In Which I Just Don't Get It

I really don’t.

A high school here in town has been deemed “academically unacceptable” for five years in a row, so it has been ordered closed. That seems odd enough, but the plans for the building reveal how the people in charge of our kids’ educations think.

They plan to open a “new” school at that same campus, probably in the fall. There will be a new name, a new mascot, new staff, and new students. So, if a school is not working – get rid of the kids?

What do they think the purpose of a school is? I know the answer: To pass standardized tests. Not to educate kids, obviously.

So far no one has said where the “old” kids will be going. They have said that “only half” of the school’s current kids will be allowed to go there, but they haven’t said what’s going to happen to the rest. Amazingly enough, the kids feel like the school system has thrown them away as having no value.

I’m all for results-based education. I just don’t think that standardized test scores are the results we should be aiming for. And I sure don’t think that throwing kids out of school in order to get good test scores is a good result!

To add insult to injury, the school (not surprisingly) is in a primarily minority area of town. It has been there for 48 years. There are three, four, maybe even five generations in families that have attended that school. (In the interest of full disclosure, DS attended that school in his freshman year of high school. He was in the Liberal Arts magnet school, but they refused to even pretend to accommodate his learning disabilities, so we moved him.)

How is this helping, again?

In other news, I finished with the G authors on Stop, You’re Killing Me! this afternoon. So it’s going faster than I expected. No, I don’t know how many authors I’ve got listed now, nor how many pages this would be if I printed them out. I don’t want to know!

And, finally, I dropped something off this afternoon at the home now run by our ex foster kittens Emma and Dusty. I would not have recognized them! They’re five months old know and HUGE! Especially Dusty; his paws are ginormous. I'm a bit surprised, as their adorable mom Arabella, still languishing at the shelter, is on the small side. They both seemed to recognize me and demanded petting and attention. Emma bit my hand and Dusty went for my bare toes! His eyes still look odd, perhaps crossed. They are clearly happy and healthy and running the show and it was a pleasure to see them. They make Xander and Willow look tiny!