Posted on 05/29/2012 7:18:20 AM PDT by SmileRight
When the passing rate for students taking the writing FCAT dropped to 30 percent this year, compared to 80 percent last year, the Florida Board of Education addressed the problem with typical aplomb: It changed the grading scale.
Like magic, failure turned into success for tens of thousands of students. Of course, they can’t write any better than before, but that’s beside the point. The students passed the FCAT, didn’t they? So their schools’ letter-grade ratings won’t go down, and their self-esteem will remain intact. That’s what’s important, isn’t it?
The high initial failure rate was due at least in part to increased emphasis this year on spelling, grammar and punctuation, a change in approach administrators didn’t adequately convey to the teachers charged with preparing students for the test. As someone who has made a living his entire adult life as a writer and editor, I find this curious. Good writing rests on a foundation...
(Excerpt) Read more at bizpacreview.com ...
I give credit to the authors of books like Harry Potter and Twilight. They are making reading fun for kids again. Sadly, there aren’t enough children’s authors around to keep the kids enmeshed.
Even devices like the Kindle Fire are touted as “eReaders,” but they are seldom used to actually read.
To further your point, someone recently said that today’s society is “aliterate”. In other words, they can read (to some level), but they don’t as a practice.
What do American’s expect. As Milton Friedman points out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RDMdc5r5z8
Single payer gives low quality for high cost. - ALWAYS.
A good education system requires two things.
1. Parents pay directly for their children’s education.
2. Fathers raise their children.
Publicly funded education and those that support it are just are just plain stupid.
Part of the view from my corner of the world:
Teachers don’t have time to teach anything that isn’t tested. Guess what?? Handwriting isn’t tested, so kids are coming into 6th grade unable to write in cursive— and, therefore, unable to READ cursive. That’s here in Texas. Spelling has gone by the by because it’s not tested or only lightly tested. [So kids don’t know/no the difference between there/their/they’re, your/you’re, and of course, its/it’s— to name only small part of the spelling problem. They think “IDK” is an answer to a question.]
Parts of speech?? LOL! The structure of the language?? LOL, again.
What’s taking up all their time?? Making inferences, inductive and deductive thinking, using conjunctive adverbs (when they don’t know what an adverb is in the first place), etc., which are all fine things— if you know the basics first.
And, guess what? There’s good old bilingual education that really only teaches them in Spanish and not enough in English. These kids get to take their state assessment (STAAR) in Spanish all through elementary. But, suddenly, in 6th grade, the law requires them to take it in English. Guess what??? They fail— and the middle school takes the hickey for the 5 previous years of neglect.
But teachers can only teach the basics that are tested— or they won’t be teaching any more. And that’s fine, too. A lot of them are getting out of teaching. I met one with young children who quit to go to work for A. G. Edwards.
Education is BS.
It started before there was such a thing as a cell phone. I went to public school starting in the middle 70s and I never learned to write properly. I was a guinea pig for the in fashion educational theories that rejected teaching the basics and rules of proper grammar, etc. When my children come home with homework around phonics I have to hit the internet to even try to understand what they are doing.
Please lurn to spail. /sarc
If this question has to be asked, it shows critical thinking is failing also.
Why can't Florida's students write? Florida teachers don't teach.
I learned phonics early on but not in school. I attribute my educational excellence to my mother’s purchase of numerous educational aides including phonics helpers, encyclopedia and dictionary sets, and a very early computer for educational games.
With all the Gender Confusion who has time to learn the basics.Exactly. Why teach students how to be Correct when you can instead spend the time teaching them to be Politically Correct?
After all, it requires zero education (but a lot of propaganda and persuasion) to get them all to vote democrap when they turn 18.
That's all that matters.
When I went through Instructor Training School (USN) they drummed into me: “If the student failed to learn, the instructor failed to teach.”
Response: The Bell Curve.
>>Because it is not important to the political educatocracy?
“A thinking child is a threat who spoils the harmony of the collective society that is coming.”
— John Dewey, the designer of America’s public school system.
Rather than make children feel bad about themselves, teachers were instructed to ignore those standards and focus on the child's "narrative."
There are many reasons why FloriDUH Pooblik Skool Collective victims (AKA “students”) can’t read.
Most of those reasons are called “teachers”. These “professionals” regularly test in the bottom decile of the university population, and I refer to both students and Edumacation Department faculty.
Dwellers in the shallow end of the IQ/talent pool walk around in Florida’s school buildings sucking on one thumb while scratching their butt with the other. Their total lack of training can be tested by using the “Drill Instructor’s Test”.
Yelling switch will rarely cause any reaction, let alone obeying a command all ed majors learned when in edumacation class. After all, obedience is essential to collectivization, and that is their business.
Can’t teach, can’t even play “Switch”, and can’t be fired.
Bah! Humbuggery!
All this “myriad” talk reminds me of scene from the cult classic, “Heathers” where the main characters are composing a bogus suicide note for the girl they just killed:
Veronica Sawyer: You might think what I’ve done is shocking.
Jason “J.D.” Dean: Yeah, um, to me though suicide is the natural answer to the myriad of problems life has given me.
Veronica Sawyer: That’s good, but Heather would never use the word “myriad.”
Jason “J.D.” Dean: This is the last thing she’ll ever write. She’s going to want to cash in on as many 50 cent words as possible.
Veronica Sawyer: Yeah, but she missed myriad on the vocab test two weeks ago.
Jason “J.D.” Dean: That only proves my point more. The word is a badge of her failures at school.
Try and give a clerk $11.27 when the total is $6.27 (trying to make it easy for him/her) and watch a look of confusion come over their faces as they ponder what to hell you are doing as opposed to simply tendering a $10 bill.
At other times, when the cost is something very simple like $9.89 and you hand them a $10 bill, they actually have to look at their register in order to find out how much change they must return.
In times past, people longed to be able to afford books. Now we all can afford them, but many people just don’t give a rip about them. Depressing.
The schools are busy teaching them to play football!! Why does a school need to go to Texas to play a football game against a TEXAS school??
I'm not the one portraying myself to be an expert in English, you are and as long as you speak in abbreviations, you are no different than the people you are putting down.
Hey, Dale Reed, what about "IIRC" and "FWIW"? Mean anything to you? I know how you like people who speak in abbreviations.
I am a self taught typist, it doesn't come easy for me as I don't even have all my fingers, I make mistakes but I'm not too damn'd lazy to spell out words instead of trying to type cool teenagerese.
CUL8er.
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