WORCESTER — Nearly two-thirds of Massachusetts public schools are falling short of performance targets under the state’s new evaluation system, even as struggling urban districts achieve solid gains, state officials reported Wednesday.
In Boston, as well as other city districts, results on the standardized tests were mixed. Scores among 10th-graders rose to new heights. But in the lower grades, results were largely stagnant, and in a number of cases dropped.
Comments
Easy for Grogan to say. The Boston Foundation pays him well north of $560,000 per year in salary and benefits. He definitely knows what's best for us commoners. His kids go to exclusive private schools (schools you've never even head of). He knows about as much about charter schools as he knows about Public schools, that is to say, very little. He does know that they offer the same type of selectivity in their student body that is very close to his own real world of experience. Grogan's and Gass's intent here is to curtail public schooling and set up an apartheid-like system for charters that cherry pick their students and public schools that educate the rest of the population, the so-called have nots. That's their step 1. Nice established they'll go to step 2, which is to take public dollars away from the public schools. After all, who will be there to advocate for the students who are not cherry picked by the charters?
Astounding. For the umpteenth year the results show us that students who live in poverty...who go to schools that are underresourced...do worse. Now take the billions of dollars the states give to the testing company and put them into schools. My school has a zero dollar budget to teach science.
Looking at the graph I was struck by the difference in the numbers of students tested in the Charter School vs. Public Schools. Could smaller class size make a difference?
Maybe we could get a quote from Grogan about how lucky those kids are who get kicked out of charter schools because they are not smart enough or have counseling needs. The scratch ticket kids you see littering the ground outside of the school. What lottery did they win?
So lets see: scores are up in general, and MA remains #1 in many national education rankings, but many teachers have not gotten a raise in years and are still in a union. Yup, we need to fire them because they are overpaid and break their union because kids are not improving!
Just looked into Major General Rice's background and career. He should be made permanent Adj.Gen.
MCAS "performance" means absolutely nothing. The test is made by educrats who hail, almost exclusively, from Winchester. Pearson publishing has raked in BILLIONS in profit. At the same time, the kids who do not perform as well as their more affluent counterparts lack basic resources, such as GLASSES so they can actually SEE! Their teachers are forced to "duke the stats" by focusing on MCAS "achievement" - not a well rounded education that promotes higher level thinking skills. If the "masters of the universe" let us (teachers) do our job, without trying to "fix" us and the kids, we would much better serve underprivileged kids. The real "reform" should lay with how education business is conducted. Teachers should have more a voice in order to help the children in front of them. Vendors overcharge the taxpayers of the City of Boston for basic supplies - such as notebooks. Publishers overcharge the city by shrewdly lobbying for scripted quick fix curriculum sets that contain millions of dollars worth of unnecessary "fluff" that rots in closets. However, the most egregious robbery of all is by said publishing companies due to our states well entrenched testing industrial complex. Still, MA is #1 in the United States, while Boston is #1 urban district. Teachers did that.