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Educational Vignettes from the Golden State: A Story in Three Parts
Part I: Dress to Impress
It begins, of course, where else but in mighty Alameda County.
Halloween is more than two weeks away, and one Berkeley elementary school is giving fair warning that ethnically based costumes will not be allowed…
Some examples of what not to wear — Arab costume, Hey Amigo costume, or a Native American costume. These costumes and others like them are not allowed on campus because of cultural sensitivity…
Spider-Man or Superman are still OK.
Part II: It Is Not Who Casts the Votes, It Is Who Counts the Votes
Next, a tale from the City by the Bay.
An election controversy has students and parents up in arms. A middle school in San Francisco is refusing to tell kids the winners of the student body government election. It is because, as one student told KRON’s Justine Waldman, the principal does not like who won…
Sebastian said the results of the student government election, held on Oct. 10, have not come out yet. He and the other candidates were told this week it is because the principal believes the winners are not diverse enough…
“The organizers are saying things like, ‘we want everyone’s voice to be heard,’ but in truth, the voters’ voices are not being heard,” Kaplan said. “Most kids are in agreement that the results need to come out because kids worked really hard on it.”
In summation this student grew reflective and opined:
“The whole school voted for those people, so it is not like people rigged the game, but in a way, now it is kinda being rigged,” Kaplan said.
Part III: Everybody Has Won and All Must Have Prizes
We conclude this tour with a brief stop in lovely Sonoma County.
A new grading scale that redefines what constitutes an “A” or an “F” is causing strife and confusion in the Cotati-Rohnert Park school district…
The new system is called the equal interval scale. Essentially, it makes it harder to get a failing grade. It departs from the traditional A to F scale in which students receive F’s for scores below 59 percent. Instead, the scale awards F’s only for scores below 20 percent…
Under the new policy, grades rise in 20-point increments. For example, scores of 20 to 40 percentage points earn D- through D+ grades — and so on, up the ladder. Students get an A- for scoring between 80 and 85, which traditionally is low B territory.
Some teachers have tried to hang on to the traditional grading system but have been tripped up by a blanket new policy that students, even if they do not hand in homework or take a test, get 50 percent. Under the new rule, it’s possible for a student who skips a test to receive a better grade than a student who takes the test and does poorly.
What news in public education from your neck of the woods my fellow Ricochet citizens? What interesting and innovative policies are being tried in your local municipality?
Published in Education
“Fake John Galt:I am offended about the schools name “Rosa Parks”.All schools should be numbered so as not to offend.”
This is highly insensitive to those cultures which lack specific words for higher numbers. Also, if you use base 10 you are discriminating against polydactyls.
As a committed segregationist* I am deeply offended that a school is named after Rosa Parks.
*I favor black student unions but not white ones, black studies departments but not white studies departments, black-only dormitories, and I’m pretty sure that only black lives matter. Also, I’m not the least bit interested in the content of anyone’s character.
Idiocracy was prophecy, not fiction.
For reals!!! It’s amazing how many times I reference that film.
@Jim, in all honesty, though, if you dressed as Che, I’ll bet nobody would complain about you stereotyping Hispanics.
That’s for sure. It’s about how physical chemistry tests went at my alma mater. The curves were usually bimodal, too. The overall average was about 20-25% and got you a B-. But there was a bell curve with the mean at about 10-15%, and another at about 40% or so. That would get you an A. They were talent spotting, looking for kids out on the far right of that second bell curve, the ones who got 80s and 90s. A whole different purpose than equal intervals.