Yeah, these things rely pretty heavily on stereotypes of Foreign Lands. Makes me think of the Republican candidates saying we're the only country in the world where someone brought up poor can aspire to anything more - it's all either suffocating socialism or dirt floors and distended bellies, apparently.
I wonder at what point Mexico will have better overall health care than the US. They already seem to have more universal coverage. Whenever it happens, we probably won't notice or acknowledge it.
I like how CT is matched to the USA. I wouldn't have thought of it as a canonical state in any way, let alone education. I wonder if this is b/c of the distortion of means vs. medians.
Sort of surprised at CO being matched to the Netherlands.
The matching of Syria to Oklahoma makes me wonder what year this data set is from . . .
This is the international data they're using - a lot of countries including Syria have stayed exactly the same in the past few years, implying where there's no new data they carry the old forward.
Also, this oddly-named clickbait site that generated the chart says they're comparing this education index from the UNDP (calculated based on years of schooling) with US Census high school graduation rate by state, so who knows if the comparison is at all meaningful.
Also this (excellent) article about de facto school segregation talks about how PTA fundraising is under-reported and important (I'm sure Thorn would have more to say about this) (emphasis mine).
Mentors who had weathered the Department of Education for years encouraged me not to despair. They told me that New York City has it better than many poorer, more rural districts because it operates as one big district with a wider socioeconomic range than most small districts. Even if state funding was inequitable, constituents, rich or poor across the city, are part of the same district. The logic: Per-student funding, though insufficient, should at least be equal.
I quickly learned that this too was not the case. When schools received insufficient state funds, local dollars had to first go to the basics: academic subject area teachers and tables. Indirect needs -- tagged as arts programming and support services -- took a back seat.
How, then, did some schools seem to be better off? The parent-teacher association!
PTA fundraising does not appear on state and federal books, making real comparisons impossible, but it is pivotal in the highly unequal districts of New York City. Parent-teacher associations in higher-income areas can raise millions of dollars per year for arts and enrichment programs, and even basic supplies, libraries, and support services. Schools like mine have PTAs that struggle to raise more than a thousand dollars over the course of a given year.
Gah, Thorn is not going to talk about that because Thorn has to get everything printed this week for the read-a-thon that is our only PTA fundraiser and has been putting it off inappropriately long because it's so annoying. The money we make goes to providing food for school activity nights (PTA meetings and reading/math programs for each grade level this year) and I funded a visit from a local theater troupe for the whole school. I'll also do Teacher Appreciation Day donuts and coffee and I got food and decorated for the Veterans Day assembly. I think that's it. I'm hoping we'll net at least $1000 to leave for next year's PTA or whatever year in the future there is a PTA, and we increased the amount students have to raise to be able to get a t-shirt reward so that we can make some money this time around.
But there are lots of ways de facto segregation happens. My neighbors who are paying I think $5K/year per child so their kids can attend public school districts in wealthier neighboring cities then also get the few hundred dollars per pupil the state actually pays tot he school sent to those wealthy schools, which really annoys me because I'm on school council as well as the PTA and that's where we do the budget work and I know how far we can make even a hundred dollars go.
Last year I prebought shirts and then gave them out to every student who collected any money at all, which does set a bad precedent but.... (They were supposed to raise $10 for a shirt.) This year I don't have the money for that in our account and don't have the money to just pay for shirts for the entire faculty out of my own money, which I did last year to conserve PTA funds, so we'll buy shirts after the money comes in. It's possible to do more than this and in the years before I took over we were doing one night a month at McDonald's where as long as we cleaned up and did certain other things we could get a small percentage of their total sales. But it was taking them about a year to reimburse us even after lots of complaining, so it didn't seem worth keeping that up. I don't feel I can do fundrasiers that ask for money from the students' families more than this one time a year because I think it's just too much of a stretch. And I don't have the energy or time to do things out in the larger community that might net us more funds. I've gotten my local neighborhood association and garden club to contribute in the past for specific events, but I'm not the right person to do that job.
I wonder at what point Mexico will have better overall health care than the US. They already seem to have more universal coverage. Whenever it happens, we probably won't notice or acknowledge it.
From what my family has told me, not anytime soon. There's nominally universal coverage, but not so much actual available medical expertise to solve your health problems that is publicly administered. The public system is akin to the US clinic model: it can handle mass, routine health care well, not much specialist-requiring problems. Middle-class professionals and the wealthy use private care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Mexico#Health_statistics
Gah, Thorn is not going to talk about that because Thorn has to get everything printed this week for the read-a-thon that is our only PTA fundraiser and has been putting it off inappropriately long because it's so annoying.
Sorry for raising a sore subject.
It sounds like your experience is broadly similar to that described in the article (which is, incidentally, about much more than just school funding).
5. PTA fundraising ... is pivotal in the highly unequal districts of New York City.
True here in true blue MA as well, except it's also the case between individual schools in the various towns. There are rich schools and poor schools, in spite of equally distributed lavish town/state funding.
I think this data set is questionable to say the least. I clicked through to try to see where they were pulling it from and the "article" is extremely vague.
