Texas Ed Spectator

At Princeton University, Grumbling About Grade Deflation – NYTimes.com

“There are tons of really great schools with really smart kids applying for the same jobs,” said Jacob Loewenstein, a junior from Lawrence, N.Y., who is majoring in German. “People intuitively take a G.P.A. to be a representation of your academic ability and act accordingly. The assumption that a recruiter who is screening applications is going to treat a Princeton student differently based on a letter is naïve.”

So why did you apply to Princeton as opposed to some lesser known state school with a reputation for easy A’s? How pathetic! Get real, you applied because of the name. If you applied because of the rigor of the program, you wouldn’t be whining now. Is this the result of the Princeton education? Maybe Princeton should reconsider their admission procedures if this is how their students react in the face of “adversity.”  

EducationNews.org – A Leading Global News Source – Texas high-schoolers to learn about conservative, but not liberal, groups under new standards

Board member Don McLeroy, R-College Station, offered the amendment requiring coverage of “key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.” McLeroy said he offered the proposal because the history standards were already “rife with leftist political periods and events – the populists, the progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society.”

McLeroy probably doesn’t understand that the reasons why the above mentioned periods are included in the history standards–they resulted in concrete achievements. You know, things like safe food, eliminating child labor, social security, and medicare. If he thinks these are “liberal” causes and indicative of textbook bias, he’s not talking about history, he promoting propaganda and indoctrination. That would explain why he wants Joe McCarthy portrayed in a more positive light. Now was that change proposed by the expert reviewers or public comment?

Textbook vote boots Henry, Sandra Cisneros

Board Republicans also removed United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta for proposed inclusion in third-grade textbooks as an example of someone who exemplified good citizenship.

Huerta is considered a civil-rights leader but Republican board members objected to her because of her past membership in the Democratic Socialists of America Party.

Helen Keller or Clara Barton would be better examples, said board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, R-Dallas.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Should I cry because board members believe that being a socialist automatically means you can not exemplify good citizenship? Or should I laugh because our board members believe that Helen Keller would be a better example, presumably because she wasn’t a socialist.

The Truth about Helen Keller – Volume 17 No. 1 – Fall 2002 – Rethinking Schools Online

While she was alive, Helen Keller fought against the media’s tendency to put her on a pedestal as a “model” sweet, good-natured, handicapped person who overcame adversity. The American Foundation for the Blind depended on her as spokesperson, but some of its leaders were horrified by her activism. As Robert Irwin, the executive director of the foundation, wrote to one of the trustees, “Helen Keller’s habit of playing around with Communists and near-Communists has long been a source of embarrassment to her conservative friends. Please advise!”

In the years since her death, her lifelong work as a social justice activist has continued to be swept under the rug. As her biographer Dorothy Herrmann concludes:

“Missing from her curriculum vitae are her militant socialism and the fact that she once had to be protected by six policemen from an admiring crowd of 2,000 people in New York after delivering a fiery speech protesting America’s entry into World War I. The war, she told her audience, to thunderous applause, was a capitalist ploy to further enslave the workers. As in her lifetime, Helen Keller’s public image remains one of an angelic, sexless, deaf-blind woman who is smelling a rose as she holds a Braille book open on her lap.”

But why is her activism so consistently left out of her life stories? Stories such as this are perpetuated to fill a perceived need. The mythical Helen Keller creates a politically conservative moral lesson, one that stresses the ability of the individual to overcome personal adversity in a fair world. The lesson we are meant to learn seems to be: “Society is fine the way it is. Look at Helen Keller! Even though she was deaf and blind, she worked hard – with a smile on her face – and overcame her disabilities. She even met kings, queens, and presidents, and is remembered for helping other handicapped people. So what do you have to complain about in this great nation of ours?”

This demeaning view of Helen Keller celebrates her in a way that keeps her in her place. She never gets to be an adult; rather she is framed as a grown-up child who overcame her handicap. Like other people with disabilities, Helen Keller deserves to be known for herself and not defined by her blindness or her deafness. She saw herself as a free and self-reliant person – as she wrote, “a human being with a mind of my own.”

It’s time to move beyond the distorted and dangerous Helen Keller myth, repeated in picture book after picture book. It’s time to stop lying to children and go beyond Keller’s childhood drama and share the remarkable story of her adult life and work. What finer lesson could children learn than the rewards of the kind of engaged life that Helen Keller lived as she worked with others toward a vision of a more just world?

I guess we know what kind of education our board members received and what kind they they think is best for the children of Texas.

Texas State Board of Education, Geraldine Miller, Helen Keller

Texas refuses federal school funds

But Perry said Texas “reserves the right to decide how we educate our children and not surrender that control to the federal bureaucracy.”

Perry’s objections seem to center on the fact that the grant rules give preference to states that sign on to a push for national curriculum standards. Perry and Scott have been critical of the Common Core Standards Initiative, a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers with support from the Department of Education. Texas and Alaska are the only two states that have not joined the initiative.

So the grant rules giver “preference” to those who sign on for national standards–why not apply anyway and see what happens? And isn’t “local control” the basis of Texas public education? So why isn’t the state supporting districts (if any) that are implementing such standards on their own?

