This subject is near and dear to my heart. Government needs to get OUT of the education business. They do it poorly and frankly our kids are suffering. The experiment needs to come to a hault. It seem there are more and more progams every year and every year the kids come out that much more less educated. Besides, the government schools have become about the unions and not about the kids. My God, look at those poor kids who are the victims of the government education in the failing districts starting with the SLPS.

Just like buildings that can no longer be saved, government edcuation needs to be torn down and a new system started. Please make a new system private where people have choices! If we can have choices in where we shop, where we eat, where we live, then at least let us have choices on where our kids can go to school.

You have choices already, superdave. You can send them to a public school, a church-run school, a private school, or you can homeschool them yourself. That’s four choices. Only one is state run How many choices do you want?

The major problem with standardized tests (any school tests, actually) is they never do BEFORE tests.

Real life example: I was 25 years out of high school when I enrolled for Calculus 1 at Meramec Community College. My high school didn’t even offer calculus for anyone back then. Though I had been through the required college math sequence, I knew negative zip about calculus. At the end of the semester where I never missed a class and groveled over homework almost every night, I had a numeric test average of 68%– enough to buy me a D+. In my class were several young people, one fresh from high school Calculus II. I don’t know his numeric average, but he got an A in the class, and his attendance was much worse than mine.

By the score, he knew more calculus than I did. Just by his comments, he probably learned very little: he was always commenting that the class was ‘just a review’. However I went from 0% to 68%, and was the one seen as deficient, though it was patently obvious to me that I had done a whole lot more learning than my fellow student.

How could this outcome be used to assess the class, or the school? It couldn’t. It took a heap of teaching to get an old dog like me from 0% to 68%. That young whippersnapper probably didn’t learn a thing, and therefore teaching “failed” him.

There are other subjects I know cold; wake me at 3 a.m. and I can give you facts and figures, write you a coherent essay on any topic you want in 15 minutes. At one time, maybe the one-room school, where a cohort of the same kids moved through the same instruction like a rat through a rattlesnake maybe standardized tests mean something.

I pay no attention to standardized (or other tests) as a way to assess the instructors or the school or the intelligence of the students. All they can say is where the class average is; and the state, like Garrison Keillor, is interested only in a land where everyone is above average.

P.S. How to hold the schools accountable? It’s not on a year turnaround, but here’s a thought: Academic records are supposed to be held in perpetuity, no?
That means, somewhere is a record of my kindergarten report card, my grade school and junior high grades and my high school GPA and class rank.

Pick 3 years of records: say, a person’s 4th grade, 8th grade and 12th grade classes. The year students in that grade turn 25 years old, have everyone living “report in” with a brief demographic snapshot. What are they doing? Are they employed? Do they have a college degree? Are they famous for some accomplishment? Are they in jail? You won’t track down everyone, but you probably can get a majority to respond, and do a statistical analysis of where they fall as ’successes’ as human beings. You might start out by doing a ‘cascade’ of people from 25 to 37 to give you 12 years of records, then add a year of records every year, dropping off those at the higher age levels until after 12 years you have 12 sets of people all compared at age 25.

Then compare schools, based on what their students have made of themselves.
Be generous; a successful homemaker with kids has as much or more value than an auto mechanic who has an arrest record.

After all, the real world is the only measure of success which means anything.

I truly am sadden by these results. As a hard working teacher (12 years going strong), I feel my staff and I worked our tails off to help our students achieve. Hearing that districts (NONE) in St. Louis oounty or St. Charles County met AYP…well that to me is complete rubbish. I cannot believe that of all the schools, none of them met it…seems a overhaul is needed quick! Teresa your plan sounds great, but you know government wants immediate response and BLAME for that matter.

I’m a cartographer from a small town in Vermont, here for professional and personal reasons, and I have just pulled my two youngest kids out of their elementary school in Florissant because of the utter incompetance and outright bad behavior of the principal, the school board and especially the school district administration. We will be homeschooling these children. It wasn’t the herding of the “minority” kids into several sets of classrooms, it wasn’t the principal’s contention that “boys are slower than girls” or that one notable Hispanic parent “just didn’t like white people” when she protested her son’s treatment. No, for me, it was the school uniforms. They stuffed the ballot box over a three month vote. They allowed one vote per “family” regardless of the fact that school board policy said “51 percent of parents” should be polled. They sought to relieve me of my Constitutionally protected right to direct the moral and religious upbringing of my children. I did not allow them to do this.
I come from a state where every public school is funded exactly the same as every other public school. I come from a place where tax money is collected by the town that WE live in, and when WE are done with it, WE decide how much to send up to the Capitol. My wife and I find the educational system in St. Louis to be a haphazardly funded, heavy-at-the-top travesty more concerned with following the trend of privatization and corporatization than actually improving the schools. And yes, although it would be a horrifying thought back home, maybe the whole thing here just needs a good flushing in the form of tax vouchers. Maybe the only way to stop the profiteers lording over suburban communities is to take the money out of it. And it also seems to me that in attempting to meet the criteria of a standardized test a curriculum must require standardized teaching. Can we believe that this something we would ever want for our kids?
Not in my household. We’re raising little Americans here.
The public educational system in Missouri is trash.
Time to take it to the curb.