I am somewhat familiar with Census Bureau data on K-12 school enrollment, and high school dropout rates, and educational attainment (that is, what percentage of people in a given state currently hold a diploma, a bachelor's degree, etc). But I don't know their HS *graduation rate* data and how it is generated, so it's hard to know how reliable it is.
The US Department of Education apparently produces "adjusted" HS graduation rates, but I'll go on record as believing that that data is GIGO. There's just no student-level record system (yet) that can accurately account for people moving in and out of district, in and out of traditional and alternative schools, in and out of the juvenile justice system, and all the other things that happen to teenagers. Including, sadly, death.
This report seems to suggest (unsurprisingly) that there are a lot of problems with HS graduation data in general.
Shorter me: Clickbait website produces article of deeply dubious statistical accuracy.
This report seems to suggest (unsurprisingly) that there are a lot of problems with HS graduation data in general.
There is no reason to think the UNDP data is any better. Take all the statistical problems with the US data, and multiply it by 193 countries.
multiply it by 193 countries
That's too complicated math.
So New Jersey = Canada, according to this map. I don't think I've ever seen such a comparison.
But NJ is a high-tax, high-spend state, despite its governor, and it does spend a lot on public education (probably at least twice as much per child, per year, as some of the states that are matched up with poor countries on this map).
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Global Warming Crushes Records Again
For the surface of planet Earth, 2015 was the hottest year on record by a stunning margin. But already, 2016 is on track to beat it.Last month was the hottest January in 137 years of record keeping, according to data released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It's the ninth consecutive month to set a new record.
The chart below shows earth's warming climate, measured from land and sea dating back to 1880. If the rest of 2016 is as hot as January, it would shatter the records set in 2014 and 2015.
We're spiking. Told ya.
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Jesus on a stick, am I reading that graph right?
0.2 degrees in 2015, and 0.3 degrees in January?
A few of more months at 1/10 of that increase, say up 0.4 by May, and Obama will declare martial law, and institute by fiat....
...cap-and-trade and one day a week ride sharing. LOL.
Eliot's whimper. What election. I need lots of fucking pot.
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Okay, Phil Platt at Slate, who I kinda trust, comes up with different numbers, as far as I can tell. A little confusing. Still spiking, but not as steeply.
But let's be clear.
0.3 increase per month means we are all dead in 2016.
0.03 increase per month means we are dead this decade, which was my original speculation
I don't think you can extrapolate this rate of change into the future that much. While it's bad, Plait says (and his map shows) that it's mostly due to the arctic warming more than usual. I think there's a limit to what you get from that--this is in part due to decreased albedo due to not having enough sea ice. That's going to most clearly have an effect in the winter, and so I don't think summer will have as high of an anomaly. In the long term, we're not going to have any sea ice which will obviously be awful, but that means the arctic warming effect due to that is bounded. We might just be in the part of that curve with maximum change right now.
And yes, El Niño does have a small effect, too.
I'm not saying don't worry, but I don't think it's quite as bad or as fast as you say. (Also, keep in mind that all these temperatures are in F, not C.)
Many good points
I don't think you can extrapolate this rate of change into the future that much.
OTOH, 40-year-averaging would underestimate a spike.
it's mostly due to the arctic warming more than usual
Permafrost. Deep sea methane. I presume people are monitoring atmo methane levels very closely, with who knows what lag. It isn't as if I want to watch this daily, I have just been waiting for the January numbers.
so I don't think summer will have as high of an anomaly.
We will see. 15 of last 17 months, unlikely completely a winter effect. Not crazy about "anomaly," and as I have said I am mostly watching the annual increase. Seen speculation that La Nina will not happen.
but I don't think it's quite as bad or as fast as you say.
So far the rule has been "faster and worse than expected" almost every single month. Guy McPherson has said 15-20 years, but spiking is always possible.
keep in mind that all these temperatures are in F, not C
WTF? Who uses F in wide discourse anymore.
Been 75+ for a week here in Dallas. 15 degrees above normal.
Sumagum, speak of the devil
US 'likely culprit' of global spike in methane emissions over last decade
"Harvard study shows 30% rise across the country since 2002 with peaks coinciding with shale oil and gas boom, reports Climate Central"
"Global methane emissions have risen and fallen several times since the 1980s, Turner said, but they've been rising continuously since 2007.
"The causes for this renewed growth are currently unknown," he said,
In the US, the government tally of the country's annual human-caused methane emissions between 2002 and 2012 shows that emissions have been about 29 million metric tons annually, without any significant trends up or down. Research by Turner's team, however, showed that emissions ranged from about 39 million tons to about 52 million tons during that period. The team based its findings on satellite data."
Looks like the methane science not all that clear, maybe there are arctic sources? And I understand the temporary nature of methane warming, but am considering the other consequences of a huge temp spike.
...I am no longer at all "worried" about AGW, I have decided there is no point. I might advocate pedal-to-the-metal accelerationism because we simply don't have the time to conserve and go green. But I don't expect anybody to listen until it's too late. Wait...
I am worried about the cruelty and barbarism we will see on the way out.