Skip to main content

re: a lack of education





From the Washington Post:



Non-English Speakers Neglected, Weast Says



Children who speak little or no English have been largely invisible in Montgomery County schools and easily ignored, officials concede. And a new report has found that that neglect has meant that these children who start school behind, stay behind.



The report, which Superintendent Jerry D. Weast is to present to Board of Education members tomorrow, found that the district has failed to train teachers or track the students' progress. It also found that the quality of education varies wildly from school to school.
But these were the same problems found in public schools when I was in elementary and high schools. And that's 30+ years now, and San Francisco. Billions (trillions?) of dollars later and the problems...persist?



As for those who oppose standardized testing:



And new federal legislation requires that all these students take high-stakes assessment tests; their scores can no longer be thrown out. These students routinely score between the 20th and 40th percentiles on such tests. English speakers, on average, score in the 70th percentile.



That, Weast says, means things must change. Fast.
Thus, the testing is pushing for change, because it has pointed out that the system has failed--again!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dune Part 2 (2024)

I have come not to praise Dune but to bury it. I am in a distinct minority. So be it. To explain why, there will be some minor spoilers ahead; sorry. The short version is #NotMyDune. Summary: Picking up where Dune Part 1 left off, we find the young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) hanging out with the Fremen. Plots to overthrow rival houses and empires ensue. Go here to see what I thought about Dune Part 1 (2021) . Overall, I found it to be technically brilliant, but lacking a human heart, an exercise in frenetic slow motion. D2 is more of the same, though with far more action. Acting-wise, everyone is doing a fine, more than adequate job. Absolutely no one or nothing stands out. The way the characters are written (adapted, actually), their back and forths and interactions, are all weak and unengaging. I generally hate when they speak. I've read the novel a ridiculous number of times, and these films are prompting me to read it again. I understand that trying to translate the n...
1 comment
Read more

I (Briefly) Try a Mac

 I Bought a Mac. My first computer was an Atari 800, fully loaded with 48k of RAM. And I mean the original, beige model, not its low-slung, fancy successor. My friend went for an Apple IIe, which cost a relative fortune. Eventually, I’d step up to an Atari 1040ST, while he’d get a IIgs. And even more eventually, we both ended up with IBM PC compatibles. MSDOS was my friend, Unix an ally. It was with great reluctance that I transition from a command-line interface (CLI) to a Graphic User Interface (GUI), always on a PC platform and never a Mac. I never bought into the hype and never experienced all the horrid things that allegedly befell anyone using a PC. For me, they just worked. Yet here I am, these many decades later, typing this on a brand-new MacBook Air M4. How things change... Initially, there was little regret but a mounting list of frustrations. Adjusting to the keyboard isn’t too hard, it’s just a matter of experimentation. Learning how to scale the display wasn’t awful, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Have I mentioned I saw Monsters vs. Aliens?

It’s possible that Pixar is becoming a blight on the world of animation. Yes, they do some really great work ( The Incredibles , Ratatouille ), but they’ve also done some clunkers ( Cars , Wall-E ). Their greatest sin, though, is that they apparently radiate a variation of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, so that any other animated film – especially if done with CG – is automatically judged inferior. There is some justification to this, but you don’t see every live action film being compared to, say, the films of Ingmar Bergman (well, except by brooding people wearing dark glasses sitting in dim coffee shops smoking clove cigarettes discussing cinema, damn you ). In the traditional film world, it’s accepted that different artists turn out different products. In the animated world, everyone is supposed to match or surpass Pixar, or so it seems. Needless to say, that’s just a crock. Monsters vs Aliens is to your typical Pixar production as Spielberg is to Scorsese. And I h...
2 comments
Read more