"The Times, They Are A-Changing...."

[Mr. Shaman]

Ah, so absolute truth, is only true, if it's your truth, and no one else's truth. That's so much different than those religious people.

I repeat....my Truths are what I've seen to be True....as-opposed-to those truths that have been (consistantly) dispelled.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

But that doesn't stop people from killing each other. You do realize many people were murdered prior to the invention of the gun, right?

I think most people are well-aware of that.​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

"As the Pentagon prepares to survey soldiers about President Obama’s decision to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a new poll of military personnel who served in the Afghanistan or Iraq wars has finds that sexual orientation is “not a burning issue that overwhelms veterans’ lives.”

It's lookin' like time to drop-back to Prayer In Schools, "moralists"!!!

 

[OldTrapper]

It's lookin' like time to drop-back to Prayer In Schools, "moralists"!!!

Could not be worse then what has happened since it was taken out in 1962. Of course, morality, and common sense, would not help the left wing cause,

http://www.inplainsite.org/what_happened_when_the_praying.html

It was this question that led Barton to uncover the statistical proof that the removal of prayer did indeed take its toll on America. Below are just a few of the examples featured in Barton's report.

A. Young People

1. For 15 years before 1963 pregnancies in girls ages 15 through 19 years had been no more than 15 per thousand After 1963 pregnancies increased 187% in the next 15 years.

2. For younger girls, ages 10 to 14 years, pregnancies since 1963 are up 553%.

3. Before 1963 sexually transmitted diseases among students were 400 per 100,000. Since 1963, they were up 226% in the next 12 years.

B. The Family

1. Before 1963 divorce rates had been declining for 15 years. After 1963 divorces increased 300% each year for the next 15 years.

2. Since 1963 unmarried people living together is up 353%

3. Since 1963 single parent families are up 140%.

4. Since 1963 single parent families with children are up 160%.

C. Education

1. The educational standard of measure has been the SAT scores. SAT scores had been steady for many years before 1963. From 1963 they rapidly declined for 18 consecutive years, even though the same test has been used since 1941.

2. In 1974-75 the rate of decline of the SAT scores decreased, even though they continued to decline. That was when there was an explosion of private religious schools. There were only 1000 Christian schools in 1965. Between 1974 to 1984 they increased to 32,000.

a. That could have an impact if the private schools had higher SAT scores. In checking with the SAT Board it was found that indeed the SAT scores for private schools were nearly 100 points higher than public schools.

b. In fact the scores were at the point where the public schools had been before their decline started in 1963 when prayer and Bible reading/ instruction was removed from the schools.

c. The scores in the public schools were still declining.

3. Of the nation's top academic scholars, three times as many come from private religious schools, which operate on one-third the funds as do the public schools.

D. The Nation

1. Since 1963 violent crime has increased 544%.

3. Illegal drugs have become an enormous & uncontrollable problem.

2. The nation has been deprived of an estimated 30 million citizens through legal abortions just since 1973.

 

[PLC1]

Could not be worse then what has happened since it was taken out in 1962. Of course, morality, and common sense, would not help the left wing cause,

http://www.inplainsite.org/what_happened_when_the_praying.html

It was this question that led Barton to uncover the statistical proof that the removal of prayer did indeed take its toll on America. Below are just a few of the examples featured in Barton's report.

A. Young People

1. For 15 years before 1963 pregnancies in girls ages 15 through 19 years had been no more than 15 per thousand After 1963 pregnancies increased 187% in the next 15 years.

2. For younger girls, ages 10 to 14 years, pregnancies since 1963 are up 553%.

3. Before 1963 sexually transmitted diseases among students were 400 per 100,000. Since 1963, they were up 226% in the next 12 years.

B. The Family

1. Before 1963 divorce rates had been declining for 15 years. After 1963 divorces increased 300% each year for the next 15 years.

2. Since 1963 unmarried people living together is up 353%

3. Since 1963 single parent families are up 140%.

4. Since 1963 single parent families with children are up 160%.

C. Education

1. The educational standard of measure has been the SAT scores. SAT scores had been steady for many years before 1963. From 1963 they rapidly declined for 18 consecutive years, even though the same test has been used since 1941.

2. In 1974-75 the rate of decline of the SAT scores decreased, even though they continued to decline. That was when there was an explosion of private religious schools. There were only 1000 Christian schools in 1965. Between 1974 to 1984 they increased to 32,000.

a. That could have an impact if the private schools had higher SAT scores. In checking with the SAT Board it was found that indeed the SAT scores for private schools were nearly 100 points higher than public schools.

b. In fact the scores were at the point where the public schools had been before their decline started in 1963 when prayer and Bible reading/ instruction was removed from the schools.

c. The scores in the public schools were still declining.

