance, while individual families should independently select the institutions educating their children via public vouchers. This tripartite framework of combining state coercion (compulsory attendance), collective local governance (threshold determination), and hyper-individualized consumer autonomy (vouchers) exposes a profound structural contradiction that destabilizes democratic accountability.
(I'm lifting this from a paper I'm working on, so forgive the formal language).

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I'm sure you know all this, but the incentives in government-provided services are fundamentally flawed. In a free market, if you fail, you go broke. In government, failure often leads to demands for more funding.

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Excellent point! There are some fundamental flaws with this model, too, though. Most obviously, schools are evaluated through standardized test scores. Determinations about schools closures are made after years of poor scores. If the State maintains a legitimate interest in requiring children to achieve a basic level of literacy to secure democratic stability, it bears a corresponding responsibility to ensure that the educational options available to fulfill that requirement are immediately adequate. This regulatory obligation is triggered at the point of operation—not years after an institution has opened, drawn tax dollars, and potentially subjected children to an inadequate education before administrative oversight intervenes.

Also, there's a contradiction between using market metrics to determine success while using a fixed-cost model for funding the institutions.

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Inevitably, the leaders and bureaucrats running the system recognize these incentives and become a constituency or powerful lobby working in their own self-interest rather than that of students. This is why I believe they oppose school choice and have organized against it so vehemently.

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This is legitimate. My concerns are around the same bureaucrats exploiting school choice models to enrich themselves and their loved ones at the expense of the students.

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But it sounds like you do. If you can show me a government-based approach that preserves the market incentives, with appropriate safeguards against future capture (good luck with that), I'd be willing to consider it. But personally, I don't see how that can be achieved.

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Give me a couple more years.

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synthesize?

Yikes. For the sake of this thread, I hope you were homeschooled.

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Well done.

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The vast majority of Americans cannot read Shakespeare, including well-educated members of this forum. Given I've seen directly how you reason through relatively simple texts, I would definitely include you in that group.

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They could read it. Could they understand or contextually relate it to their current life, situation, history, etc?

Probably not.

Reading and comprehension are not the same thing ... but you know this.

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And despite being a charter school

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The irony ...

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Teachers want students to “fall in love with (insert topic here.)” I always laughed at the English teacher doing 6 weeks on Shakespeare to a group of kids who had less than 1 in 3 kids reading on grade level.

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How else are kids supposed to learn anything? It's education 101. Students need to be exposed to material outside of their comfort level or present level of mastery in order to learn literally anything.