Texas Ed Spectator

With the Top 10 % Rule, obviously more people are paying attention to how schools rank the students.

MySA.com: KENS 5: Education

Catherine takes mostly AP courses, and under the district’s system those courses earn more points than regular classes. But for three years of soccer, she earned no points at all.

North East adopted its rank point system in 2003 because district officials said under the GPA-based system, students could make it to the top of their class simply by doing well in basic courses. They wanted the top-ranked students to be those who were most prepared for college, so they devised a system intended to encourage students to challenge themselves.

I’m astounded at this incredibly bizarre system. Apparently, the district thought it was better for students to accumulate points for the various classes rather than do a weighted average for gpa. I can see where they might go down this path. Theoretically, a senior could just take one AP class and no other classes and have a higher weighted gpa than someone who took six AP classes as a senior. But by giving absolutely no points for certain classes, the student who takes PE, Art, and Theater Arts (I’m just guessing at what might be no point classes here) is no better off point wise than the student who didn’t take any classes. Who came up with that system?

Did anyone stop to think which system, a weighted GPA system or an accumulated point system had more “non-deserving” students in the top ten percent? Given the importance of class rank, would it have been that difficult for the district to apply the various systems to past classes to see who it would sort out?

Apparently, it was so obvious to some decision makers that a weighted gpa would be more unfair than a point system that there was no question of which way to go. I just wonder how many other school districts in Texas thought it was obvious to use such system?

Technorati Tags: Class rankings, calculating class rank, Texas, gpa

Spring high school football camps have started here in Texas. As far as I can tell, if you expect to play in the fall, you better be at the camps in the spring. They even “ask” promising eighth graders to join the spring camps so that they will have a head start on the fall.

So do you think that the advanced placement teachers have a spring camp for those planning on taking ap classes in the fall? I know band is pretty involved, do they have spring practices for the football marching season? How about the debate team?

My contact with high school athletics is only tangential in that I see it effecting everything else in the community that has to do with sports. Do high school athletics truly develop the athletic potential of students? No. What they do is generate businesses for various private athletic training programs. You want your daughter to make the volleyball team, better have her do some strength training at one of these private businesses. Your son wants to play baseball? Better get him some hitting lessons because everyone else who wants to make the team does.

High school athletics is in no way a level playing field with everyone having a shot at the team. How can it be when not only does it cost money to play on the team, it costs money to prepare to even have the chance to play on the team?

Nor is this about having “well rounded” student-athletes. How many 5a football players are involved in any other extracurricular activities? How does demanding total time commitment to one activity better prepare our students? Ultimately, high school athletics is about exclusivity and it’s affects reach far beyond the school walls.

MySA.com: Metro | State:

The classification system that long has arranged Texas high school football programs by enrollment size for the purpose of competitive parity may be on the verge of its most radical alteration ever.

University Interscholastic League athletic director Dr. Charles Breithaupt said his organization’s legislative council will be presented in June with a formal proposal that would carve all UIL classifications into two divisions for football competition only.

The proposal, Breithaupt said, would achieve an even higher degree of competitive balance by grouping more school of similar size together.

Frontpage, above the fold news for the San Antonio Express News.

High School Students Upset Over Holocaust Assignment | WOAI.COM: San Antonio News:

Students and teachers said the students tagged as Jews were forced to stand against the wall as those portraying Germans passed by in the hallway. The Jewish students were also the last to eat lunch and had to pick up everyone’s garbage, the station reported.Some students said the exercise got out of hand when the German students spat on or hit the Jewish students. “They would spit on them.

They would push them down the stairs. They would be really rude,” student Tiffany Zimmerman said. “I think it was too rough and over the edge.”

Aune said this was the fifth year the school has run the Holocaust exercise. He said he had not received any reports of students spitting, pushing or tripping one another.

“I think that some of the kids were kind of harsh, but it taught us a little bit about how it was back then,” student Trevor Smith said.

I think that this exercise was more revealing than most realize. The lesson isn’t about how Jewish students were treated, the real lesson is how easy it is for people to start treating people badly on the slightest premise. You wonder how the Holocaust happened, look at how easy it was for students to start spitting on others given the excuse.