3. Of the nation's top academic scholars, three times as many come from private religious schools, which operate on one-third the funds as do the public schools.

D. The Nation

1. Since 1963 violent crime has increased 544%.

3. Illegal drugs have become an enormous & uncontrollable problem.

2. The nation has been deprived of an estimated 30 million citizens through legal abortions just since 1973.

It's pretty obvious just why test scores are down in schools, isn't it? How can schools possibly cope with the decline in society over the past 47 years? Surely, you can see that it is more difficult to teach children from a chaotic background than ones from a stable one.

Of course, it is difficult to really compare schools from '63 with ones from today, as so much has changed in the curriculum, and the tests used to measure student acheivement are not the same.

The dropout rate, despite the fact that most of the students came from intact families, was around 40% in the late fifties when I was in high school. I don't think it changed much until after the drug revolution and the breakdown of families that started in the late '60s.

Now, how can you establish any kind of cause and effect relationship between prayer in school and breakdown in society? Was that your point, or did I misread it?

I can tell you from personal experience that we did not pray in school back in the '50s. I started first grade in '48, graduated high school in '60, and uttered no prayers in school during that time.

 

[OldTrapper]

It's pretty obvious just why test scores are down in schools, isn't it? How can schools possibly cope with the decline in society over the past 47 years? Surely, you can see that it is more difficult to teach children from a chaotic background than ones from a stable one.

Of course, it is difficult to really compare schools from '63 with ones from today, as so much has changed in the curriculum, and the tests used to measure student acheivement are not the same.

The dropout rate, despite the fact that most of the students came from intact families, was around 40% in the late fifties when I was in high school. I don't think it changed much until after the drug revolution and the breakdown of families that started in the late '60s.

Now, how can you establish any kind of cause and effect relationship between prayer in school and breakdown in society? Was that your point, or did I misread it?

I can tell you from personal experience that we did not pray in school back in the '50s. I started first grade in '48, graduated high school in '60, and uttered no prayers in school during that time.

I was responding to the fauxshaman, and his denigration of prayer. While it is true that not all schools had a moment pf prayer it is also true that most did. Don't know about yours. If they didn't then there would have been no need for the O'Hair case which was based on prayer in school. This was in 1965, or 54.

The breakdown in society has a direct correlation to the attack on religion, especially that of Christianity, in the school system. Whether one agrees with religious beliefs, or not, one cannot deny that the reminding of children of moral values, which leftwing teachers abhor, had a beneficial effect on the children.

On dropouts:

http://vdare.com/sailer/080101_dropout.htm

But in fact Heckman and LaFontaine's exhaustive study of the widest array of data sources consulted to date finds that the high school dropout rate isn't 12 percent, but about twice that. And the racial gaps have been steady since the early 1970s.

Moreover, although the high school dropout rate improved steadily through the middle of the 20th Century, falling from 75 percent in the early 1920s to 20 percent in the late 1960s, it has worsened, by up to one-fourth, since then.

This was not expected, to say the least. The high school graduation rate should still be going up—because dropping out is ever more of a personal disaster. H&L point out:

"The U.S. high school graduation rate has declined at a time when the returns to completing high school have greatly increased."

Dropping out of high school is a terrible way to start your life. For example, 78 percent of prisoners, but only 9 percent of new recruits allowed to enlist in the U.S. military, are high school dropouts. H&L add:

"… more than one-third of all black male high school dropouts age 20-35 were in prison on an average day in the late 1990s—a higher proportion than found in paid employment."

This means trouble for all of America. H&L sum up:

"To increase the skill levels of the future workforce, America needs to confront a large and growing dropout problem."

H&L’s study finds:

"The decline in high school graduation is almost exclusively concentrated among young males. The overall male graduation rate fell 7 percentage points from the first to the last cohort, while the female rate fell by only 1 point ..."

And that's bad news because males cause most of the trouble in this world.

(The college graduation rate has been improving, reaching 24 percent for men and 36 percent for women born in 1980. But even this growth has been tailing off lately as the high school graduation slump feds through. H&L comment:

"The slowdown in the high school graduation rate accounts for a substantial portion of the recent slowdown in the growth of college educated workers in the U.S. workforce… This slowdown is not due to a decline in rates of college attendance among those who graduate high school.")

The high school dropout rate has improved a little since the passage of the No Child Left Behind act in 2001. But H&L are cynical:

"NCLB gives schools strong incentives to raise graduation rates by any means possible… Whether these represent real gains or are an indication of schools cheating the system in the face of political pressure remains an open question for future research, although the timing suggests strategic behavior."

"Strategic behavior" is a euphemism for skullduggery.

