The Journal Times had this link on their website this afternoon and I thought it was worth talking about here.




I “played” the game and found it to be fraught with left wing BS…as if there were only three choices in all of these circumstances!! Then when you choose the Best choice in some circumstances they say it is the worst.

This mentality is now being spread as fact and not the fictional tripe that it really is.

Then there is the one glaring issue that they did not talk about and which RUSD has perfected:

You are a weaselly superintendent and want to hold yet another referendum because you can't add any better than most of the 1st graders in your school district, when do you hold the referendum?

Fall Elections are the worst choice since there will be the most voters at the polls and many will be out for purely political reasons. You would be hard pressed to find many supporters of your $1 Billion referendum to give yourself a raise.

Spring Election time is a bad choice for holding a referendum. While those that vote in the spring are at a minimum they are usually the people that are the most well informed and least likely to give you money that you will just waste.

Summer is the Best and Only time to hold a referendum. Think about it, summer is when people are not thinking about elections. You will be lucky to get 10% of the registered voters to the poll. Most who will vote in the summer will know that there is an election because they are either teachers that don’t work the summer or parents that you can scare by saying things like “sports will be cut!”

Congrats! You can now give yourself a raise, give the teachers nothing, screw the taxpayers, and continue to fail the children and NCLB!!!

I believe that we can always do better but for some reason this 2nd grade teacher, who professes to teach “minority and high-poverty” students believes that it is best to ignore the basics for these students. (Washington Post Commentary: Classroom Caste System)

Mr. Keyes is obviously an opponent of NCLB since he believes that it has created a “caste-like system in which students' future prospects are likely to be similar to those of their parents” his reasoning seems simple: “Students in largely wealthy and white schools are learning to ask larger questions; students in poor and minority schools are only being taught to answer smaller ones.”

But Mr. Keyes’s argument is flawed. The reasoning that the schools differ is related to the “small questions” and who has the ability to answer them. The administration and the teachers in his school have failed the students that have been placed in their care by not teaching them the fundamentals. There is an old saying that we must learn to walk before we can run and Mr. Keyes would like his students to run marathons before they have learned to crawl.

If the administration is pushing the test-prep books and the students are still failing then it is time to stop teaching to the test but to teach to the students. Now this can’t be a new concept to these people, after all they did get their teaching certificates didn’t they?

NCLB is not perfect but it is not creating a gap…it is exposing the hidden secret that many teachers and administrators have wholly ignored until now. With the secret out in the light of day teachers will have to go back to teaching the basics to ALL students. They will have to hold their ground and hold back students that do not succeed. We should expect that our children can read and do math at a basic level, after all that is why we are sending them to school.

WEAC Study of Superintendents view of No Child Left Behind

• 80% of superintendents do not believe their districts will meet the AYP goal of all students scoring proficient or advanced by 2013

So it sounds to me like the superintendents;

a) think their teachers are so bad that they can’t teach students how to read or add

b) think the students are so bad that no teacher would ever be able to instruct them

c) think that a child should not be required to be able to read or do math

“School superintendents have been working under the burden of this law for five years now,” WASDA Executive Director Miles Turner said. “And what they now know is this is a plan in which failure was inevitable.”

I get it now…they didn’t like the law and therefore created the outcome that they expected.