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Name: Brian
Country: United States
State: Michigan
Metro: Grand Rapids
Gender: Male
Interests: bass, music, the cubs, hanging out, watching movies, reading, writing, and whatever else goes on around here
Message: message me
Member Since:
9/17/2005
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| NCLB (In section 9528) requires public secondary schools to provide military recruiters the same access to facilities as a school provides to higher education institution recruiters. Schools are also required to provide contact information for every student to the military if requested. Students or parents can opt out of having their information shared, and educational institutions receiving funding under the act are required to inform parents that they have this option. Currently, many school districts have a generic opt out form which, if filled out and turned in, withholds students' information from college and job recruiters as well as the military.
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| Recently I have been in discussion with others regarding the state of education within our country. I am, by no means, an expert on the topic but I do have a knowledge greater than the ordinary layman. However, as of the early 21st century the American education system has been dominated by terms like No Child Left Behind, AYP and testing, testing, testing. When the No Child Left Behind act was passed in 2001 in promised to bring America's education system into the next millennium, updating outdated teaching practices and schools, and reforming every school so that every child can succeed. The central tenet of this legislation rests on the premise that standardized testing is a viable and accurate way to measure the effectiveness of the teachers in American public schools. However, a child's performance on a standardized test has just as much to do with how much sleep they got that night, than with how well the teacher conveyed the material in class. It is preposterous to hold teachers entirely responsible for the outcomes of their students. Ask any teacher who has been in the classroom long enough and they will tell you that it is ultimately up to the student to determine how well they do on an assessment. So is it wrong for the government to hold schools accountable for their performances? No, it is not. Governments have every right to hold their schools, which use their resources, accountable for their actions. But Standardized tests are not the way to do it. First of all, if the tests are norm-referenced, which means that the performance of each student is compared to the performance of every student (this is where percentile ranks, and the bell curve come from) then at least half of the schools are guaranteed to fail. All these school will be in low-income areas and more than likely have a predominant racial minority population, while the schools that pass will be wealthy and predominantly white. The alternative is to make tests criterion referenced. This means that students performances are judged against a set of standard information and if they get enough questions right they pass. But this presents many problems itself. Who creates the standards? Should it be done at the federal, state, county, or district level? There are problems that arise with each level. Is it equitable to hold poorer schools accountable to same standards that the rich schools barely exceed? If the standards are too easy, does everybody passing really mean there is no child left behind? you get caught in a catch-22. Set the standards too low and every school passes, essentially nullifying any school reform that could stem from NCLB. This goes even for schools that are failing to provide for their students and really need support. Set the standards too high and too few schools pass, and there are too many schools competing for too few resources, and essentially you cannot reform schools anymore. You have to set the standards in such a way that you are guaranteed to have a set number of schools fail, and it won't be the rich white suburban schools. It is the same dilemma as with norm-referenced tests. But is testing even a viable way of measuring student achievement and teacher effectiveness? Hardly. Colloquially, this is called high-stakes testing. Students who belong to a failing school have much on the line. Their school can be shut down for not showing adequate yearly progress (AYP) through several consecutive years. Teachers and faculty members can lose their jobs if test scores do not reach standards. But recall that there are guaranteed to be a set number of failing schools, so a set number of teachers and administrators will eventually be put out of a job. High-stakes testing usually leads to teachers preparing their students for the tests that they will take each year. Teaching to the test though, is actually counterproductive to the stated goals of NCLB. Teaching to the test leads to narrower curriculum, less relevant material and presentation, and meaningless, out-of-context tasks that rob the student of any useful education. Students may be able to do well on a test, but when presented with a real world situation that involves complex thinking, they will be very hard-pressed to succeed. So, in the end NCLB does more to hurt our schools than to help it. Governments have a right to know what goes on in schools. They have every right to push their schools to succeed. They have the right to hold schools accountable for their actions. They just need to find a way to do so without stabbing the schools in the back. | | |
| No I haven't forgotten about this entirely, it had just fallen out of favor with me as a means of communication, or whatever it was that I did here. Apparently not very much. Well this marks my foray back into the world of web logging, or what is colloquially known as blogging. So with this inaugural maiden post in this domain I know not what to say. To which corner of the web shall I turn? Perhaps an exposition into religion and politics, seeing as it is the topic of a semester long research project I am attempting to pull off in let's see here, less than 48 hours. Well I already know a lot about the subject, I am just trying to find out what others think. The one thing I have found out though, is that it is hard to find African-Americans on Calvin's campus. Who knew? Well, I did, and pretty much everybody else who goes here, and pretty much everybody who knows anything about Calvin. Ok, I am gonna go off on a rant, and it has much to do with the current topic of my research.
