It would seem that the contract might need to be re-bid?

Dang Common Core!!

Answer to all: "It's a great day to be a Bobcat."

Good stuff.

Let's just let the UN run our schools, then you'd finally be happy.

Well, since we're off topic anyway, here's a question for those of you in public education: Is a school district in Ohio required to provide to parents copies of the standards and objectives that students are expected to meet? (Are they even required to actually have standards in writing???)

The situation: My eldest started Kindergarten this year. By all accounts, he's a bright kid. His pre-K teacher told us he was the most well-rounded kid the teacher had ever had. No behavior problems--in fact, last month he won his class award for exemplifying good character.

So this week, we get a stack of papers from his teacher where he had been tested for writing and math. Not standardized testing--graded assignments. The batch is mostly Cs, Ds, and Fs. From what I can tell, the problem isn't that he doesn't know his letters or numbers, or can't follow instructions or count, or do the things that I would expect a Kindergartner to do. It's that his fine motor skills aren't great and he doesn't put the answers right perfectly on the line. So the teacher marks them incorrect.

I cannot find anything at the state level stating that Kindergartners are expected to have perfect penmanship. The K-3 standards don't appear to address writing at all. The pre-K standards do--but it's pretty much can the kid make a symbol that sorta looks like the letter and use the quasi-letters plus pictures to tell a story.

If the school wants to have standards that exceed the state standards, I don't think there is a problem with that, but it's never been communicated to us. I've searched the district website, and there's nothing. Setting aside the fact that letter grades for Kindergartners seems pretty ridiculous, I don't get how I'm supposed to know to drill these extraordinary objectives with my kid if I'm never told what the standards are. And if there are no standards, how the hell did this curriculum get developed?

(Or, as the conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe, are letter grades some bogus method of trying to get parents' attention? My son has no clue what they mean.)

Down with locals! Up with central office bureaucrats!

Robert it's because of local control that we have such a great disparity in outcomes in our public schools from state to state. When I was a regional vice president for the northeast the level of education that I saw on a daily basis in the public schools far outpaced what i saw here in Ohio and down south. This report clearly shows that. If you want to keep local control and continue to fall farther and farther behind, so be it. But if you want kids in Knoxville to be able to give SBH the correct change, give the governors and educational leaders of our 50 states who came up with the plan a chance to see it through to implementation.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

Yeah...the federal govt is doing a bang up job with everything else.

Two things:

1. SBH tells a great concessions story. Drama. Humor. Irony. Legitimate issues discussed. Nice!

2. Somebody get this education talk over to Siberia. It's a good and robust conversation which deserves it's own space in the right location.

And some of those uneducated buffoons are in Columbus and Washington, D.C.

And, somehow, miraculously, with schools all under local control for over two hundred years, our country advanced anyway, and was once considered a leader in education. In the last fifty years, though, much has changed. Control is increasingly moved away from local control to central control. Expenditure per student in constant dollars has risen dramatically, up nearly 400% in fifty years.

And, how are schools doing? Well, SAT scores have been falling. In international comparisons, US students now place behind virtually every other developed countries in Math and Science.

Clearly something must be done. If increased spending, and more centralized education control has moved us to the bottom of the heap, then it seems clear enough, that the only solution is even more spending, and more centralized educational control.

Well I am guilty of contributing to this dynamic. My wife and I lived in an underperforming school district when we first got married but it was where our budget allowed for a modest but quality house. Not long after our first child was born we moved out to a highly rated school district where our means may not buy as much house but ensures that our two sons will get a really good education and will also be in a strong extracurricular setting. We have higher property taxes and pay an extra earned income district tax but to us it is worth it. We thought about staying in the underperforming district and going the private school route but we're both believers in public education (but obviously in a certain setting since we chose to move).

I personally do not care for the way things are in Ohio currently but we knew it was going to be easier to move to a different district than try to wait for the system to change. I also sometimes feel guilty for not staying and trying to improve the district profile by being active/engaged parents and having students to help improve things as well.

I do not disagree....again, the only field run by non-professionals