Monday, March 26, 2007

New TAKS Ratings Blow Smoke

An iteresting article in the Dallas Morning News by Joshua Benton says there is a plan to replace the relative simple system of ratings with a more complicated system.

We now have 4 ratings: exemplary, recognized, acceptable, and unacceptable. The TEA is considering adding 3 more ratings: exemplary-commended, recognized-commended, and acceptable-commended.

Huh? So is recognized-commended better or worse than commended? This is nonsense. This seems to be an effort to make the ratings so nonsensical that people quit paying attention to them.

Have you heard the expression, "If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS" ? They are trying to baffle us with BS.

Instead of focusing on fixing broken schools, the efforts now are to throw out the test results by making the results obsolete, either by replacing them with new test scores or by replacing the ratings with BS.

Failing districts are squirming like worms on hooks. They are going to the State Legislature and the TEA and doing everything they can think of to avoid fixing their problems.

Plano is stuck with testing because many districts do not educate their children. As long as these districts are allowed to continue failing, we will be stuck taking the same tests they take. If they would fix their problems so all districts provided a decent education, then testing would become either unnecessary or trivial.

We must be vigilant in stopping the failing districts from getting off the hook.

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