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VicMan

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Posts posted by VicMan

  1. Isn't this why a lot of the rich of many European countries go to Monaco?

    Anyway, Americans typically do not eat three-course lunches, so we do not need the same taxation rate for school lunches :)

    Musicman: I would say that HISD has edible school lunches much of the time - Though I prefer McDonald's hamburgers to HISD burgers and New York Pizza to HISD pizza, I understand taxation limits, so I am fine with what HISD food service has for the general population (at $1.50 per person).

    Some schools have 3rd party food providers (i.e. Chik-Fil-A, Papa John's Pizza, etc.) to allow for people who want more expensive food; I was talking about adding other 3rd party groups to provide more types of food at large, comprehensive high schools.

    You could have that in HISD, too, if you want to be taxed at the same rate as the French.

    Sales tax: 19.6% (25.6% for gas)

    Income tax: Starting at 16%. 48% for people earning over US$66,000 (leaving you with $34,000 of your hard-earned money).

    Business tax: Starting at 12%

    Real estate tax: 33.3%

    Also, note that the real estate tax isn't only payable by the person who owns the property, but by the person who lives there, too. So if you're renting, you STILL have to pay real estate tax.

  2. I do not know about the commute times from Pearland to Downtown. That commute MIGHT have the quickest commute from a suburban area to Downtown.

    I live inside 610 and I am zoned to high-performing schools that are popular with locals. However houses zoned to that schools usually (if not always) exceed 250K, and those that are 250K are below, if any, may be too small or old for your liking. Your best bet is probably the suburbs.

  3. http://www.chron.com/disp/commnts.mpl/metr...an/5035934.html

    Sam Houston failed AGAIN!

    Thanks to poor science test scores, Sam Houston High School failed... it got a TEA Unacceptable.

    HISD wants to spend money to fix Sam Houston. I have a different idea.

    Why not bill parents who show no effort to prevent their kids from failing and/or getting into trouble? $7,000 would be a good wakeup call to those parents.

  4. If this was the 60's you would be defending the tobacco industries "scientific research" that showed that smoking was harmless and that the surgeon general was in cahoots with the nicotine gum industry.

    Remember, if someone is calling you out for not backing up your assertions, don't take the law into your own hands. You take them to court.

    Just remember, though, that on HAIF, the law is in Editor's hands. Editor is the judge, the jury, and the executioner :)

  5. LOL when users are putting the information in.....what do you think happens?

    And other users hold them in check.

    See, Wikipedia is not a community where one person can edit every single article to his liking, because another person will revert his edits (i.e. undo them). There are entire groups of people who watch the recent changes list to check for people who are "vandals" (people who remove content without reasoning or discussion or people who insert junk into articles). Look at talk pages of famous subjects like September 11 and Saddam Hussein. Notice a lot of heated discussions?

  6. GWilson, Wikipedia is not supposed to be "notoriously liberal" - the cornerstone of Wikipedia is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view - Which states that no point of view is to be taken.

    Wikipedia is notoriously liberal, so that doesn't surprise me. I've literally watch, real time, posts in Wikipedia that were not ultra critical of the war in Iraq be changed to be detrimental. For example, a wiki post was made about a school in Iraq that was built by US troops. The post was edited within minutes to state that it was a form of repayment for the hundreds of thousands of dead iraqis by the US troops, etc.
  7. How often does that happen?

    I get the feeling that the committee route does not happen often, because if this often happened, we would not see a lot of seniors who cannot pass TAKS take the "private school" route.

    By the way, does the Texas Education Agency discuss this committee detail on its website? It would be nice to see if there are extra criteria or details.

    Any student can legally graduate without passing the TAKS test. How? Each kids is given three chances to pass and if they still can't figure it out, a commitee can intervene and save them, place in SPED, remove them from the requirement. It's all such an unethical racket.
  8. Why not MORE grocery stores in the loop open 24 hrs??!! Miss my 24 hr grocery stores on west coast!!!! But, I guess the answer to that from most on this noard would be..."GO BACK!"

    I wish that there were more 24 hour stores too. Some stores that used to be 24 hours later switched to having store hours.

