Posted on 11/01/2011 6:48:25 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
On the nation's report card, California schools have advanced from failing to -- failing a teensy bit less.
Despite posting minute gains this year, California students scored at nearly the bottom of the nation in reading and math, test results show. In reading, California performed worse than all other states and only outscored Washington, D.C. In math, state fourth-graders ranked above only D.C. and Mississippi; eighth-graders did a notch better, also outscoring Alabama.
The National Assessment of Education Progress is administered every other year to a sampling of students across the country. It is the only nationally standardized test for public schools. California students have typically performed poorly, both overall and in comparison to other children.
Education reformers reacted with dismay.
"Slow, incremental improvement is not enough for our kids," said Arun Ramanathan, executive director of the Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based advocacy group. Further, he said, "These results show just how far out of the mainstream, of the national education reform conversation, that California is right now."
Other large diverse states, like Texas, Florida and New York, performed better.
California schools Superintendent Tom Torlakson gave a more nuanced reaction. "Asked to do more with less, students, teachers, school employees and administrators have delivered. Imagine how much more they could accomplish," he said in a prepared statement, "with the resources they deserve."
For several years, California has steadily cut public education budgets and laid off teachers.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Genetics has nothing to do with it. I knew a half dozen black engineers who came from Cameroon, Somalia, Nigeria, & etc. who did just fine in the USA. Very successful.
It had nothing to do with their genetics. All of these black people came to the USA with little English skills and went to school became engineers and are successful. They don’t carry the cultural baggage of US inner city blacks, ghetto blacks.
These immigrants only saw unlimited opportunity in America and applied themselves to take advantage of that opportunity. It is the ingrained victim mentality that makes many minorities think like victims, do nothing to improve themselves and otherwise refuse learning and doing other things “acting white”.
Has nothing to do with genetics.
The "less" is only relative. It's because there was a mammoth spike in revenues during Arnold's term when the economy was roaring and so the education budget also spiked. Even in these "lean" times, the state education budget is well above inflation compared to the 1990s.
All they do is cry for money, money, money. That's not the answer. If it was the answer D.C. schools would not be dead last!
The corrupt unions have ensured greedy, unsustainable wages and benefits while guaranteeing deadweight, even dangerous, teachers persist on the payroll. Newt actually singled out Los Angeles Unified for special criticism at the College Board candidate forum last week.
I moved my kid to a new school here in Los Angeles this year.
You’re right, no amount of money is ever going to force Latino families to take an interest in their kid’s schooling.
I got the school’s report card yesterday, and it had an API of 953, but they only had 2% English learners.
My kid had great teachers at her old school, but the learning environment sucked. My kid is much happier at her new school.
Of course, there are individual students and families who are different from their cultural norm, who are focused on achievement. They tend to have excellent children who are a joy to work with. But most of them simply have a different set of priorities, and that is just that.
-——But most of them simply have a different set of priorities, and that is just that-—
Translation: They are lazy, it’s a cultural thing
I remember a teacher at my old school, a (legal) Mexican in his 60's, telling me he had to cut his family off years ago or his parents and brothers would all have climbed onto his back and rode him to the ground. "That's how Mexican culture is," he told me. He'd joined the Marines when he was young, met a woman in Japan and married her, and told his family to buzz off. He was completely estranged from them, because he was determined to be American.
He was a great guy... he's retired now. But anyway, he's not the only one. We have another Mexican teacher at my current school, and he takes care of his parents, two of his four siblings, they all live in his house and he's the only one who works full time. He never married (who'd want to marry into that situation?) and he just works and hands the money over to a pack of parasites.
And another situation I just learned of, one of my students is pretty much a neglected child because her parents work all these hours and are supporting all four grandparents back in Mexico.
It just blows me away, because white culture is just not like this! My parents are in their 60s and they would never, ever, ever expect any of their kids to neglect their own children and their own lives to send them money! My grandma lived to 93, and took care of herself till 92. She'd have never accepted money from anyone. Pride, you know?
I’m in one of those ‘acheivement gaps’. And I was the top student in my high school. Sorry, I ain’t buying it.
