Comments on: Secretary Spellings, do you want your children "left behind"?

By: President Bush forming conference on school violence - Homeland Stupidity

President Bush forming conference on school violence - Homeland Stupidity — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 09:01:03 +0000

[...] Declining test scores brought us No Child Left Behind. Successes of international institutions of higher education have brought us the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. I can only imagine what this conference will bring. Comments RSS – Trackback URI [...]

By: Dana

Dana — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:32:18 +0000

Hey, we have Even Start now, too. The only way to give kids an “even start” is to start them off at six weeks in the public school.

To be fair, this program actually largely concentrates on the parents and parenting skills, but do you want the state teaching how to parent?

By: Q

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:49:05 +0000

Again i ask, what ever happened to giving our children a “HEAD START”? wasn’t that the theme just a minute ago? now we’re worrying about them being “LEFT BEHIND”? something not quite right about that…are we loosing ground?

By: Dana

Dana — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:46:39 +0000

The only problem I see in that is that theory is that a teacher cannot give an “A” to a student who does not do well on the test. I had to explain discrepancies between class grades and performance on the first grade benchmark.

I think the problem is that parents have long seen problems in public schools, but rather than take responsibility through increased involvement with their children, teachers and school board members, they took the easy way. They “demanded” the state do something about it.

By: J. Bruno

J. Bruno — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:38:17 +0000

As a rule, government entities are merely a tool for the self-aggrandizement of politicians. Therefore we can reason that public school reforms have little to do with educating children, and everything to do with creating the appearance of educated children. What the secretary secretly wishes is that all those teachers would simply give As to every child. Then she would shake the hands of all her admirers at parties as they lavish her with praise! What fun!

By: Nigel Watt

Nigel Watt — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:26:09 +0000

Dana Hanley: What district in Texas did you teach in? I skipped my senior year at Highland Park HS in Dallas (HPISD) partly because the state standards made it so I had nothing more to learn from one of the best high schools in the nation after three years. Now I’m at a private university (Cornell) and loving it – and now Secretary Spellings is trying to screw me up here, too.

By: Dana

Dana — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:51:17 +0000

I don’t think I can answer that exactly…but I taught in the Rio Grande Valley. Beautiful area with very unique challenges. I taught Pre-K and first grade before deciding I had enough of the career I had gone to college for. There was a bit of insanity, I thought, in aligning pre-K and first grade lesson objectives to TAAS tested items and starring them to show that we were teaching the critically important items that would be tested on TAAS.