Mennonite Measles in Texas

[Southerner]

We have three high school in southern PA that are plain. All have decent to very good science programs . Even Nationwide schools go to 10th. Or 11th. The fact that our students read at a high level is well known, and has nothing to do with science education. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

If you use your definition, only the OOA are plain. If that is where you want to be, a good start would be disconnecting from the internet.

A trait of groups becoming less conservative is they embrace higher education both in adopting high school and then, eventually, college and seminaries.

And some groups are becoming less conservative while shunning higher education.

[JohnH]

We have three high school in southern PA that are plain. All have decent to very good science programs . Even Nationwide schools go to 10th. Or 11th. The fact that our students read at a high level is well known, and has nothing to do with science education. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

If you use your definition, only the OOA are plain. If that is where you want to be, a good start would be disconnecting from the internet.

A trait of groups becoming less conservative is they embrace higher education both in adopting high school and then, eventually, college and seminaries.

And some groups are becoming less conservative while shunning higher education.

That’s certainly possible. What generally holds is that no group (so far) has embraced higher education yet retained its level of plain identity or actually achieved more.

[Southerner]

A trait of groups becoming less conservative is they embrace higher education both in adopting high school and then, eventually, college and seminaries.

And some groups are becoming less conservative while shunning higher education.

That’s certainly possible. What generally holds is that no group (so far) has embraced higher education yet retained its level of plain identity or actually achieved more.

River Brethren????

[JohnH]

And some groups are becoming less conservative while shunning higher education.

That’s certainly possible. What generally holds is that no group (so far) has embraced higher education yet retained its level of plain identity or actually achieved more.

River Brethren????

If you mean OORB, they never took a stance against it in the first place and they also have a large number of unique qualities.

Our experience with college is simple: young people who go either lose their faith, fall into fornication, or both. There is no reason to do it since we don’t seem to have any problems creating lots of wealth and finding jobs and running businesses (myself excluded, but I’m a seeker who went to college…)

[Judas Maccabeus]

And some groups are becoming less conservative while shunning higher education.

That’s certainly possible. What generally holds is that no group (so far) has embraced higher education yet retained its level of plain identity or actually achieved more.

River Brethren????

Absolutely!

[Ken]

Most plain schools don’t go past 8th grade.

The barely-conservative schools have bought into the worldly concept of higher education. The counter I have to your arguments is that plain people consistently show higher rates of basic literacy than (for example) high school graduates from Baltimore. If you can’t read, advanced science is irrelevant.

That is a pretty low bar to compare against the one of the poorest big cities in the country.

A better and more realistic comparison would be against public school districts with comparable demographics (White, middle class, etc.) so that you are comparing schools and education and not poverty rates.

How would 8th grade educated plain Anabaptist kids compare against the kids at the typical middle class white suburban high school in a standardized test of literacy and math proficiency like the SAT or ACT? Or subject-area IB or AP tests? Probably not as well as you think.

Why would I compare to white and middle class? Some of the people I go to church with aren’t white. Some are black American; some are Hispanic or whatever you classify Brazilians as. Some are not middle class but are relatively poor (such as myself). (Our demographics are roughly the same as the surrounding county and the nearest city.)

The typical White middle class suburban high school in this country has non-white and poor students attending and is likely more racially and economically diverse than most conservative Anabaptist congregations. And as for income and being middle class. Did you not just tell us that:

we don’t seem to have any problems creating lots of wealth and finding jobs and running businesses

My point is that it shows a dramatic lack of confidence in the quality of education in your community if you have to seek out some of the poorest communities and poorest performing schools in an enormous country of 340 million against which to compare yourselves. Educational performance and outcomes are very much tied to demographics in this country for a whole lot of reasons. In fact if you map test scores and educational outcomes geographically by zip code you more or less create a map of wealth and per-capita income. The outliers stand out because they are rare.

So again, a legitimate evaluation of the quality of small Anabaptist schools would be to compare their student performance to the performance of a similar cohort of non-Anabaptist students attending public schools who have a similar demographic profile, which would be mainly White, middle class, from 2-parent families, and so forth. Otherwise you are measuring factors other than education. What would the results look like? I dunno. But from what others have written here. I suspect the performance in standardized science tests would be lacking.

