Poor conservatives, I don't get it. Righties please explain.

[anvi]

htmldon,

I don't know to what extent I have the authority to speak for "liberals," especially since I'm confused myself most of the time about where exactly I'm supposed to fit on the prepackaged political spectrum that exists in our culture now.

I certainly agree that there is a lot of public assistance fraud perpetrated by people who intentionally take advantage of the system.  But I don't think that "liberals" as a group ether encourage that "lifestyle" or wanted people to become eternally dependent on the aid.  I think the intention was for the helping hand to be there in case people really needed it, as your father did, as you did, and as I once did as a disabled college student.  It's a difficult thing to navigate, all this public aid; if we have it, we risk fraud and dependency, but if we don't have it, we risk neglecting people who are genuinely in need, and we risk losing the benefit of lots of human potential in our country that lies in people who might at times be too disadvantaged to have much of a chance otherwise.  But I don't think those who genuinely need help should be embarrassed by it, or consider it dishonorable.  Helping one another when we are in need is one of the best things human beings can do with their time.  "The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

As far as the other stuff goes, as you well know, liberals aren't any more of one cultural flavor than conservatives are.  Happily, life is far more complex, and interesting, then the stereotypes that have been erected to represent it.

JMO.

[anvi]

Class size has little or nothing to do with the quality of education in fact, unless you get the class size down to 12 or less. That is yet another factlet that the teachers' unions don't want you to know about, along with the median academic performance level of the current crop of teachers.

Oh, damn.  I was working on another thread prompting us to put together our dream cabinet of Atlas posters.  You were my first choice for Secretary of Education, Torie.  Then, you posted this.  

The OECD statistics, which I assume are the ones being drawn on here given the post from "education blogger" Jacobs above, compare educational systems across countries and cultures with markedly varying pedagogical expectations and foregoing circumstances.  I know because I've both been a student and taught in several of them.  In countries with more fact- and method-learning oriented pedagogical systems where student-teacher interaction is not a major feature of instruction, larger class sizes indeed tend not to impede the quality of education.  In countries where more student-teacher interaction and remedial intervention are required, class sizes do make a difference.  If it's disadvantaged children that we're trying to help, which includes children with bona fide learning disabilities or children whose previous educational preparation has been poor, putting them in smaller classes, where they can get more individual attention and access to teacher assistance, will positively impact the quality of their learning.  To the extent that smaller classes in our own pedagogical culture enhance teacher-student relations and ease disciplinary tasks, smaller class sizes better facilitate enhanced reading skills as well, and this tends to especially be the case for children in early grades who are just learning how to read.  

It should also be remembered that the number of students per classroom across OECD countries is relatively small; 21 students per class on average, and in the United States the average stands only slightly higher, at 23.  For someone who has been teaching for a long time, I can say that such class sizes are very manageable and easily allow for optimal teaching performance.  The single biggest incentive in our pedagogical culture for further increasing class sizes, and we all know it, is cost efficiency.  

As I've said many, many times, I'm not a member of a teachers' union, and I'd support eliminating teacher tenure and having teachers contribute larger portions of their earnings to their health and retirement packages--that's all fine with me.  But it's hard to see how steadily increasing class sizes is going to help the students you say need the most help, Torie.