Why is the federal government’s favored measure of high school graduation misleading? It’s biased in large part by counting as graduates those dropouts who subsequently pass the GED test (the "General Educational Development" exam, often referred to, incorrectly, as the "Graduation Equivalency Degree".) Heckman's earlier research shows, however, that the GED counts for less in the eyes of potential employers than does a genuine high school degree:

"Although GED recipients have the same measured academic ability as high school graduates who do not attend college, they have the economic and social outcomes of otherwise similar dropouts without certification."

Dropouts who can pass the GED test are generally smarter than dropouts who can't, but they tend to have poor work ethics:

"Despite measures of cognitive ability similar to high school graduates, GED recipients perform significantly worse in all dimensions when compared to them (Heckman and Rubinstein [2001]). GED recipients lack noncognitive skills such as perseverance and motivation that are essential to success in school and in life."

Indeed, over 10 percent of all GEDs are earned in prison:

"However, minority male high school completers are almost twice as likely as white males to possess a GED certificate (Cameron and Heckman [1993]). … A significant portion of the [ethnic] convergence reported in the official statistics is due to black males obtaining GED credentials in prison."

Needless to say, boning up for the GED is a better way to pass the time in the slammer than such popular alternatives as sharpening a shiv on your cell's concrete floor or making Pruno wine out of ketchup in your toilet. But it likely won't do you as much good as staying in school and out of prison in the first place.

Another major contributor to the long-term worsening in dropout rates since the late 1960s: changing ethnic ratios among young people. For example, the Hispanic share of public school students has increased from 6 percent in 1972 to 20 percent.

Dropout rates have gotten slightly worse for all groups, but I estimate that the majority of the deterioration for the country as a whole is simply because Hispanics and blacks making up a larger share of the population than they did 35 years ago.

In contrast to the federal propaganda, H&L find that the dropout rate is around 35 percent for both African-Americans and for those more assimilated Hispanics who either were born in America or have been here at least a decade.

In fact, despite somewhat higher test scores than blacks, these Americanized Hispanics still appear to leave school early at a somewhat greater rate than blacks.

H&L report that the dropout rate for all Hispanics, including recent immigrants, is significantly worse because

"… almost half of Hispanics in this [18-24] age group immigrated within the last ten years. These recent Hispanic immigrants are primarily low-skilled Mexican workers … The migration of workers with low levels of education has increased substantially over the past 40 years.…"

One of H&L's crucial findings: the ethnic gaps are not getting better:

"In fact, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years."

The H&L study carefully inspects seven massive "longitudinal" surveys that have tracked thousands of young people through their adult lives. It finds that graduation rates for blacks and Latinos improved during the 1960s, when legally segregated schooling was effectively abolished. But since then, there has been stagnation and, perhaps, slight deterioration for all three major ethnic groups.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

I was responding to the fauxshaman, and his denigration of prayer.

I digress.

I should have said Republicans can re-energize their efforts to address the Big TWO: Prayer In School & Flag-Burning!!!!

(Typical, after gettin' your collective-noses rubbed in one more o' your bogus-Absolutes.)

​

 

[PLC1]

I was responding to the fauxshaman, and his denigration of prayer. While it is true that not all schools had a moment pf prayer it is also true that most did. Don't know about yours. If they didn't then there would have been no need for the O'Hair case which was based on prayer in school. This was in 1965, or 54.

The breakdown in society has a direct correlation to the attack on religion, especially that of Christianity, in the school system. Whether one agrees with religious beliefs, or not, one cannot deny that the reminding of children of moral values, which leftwing teachers abhor, had a beneficial effect on the children.

On dropouts:

http://vdare.com/sailer/080101_dropout.htm

But in fact Heckman and LaFontaine's exhaustive study of the widest array of data sources consulted to date finds that the high school dropout rate isn't 12 percent, but about twice that. And the racial gaps have been steady since the early 1970s.

Moreover, although the high school dropout rate improved steadily through the middle of the 20th Century, falling from 75 percent in the early 1920s to 20 percent in the late 1960s, it has worsened, by up to one-fourth, since then.

This was not expected, to say the least. The high school graduation rate should still be going up—because dropping out is ever more of a personal disaster. H&L point out:

"The U.S. high school graduation rate has declined at a time when the returns to completing high school have greatly increased."

Dropping out of high school is a terrible way to start your life. For example, 78 percent of prisoners, but only 9 percent of new recruits allowed to enlist in the U.S. military, are high school dropouts. H&L add:

"… more than one-third of all black male high school dropouts age 20-35 were in prison on an average day in the late 1990s—a higher proportion than found in paid employment."

This means trouble for all of America. H&L sum up:

"To increase the skill levels of the future workforce, America needs to confront a large and growing dropout problem."