[JohnH]

The typical White middle class suburban high school in this country has non-white and poor students attending and is likely more racially and economically diverse than most conservative Anabaptist congregations. And as for income and being middle class. Did you not just tell us that:

Many plain Anabaptists are not wealthy. Some are indeed poor. In many congregations I would estimate the majority of the families with young children are below the poverty line.

Likewise, plain Anabaptists are not uniformly white. As I already told you, my congregation reflects the surrounding demographics, and in fact is less white than the surrounding county. So why would I compare my congregation's school to "white, middle class" schools?

My point is that it shows a dramatic lack of confidence in the quality of education in your community if you have to seek out some of the poorest communities and poorest performing schools in an enormous country of 340 million against which to compare yourselves.

I compared to Baltimore because (a) the statistics have recently been shared in the news, and (b) it is an area J M would be familiar with.

Baltimore's spending on schools is also some of the highest in the nation. I presume they hire science teachers with degrees too. None of that has made a difference. You can't learn advanced science, calculus, etc. in a school setting if you can't read or do basic arithmetic.

Educational performance and outcomes are very much tied to demographics in this country for a whole lot of reasons. In fact if you map test scores and educational outcomes geographically by zip code you more or less create a map of wealth and per-capita income. The outliers stand out because they are rare.

That makes this all the more interesting, then, since plain Anabaptist schools achieve near 100% literacy rates, despite being composed of many people who are not wealthy.

So again, a legitimate evaluation of the quality of small Anabaptist schools would be to compare their student performance to the performance of a similar cohort of non-Anabaptist students attending public schools who have a similar demographic profile, which would be mainly White, middle class,

Incorrect, yet again. Plain Anabaptists are not universally white and are certainly not universally middle class. It is true, however, that plain Anabaptists are almost universally 2-parent families, yet even that is not universal: I can think of a single mom with 2 kids by 2 different dads who joined one of our churches. She put her kids in our school and they both did very well. They are married now (one got married at 18), although I am guessing you would consider that a "failure" since they didn't go to college.

from 2-parent families, and so forth.

Having a 2-parent family is a choice. It means making choices not to have sex outside of marriage. That is a choice anyone can make, outside of quite rare edge cases like ***ual assaults. Nearly all births out of wedlock are due to the selfish choices of the mother and father involved. They could have chosen to get married first, but they did not.

Otherwise you are measuring factors other than education. What would the results look like? I dunno. But from what others have written here. I suspect the performance in standardized science tests would be lacking.

I think the basis for good schooling is having good, strong families. Therefore it makes sense to start there and figure out how to have good, strong families. It turns out that education is NOT the basis of good, strong families, nor is spending on schools.

[Ken]

The typical White middle class suburban high school in this country has non-white and poor students attending and is likely more racially and economically diverse than most conservative Anabaptist congregations. And as for income and being middle class. Did you not just tell us that:

Many plain Anabaptists are not wealthy. Some are indeed poor. In many congregations I would estimate the majority of the families with young children are below the poverty line.

Likewise, plain Anabaptists are not uniformly white. As I already told you, my congregation reflects the surrounding demographics, and in fact is less white than the surrounding county. So why would I compare my congregation's school to "white, middle class" schools?

My point is that it shows a dramatic lack of confidence in the quality of education in your community if you have to seek out some of the poorest communities and poorest performing schools in an enormous country of 340 million against which to compare yourselves.

I compared to Baltimore because (a) the statistics have recently been shared in the news, and (b) it is an area J M would be familiar with.

Baltimore's spending on schools is also some of the highest in the nation. I presume they hire science teachers with degrees too. None of that has made a difference. You can't learn advanced science, calculus, etc. in a school setting if you can't read or do basic arithmetic.

Educational performance and outcomes are very much tied to demographics in this country for a whole lot of reasons. In fact if you map test scores and educational outcomes geographically by zip code you more or less create a map of wealth and per-capita income. The outliers stand out because they are rare.

