Posted on 06/09/2003 4:52:58 AM PDT by Hobsonphile
2 + 2 = ?
On Number 2 Pencil, Kim Swygert rounds up the controversies over graduation and promotion exams. Basically, everyone wants to blame the test instead of blaming the school for not teaching algebra or the student for not learning. Or they just blame racism:
“I call it a testocracy,” said Ron Walters, the director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. He said that the tests used for high school graduation in Florida are culturally biased, as are most tests across the country now being used to measure the performance of schools, teachers and pupils.
“The sum total of these tests is that they are a strong reflection of the white Anglo-American-European experience in American culture,” and unfair to Hispanic and black test-takers, Walters said.
Most Florida students eventually pass the reading and writing part of the state's graduation exam; they falter on the math. I wonder what part of math reflects Anglo-American experience. Perhaps most of the numbers are white, and blacks only get 13 and 17, while Hispanics get 23 and 29. What color is a triangle? What does the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equal in the ghetto, the barrio and the 'burbs? And how come Asian-Americans are capable of learning algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus, despite their non-Anglo culture?
Newspapers are running stories about B students who can't get a 60 percent on a multiple-choice math test in multiple tries. I'd love to know what grades these students got in math. From the Washington Post:
Tyler Douglass, 18, a senior at Cimmaron-Memorial High School in Las Vegas, has been a solid student: He has a B average, has taken a smattering of honors classes and is qualified for Nevada's Millennium Scholarship, which would award him as much as $10,000 in college scholarships over four years.
But like many students in Las Vegas, he has not passed the state's math exam.
His mother says it’s a “flawed exam” because students weren’t taught all the material on the test. No, it's a flawed system, Mom. If your college-bound son wasn't taught algebra and geometry in high school, what was he taught? Math Appreciation?
California students also are struggling with the math section of the graduation exam. This site links to sample questions, and points out that most of the questions on the math exam cover knowledge that's supposed to be taught in seventh grade. It's possible to pass with the minimal 55 percent score without answering any algebra questions.
I did the first 25 questions in my head and got all of them right; only the ones with exponents required more than a few seconds. It's been 30 years since my last math class, but the kids I tutor always seem to need help with algebra, so I've had some refresher training.
No Siphon
Texas spends $7,300 to educate the average public school student. If the state spends $5,000 on students educated in public charter schools, is that siphoning money? Francis X. Clines, writing in the New York Times, thinks so. He wants more oversight of “how the money is spent.”
The whole point of charter schools is to oversee the results: Are students learning? Charters that fail to offer parents a better alternative will lose students and shut down. Mismanaged schools can be closed. Try closing a mismanaged, educationally bankrupt public school run by a school district. It can't be done. But Clines complains that 25 of 200 charters have gone under. He doesn't get it.
In National Review, Chester Finn dismembers Clines' facts and analysis, but commends the Times for its flair for fiction writing.
Choking Charters With Red Tape
In exchange for freedom from regulation, charter schools are judged by results. That's the theory. In California, charter school operators struggle to comply with nearly as many regulations as conventional public schools. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Although the first dozen charter-school applications approved a decade ago averaged fewer than 20 pages, nowadays they tend to run to more than 100.
Meeting new requirements costs money. Applications alone often require expensive advice from lawyers, accountants and other professionals.
. . . Funding formulas and regulations favor charters that are . . . housed in traditional school buildings, as opposed to homes and churches; offer college preparatory curriculums, as opposed to job training; or locate in poor neighborhoods.
Cato's David Salisbury warns about creeping regulation of private schools that accept vouchers.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Oh, just shut the heck up! Shut your pie-hole, toast-hole, cake-hole, shut every one of your holes!!!
That's better...
Who founded this culture anyway?
Of course its "not fair" to hispanics and black test takers..oh and BTW just how much hispanic or black genetic material do you need to be qualified as some one to who this test is unfair, anyway? 10% 50% 80%?
Is any test fair?...I dont believe any test is fair...tests are designed to weed certain people out..not be fair...to separate the wheat from the chaff...so to speak
Tests are also not fair to slower kids or to those who are unwilling to DO THE WORK necessary to doing well on tests...
The tests simply separate the wheat from the chaff....
Psst: Spain is a part of Europe. This may be part of your problem. Blacks have been in this country for 400 years as you folks are fond of pointing out. You should have absorbed some cultural clues in that time.
Stop making excuses for the willful ignorance of your people: the culture that derides learning as a valuable thing.
I call it "bullocracy"
Will this stuff happen in my lifetime? I doubt it.
Alfonso sells two dime bags and an ounce of blow for a half pound of grass and two hits of crank plus $20. How many dime bags would Alfonso have to sell to get $120?
That question is racist, mbynack. The white grammar structure discriminates against minorities who speak "urban dialects." I don't see a single apostrophe in the whole thing. </sarcasm>
Maybe you are just a lazy minority that needs someone else to do the work for you.</sarcasm>
Oh, just shut the heck up! Shut your pie-hole, toast-hole, cake-hole, shut every one of your holes!!! That's better...
Maybe he's right. Maybe white Anglo-America-Europeans (and Asians for some reason) are steeped in a culture of 2+2=4 while Hispanics and blacks are steeped in something else? Maybe he could finish the thought...
Don't be so sure! The ridiculous stuff that your post adresses happened during your lifetime! Maybe it can be "devolved"[thats just gotta be a real word...sounds too pc and like a libbull word not to be real!]in your lifetime too!
The how come Asians consistently outscore whites? Frauds like Walters have never come up with a shred of evidence backing up their claims. They rely instead on the help of white Uncle Toms and the silence of other whites.
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