Why education in so much of the south is a joke.

He tried to claim it was from a South Carolina religious school that was receiving voucher money. Problem is, there is no voucher system in place in South Carolina.

No. Just being cheeky.

So where has the liberal counterpart to Midnight Funeral gotten to, anyway?

Eh, he's just going to ignore this thread now and hope we all forget his fuck-up and the way he never admitted to it.

That's what I was told in the thread I got it from, I didn't check to see if there was a voucher program or not, and I have said it isn't that great of a comparison. Blame it on a late night drunk thread if you wish.

Uh, it says there that the bill was tabled...

Thank god.

It has made it to snopes, earning a "probably true" rating.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/sciencetest.asp

Snopes also has page 2.

Have to wait until June to get an update and find out exactly which school that is; but yeah, that does provide enough substantiation to the claim for me to say: That's seriously fucked up. But at least the kids who are raised with that BS in their science classes won't be building any garage nukes.

Page 2 didn't show up on my browser. I guess it's just as well -- this thing makes me want to .

It's missing substantiation on this school receiving public money, however, and since the bill Turdin provided a link for was tabled, I'm kind of doubting that part of it is true.

Yeah, without knowing more about the school, the public funding question is just that. It is often true that private schools receive public funding even without a voucher program. They can, for example, apply for state and federal grants. And in many regions, transportation is provided by the local school district. But we just don't know if any of that is the case here. I will say that the school should lose its accreditation based on the science curriculum, and add that if it did receive any government grants, the application process needs some reform.

Looks like some real reform is coming to California.

This should be fun

The veracity of the actual quiz wasn't in question. The claim that it was from a school receiving voucher money was.

Where was it said that it was a voucher school? From the OP:

As I've already pointed out, getting public money doesn't necessarily mean vouchers.

And yet, when the claim is made with such certainty, you'd think the OP would be able to explain what those sources of public money are.

Last time I looked, any public money that would be available would also be tied to federal restrictions on curriculum. Any school using a "Creation based" curriculum of any sort would be ineligible for gov't grants.

and here ya go.

Private school, no public funding.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friend...e-creationism-test-heard-around-the-internet/

Well, that makes me feel better. Thanks, man.

So the school in question is Blue Ridge Christian Academy in Grenville, SC.

http://www.brca.us/

Page two was even more shocking than page 1. I do think there needs to be tests and standards even for private schools and if the students can't pass the age specific standards then at some time the "school" shouldn't be counted as the child attending school. The same goes for home schooling. Make them all pass the same standardized test, make the tests hard instead of watering them down so everyone passes (as happens in much of the country, especially the south. Alabama is a state know to have jokes of a test where everyone passes because you don't even need to know multiplication much less anything harder in order to pass) and if the "school" in question fails then shut it down and start fining or even arresting parents for allowing their child to be truant from real school.

"sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format". But people who buy books online or who go to the library or a used book store don't get counted, huh? So really all we have is an incomplete partial list made from incomplete sales data but because it results in something you like you post it any way. Got it.

How about you find a list of how much people ACTUALLY read and not just places where people buy books. Hell, I bet several of those cities just have mail order warehouses so they rack up lots of "sales" from those locations but no one there actually reads the books and instead they get mailed some where else as the point of sale is officially where the warehouse is located instead of where the book goes and is actually read. Anyone want to look up which cities Amazon has their warehouses in?

Now the Mass and Virginia (right outside of DC) parts I believe it's the other three which make me want to double check.

http://www.thestate.com/2013/01/25/2603904/school-choice-bill-introduced.html

Does anyone know what happened with that bill introduced in South Carolina last Jan? It would not only allow vouchers but would also a "tax-credit scholarship program" which would allow 100% of private school costs to be tax deductible. Currently 16 states (according to the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/e...ools-to-the-families.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) already do those two things which funnel public money into private, almost exclusively religious schools, and those private schools normally can teach what ever they want including factually incorrect things and get public tax money to do it. I have a massive problem with the idea that everyone is forced to pay for other people's private religious ignorance.

At a bare minimum if they get public money then they have to teach to the public standard and be tested regularly to make sure they're meeting the goal. If not then black list them and don't let a penny of public money into those garbage pits.

This can't possibly be correct -- I clearly remember somebody swearing that this school already received taxpayer funding! Obviously South Carolina must have some kind of super-double-secret private school funding program already in place.

Michele Rhee got fired from her last job as head of D.C.'s schools because of the cheating scandal and her track record is horrible. Sure, she pushed "school reform" ideas which the right wing loves but which usually fail to improve anything other than increasing class size and lay off teachers. They had to cheat just to ever so slightly raise test scores and that brings any results they had open to question. How much of it is the result of cheating?

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/michelle-rhee-cheating-scandal-041213

No, thanks, but I'd rather go with real reform rather than just fake union busting reform with faked test results. There is little doubt in my mind that she was personally behind the faking of test scores and encouraging teachers to help their students cheat (by the teachers giving the students the right answers) problem which popped up right after she took over in D.C.. Even if she wasn't personally responsible her record is at best one of incompetence and there are enough school professionals not to hire a disgrace like her.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StudentsFirst

Her lobbying group almost exclusively backs Republicans, her "reforms" amount to nothing more than union busting, and her claims that about test scores and cheating are proven wrong by her own track record in D.C. where she was fired for a cheating and test score faking scandal. Please do read the wiki (which is pretty balanced) because that chick shouldn't be allowed any where near a school. She's just a political operative with an agenda other than what is in the students' best interest.

When unions are the single strongest force in opposition to any meaningful reform, is it any wonder that someone who wants to improve education would be cast as a "union buster"?

Your premise isn't true or at least ignores a hell of a lot of other factors. Unions are not the biggest or the strongest opposition to meaningful reform and that's almost exclusively pushed by politically motivated commentators whose main agenda is to defund education and to politicize it (see the Texas state educational standards for an example which would be laughable if it wasn't so sad). That's not reform. In fact, meaningful reform can easily be done and has been done in numerous cases but the politically motivated right wing actors aren't interested in those and instead their main desire is to break unions for political reasons and to lower standards by politicizing curriculum (like force creationism into science classes and trying to sneak in political messages). I'll admit some people on the left have tried, with extremely limited success to do similar things but they're mostly blocked and what you hear about them in the right wing media is usually completely distorted and untrue spin.

Like when Fox and a bunch of talk radio folks claimed public schools were trying to indoctrinate students into the gay lifestyle and even claimed it was secret cover go gay teachers to molest students. When in reality is was a one page requirement for history text books to take about the historical contributions of gays in society so please do take those claims with a grain of salt.

As usual with this subject, I'm at a complete loss to know why that matters. Refusing to teach a child the basics of biology in favour of religious mythology is not okay just because you pay for it.

I'm thinking there must be some kind of standards that are set in order for a school to qualify as a school. Otherwise, I could open up a playground, call it a "school", and those children who come there would be considered as "going to school".

Which means that there are only two possibilities here:

1) The school does indeed teach correct science, but in addition to that has this class that indoctrinates the students with culpably ignorant fundamentalism.

2) The standards set by the state to evaluate what counts as a qualified school are woefully insufficient.

Or maybe a bit of both...

Alexandria isn't culturally the South - its culture if far closer to Boston than it is to Charleston. Its a DC satellite - it actually was part of the allotment for DC until a spat over development and slavery sent it back to VA.

Knoxville is probably well represented by Oak Ridge Laboratories - there's a huge federal government presence in Knoxville along with the state TVA.