News-Record.com

Doug,

As long as this school board is stuck on achieving diversity, rather than actually educating students, this is the result that we will get in our public schools. We are spending more than $1/2 billion per year here in Guilford, and we aren't getting much for our money. When will parents and taxpayers stand up and demand better for their children?

Doug,

Great column. I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph. Problem is then we couldn't "teach" the practice test.

Many of our high school graduates are in for a big surprise when the graduate. See today's Chalkboard strand. It looks like many have come to similar conclusions.

Thanks, Alice. I just took a look at the Chalkboard strand, I think the article Buchmtn asks about may have been my blog post of last Nov. 3: "Guilford County students and UNC performance."

It began: "How well are Guilford County students prepared for college?

"There are several measures you can use, including grades, SAT scores, performance on state end-of-course tests, college acceptance rates and scholarship offers.

"The University of North Carolina puts out what I consider to be a very valuable measure -- and one you don't see very often.

"It shows how well students do in their freshman year at UNC institutions.

"Looking at this indicator, the answer for Guilford County students is, unfortunately, below average ..."

I'll try to update that information sometime this summer.

This is a statewide problem, but of course we have to be worried that many of our high school graduates are not well prepared for work or higher education.

Doug,
You and your newspaper must take part of the blame for this.
You have the responsibility to question and pressurize the school board and the current superintendent with the ultimate goal of educating our children.
Instead you praise and applaud this failure. You glorify expensive early colleges and their success while never criticizing this "system" for the thousands of children it fails each year with basically no improvement for the past five years.

News and Record, you have a responsibility to the community to take a lead role in this problem. The time has long gone. Several generations have already failed. We can’t afford anymore.

Doug,

Can you find the article and put the link on the Chalkboard strand? Thank you.

We would like to start seeing more concrete educational statistics as compared to the rest of the state, and particularly the country. Hopefully, N & R will start doing more research type reporting.

Time: You're right. We can accept our share of the blame.

There's plenty to go around. We need a fuller discussion in Guilford County of what's needed to make our school system not just a little better, but so much better that it becomes far and away the best in North Carolina -- because that's what it will have to be in order to provide even an adequate education for most of the children enrolled.

A follow-up investigation might be to track the outcomes on these tests and then have a really good statistician figure out where NC students rank in achievement vs. other states. I don't think the AYPs really reveal this as they stand alone.

My suspicion is the states with higher percentage of FRL students (if they are counted in test results, as we have been learning may not be the case) have lower achievement scores.

This is not because the poor are less natively intelligent; but lower scores often seem to dog children with less-involved parents (who may not get to know teachers and may feel overwhelmed by working multiple jobs, etc, to be able to support the kids academically, e.g., by helping to bridge the gap with getting homework in), and who live in less-intellectually active homes (the less books IN a home, the less well students seem to do in reading...even if parents aren't avid readers themselves, just OWNING books sends a message of worth...weird, I know, but the book Freakonomics presents compelling data).

An interesting article on the need for federal testing in North Carolina and how the education oligarchy manipulates testing results and tests, themselves, to make the state look better.

http://www.jwpcivitasinstitute.org/keylinks/federaltesting.html

Ok Doug,

what do we do?

I hope the N&R can take the lead here.

Today we read the Governor threatens to restructure even more than Judge Manning. Dr. Grier (what is his PhD in?) comes out with the new writing scores. The stats are minimally improved. talk about getting the numbers over the 60% mark in some cases.

We are indeed a county and a nation of NASCAR. Going in circles.

Time for some real genius in our leaders, instead of the banal mediocrities. How about Dr. Svi Shapiro of UNCG? Get him in there and you'll see some real education, not just bean-counters!

New approaches are needed, but there are tried-and-true measures everyone knows would work:

Smaller class sizes. Give struggling students the best teachers. Employ tutors for one-on-one work. Put kids in more demanding classes. Set higher standards for passing each grade. Kids who don't pass meaningful achievement tests get serious remediation in small classes, then retake the tests. Maintain strict classroom discipline. Instill lines of accountability. Pay teachers and administrators for results.

Doug,

you have it!

When I did my teaching degree the most important word I heard was "reinforcement"

Back to basics please !!!!!!!!!!!