Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Is current traditional schooling accepted cruelty?

Oh no, Mister Bill! Everyday Math!

Your reply gave me the vocabulary I needed to find information. Thanks.

This site notes that Open Court isn't very effective, but there aren't any citations.

This seems to be the paper you found. It has a lot of citations and presents details that don't support the advertised effectiveness of Open Court.

"Ultramarina- Lotteries are required to be held publicly. Did you go and observe? "

I don't think this is true in my state. I have never seen such a public lottery advertised or mentioned in any of the charters we've dealt with or investigated. I have a friend who helps run a charter in another state and she's often commented that our laws are quite different from hers.

When we were looking at school, we visited a highly sought after "option school" within our district. It is a lottery school and has some of the highest state testing scores in the district. People self-select for this school so it is hard to know what is a function of involved parents versus the actual curriculum. They used Open Court reading. I witnessed one mind-numbing session and vowed that I would never subject my kids to that curriculum.

My kids seem fairly content in their gt classrooms within a regular neighborhood school. My kids enjoy their peer group and general community. They use various curricula developed for gifted programs. I don't know if they would feel the same way if they were in traditional classrooms. I do agree that the two weeks of onerous standardized testing are sheer torture.

My kids have one testing session per day for two weeks -- 3 math, 3 reading, 3 writing and 1 science (only fifth grade). I'm not sure how long each session is -- I have one kid who gets extended time so for her it's longer than for the average kid. It's two weeks of anxiety (even if we tell the kids we don't care about the results, the teachers send the opposite message) and messed up schedules. This is compounded in our state by the fact that we "spring forward" in the middle of the testing period.

Ultramarina- if a charter school is receiving funds under the NCLB designated Charter Schools Program, they must conduct a public lottery. This does not mean that they have to advertise it, tell anyone about it or even put it in their application. However, the lottery must be held in a way that can be observed by any member of the public who requests it.

Siegfried Engelmann was one of the developers of "Direct Instruction" , and his site http://www.zigsite.com/ has his published works supporting DI. An overview of DI is at http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/387/OpenModules/Engelmann/Engelmannbio.html .

Someone who wants to have an informed opinion of DI could browse these sites as well as those of the critics of DI.

"This does not mean that they have to advertise it, tell anyone about it or even put it in their application. "

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it public, then. The law has no teeth if that's how it works.

Anyway, do they all get funds from NCLB? I wouldn't be surprised if the school we used chose not to, if doing so imposes restrictions.

That sounds like how law works in general.

My favorite part about law is when bureaucrats have no idea what the law is but give you an answer off the top of their head.

Always read the law.

Nobody is going to tell you what the law says.

Remember:

"Ignorantia juris non excusat or ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Latin for "ignorance of the law does not excuse" or "ignorance of the law excuses no one") is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because he or she was unaware of its content. In the United States, exceptions to this general rule are found in cases such as Lambert v. California (knowledge of city ordinances) and Cheek v. United States (willfulness requirement in U.S. federal tax crimes).
European law countries with a tradition of Roman law may also use the expression from Aristoteles nemo censetur ignorare legem: nobody is thought to be ignorant of the law."

And yes, this is somewhat insane.

In our local schools- one lottery is held in a giant auditorium with a thousand people in attendance, another in a small library with a few parents who care enough to attend. It depends on how the school addresses it. Just like school board meetings are held publicly but only a handful of people attend, public is public only if the public cares to show up.

I encourage anyone working with schools to not trust what anyone at the front counter tells you. If you do, you will believe that you have no access to your child's cumulative record, that if you want to see it it will cost you money, that you can't see what your child's score was on a particular test, that you can't attend the lottery and that your child has become a ward of the school from 8-4 and you have no say in the matter.

These are all things I've heard people here were told by the front counter.