{"id":832,"date":"2005-03-22T08:36:15","date_gmt":"2005-03-22T12:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=832"},"modified":"2005-03-22T08:36:15","modified_gmt":"2005-03-22T12:36:15","slug":"on-the-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=832","title":{"rendered":"on the radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

NPR<\/em> features an audio report on the Houston cheating scandal which Dallas Morning News<\/em> reported in December<\/a> may involve 400 or more schools across Texas. According to its report, the News<\/em>‘ method of detection only caught the “dumb” cheaters. It did not “detect schools that cheat consistently across multiple grades and multiple subjects.”<\/p>\n

NPR<\/em>‘s Claudio Sanchez interviews<\/a> several people including Donna Garner who attempted to expose this problem last spring<\/a> but “gave up when the Houston school district’s top lawyer refused to grant her immunity from punishment,” according to the teachers’ union president.<\/p>\n

Garner describes actions she was told to take including cruising the classroom during test sessions and standing behind students if they’d answered a question incorrectly. The student would then run a finger down the choices and knew they’d hit the right one when she moved on.<\/p>\n

Texas educators are so inventive. Remember this?<\/p>\n

Formula for raising scores: Drop worst from class<\/a><\/p>\n

Two months after The Times<\/em> reported the dropout-pushout hoax, The Washington Post<\/em><\/a> visited the story and added another dimension, this one about the achievment miracle.( When Secretary Paige took over as Houston superintendent, only 26 percent of the city’s 10th graders were passing the state math test; the year he departed for Washington, 99 percent were passing it. Miraculous? <\/p>\n

Not quite, suggests The Washington Post<\/em>. It seems that Paige’s association with the Houston-based American Productivity and Quality Center taught him a few things about statistics that would help the district. For example, under Paige it became commonplace for at-risk 9th-graders to be retained in that grade, allowing only the competent to matriculate to 10th ? the year when they would take the state math test. After two or more years in 9th grade, those at-risk students were moved up to 12th grade, in effect sidestepping the 10th-grade test. The result is that by 2001, there were 1,160 students in 9th grade and 281 in 10th grade. And 99 percent of those 281 passed the state math test. (For details, see: “Education ‘Miracle’ Has a Math Problem<\/a>,” by Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Nov. 8, 2003, p 1; also the Houston TV investigative report from KHOU: Report 1<\/a> and Report 2<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On a more positive note, Jude<\/a> links to an MP3 report that features Azania Al-Shabazz, a 6th grader at Crossroads Middle School in Harlem, New York. Radio Rootz!<\/em><\/a> is a programme that works to involve students in the media. It originally aired on Free Speech Radio News<\/em><\/a> but was edited by michael and posted here<\/a> with permission from Radio Rootz!<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Zasha Medina’s opinion on standardised testing can be heard here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NPR features an audio report on the Houston cheating scandal which Dallas Morning News reported in December may involve 400 or more schools across Texas. According to its report, the News‘ method of detection only caught the “dumb” cheaters. It … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-dq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}