    The following are still 24 hour stores:

    * Kroger - 5130 Buffalo Speedway, Houston 77005

    * Kroger - 1938 West Gray, Houston 77019

    * Kroger - 3300 Montrose Boulevard, Houston 77006

    * Kroger - 1990 Old Spanish Trail, Houston 77054

  9. Milby had right around 5000 at its peak back in 1993 or so. I was working at the Kroger's on Red Bluff and Preston in Pasadena when I took a break and picked up the paper. I remember reading an article in the paper regarding big high schools. It was the 5 largest high school in the United States.

    It turns out Milby's peak was 3,567 students in 1992.

    Here is what I found: http://www.schooldigger.com/go/TX/schools/...536/school.aspx

    Notice the major population decline in 2001 and 2002 due to the opening of Ch

  10. i'm not sure your example concerning a convicted rapist opening up a school has anything to do with vouchers. this happens with or without vouchers.

    From what I can tell, Milwaukee's system screens schools so that they are eligible for vouchers. For some reason, this guy's school slipped through. It had to have been marked as "eligible" for the program as it was mentioned in this article.

  11. would you be for vouchers?

    I do not believe that vouchers are the best solution to solving the ills in the public school system.

    Vouchers are politically divisive. The legality of school vouchers is often questioned. For instance, a Florida judge dismantled the system in its state: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page...T20020805b.html - http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-0...-vouchers_x.htm

    http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0523/p01s03-usgn.html - This article states that many parents in Milwaukee are satisfied with vouchers in that city.

    But these reasons convince me that school vouchers are not beneficial:

    "In one of the worst instances, a convicted rapist opened a school, which has since shut down. Reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tried to visit all 115 schools then in the program last year, and found a mixed bag. Nine schools refused to let reporters in, and the paper cited "10 to 15 others where ... the overall operation appeared alarming when it came to the basic matter of educating children."

    One school was opened by a woman who said she had a vision from God to start a school, and whose only educational background was as a teacher's aide. Others had few books or signs of a coherent curriculum. Yet they've been able to enroll students.

    Some of the worst schools - including four this year - have been shut down, often for financial reasons, and voucher proponents hope that the new requirements will make it tougher for bad schools to enter the program.

    Studies done in the early years of Milwaukee's program, before the state stopped requiring yearly reporting from voucher schools and before religious schools were allowed into the program, showed little difference in student achievement among voucher students, but measurable improvement in parental satisfaction. A new five-year study was just announced by Georgetown University in Washington.

    Nationally, studies on vouchers have been mixed. A few showed signs of improved student achievement and evidence that competition improves public schools. Others showed negligible difference. "The evidence to date is very mixed," says Jack Jennings, director of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy. "For [the] sake of kids ... it would be good to have an objective analysis."

    Smaller voucher programs currently exist in Washington, D.C. and Cleveland, while Florida and Utah have specialized ones that target students with disabilities. A larger Florida voucher program was declared unconstitutional by that state's supreme court earlier this year.

    "People feel good about having choice," says Martin Carnoy, a professor of education and economics at Stanford University. "But most of what they're having is the choice to move into a private school that is not so different from the public school they left.""

    Also, Texas has very few laws that apply to private schools (See http://www.ed.gov/pubs/RegPrivSchl/texas.html ) - After all, the TEA has no control over private schools. - If vouchers are initiated, I would suspect that some private school parents would be against this as they see vouchers as government intrusion.

    -----------

    I see school choice options within a public school system and a private scholarship fund for private schools as better options.

    Establishing magnet schools, charter schools, and inter-district transfers are more politically palatable. In addition, magnet-only schools can be demonstrated as remarkably different than neighborhood schools due to statistics such as test scores. A range of school choices, often associated with vouchers, can be (and in some cases, such as Houston ISD, already are) created within an existing public school system, especially an urban school system.

    This 2005 article shows that many Houston I. S. D. students are taking advantage of school choice by bypassing neighborhood schools, much to the chagrin of declining enrollment neighborhood schools such as Yates High School: http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive....id=2005_3900502 This 2007 article describes the scenario as continuing: http://search.chron.com/chronicle/openDocu...edPath=Archives

    Some large corporations in Philadelphia contribute to a scholarship fund for private schools. Low income school kids in Philly have avenues to attend private school. The difference from vouchers is that the money comes from private companies, and no government strings are attached to the money: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmtp...01/ai_n17121325

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