I want to know what percentage of hispanic to white are found in the TUSD district. Is it possible to have less than 70%, even 50%? We know bussing doesn't work, so what is the solution? This is a hispanic district. What do we expect? When I lived in Detroit, it was black, so what? Can we move on and just teach neighborhood schools again?
What happened to the money AZ got from Feds for Special Education? I think AZ was one of eight states to receive this special funding for special education professional development and support . I haven't heard anything since. Can you write an article about that?
More, more, more schools of choice, but given a family of three, each unique needing a different charter, parents would have to quit their jobs to get everyone where they need to be. Am I the only family with this problem? What happened to the community school, where kids knew their neighbors?
The big difference, boys, is that for-profit Charter schools have NO elected boards. That means they are appointed. Given, that they are appointed, parents, students, nor teachers have any say in how it is run. That means if your kid has a bad day, they can kick him out for anything.
As long as we have public schools, we can still vote on who runs the school. (...except if you are TUSD, the exception to the rule, or other boards bought out by for-profit businessmen who paid for election campaigns.) Maybe we ought to rally around our public services before they go away. WAKE UP! This has been done already in other cities like New Orleans, Detroit, and etc. and the results are NOT good. You don't hear about the mass lay offs and the lawsuits underway.
This is the next generation, who will put your ass in the grave early because they are ignorant of their history, and don't know how to read because YOU didn't fund it, but made money off the system, that in truth, wasn't really that bad. (unless you believe all the propaganda).
Parents can opt their child out of testing by withdrawing their child from the school on the days of testing, and then re-enrolling their child back into the school after those days of testing are over without risk of the child being forced to do make-ups upon return or having to keep them out of school for the 12 days of the testing window, which in most cases is a forced drop from the school anyways In this way, schools will not be punished through attendance or by poor scores, since student's scores, who transfer or move during a school year, do not count anyways. (Those unaware students take the test even though their scores are not valid. What a shame!) In this way the pressure is off the school and the students. Think about how easy it is to stop testing if everyone quits school for 3 days and then registers again after the break. No test scores, no data.
"Today’s education-reform consensus is a reflection of the ideology and outlook of the business people and philanthropists who fund the movement and who bring to it the same top-down, blame-the-rank-and-file mindset of the auto executives of the late 1970s and 1980s. Today’s quick-fix authoritarian strategies—from testing regimes to the failed $1 billion iPad gamble in Los Angeles—mirror the war footing of Detroit when GM’s CEO Roger Smith wasted billions of dollars on robotics as a way to solve the “people problem” in Detroit.
Then as now, the more authorities seek to blame rank-and-file employees, the worse things get. Fear and loathing led, in Detroit, to look-alike cars, poor quality, lost market share. In schools it has resulted in endless testing and test-prep, a narrowing of curriculum, and, no doubt, a deterioration in meaningful education—the kind that is difficult to test.
Then as now, the cognoscenti have sought to quantify all outcomes by looking at a narrowly defined bottom line. For automakers this meant focusing on short-term profits—even if that meant eroding quality and, eventually, market-share. In schools, they look at an ever growing array of test scores—most recently in New York State kids were subjected to at least three different standardized tests per year (one State test and two city tests designed for the sole purpose of evaluating teachers.) One problem is that because of budget constraints, the more you test, the lower the quality of the tests and the less meaningful they become. And given that the tests are cloaked in secrecy, they are stripped of their only pedagogical purpose—the ability to help teachers analyze what their kids know so they can improve." (Quote from: Lessons for Education Reformers from W. Edwards Deming, America’s Leading Management Thinker. Posted on November 15, 2014)
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As long as we have public schools, we can still vote on who runs the school. (...except if you are TUSD, the exception to the rule, or other boards bought out by for-profit businessmen who paid for election campaigns.) Maybe we ought to rally around our public services before they go away. WAKE UP! This has been done already in other cities like New Orleans, Detroit, and etc. and the results are NOT good. You don't hear about the mass lay offs and the lawsuits underway.
This is the next generation, who will put your ass in the grave early because they are ignorant of their history, and don't know how to read because YOU didn't fund it, but made money off the system, that in truth, wasn't really that bad. (unless you believe all the propaganda).
Then as now, the more authorities seek to blame rank-and-file employees, the worse things get. Fear and loathing led, in Detroit, to look-alike cars, poor quality, lost market share. In schools it has resulted in endless testing and test-prep, a narrowing of curriculum, and, no doubt, a deterioration in meaningful education—the kind that is difficult to test.
Then as now, the cognoscenti have sought to quantify all outcomes by looking at a narrowly defined bottom line. For automakers this meant focusing on short-term profits—even if that meant eroding quality and, eventually, market-share. In schools, they look at an ever growing array of test scores—most recently in New York State kids were subjected to at least three different standardized tests per year (one State test and two city tests designed for the sole purpose of evaluating teachers.) One problem is that because of budget constraints, the more you test, the lower the quality of the tests and the less meaningful they become. And given that the tests are cloaked in secrecy, they are stripped of their only pedagogical purpose—the ability to help teachers analyze what their kids know so they can improve." (Quote from: Lessons for Education Reformers from W. Edwards Deming, America’s Leading Management Thinker. Posted on November 15, 2014)