How much does your state support public education? Not as much as you would hope.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

The report card is being issued Tuesday by the Network for Public Education (NPE), a nonprofit group co-founded several years ago by education historian and activist Diane Ravitch to advocate for America’s public school system. The authors evaluated states on criteria they see as promoting a professional teaching force, equitable and sufficient funding and equal opportunities for all students to succeed — all critical to the health of public schools. 

Specifically, the reports looks at how states approach high-stakes standardized testing and school finance as well as how much they promote teachers as professionals and resist privatizing public education. How states spend taxpayer money is another criterion, as is whether states promote policies that affect the income, living conditions and governmental support for students to give them all a chance to succeed in school. Some states earned A’s in a category or two but none earned higher than an overall C. 

I am both pleased to see that my state of Alaska is one of only thirteen states to achieve a grade of C, while also being horrified that C is the highest grade ANY state had achieved.

Public education is one of my sore points, and in my opinion NO state should feel satisfied with any ranking below an A, or an A- with extenuating circumstances.

However these days public education, and our teachers, are undermined, underfunded, and under empowered, and the result is dumber children, moronic adults, and voters who cannot find their asses with both hands and a road map.

Which by the way is really the driving force behind the conservative attacks on public education.

I mean come on, would an intelligent, well educated person vote for a Ted Cruz or Donald Trump?

Neil deGrasse Tyson gets it.

When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 14, 2013

Of course it is not JUST the students cheating on the standardized exams, the teachers have also been caught fudging the numbers or helping students cheat, and in more than a few places.

The fact is that once you place all of the importance on the educational product (Test scores), rather than the journey (The educational experience itself), you devalue it in a way that makes it seem as if the ends justifies the means.

If all anybody cares about is that the correct boxes are filled in, then HOW they are filled in, and by WHOM, becomes less relevant. And therefore the education itself becomes less relevant as well.

After all what value does a professional test taker have to future employers?

GOP backed for profit school caught deleting "failing grades."

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

A for-profit school that was hyped by Republican lawmakers as a solution to Tennessee’s education problems recently admitted deleting bad grades to “more accurately recognize students’ current progress.” 

A December email obtained by WTVF showed that Tennessee Virtual Academy’s vice principal instructed middle school teachers to delete “failing grades” from October and September. 

“After … looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes before the holidays,” the email says, adding that each teacher needed to “take out the October and September progress [reports]; delete it so that all that is showing is November progress.” 

“If you have given an assignment and most of your students failed that assignment, then you need to take that grade out.” 

Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson said she was horrified because the school’s instructions amounted to cheating. 

“Does it talk about we need to make changes in curriculum? Does it talk about we need to make changes in our teaching strategy? No,” Johnson told WTVF. “Those changes we need to make are deleting grades from the computer system.” 

“To come in and say ‘everybody who made failing grades the first two months, we need to delete those grades,’ to me that’s a huge issue,” she explained. “To me, this appears like it’s grade fixing.” 

The problem with for profit schools is that if their product, student's grades, is not good enough there will be less profit. So if you cannot delver the goods, you take shortcuts.

Just another reason why capitalism and education shouldn't mix.

There is more on this situation to be found here.