The Republican party long ago labeled itself the party of "ordinary working Americans"* and has aligned itself at least partly with the conservative Christian right. What this alliance has created, is its own ideology. Part of that ideology is the belief that family values, the sanctity of human life, and individual issues of morality are the most important criteria in selecting a candidate. This has grown into the belief that if a person vote's on any other standard, that person cannot be a Christian. The most concrete alignment of the Christian right and conservative Republicans is exemplified by the Moral majority and the Reagan administration of the 1980's. It has since persisted to this day that conservative Republicans and Christianity are closely related, to the point where they are practically mutually inclusive. Recently those issues have turned into same sex marriage, but mostly have remained the same, e.g. abortion. Since the 1980's little has been done about these issues, but large corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthiest have thrived. In the current state of our nation the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it has ever been in our history. In an article I read the author stated this:
Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes... Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.
Obviously the power and wealth in our society is concentrated in the hands of the very few, who rule against what they were elected to office to accomplish. Keep this in mind as I introduce another piece of the puzzle
Many biblical scholars would agree that Jesus's ministry concerned issues of economics more than that of individual morality. Just take a look at the time Jesus spent feeding those who were hungry, preaching about economic responsibility to the poor, and taking care of those who were cast out by the society: lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, fishermen, the list goes on and on. Jesus did not preach a universal morality, other than love your God with all you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. When did loving your neighbor turn into stopping abortion at all costs, but letting the homeless man down the street freeze in the winter? When was it more important that homosexuals not be allowed to marry that it was to take care of the millions in Africa, or even in the United States, that cannot afford to eat everyday? How can Christians justify voting for a party that goes against almost every thing Jesus taught about caring for you neighbor? I will grant that abortion is an abomination to our society, and I do not agree with it at all. What I disagree with, is that that has become the sole determining factor people consider when entering the voting booth. I also feel that the issue of same sex marriage should hardly be considered as a voting criterion. The best illustration I can use is what Jesus did with the woman who was brought to him accused of adultery. "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."† The only person without sin refused to cast the stone, so why do we? It is not up to us to determine other people's lives for them, but it is their choice. Voting to install a ban on same sex marriage, or to ban abortion should be extremely discouraged. Let us love our neighbor as ourselves regardless of their sexual orientation, or the choices they have made due to the consequences of past promiscuity.
One of my conclusions here is that, when we see that much of what our faith teaches is compromised by a candidate, or a party, we shouldn't choose that party. I want everyone to consider all the issues equally when they step into the voting booth. If after having done so, you feel that a vote to possibly affect a future supreme court case concerning abortion, is more representative of your faith, even though it results in a society where the lower classes are increasingly marginalized, then go ahead and vote that way. At least you see the entire picture and can perhaps act upon that knowledge in other ways. But please do not go on blindly believing that the Republican party is the only Christian party. Being a Christian and being a Republican are not mutually inlcusive. We are responsible to take care of those in our society who are in need. Jesus said, "For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me."‡ This is one thing that Jesus has called us to do, and coincidentally the Republican party is not very good at doing. We have been given very much as Americans. We have a multi-trillion dollar economy. If Jesus can feed a crowd of five thousand people with a couple of fish, and few loaves of bread,‡† how many people should we be able to feed? How many people can we clothe? Let us do what Jesus preached, and let us do as he did.
*Any quotations, other than biblical passages, in this post are from an article entitled "Lie down for America" by Thomas Frank.
† John 8:7
‡ Matthew 25:42-43
‡† Matthew 14:13-21 | | |
| Well its finals week and I have but three left. I have one starting at 7 tonight and then i ahve a quick turnaround with another starting at 9 tomorrow morning. I was up til 2 am last night studying for my physics (monday night) and math (wednesday morning), and then up til 4 getting my room ready to be checked out. my roommate left earlier this afternoon, so now I got the whole room to myself. It seems kinda empty since we don't have our couch in ehre anymore and the furniture is all rearranged. I hope to make the journey down this week sometime to chicago to spend some time with al the cool people I know and well, hopefully i can stay there the whole summer. Well I should get goin the call has rung out for dinner on my floor and I should join the guys. Have a great whatever you're up to. | | |
| 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back late from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, and I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
I just wanted to write that quote and see if anyone knew it. Its another little test of my audience's literary bounds. | | |
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