Posted on 08/13/2016 5:10:50 AM PDT by detective
This belongs in the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category:
In Florida (you knew it was Florida, didn’t you?), some third-graders — including honor students — are being forced to retake third grade because their parents decided to opt them out of the state’s mandated standardized reading test this past spring.
An undetermined number of third-graders who refused to take the Florida Standards Assessment in reading have been barred from moving to fourth grade in some counties. A lawsuit filed by parents against state education officials as well as school boards in seven Florida counties says counties are interpreting the state’s third-grade retention law so differently that the process has become unfair. Test participation, therefore, is more important than student class academic achievement.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I have been retired for two years now, but during my last year there was close to open rebellion from parents. At least three weeks were taken out of the school year for various tests. Many parents did not permit their children to take one of the tests they found out was an optional one.
Yes, conservatives should run but with only **one** purpose. That purpose is to close down the government's K-12 socialist entitlement schools and replace it with private systems of schooling. Tax credits, vouchers, and charters may ease the transition but the final goal should be complete separation of school and state.
The government's K-12 socialist entitlement schools can not be reformed precisely because they are a **socialist** program! The foundation of socialism upon which they are build is rotten.
Corrupt and incompetent is the very definition of a socialist-entitlement program.
No one should be surprised that the government's K-12 socialist-entitlement schools are corrupt and incompetent.
There will be some government school defender who will claim that their child's school is not corrupt and incompetent. Dig a little deeper into those schools and you will find that it is the **parents** in these homes who are doing tons of after schooling and private tutoring. That after schooling is never measured.
“When you work with ‘hoodrats with COLLEGE DEGREES that are functional illiterates, you’ll understand the appeal of a test that would stop that charade in its tracks”...
It’s been true for more than a decade in Flori-DUH...I recall the fuss LONG ago when the ‘teachers’ that were produced by our ‘education schools’ couldn’t pass the exam....Answer ? Lower the required scores to get a qualifying grade !
So we get unqualified folks teaching our kids to this day !
“What I find particularly disgusting is that teachers aren’t UP IN ARMS opposed to Common Core and mandated testing”
The good ones are.
Parents: sue the bloomers off them and chase those needless administrators and that superintendent out of the state!
Sounds like more ridiculous “no tolerance” rules. If the kids don’t take the test next year, are they held back a second time? What about the year after that and the year after that and the year after that? By that reasoning, they have reached the school’s cut off age of 21 and still be in 3rd grade. Let the administrators try to wiggle their way out of that.
When you fail to show up for the "Final Exam" chances are you are going to flunk the class.
That's called "reality."
I don't know why these parents refused to allow their children to take the examination, but actions have consequences.
I suspect the school is punishing the parents because these standardized tests are mainly for statistics to gauge how the school ranks with the other schools and the district and when the "honor" students refuse to take the test, that skews the results down.
I’m thinking taking a reading test is probably the only way to judge whether or not a child knows how to read. How else would you determine this?
I know lots of standardized testing is done to excess, but a reading test is probably a good thing to use as an assessment tool. It’s not assessing what they know but how equipped they are to find out so they can know.
It is still a gauge - and students performed poorly with the lowered standards. PARENTS NEEDED TO KNOW THAT.
I am schooling my fourth grader at home this year. We are both excited to do it. Just couldn’t take all of the wasted time and substandard curriculum any longer.
AA, union types (teachers) are the worst of the worst
Your point is good in theory, and would work in a home school environment, but even kids that flunk the tests are still promoted. The test would only be valuable if it was used for a purpose that benefitted the child, instead of the wallets of the test companies.
Sure; it cuts both ways. How many of those intelligent dropouts were from urban minority school districts/areas?
“Parents must help effect change in the system by refusing to send their children to these broken institutions.”
That doesn’t work; here in the NYC metro area “parents” went a step further and stopped breeding - and our government simply imported student bodies from abroad.
After the whole Elian Gonzalez thing, why do you think our government is allowing “unaccompanied minors” across the border? Because the public school teachers’ unions need clients, and everyone who makes a living clothing/housing/feeding people needs those clients as well...
The education industry hasn’t been about educating children for decades; it is simply a scheme to (very successfully) funnel taxpayer dollars to the Democratic Party - which is just the political arm of the teachers’ unions. They have foot-soldiers in every municipality, feed on the occupied host like an invading army, and fund the campaigns of politicians who will throw even more through the taxpayer money laundering machine.
Brilliant, and devastatingly effective.
Oceans of taxpayer dollars are utterly wasted on P. S. 666 and always the educrats demand more $$$$$, and then more $$$$$ and still more $$$$$.
With homeschooling, the parents take direct responsibility for the education of their own children. Imagine that! The available curricula like Saxon Math are infinitely superior to the Common Core trash designed to make the kid competent enough to vote Marxist and apply for welfare when the time comes but no more.
Parents NEED to have an alternative for the education of their kids. One that does NOT include Heather Has Two Mommies, or how to clothe a banana with a condom, or how to get an abortion with the help of the school so that mom and dad will NEVER know. One that competently teaches (no PC imposed or allowed) actual American and world history, rigorous mathematics, challenging science courses, biology, chemistry, physics, actual civics, high level English grammar, syntax and literature (the real thing, Faulkner, Saroyan, O. Henry, etc.), world literature (Shakespeare, Donne, German authors, Japanese authors in translation, etc.). Rigorous language courses: Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish with required translation of great literature of each. Economics (von hayek, von Mises, Sowell, Friedman). Since it is homeschooling, theology and philosophy according to family preferences.
But some may say that such a curriculum is too challenging for the parents who, after all, are often themselves victims of pathetic P.S. 666 attempts at edumakashun. Then let homeschooling parents form their own private schools and let those who are talented teachers in each subject teach and maintain strong central discipline and standards of behavior. Such parents will be amazed at how much less expensive such private schools are without all the frills and fancy stuff. Such a school does not NEED football, marching band, junior years in Europe (some CT school systems were raping the taxpayers for that 40 years ago) and other forms of, frankly, entertainment. The kids are too busy learning anyhow.
The only thing that public school parents are guilty of is abandoning their kids to gummint skewels. That guilt is easily dissolved by withdrawing the kids from Stalag 666.
Catholic parochial schools may or may not be an answer. UI am Catholic but the parochial schools are increasingly caving in to Common Core and the various educrat unions. In the very conservative diocese where I live, the DIOCESAN superintendent is a creature formerly involved in running gummint skewel teachers' unions. The kids aren't learning much more than the denizens of PS 666. They just wear uniforms and are required to behave and be polite. My wife teaches at a parent-controlled private Catholic school and tests incoming students with the Iowa Tests. Generally the parochial school kids seeking to transfer in are two years' behind grade and the gummint skewel kids even worse. Inadequately educated kids can use intensive summer school to get up to grade but, if they cannot demonstrate proficiency on the Iowa Tests they have to go back as many years as necessary. When they are promoted or graduate, they WILL have attained a competent grasp of the material and then some.
Therefore: Jeb Bush, go to hell!
The writing was on the wall when “education” became a major/degree; “teachers” were produced who knew little math, science, history, etc.
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