quote:But this is not just some completely random school board case picked from the entire population of such; it is a controversy that has in fact reached the national media - to wit, Hatrack. So my guess had, by these admittedly low statistics, a 50% chance of being correct. Those are betting odds.
But the reason it was reported nationally is that the town lost accreditation - an event in and of itself noteworthy enough to warrant national press. The accreditation agency is unlikely to be swayed by skewed coverage in rendering its decision.
If you check back to my original post, you'll observe that I started out unsure about what accreditation meant. So the category for me was 'school board trouble', not 'accreditation trouble'. Which indicates a certain amount of ignorance, certainly; I am ignorant of many things. Hence my sincerely meant question, "What does this mean?" Which is how I intended to become less ignorant on the point.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:The data set of interest is not "all accreditation cases", but "accreditation cases that make it onto the Internets".
This is the first loss of accreditation by a public school system in 40 years. It was guaranteed to get into national headlines. There's nothing else in the total population during the period the internet has existed.
(...)
None of the top-10 links using the search you provided had anything to do with accreditation. You provided nothing.
Again, this sort of thing is why I asked the question in the first place.
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: Any school that teaches ID should lose its accreditation.
Make that any public school, and further specify that they are teaching ID as part of a science class, and I'll agree with you.
If you try to include private schools, I'll just laugh at you, and assume you know nothing about accreditation. (I have been involved in working to get/keep accreditation of private schools at the elementary, high school, and college level.)
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Any school that teaches ID should be grouped with schools that teach Flat Earth and the Dome of Stars which revolve around the earth. It's junk, pure and simple. If a religious school wants to teach religious classes, good for them.
If they teach ID as science, they should lose accreditation - public, private, home school, whoever.
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posted
It's my understanding that accreditation is a process by which an outside agency determines that a school provides a quality education to its students.
Accreditation is simply a standard which is set, so that without having to examine each particular school, a person can have some degree of certainty that a student who has graduated from an accredited school has received an education within specific standards.
Which part of accreditation am I misunderstanding?
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: It's my understanding that accreditation is a process by which an outside agency determines that a school provides a quality education to its students.
Yes and no. It is a process by which an outside agency (usually one of the six regional accreditors) determines whether a given school meets a set of criteria (or shows sufficient evidence of progress towards doing so since the last visit to warrant a temporary reprieve). Those criteria vary greatly between segments (i.e., public non-profit v. private non-profit v. for-profit), and for the latter two need not meet any outside body's criteria (usually with the specific exception of certain minimums in mathematics and reading/writing). That is, if School XYZ can satisfy their local accrediting agency that they are meeting their own criteria, are measuring incoming students' math/language abilities and attempting to bring them to at least minimum standards, and that they are fulfilling their stated mission, they will probably get/keep accreditation. The problems usually come up with schools that are not actually sticking within their own stated parameters (claiming to be college prep and not offering math above algebra, etc.). This includes public schools, whose parameters are set by outside groups, such as the state or city school board, as well as by state and/or federal laws. (Occasionally a school's mission will be viewed as the accreditors as outside of their purview, and the school will be referred to one of the religious or other specialized accreditors.)
Oh, and you may not be aware that school visits and report reviews are primarily conducted by a school's peers -- private schools get reviewed by principals/deans/board members of fellow private schools, public schools by those of public schools, and religious schools by folks from other religious schools.
To summarize the point I was trying to make: public schools have criteria set by public groups (local, state, and federal), and the accreditors will expect them to stick with them. Private schools have very few criteria from public sources, and for the most part will be expected to concern themselves with sticking to their own criteria.
IMO, that is exactly how it should be.
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I see the distinction. You're correct, I was not aware of those differences before. Thank you for the additional information.
I still think it's a disgrace if any school teaches ID as a science course. It goes to my argument in the other thread, which is that it's intentionally keeping the students ignorant. That should abhorrent to the goals of ANY school.
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posted
From those schools' perspectives, it is not so much keeping the students ignorant as protecting them from being influenced by evil lies.
And to be clear (in case my position on this issue has not been made clear before), I disagree with them. But I still think they should have the right to do so.
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i grew up maybe 30-40 minutes away from clayton county in gwinnett and i had never heard of this. i feel kind of bad for the families living in that district.
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Of course I don-hey, wait a minute! Wow! I just reconsidered my entire position thanks to your penetrating analysis of the situation. Whew! What a dumbass I was until you came along! Whatever it was I actually thought about the situation, that is.
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quote: I still think it's a disgrace if any school teaches ID as a science course.
I'm ok with it, though my reasoning is a bit twisted.
See, the moment you teach a kid the Scientific Method, they now have the ability to decide for themselves what counts as science. And much as I believe in God and Him doing something unspecifically different with Adam and Eve, I don't believe ID is science. It half explains the how (sort of) but not the why, and it's certainly not repeatable.
So if part of science is learning to question the conventional assumptions of our time, then anyone who learns ID but fails to apply the Scientific Method to it hasn't really learned any science at all. Those that really learned what science is won't need to be told that ID isn't it. It will be obvious.
Evolution's the one that's really in danger from being taught badly. As I've said in other threads, I didn't buy it for the longest time because it was presented as the same kind of quasi-scientific bunk. And most science-y shows don't help since the narrator tends to say idiotic things like, "The pteradon recognizes that it is losing it's ecological niche and must evolve to survive." Really? The bird decides to evolve and does, so those other species died out from a lack of foresight? It's obnoxious and doesn't help clear up the confusion any.
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I was taught creationism in my school, and like millions of other children who became interested in the dinosaurs, noticed that somehow Adam and Eve lived several thousand years ago but the dinosaurs were hundreds of millions of years old.
Having said that, I agree with what Rivka has been saying in this thread.
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