Posted by Rick Raznikov, a member of the Sir Francis Drake High community, on Aug 25, 2009 at 5:30 pm The editor's note is worse than the original article. It shows that you not only don't understand what's been going on in education, you don't understand how to evaluate data relating to cost.
Steiger is correct, and you'd know that if you examined what services are covered in the 'dollar-per-pupil' math; these are different districts, obviously, with different ethnic and economic characteristics.
You also show ignorance about standarized testing. Recently, there have been articles in other publications concerning how shocked and disappointed state educrats are over the continued wide disparities among and between races in test results.
Guess what? The testing lunacy has nothing to do with learning. It exists as a political "fix" for pols who don't want to commit genuine resources to schools. It's a phony way to 'measure' 'success' which inherently cannot do so.
Do you know what a norm-referenced test is? Do you understand the flaw in using such a test? Have you considered the overall distortion to the system when testing drives curricula? Have you wondered about what students can learn and teachers teach when fully 12% of the school time is necessarily devoted to preparation and administration of these tests?
Real education has been sacrificed at the altar of expediency and the conflation of testing (and test results) with education and learning is costing our children dearly.
If you are going to print stories about what's going on in the schools, then do the research and use your head. Don't simply accept the underlying assumptions because when you do so you guarantee deriving bogus theories from them.
Oh, and by the way, add me to the list of readers who think your persistent stab at humor (a "wedgie" for the Sun) is not very amusing; the jokes are weak, and they often trivialize matters of importance.
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