I can remember when we were kids and how motivated we would be after getting a sideshow about needing a 9% higher pass rate on a standardized test.
If everyone does really well, boys and girls, we might even be able to revisit our state funding per capita formula and recalculate which BRACKET WE'RE IN! WHOOOO!
Now that Hawaii is in high school, we are running up against the state attendance policy, which is that you lose credit for any semester with 8 or more absences, excused or unexcused. (There's a waiver for actual hospitalizations, but just being sick doesn't count.)
The problem is that with block scheduling, that means missing only 4 MWF days or 4 T/Th days. The next problem is that with my schedule, any time Hawaii needs a doctor's appointment, I try to make it for first thing in the morning on MWF. So basically, it's extremely easy to run through your absences, what with an orthodontist appointment or a dermatologist, plus actually getting sick.
(There is an attendance-recovery thing you can do once you lose credit.) But kids lose credit all the time because it's so extremely easy to do. (You definitely can't take, say, a mental health day for being overly stressed out, the way you might do in your actual life.)
The state of Texas micro-manages such things because of state's rights, see? NCLB.
Oh, geez. This really is the worst in multiple ways.
I wonder if they started discipline for the administrator responsible because of press attention, or if there's no local press and it was just big in emails and Facebook and the press picked it up later.
5 could use a PowerPoint deck. I'm not following.
Looks like mc got there first, but I find it hilarious that there's a glaring typo in the slide.
There was supposed to be two ( 2) spaces after admin in that last comment.
Some additional highlights from the Guardian article.
A subsequent slide added that students will be placed in a competition with each other to improve their test scores and could receive a meal from McDonald's as a prize, according to the presentation.
Parents also said their children were reportedly told that if they did not do well in school they would end up dead or in jail.
In this state, the schools aren't allowed to imprison or execute.
When my kid was in high school, the policy was that students who had perfect attendance could skip the final exams each semester. Since my kid had therapy once a week, which we could almost NEVER schedule after school (that is, from 4:00 to 5:00, since he didn't get out of school until 3:30), you can imagine how he felt about that policy.
Penalize your students for seeking needed therapy! What could go wrong?
heebie: Gotta bet this policy has nothing to do with learning, and everything to do with getting that sweet, sweet state per-student funding.
Parents also said their children were reportedly told that if they did not do well in school they would end up dead or in jail.
What a show, I should do a rewatch.
Gotta bet this policy has nothing to do with learning, and everything to do with getting that sweet, sweet state per-student funding.
Except it's a state attendance policy! The district can't control it.
Never forget that schools of education are the root of most evil--schools of dentistry cover what's left--including secondary school administrators, who are generally worse than Hitler.
How many Hitlers have school administrators killed? Probably a few?
Honestly this sounds like my administration's way of motivating faculty.
And my guess is that some clown had slides like this for an internal presentation and decided clownishly that leadership means making it everyone's problem.
When my kid was in high school, the policy was that students who had perfect attendance could skip the final exams each semester.
So, some exams are necessary because they're externally imposed measures of skill and knowledge that you need to get some sort of qualification, or to proceed to a more advanced stage. And others could be argued to be necessary because the school itself needs to measure how the students are doing - so you can identify students who are struggling, and/or subjects which are not being well taught.
But this policy makes it very clear that final exams are neither of these. They're just pointless cruelty.
No, they're incentivising perfect school attendance. They're cruelty in the service of cruelty.
They probably don't realise it, though. If you asked them "final exams are purely a punishment for absence from school and have no pedagogic value, yes/no" they'd say "no" but that is none the less how they are acting.
One wonders at this point if these teachers actually believe they are teaching the kids anything worthwhile at all, or if they think of themselves simply as daycare workers with a sideline in helping kids get credentials.
I think it's just late capitalist Stakhanovitism. The good worker shows up every day regardless of how they feel, so the students should be trained to show up every day regardless of how they feel.
Never forget that schools of education are the root of most evil
LBJ went to one, as I was reminded the last time I used the phrase as an insult (referring IIRC to Tyler Cowen as "a half-crazed shaman locked in a broom cupboard at an obscure colonial teacher training college").
That's not exactly right. A teacher training college (my dad always called them "normal schools") like aren't a school of education. They were just community colleges to train teachers who couldn't get to an actual school of education.
They don't exist anymore because they became universities, Texas State in the case of Johnson's alma mater.
30: So, what's the difference? All of my teachers went through what you're calling teacher-training colleges and most of them were solid teachers. The adminstrators were the same, they'd just moved up the ranks.
The people who say "schools of education are the root of most evil" are complaining about elites in educational institutions (mostly the prestigious ones) destroying America with theories about pedagogy and whatnot. They kind of people who say that didn't complain when the teachers were from teacher-training colleges. Cowen is a well-educated asshole making fun of Johnson because Johnson couldn't get in to a real university.
34.last: sorry, I was unclear. I was making fun of Cowen (and doing so in a way that inadvertently insulted Johson). Cowen wasn't making fun of Johnson. Cowen and I are both assholes, and I at least am well-educated. Cowen, I believe, has some sort of diploma from an institution which does a lot of valuable work among his people.
33: Normal schools (the standard term back in the day, not limited to Moby's dad) were general-purpose colleges that taught a variety of subjects to students who were expected but not necessarily obligated to become teachers afterward. They've mostly evolved into regional state universities.
Schools of education in the modern sense are a more recent development that started as graduate-level professional schools for existing teachers to further develop their skills and/or move into educational administration, though I believe they've now started to move into undergraduate education in some cases. Teacher's College at Columbia may have been the original model but I'm unsure of the exact history. The content of what they teach is all about theory and practice of education rather than substantive topics that are helpful for rank-and-file teachers to know, so they're mostly influential on educational administrators rather than teachers per se.
Teo explains things better than me. Thanks.
My dad's point was that I shouldn't apply to any school that started as a normal school.
George Mason is neither type of school, btw, so I'm not sure where ajay's crack at Cowen actually came from.
Cowen sucks. Libertarians should be insulted regularly.
No need to also insult teachers or LBJ, though.
My grandma was always mad at LBJ for a variety of reasons.
They have a bit of reputation for being the craziest people on campus. There's a reason that this story came from a university where the president was from the ed school:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html
38: I was insulting GMU by calling it a "teacher training college" as though this was the worst sort of university it was possible to be. This was, I admit, unkind and unfair to teacher training colleges. But, vide supra, I'm a well-educated asshole.
GMU is actually a significantly worse (and probably unique!) type of college, sort of a training school/refuge for libertarian trolls.
GMU is the non-joke version of University of Austin.
Cowen also attended the Duke of the North.
45: It's law school is the Antonin School of Internet Trolling Law.
GMU is one of those schools where some departments are probably normal and good and some are the literal worst. Some really good technology for the humanities (Zotero*, Omeka, etc.) has been centered there.
*As a citation manager, Zotero isn't just for humanities, but it started in a humanities focused group.
My doctor had me on Zotero and Omeka for awhile, but the one didn't do any good, and the other was just as effective in generic form.
Speaking of bizarre college things...
"the student newspaper The Nicholls Worth"
Months after she refused to meet up and filed the police report, Tokosh texted a picture of himself wearing white face paint to her cellphone. It arrived at midnight and contained no message, although writing on his shirt read: "I'm not a failure."
This judgment was premature, it turned out.
Paying undergraduates to let you paint their faces and not telling them you're a graduate student when you do so is definitely an innominate crime. You can tell it's wrong, but it's difficult to say exactly why. (Pursuing the undergraduates and harassing them when they say no is different. That's harassment.)