Originally Posted by master of none
Originally Posted by Mom2Two
Originally Posted by Val
It's a game. Student learning is incidental to winning the high-stakes testing rounds, and lack of learning is irrelevant unless it directly affects scores on high-stakes tests.

IMO, most of the US K-12 education system should be pillaged of anything of value in it, with the rest being burned to the ground and buried under a two-foot layer of salt.

It is a game. It is all about the scores and how you can play with the numbers to make it all look good.


Um, in one district--might even be yours--they bus kids to lower performing schools to take AP tests to improve the ratings for the lower performing school. In another district, they put GT programs into the lowest performing schools to hide the fact that there are lower performing kids who are not getting what they need. A game indeed.

This happens all over our district. Kids are a commodity to be shuffled around so that "failing" schools aren't taken over or shut down by the government. It's not just bussing gifted kids to bad schools (which definitely happens). In one twist in our district, there is a school in a bad neighborhood already containing a full time gifted program, and this school was performing enough above "failing" level that they could ship in a bunch of the worst kids from a "failing" school in a different bad neighborhood to try to even the schools out and keep them both above "failing" level. Upon mixing the kids from two different bad neighborhoods, gang warfare ensued.

Our district has full time gifted programs. (They also have busywork sweatshops where the low performers are kept out, but no gifted programs, because the gifted programs are all in the ghetto.)

For some reasons we're going to stick with homeschooling. whistle