That makes this all the more interesting, then, since plain Anabaptist schools achieve near 100% literacy rates, despite being composed of many people who are not wealthy.

So again, a legitimate evaluation of the quality of small Anabaptist schools would be to compare their student performance to the performance of a similar cohort of non-Anabaptist students attending public schools who have a similar demographic profile, which would be mainly White, middle class,

Incorrect, yet again. Plain Anabaptists are not universally white and are certainly not universally middle class. It is true, however, that plain Anabaptists are almost universally 2-parent families, yet even that is not universal: I can think of a single mom with 2 kids by 2 different dads who joined one of our churches. She put her kids in our school and they both did very well. They are married now (one got married at 18), although I am guessing you would consider that a "failure" since they didn't go to college.

from 2-parent families, and so forth.

Having a 2-parent family is a choice. It means making choices not to have sex outside of marriage. That is a choice anyone can make, outside of quite rare edge cases like ***ual assaults. Nearly all births out of wedlock are due to the selfish choices of the mother and father involved. They could have chosen to get married first, but they did not.

Otherwise you are measuring factors other than education. What would the results look like? I dunno. But from what others have written here. I suspect the performance in standardized science tests would be lacking.

I think the basis for good schooling is having good, strong families. Therefore it makes sense to start there and figure out how to have good, strong families. It turns out that education is NOT the basis of good, strong families, nor is spending on schools.

All of this completely misses my point. Which is a very simple one.

Namely this: If you want to know how good conservative Anabaptist schools are then the proper way to do that is to try and determine how those SAME students would do academically if they enrolled in public schools rather than their local Anabaptist schools. Since we can't run that exact experiment the best way to do it is to find cohorts of students in public schools that most closely match the demographics of students in Anabaptist schools and compare their performance. If you compare against from dramatically different demographics then all you are measuring is differences in demographics, not differences in school quality.

What would such a comparison look like? I suspect conservative Anabaptist schools would score quite well on basic middle-school level reading, writing, and math. Because that is what they focus on. The would probably do less well on advanced high school level English and math subject matter like AP level English language and composition. Or advanced math like calculus or linear algebra. And not so well on any advanced science subjects. All classes that all my own daughters took and were tested on in HS. But all that is just a guess on my part.

[JohnH]

Namely this: If you want to know how good conservative Anabaptist schools are then the proper way to do that is to try and determine how those SAME students would do academically if they enrolled in public schools rather than their local Anabaptist schools.

We don't have to speculate, because we used to use public schools. We were starting to run into serious problems. Academic quality was declining, bad influences were present. There was a spiritual risk as well which is of course the most important thing. Local control was being lost. Consolidation meant onerous 1-hour bus routes were becoming the norm. (Public schools have become much worse since then.)

[qupte]Since we can't run that exact experiment the best way to do it is to find cohorts of students in public schools that most closely match the demographics of students in Anabaptist schools and compare their performance. If you compare against from dramatically different demographics then all you are measuring is differences in demographics, not differences in school quality.[/quote]

You are putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps the plain Anabaptist lifestyle creates good schools, and the good schools create more good plain Anabaptists who in turn have stable families.

What would such a comparison look like? I suspect conservative Anabaptist schools would score quite well on basic middle-school level reading, writing, and math. Because that is what they focus on. The would probably do less well on advanced high school level English and math subject matter like AP level English language and composition. Or advanced math like calculus or linear algebra. And not so well on any advanced science subjects. All classes that all my own daughters took and were tested on in HS. But all that is just a guess on my part.

You don't need to speculate because plain Anabaptist schools exist that take in community children (including my own). Some are majority not plain Anabaptist students. Their results far outclass the local public school systems. Judas Maccabeus would be familiar with some of them.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pick up my preschooler from the non-Anabaptist Christian school he goes to on Mondays.

[ohio jones]

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pick up my preschooler from the non-Anabaptist Christian school he goes to on Mondays.

Is he in Texas? Does he have measles?