H&L’s study finds:

"The decline in high school graduation is almost exclusively concentrated among young males. The overall male graduation rate fell 7 percentage points from the first to the last cohort, while the female rate fell by only 1 point ..."

And that's bad news because males cause most of the trouble in this world.

(The college graduation rate has been improving, reaching 24 percent for men and 36 percent for women born in 1980. But even this growth has been tailing off lately as the high school graduation slump feds through. H&L comment:

"The slowdown in the high school graduation rate accounts for a substantial portion of the recent slowdown in the growth of college educated workers in the U.S. workforce… This slowdown is not due to a decline in rates of college attendance among those who graduate high school.")

The high school dropout rate has improved a little since the passage of the No Child Left Behind act in 2001. But H&L are cynical:

"NCLB gives schools strong incentives to raise graduation rates by any means possible… Whether these represent real gains or are an indication of schools cheating the system in the face of political pressure remains an open question for future research, although the timing suggests strategic behavior."

"Strategic behavior" is a euphemism for skullduggery.

Why is the federal government’s favored measure of high school graduation misleading? It’s biased in large part by counting as graduates those dropouts who subsequently pass the GED test (the "General Educational Development" exam, often referred to, incorrectly, as the "Graduation Equivalency Degree".) Heckman's earlier research shows, however, that the GED counts for less in the eyes of potential employers than does a genuine high school degree:

"Although GED recipients have the same measured academic ability as high school graduates who do not attend college, they have the economic and social outcomes of otherwise similar dropouts without certification."

Dropouts who can pass the GED test are generally smarter than dropouts who can't, but they tend to have poor work ethics:

"Despite measures of cognitive ability similar to high school graduates, GED recipients perform significantly worse in all dimensions when compared to them (Heckman and Rubinstein [2001]). GED recipients lack noncognitive skills such as perseverance and motivation that are essential to success in school and in life."

Indeed, over 10 percent of all GEDs are earned in prison:

"However, minority male high school completers are almost twice as likely as white males to possess a GED certificate (Cameron and Heckman [1993]). … A significant portion of the [ethnic] convergence reported in the official statistics is due to black males obtaining GED credentials in prison."

Needless to say, boning up for the GED is a better way to pass the time in the slammer than such popular alternatives as sharpening a shiv on your cell's concrete floor or making Pruno wine out of ketchup in your toilet. But it likely won't do you as much good as staying in school and out of prison in the first place.

Another major contributor to the long-term worsening in dropout rates since the late 1960s: changing ethnic ratios among young people. For example, the Hispanic share of public school students has increased from 6 percent in 1972 to 20 percent.

Dropout rates have gotten slightly worse for all groups, but I estimate that the majority of the deterioration for the country as a whole is simply because Hispanics and blacks making up a larger share of the population than they did 35 years ago.

In contrast to the federal propaganda, H&L find that the dropout rate is around 35 percent for both African-Americans and for those more assimilated Hispanics who either were born in America or have been here at least a decade.

In fact, despite somewhat higher test scores than blacks, these Americanized Hispanics still appear to leave school early at a somewhat greater rate than blacks.

H&L report that the dropout rate for all Hispanics, including recent immigrants, is significantly worse because

"… almost half of Hispanics in this [18-24] age group immigrated within the last ten years. These recent Hispanic immigrants are primarily low-skilled Mexican workers … The migration of workers with low levels of education has increased substantially over the past 40 years.…"

One of H&L's crucial findings: the ethnic gaps are not getting better:

"In fact, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years."

The H&L study carefully inspects seven massive "longitudinal" surveys that have tracked thousands of young people through their adult lives. It finds that graduation rates for blacks and Latinos improved during the 1960s, when legally segregated schooling was effectively abolished. But since then, there has been stagnation and, perhaps, slight deterioration for all three major ethnic groups.

All that just to sa that the high school drop out rate is higher than the schools acknowledge it to be? Yes, it is higher, no question. The drop out rate in the '50s was around 40%, and probably is still somewhere close to that.

Now, as to your point that the decline in morality is due to "liberal" teachers who don't teach moral values to their classes, that's totally bunk, as anyone who has been paying attention can see. Do you seriously believe that any teacher, however non liberal he or she may be, can teach children values that they don't live? Kids learn values at home, not at school. When a child has three siblings with three different last names, a teacher telling him or her that marriage is necessary to raise children is not going to have much of an effect. Telling kids that drugs are bad isn't going to have an effect when mom/dad/uncle/whatever series of boyfriends play the male role model are hooked on drugs isn't going to work. We could pray all day and moralize all we want in school, and kids would not change their behavior as adults. The schools job is to teach reading, writing, and math, along with some history and science. Kids coming to school from a chaotic home life makes that job more difficult than it would otherwise be, of course. Schools can not change society.