Posted on 03/19/2006 6:19:56 PM PST by SmithL
Too many students fail to meet California's standard for proficiency, sparking a simple solution under consideration in the Capitol: redefine "proficient."
By changing a few words in state law, legislators could dramatically affect how the federal government rates the state's education system.
"I think it's a totally sensible thing to do," said Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley.
Critics of Hancock's proposal, Assembly Bill 2975, say the state's goal should be to improve schools, not alter words.
Hancock counters that both are needed to avoid severe sanctions in coming years under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB.
"What all of this needs is for grown-up egos to be set aside and to focus on the young people," she said.
The California School Boards Association and the Association of California School Administrators have taken no position on AB 2975, but they say Hancock has seized on a very real problem.
Jack O'Connell, state schools superintendent, opposes AB 2975.
"It's a measure that would have the net effect of watering down our standards," O'Connell said. "It takes us in the wrong direction."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Perhaps that would be a good place for a school system to start.
Why not remove your children immediately?
Lake Woebegone, they're not!
(Has anyone suggested the reason the average scores are so low is because of all the illegals?)
<a href="http://www.morganquitno.com/edrank.htm"> http://www.morganquitno.com/edrank.htm</a>
And it will come out looking like this:
Yea, friend of the family tends to prefer public school kids over their private(usc/stanford)(well here in california anyway) counterparts. He hates ivy league mba's becuase the ones he encounters all think there going to be ceo in 2 years.
........When the federal government adopted NCLB, it accepted each state's definition of "proficient" but required every student to reach that threshold in English and mathematics by 2014.
Thus the rub: States that set the bar low academically have a distinct advantage over California, whose high proficiency standard is a laudable but unrealistic mandate to apply universally to more than 6 million students of varying backgrounds, Hancock contends.
"Be real," she said. "This isn't 'Alice in Wonderland.'"
Less than half of California's students currently qualify as proficient - 40 percent of them in English-language arts and 38 percent of them in mathematics, state records show..........
Oh, and quit dishing out free education when they turn 18.
After looking over the ranked list, I think the title should be "Liberalism Rankings". It appears that the more liberal, socialist northeast states hold the higher positions on the list.
The problem is real. The Federal Department of Education believes, because Congress told it to believe, that 100% of US 18-year olds are capable of twelfth-grade work, if only a) enough money is spent and b) schools are not racist.
This is of course false, grossly so - and anyone or any thing, including President Bush, who thinks otherwise cannot improve the situation but can make it a lot worse.
Which they are doing, in a hurry,
Virginia at #7--Highest ranking red state
I can write the code, I'm just lazy sometimes ;-)
OK, I looked at the California Exit Exam -- I have a kid I am tutoring who needs to pass that, and it will be a miracle. That test is ridiculous. The first ten questions (in the test prep book) are about statistics; they use statistics buzzwords that I have never heard, and ask the most convoluted questions. In the years since high school, I have not used ONE of these concepts, ever, and probably would have gotten them all wrong.
How can that be right? It should be a test for basic reading and writing and arithmetic. The test I looked at is meaningless for assessing -- what? -- whether the student is ready to go on to a degree in statistics, I suppose. It reads like some smarmy, self-satisfied, Ivory Tower mathematician who never spends time with kids wrote it.
"I think it's a totally sensible thing to do," said Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley."
Do you mean to actually tell me that they charge
tuition at California universities to teach people
how to think like this?
Do it (homeschool). You'll love it. Great for the kids. You can step out of the bureaucratic stuff and go straight to learning.
Mastery of twelfth grade work entails the following:
Three years of History, four years of English including composition, rhetoric, and literature, a foreign language, science through physics and (therefore) math through trigonometry and (certainly) statistics.
What kind of "exit exam" would test "basic reading, writing, and arithmetic"? The third grade exam?
Liberals always stereotype people of Southern heritage as "uneducated rednecks", barely passing the sixth grade, yet, thanks to liberals; today's seniors in high school resemble yesterday’s sixth graders.
Um -- I am not talking Prep School here. This is a basic test, just simply to get people out of high school. In inner city Los Angeles. They have to have the basics to get through life; I doubt seriously that all students have that, are being challenged to know even that.
It is not what I demanded of my homeschooled son, either. But this kid I am tutoring, foster kid, remedial reader, will have a tough time with the statistics part of it. And, frankly, why should he have to know that? That's what is screwy, to me. The schools have had him for 12 years. Granted his life has been totally chaotic. I think he could do the basics on this test, but to ask him to understand statistics, when he will most likely not use them, doesn't make sense to me. And -- he will be an adult soon, and working. Without a high school diploma, WE will be paying for him.
Statistics -- it is a terribly-written test, imho.
Probably depends. What is your definition of 'basic' and what is mine?
Ping!
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