Life Imitates Scrappleface

Scrappleface announced today that

In the wake of a new study which shows that 25 percent of the nation's public schools fail to meet the standards of the No Child Left Behind law, the Bush administration today announced a tutoring program to help the low-performers ... "Some people say that there's no way a remote federal bureaucracy can force accountability on 91,400 schools in a bloated, unionized public education system," said the DOE spokesman. "But we're not giving up yet. As long as we have ideas to try and taxpayer dollars to spend, we'll keep the dream of federally-controlled education alive for all freedom-loving Americans."

Meanwhile, here in Washington state today:

Faced with the prospect that tens of thousands of high-school students might not graduate because they failed the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), state education leaders are in the middle of a collective gut check.

Is the exam fair? Too hard? A valid measure of learning?

the state's "education leaders" admit that

Just 35 percent of last year's 10th-graders met the standards on all of the WASL's main subjects — reading, writing and math.

Instead of figuring out how to get more kids to learn more, the primary objective seems to be

to catapult the passage rate to politically acceptable levels.

Possible solutions: lower the score needed to pass, give kids more chances to pass, and exempt those who still can't pass!

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 27, 2004 11:31 AM