Monday, August 18, 2008

Teachers Give Dallas School District a big F

Dallas public school students who flunk tests, blow off homework and miss assignment deadlines can make up the work without penalty, under new rules that have angered many teachers.

Teachers Give Dallas School District a big F
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, August 15, 2008
By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News
/ The Dallas Morning News
Tawnell D. Hobbs, Stella M. Ch
รกvez and Karin Shaw Anderson contributed to this report.


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This is absolute lunacy.

Clearly responsibility and academic achievement are the latest casualties in the US battle to be internationally competitive in education. Who elects or who appoints these school boards and who hires administrators so far out of touch?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is exactly your comment regarding the Seattle School Board not enforcing rules governing student achievement - rules that can't be successfully enforced.

Did the school board do what it promised and adopt the best academic curriculum for its students? Obviously no, so you can't enforce rules since there is little justification for following them - students won't be successful anyway. Creating rules for teachers might be plausible, but it will be unpopular.

Wouldn't it make more sense to look at curriculum and adopt something that made it worthwhile to learn? Clearly, with poor curriculum, students do not see a reason to conform and follow rules that make learning more efficient and effective. Therefore the teacher spends more energy controlling behavior and less on teaching. Adopt curriculum that children can understand, uses appropriate algorithms that can be applied to all numbers, and focuses on preparing children for formal algebraic problem-solving using an approved method of teaching. It is positively foolish, that children are being asked to discover algebra on their own - especially, learning algebraic methods for solving problem - by 11th grade, students have been taught around 10 methods for solving systems of equaitons.