First, what do you call a standardized test. It’s certainly not the tests given In Illinois or Missouri. The Iowa tests, and Cal Tests are the nearenst to being standarized. They are given in over 20 states.

The fallacy in any testting is that you can compare what students learn students learn this year with what students learned last year. That cannot be done.

Anchorage uses the Iowa test. The Superintendent of schools announced that reading had improved in Anchorge schools. I went in his office, and it took me over two hours to explain how percentiles work. He make a new press release.

All a test can do is compare individual students, and groups of students on a given test in a given year. NOTHING ELSE.

Now, without giving a test, I can rank the schools on what the tests will show before the tests are given, if you provide me with average family income within each district. (Can that be changed? of Course, it’s early intervention with at risk stuedents) that’ another subjcct.

Now: I agree with SuperDave that “public education should “privatized”.

Pending that being done, Kurt. Kurt, you are on the right track, go to the school, meet your student’s principal, teaches, coaches, etc. Then ask someon to show you the Men’s Rom”. Go inside and look in a mirror. Sir, you are looking at the person who is responsible for your childrens education.

Schools are only l tool in the box that contains many other tools to help you educate you children.

Hmmmm, Kurt, I will pick on you today. I haven’t picked on you for at least two weeks.

Do you feel comfortable sending your children to a public school that has a “school year” based on cotton farming in Virgina 200 YEARS AGO? If you grow cotton in the back yard, have taught your kids how to card cotton and use the spinning wheel to weave it? If so, you are an admirable parent.LOL.

Now, Teresa, you made some valid points about what “success” should be used in determining whether a school is successful. What is ’successful’ in your opinion?

So Teresa, do you really think we have a choice? Do those kids in the SLPS have a choice? I lived on a street where next door neighbors had to send their kids to different schools because their houses were on different sewer lines. What choice is that? Is it right that my hard earned tax dollars are funding these failure schools and I have to pay above and beyond if I decide to send my kid to a private school or home school? By the way, we home school and let me tell you that my daughter is light years ahead of the kids her age. I feel sorry for so many kids who are forced to attend the public school that they are assigned to attend. Not much choice there if you can’t afford it, is there?

Please tell me why we continue to fund failure? Please tell me why people think that government should be in the business of education. What does government do well? Even though I am not a fan of public money going towards education I can live with that. However, when the results are so horrible I cannot live with that! What I find fascinating as a home school parent is that we must prove to the state that we are doing our job. I am still waiting for the state to start doing their job.

There are many hard working teachers out there and I commend them. Unfortunately there are many people out there who have given the decisions to educated their children to politicians. What a horrible loss of freedom. It seems the minority is in charge of education. We are teaching our children to testing. We are teaching our children some of the most useless information that means nothing to them when they become adults. When I got out of school I was so il-prepared for real life. I did know the capitals of the 50 states though. What the heck does that get me?

The whole curriculum of eduction needs to be changed. Are we teaching our kids to win trivia contests or educate them for life? We are teaching kids to be robots. That’s disgusting! Most teachers are not allowed to be teachers. Many teachers shouldnt be near a classroom or around our kids to begin with. We have teachers teaching Global Warming as fact when it’s only theory. I could go on and on. This is not what education should be. I will say that Karl Marx is smiling from ear to ear today. Now that’s scary!

Wow! Only slightly off the subject, johnh asked a terrific question: how do we define “success?” Because we can’t measure success if we don’t even know what we mean by the term. Using Teresa’s idea of doing periodic checks to see how people are faring in life and comparing that to those persons’ school grades kind of illustrates johnh’s point, I think. There are folks that did poorly in school only to build an empire later in life. Then there are people like me…high scores all around, top 1%, and so on. I was the Dream Student. Now, I’m not living in a shack and I’ve never been in prison, but I never achieved what my high school counselors would have called “potential.” Why? Possibly because I got burned out while I was still in school. The point is that I didn’t feel like knocking myself out working 80 hour weeks and having no life of my own. So I settled for a lower tier job. Does this mean that there is no correlation between school grades and real life? Or does it just show that grades are an indicator of what “might be?” I would define success as someone who has found their place in life, is reasonably happy, and has a positive rather than a negative influence on society. I wouldn’t measure it by gross income or job title or social contacts.

More on the subject…public schools were set up to be sure that everyone had a chance at education. Prior to the concept of public schools, most people never got a chance to learn to read and write unless it was taught in the home. On the other hand, rich folks always had options. Sometimes I wonder if that idea has gotten lost in the shuffle….

Blow bugler, blow!