I understand what you are saying. I am a Californian, and proud of it. I went to public school in California. It is my contention that all a good teacher needs is a chalk board, some chalk. The kids need a Big Chief writing tablet and one of those really thick pencils.
When kids in African countries can learn with teachers using the basic rudimentary of materials, then so can our students.
Fancy pants electronic devices and magic chalk boards do not an education make. The “Look-Say” method of reading is designed to create idiots in my humble opinion. The “New Math” is designed to create kids illiterate in numbers.
We learned by one block at a time. Multiplication beginning in the first grade. It was sing song, but the rote method of learning simple multiplication worked. Addition and subtraction by simple rote method also worked. We didn’t need to know why, just that it was true.
Look, before Mexicans came to California there were other cultures. I am Italian and in San Jose, there was a Little Italy around Julian Street and 13th street. Immigrants drawn to the area because it was the “Valley of the Garden’s Delight”. It the kids of those immigrants could learn english—then the kids of any other immigrants could learn english. Were Italian immigrants, the salt of the earth, so to speak, anymore literate, or illiterate than today’s current mexican immigrants? (legal or illegal) The current mexican immigrants are peasants in their homeland: for the most part, so were the italians.
But perhaps 75 years ago, the insidious program of actually “dumbing down” the population hadn’t quite taken hold yet. I know that teachers are not allowed to teach, but must hold the a strict curriculum that does not allow deviation.
More money will not solve the problem. In the 60s when I went to school, classrooms held 35 kids or more. We learned. But then again, we didn’t know that we had a choice not to learn.
I’m disabled. There is a far more severe ‘achievement gap’ for students who are disabled, and with my disability, than there are for students based on race. Far more.
The average person with my disability learns to read at a grade 3 level, and generally that’s as far as they get.
If I can do it, then any of the others can do the same.
That and the meme that “every kid deserves a college education”.
The world needs ditch diggers and tradesmen more than it needs Liberal Arts or some Afro-centric studies majors.
After the 8th grade, if a student has shown a tendency to be a problem in school or have difficult with academics, send them off to a trade school and teach them something useful.
Not every kid is pre-destined to be the next Einstein.
Use the grade 9-12 classroom resources for the kids who can and want to learn in order to get into good colleges.
Whups! I disagree with that entirely.
It is 100% cultural.
The measure of student sucess is not genetics, it is parental involvement.
I don’t know the answers. I’m not a native Californian. I’m from a tiny town in the mid-west that was all white, very quiet, kind of American Gothic. You know, unsmiling folks with pitchforks. Kids where I’m from learned to drive on John Deere tractors, learned to shoot BB guns at 7, and went to school knowing that if you screwed up, the teacher had a paddle with your name on it, and your folks would give you a follow-up beating at home if you got into trouble at school. I get a little depressed when I look around me now.
“It isn’t illegals. Many that I have worked with from CA. have no geography or history knowledge. They are decent with math. It is pathetic.”
Unfortunately, this makes sense. There is no money in being “well-rounded” anymore for an average person.
My grandfather was semi-literate and never finished middle school, yet he earned a living good enough to put his daughter through college and his wife didn’t work except during WWII, and that was only for patriotic reasons. He knew enough self-taught math to become an expert machinist.
If one has a trade and is very good at it, I believe that this can still be done.
I’m really starting to think that the European system is “fairer”, where if you have the test scores, you get a scholarship to college. If not, you can go to a trade school. You can’t “buy” your way into a school. I work with “furriners” who think that our system is insane. Most of them went to college for free, on merit.
A machinist that can run the automated vectrax (CNC Milling) can command quite an audience. It’s high tech now. I really respect the old hands that didn’t have the automation. It’s not any easy trade.
Check out identical twin studies. Even raised apart they score +/- 5 points on standard IQ tests. Parents can make a big difference, but they can’t skew the IQ tests.
I agree with that.
But - if the parents don’t care, neither do the kids.
Done.
IQ does not measure success, you know - or I would be ruler of the universe.
And my kid would lord it over me. Dang Bastich.
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