FURY!

It is a very good thing right now, that there's a computer screen and miles of distance between myself and the idiot you're about to read of.

Thanks to my blog-sis, for sending my normally tranquil blood-pressure off of the chart. By the way, you must read Baldilocks on a daily basis. Captain's Orders!

How is it that this school administrator hasn't been taken out, and horsewhipped, then tarred, feathered and hung by the neck from the gym's basketball hoop is beyond me. I'm serious. This asswipe is doing as much, if not more harm to the kids under his care, than every violent cartoon and video game ever made, combined!

And you wonder what the hell is wrong with our schools?!

Comments

[Juliette]

Jim,

Breathe deeply!

This story is a fruition of what many smart black kids have long experienced during their primary and secondary school years. Believe me, I know; so it's not so surprising to me.

[Rivrdog]

Sorry, people, you reap what you sow. Remember the right wing chanting, about 20 years ago, that we needed better evaluation of teachers? Well, that chant morphed into "The No Child Left Behind Act" with a few transitions thrown in for good measure. Now, every school must be measured, and the reports are front page news.

This is where we went wrong: instead of developing an accurate system to test teachers, GWB gave in to the NEA, who had decided that the best way to test teachers was to test students. Well, the predictable thing happened, and the schools spend the largest part of their effort teaching the tests, so the students will do well, etc, etc. That leaves very little time for actual teaching of subjects according to the time-tested system of stimulating and challenging their minds, like the young man wanted to do.

The educator who turned his application down is an idiot, but no more than our President, who with a stroke of the pen in signing the NCLBA, effectively killed off any possibility of cultivating these young minds to think for themselves.

[Jim]

Rivrdog, I've gotta plainly disagree with you on most of your major points.

Testing and evaluation, done properly is the only credible way to objectively determine just who knows what.

Which, of course is the foundational goal of basic education. Secondary, or higher education moves this upwards into cognitive skills, reasoning, logic, etc. But without the basics, the abstracts become intellectual anarchy.

Here's the rub. We left the process of testing and evaluation in the hands of the very people who've screwed up the system, i.e; The Educrats.

And true to form, they've gone and developed tests which in the real world, are both meaningless and dumbed-down to ensure the mere image of "success".

Multiple choice tests are designed to evoke mneomic, reflexve recall. And even then, the failure rates are abysmal.

These problems have been in place for far longer than George Bush has been President. And, a similar structure of testing and accountability is paying dividends here in Texas.

Rivrdog, what we need to do is to get a cardre of ex-military officers such as yourself involved in the process. Yank the keys away from the educrats. Don't let the inmates run the asylum any longer.

Run the education system the same way that the military runs Tech Schools for enlisted personnel.

And that involves testing and evaluation against fixed, measurable standards, as you well remember. (StanEval Boards, anyone?) Further, I'm sure you recall the fate of USAF instructors whose students routinely tested out as substandard. They were either brought up to snuff as instructors, or snuffed as instructors.

Society, being the ultimate consumer of the Educrats products, has the right, and ought to enforce that right, of demanding results for monies paid.

For me, I'll stick to holding the educrats as accountable as possible. Granted, the current testing process leaves much to be desired.

But it beats the hell out of the accountablity vacuum which preceeded it.

Jim
Sloop New Dawn
Galveston, TX

[Rivrdog]

You could be on to something with your suggestion of looking at the military testing system. While in the USAF, I experienced two systems, one for PME (Professional Military Education), for the likes of Squadron Officer's School and Air Command and Staff College. The other system was the StanEval system of testing on basic subject knowledge.

The two systems had some similarities, but were different. The StanEval system relied solely on rote memory. These were for things you HAD to know, like Emergency Actions for bailout, etc. The PME was more like civilian education in it's structure, but it too relied on the multiple-choice or true-false type of testing.

The successful student in either system had the requisite knowledge to carry out their duties, even under great stress (where else have you seen a test where the only acceptable score is 100%, required in the weapons field).

The problem is that today's educrats don't believe in this type of learning and evaluation any more. They invented the "fuzzy math" and re-invented history so that no one would feel any stress in learning at all. The difficulty is that learning ALWAYS involves stressing the student to some degree, and the further away one gets from using the tool of stress in learning, the further one gets from adequate results.