Are there potential negative consequences of national standards? Of course there are. But national standards or no, Texans, parents, students, and citizens, deserve to know why over 80 percent of students in the more desirable high schools are considered “college ready” but only half of them can meet the minimum SAT/ACT scores required by state colleges to enroll in schools without remediation.

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James Gang helps Texas Tech get revenge on Leach – Matt Hayes – College Football – Sporting News

That’ll teach Mike Leach to embarrass Texas Tech University during contract negotiations.

This is the definition of payback, everyone. Nearly a year after the fact.

The record will show that Leach, Tech’s unorthodox yet highly successful coach, was fired Wednesday for mistreatment of a player with a “mild” concussion. The reality is Leach was fired because he took Texas Tech for everything it had last February during contract negotiations — and made the university brass look like bumbling fools in the process.

Texas Tech head coach suspended

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that Leach locked sophomore receiver Adam James in a closet because he thought the player was faking a concussion.

I’m really having problems envisioning the scene.  Not the getting the kid into the closet part but what the other adults at the scene were doing. Did anyone suggest that this might not be the best way to handle the situation or were they all thinking, “damn, I’m going to use this technique once I’m head coach.” Or maybe they were the sergeant in Hogan’s Heroes “I see nothing!” More likely, it was “the idiot did it this time, that’s Craig James’ son, hmmm, maybe I’ll have a shot at his job.” Regardless of which thoughts were actually present at the time, I think this shows that Leach has some serious management issues.

Kerrville Daily Times

Kerrville Independent School District officially supports the six plaintiff districts in claiming that commissioner Robert Scott is overreaching in his interpretation of a recently enacted law against minimum grades.

Minimum grading policies are the practice of giving failing students at least 50 percent on report cards regardless of whether a student’s cumulative work on individual assignments actually justifies a lower percentage.

Such a policy currently exists at KISD and more than half of all Texas schools. The KISD policy states teachers must record a 50 for any student scoring below that amount during the first five six-week grading periods.

I understand wanting to make sure that kids are able to succeed at school but maybe the point is to put them in classes that are a better match to their abilities?  And I can see this maybe working for a History or English class but what about math or science? How many kids can actually pass the remaining grading periods if they bombed the first one in Algebra? And how is this policy going to help students pass the year end tests that will soon be administered in high schools?

Maybe this is something that only happens at the elementary school level which would make more sense. In any case, I would like some specific examples and numbers. And the fact that none are provided suggests that neither side really has any reason for supporting/opposing the policy.

Recently, there’s been another article on the need to regulate homeschoolers. As best as most homeschoolers can figure out, it’s because we don’t think like everyone else and are passing that trait on to our children. See, it’s not about preventing harm, it’s about control and we all know how well that turns out education reform.

Class Struggle – How fashion frustrates school improvement

James P. Comer is one of the most successful school improvement experts in the country, but that doesn’t mean he gets much respect. Policy makers often resist his ideas. Take, for example, the Midwestern elementary school that went from 23rd to first in its district by using the School Development Program created by Comer and his Yale colleagues.

Did the school district leaders celebrate and recommend the program far and wide? No. They appear to have been disturbed by the results. They accused the school of cheating and insisted on a re-test, with local newspapers suggesting scandal. The students did even better the second time, but that did not win Comer’s team any plaudits. The superintendent removed the principal who had done so well with their methods and installed a new staff not trained to use them, bringing the scores back down to where the district leadership apparently thought they should be.

Yeah, the public education system does so much more to ensure a quality education. This isn’t about education, this about brainwashing our children and who gets to do it.

Are there children out there who would do better in public school than being homeschooled? Of course, depending on the public school and the randomly assigned teachers. But I would bet that there is an even larger percentage of children in public school who would be better served by homeschooling.

Tell you what, fix the system for the kids that are already there and then talk to me about regulation.

Another ranking system.

the College Grid

After helping numerous students with their college applications, we noticed a lack of useful tools to help manage the school selection process. We decided to build a website with a “top-down” approach to researching colleges. Within a week, the College Grid was born.

It is improvement over the Princeton Review and US News and World Report in that it actually lets you sort on any of the variables. But the choice of variables!

The default sort is on the admissions rate. Obviously the creators are believers in that selectivity means better. But such a system does have its limitations. For example, select just for Texas schools and see what school shows up second with the default rating. And it even has a 99% acceptance yield! What a find! The problem is that is has a six year graduation rate of less than 20%. I’m sure that’s why there’s a column of SAT scores to give a heads-up that you might want to check into the value of the selectivity but still, is this really valuable?

The top five Texas schools in terms of four year graduation rates are ranked 1, 25, 15, 31, and 44 on the College Grid. Which is more important, selectivity or graduation rates? (They are ranked 1, 6, 2, 4, and 9 by SAT scores.)

The problem is that somebody out there doesn’t want your average college student ranking schools by graduate rates. (I’m not saying that graduation rates should be the only consideration but when your shelling out $40,000 a year, I would put it at the top of the list.) Most lists are now listing graduation rates as part of the school profile but the only place where you can actually select on it is at www.Collegeresults.org. Even the College Navigator, the website run by the federal government that actually collects the graduate rate data, doesn’t allow you to search on it.

So do potential students really not care about graduation rates or have they just been convinced that acceptance rates are actually a reflection of graduation rates?

College graduation rates, college rankings