So, of course, the standards must change.
I’ve written here before about the state of education here in the State of Washington and given some of the history leading to the creation of the WASL (Washington Assesment of Student Learning) test that all students now need to pass in order to graduate from high school.
As I wrote about the probability of in the linked post, people in the capitol are now putting on a full court press to replace the WASL with something less ‘assessing’ and less ‘judgemental of student performance’. In real people language that translates to “We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars to show that the system is succeeding, but now that we can clearly see that it is not, and we need to change it.”
One of the ideas being bandied about is to have ‘student portfolios’ kept for the students to show off to a board of what I would hope will be educators and if said board OKs it, the student can graduate based on their ‘portfolio’.
I call it the “Look the teacher gave me an ‘A’ on my diversity collage. Give me my diploma!” scenario. But I think LTTGMAAOMDCGMMD is too long for an official name. I’m sure that the Office of the Superintendant of Public Instruction will think of something that rolls right off the tongue though, what with all those English majors now working in the public sector here.
Another idea is to compare the grades of the student to the grades of other students who also took the class.
I thought that was what a Grade Point Average was. I guess I didn’t learn alot from going to school in Washington.
Speaking of me going to school, let’s just say I was a ‘problem student’. Piss poor grades to go along with a piss poor attitude all the way through junior high. I think I remember failing a quarter of 7th grade English because I couldn’t find anything interesting to write about the Roman deity Saturn in a short story. That was the same teacher who would send students to the principle’s office for pronouncing the word ‘Sherbet’ as ‘Shurbert’. She told us at the beginning of the year that that was one of her pet peeves and some folks forgot.
I got to high school and somehow convinced a counselor to put me into the ‘College Prep’ line of classes and magically, my grades improved. They weren’t perfect by any means, but I went from steady C’s with the occasional B to steady B’s and A’s in every subject.
I was being challenged. Imagine that! I was no longer bored and actually cared about what I was learning.
Then we moved and I started going to a new school district that was in an urban setting and I came to understand what was nice about going to school in some podunk cowtown: the lack of political correctness.
The boring as hell ‘mandatory assemblies’ in the school gymnasium that occured at a rate of at least four a month wore down my attitude until I found another sympathetic school counselor who believed me whan I laid down a roll of BS about how large crowds scared me. He got the administrators to sign off on me hanging out in the library during those assmeblies where I could do some actually studying instead of listening to two hours of why ‘drug use is bad’ or ten speakers talking about Black History Month (in November!) or my personal favorite “If your parents have guns at home, tell a teacher.”
If these people actually cared about teaching these kids, they’d talk to them, most especially the successful ones, along their parents instead of school adminstrators. They used to have a thing call the PTA where parents and teachers could get together, now it is the PTSA (the ‘S’ standing for ‘Student’) that is more about scoring political points and getting a spot on the school board than anything else, at least here in Washington.
The students who do well and the parents of thsoe students know more about what is going on in that school and what works best than any number of administrators you care to name. We had one principle and three vice-principles in my politically correct high school, for barely 650 students, all making $70K or more a piece. What a way to spend tax dollars on education!
But of course the administrators and the union don’t want to be told how to teach by non-educators. That would mean that they don’t get to push their agenda on the kids; like eight weeks on the civil rights movement right after a whole week on WWII (and an hour of classtime on Korea).
Which just goes to show that they don’t really care about teaching.
Sand Crabs. It always boils down to sand crabs. The cost of schooling has gone out of sight, while the results have gotten worse. The sand crabs are to blame. Everyone wants to be “and educational professional”, but they don’t want to bother to get a degree and a teaching certificate. So they become an educatinal sand crab, and dig their way into the system, never to be removed. If we fired every one of these sand crabs, the teachers would still teach, but without the sand crab support, they would have to get rid of all the BS in the classroom. All of the political correctness crap. All of the gender-bending, culture-overturning crap. All of it. That would leave more time for teaching, and the results would show in better-educated students.
We got it bad here in California too. The Governor put a measure on the ballot last November to extend the amount of time it takes for a teacher to get tenure, at which point they are virtually “untouchable”, and it went down in flames! Nobody wants to hold the teachers accountable for the poor education our kids are getting! The teachers say the schools just need more money and that will fix everything!
Teachers already have it great thanks to the unions and all they do is complain that they don’t get paid enough, it’s ridiculous.
Heaven forbid we should actually try to determine the quality of education by actually measuring how much kids have learned, let’s just assume the teachers are doing fantastic and leave it at that!
Bottom line: my kids, when old enough, are getting home-schooled or private schooled.