Saddam Captured!

[A Black Falcon]

What does that say? It says that college admission is more accessable, due to student loans and dramatically lowered standards of admission. The same goes for student approval. Sure, the kids love it. The fact remains, against other nations, our schoolchildren suck, by and large, because our education system is in shambles.

I just do not think that that is true. Sure, our scores aren't as good as many other nations, but it's not nearly as bad as you suggest and definitely could be fixed with the right kinds of attention and effort.

If by subgroups you mean different races, I think you're essentially saying that certain people are less-intelligent than others. My expectations are the same from everyone. All students should be able to read at their grade level. Why is that such an outlandish expectation? Some high-school grads can't read at all!

I'm not sure, exactly, I was referring to articles in some local papers a few weeks ago...

And all students should be able to read at their grade level? First, you need to exempt special needs kids from that... and recognize that while it's a good goal it's not realistic as a standard for a failing school. Set reasonable standards schools can reasonably meet, and raise them as you see where they should be... it doesn't help anyone to set standards that are so high or hard to meet that no school could possibly ever pass them. Of course high school graduates should be able to read, and if someone graduates without knowing how the school obviously failed them. So saying that everyone should take the tests seems reasonable... then you think about it, and how many factors there are and how easy it would be to miss something like that, and it seems unrealistic. Set a high standard, sure, but 100%?

And as for subgroups, they might include races but I think it's more than that... and anyway just in race schools have a legitimate complaint in areas like this where the number of black people in a school well might be able to be counted on the fingers of two hands... my grade, for example, was about 250 people and under five people were black... it has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with saying that it's absurd to make everyone in a group of five take the test or the whole school fails. One person sick? Oops, you're a failing school and if it happens again next year parents can send kids elsewhere with town money!

Okay, I think I did hear that the Bush Administration might be relaxing this part of it, but it'd be badly needed in areas like this, and barely starts to address all the problems with this bill.

As an article in the Portland paper said after 130 schools in Maine failed the test, the law is set up so that the standards are so high that within a few years nearly every school will be failing. Setting that kind of bar isn't good education, it's idiocy!

And they do it without sinking huge amounts of money into it. Egad!

I'll bet most of those nations spend a quite definitely higher percentage of their budget than we do, for sure.

There is a test in Florida that all students must take in order to graduate. The minimum score required to pass is 40%. You are given FIVE opportunities per year to pass. Yet, many students can't even manage that.

Some people just don't test well and forcing them to take a test to graduate isn't fair... but most of course should be able to do that well, if it's a reasonable test. If it's like the MEA (Maine Educational Assessment tests, which are given to 4th, 8th, and 11th graders)'s though... the MEAs are hard. Just getting like 50% is not much below average I think... it's a short-answer test, not multiple choice, for one...

Anyway, how many people can't manage that? I would expect that a lot of them would be from school districts that genuinely do need improvement, anyway...

Can the crap. Again, we spend more money than ever on public school funding. That teachers are paid so little is all the evidence necessary to see just why throwing more money at the problem doesn't help. Where is all this money going?

It's not just poor teachers. Curriculums are terrible. History is being re-taught for purposes of 'diversity and fairness', the two most terrible misnomers of a liberal's vocabulary. And worse, we're told that it is bad for a child's self-esteem to fail. So, the solution apparently is not to fail anyone, regardless of how much they deserve it. Thus, you have children progressing through school, essentially pushed through the grades until you have a high-school graduate who can barely read on a sixth-grade level. This high-school graduate has great self-esteem that will be mercilessly shattered once they realize that the real world will not allow... hell, provide for failure the way our public school system does.

We spend more money on everything than ever. And like always when there's a budget problem school funding gets cut. I don't know where you get this delusional idea that our public schools are awash in money and are shovelling it into the furnace or something, but they are almost all quite poor. The only exceptions are lucky schools in towns with some big business that pays a lot of taxes and gives the town the money to build very nice schools...

I would say that we whitewash history we teach to young kids... I've seen those textbooks. I don't know, though... in younger years we can't be saying all the truth because they wouldn't understand... still, I think that highschool texts at least could try a lot harder for balance and telling history as it happened and not just the view of the publisher. Though you seem to disagree and think that we should just be teaching kids how great we are and how we can do no wrong and all the stupid stuff for unintelligent people we have been teaching kids forever.

And you are right, in plenty of cases people are passed when they should fail. I think that shouldn't happen, but it happens all the time... in many cases the reason is simple: the school district doesn't want to get sued. This is a huge problem at colleges too of course, with grade inflation rampant at even the top schools... but in this sue-happy nation it can't really be avoided... teachers often I think just can't do anything. Not in the legal culture we've created.