Showing posts with label Goals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goals. Show all posts

No End Planned for Ferguson Demonstrators


The man running the demonstrators in Ferguson -- or at least 16k+ of them is Deray McKesson @deray. 

I was working with him to define goals and negotiations. It's been something like 150 days, and he's not even talking to anyone. So I opened a dialog to see if I could help. But I'm not black enough, or I don't understand... or that's what he was saying. Today he tells me the real reason is that he is an anarchist. He's not going to end it. He's just going to push it forward as far as he can. 

Over the last week he has been collecting donations for financing to August. He's not going to stop... To Infinity and beyond...

Those people out there demonstrating think they are doing something for a reason... They're not. They're just meat on the street. He's even started sending phrases that start with "Blessed are those..." 

If you have reporters you know... maybe  you could send this to them. Those people should at least be told who they are following, and why.



Many Children Left Behind.- Epic Fail

This is the 12th year. The year the educational law passed by near unanimous vote in the House and signed by Bush in 2002 "No Child Left Behind" was suppose to be met, and hopefully exceeded. The goal was that every student in the nation should be at or above grade-level in Math and Reading.  Grades 4 and 8 were the check points.

Doesn't seem like that difficult of a goal. If a child is in 4th grade, shouldn't she be reading at 4th grade level?

The whole plan sounds acceptable. It even gets your blood going. "No Child Left Behind". It rings with those slogans we hear from Fireman, Marines and Special Forces, "We Don't Leave Our Men Behind", "Everyone Goes Home." And at the time, 2002, just after the 9/11 crisis, we were looking for things to be patriotically positive about. Yeah, we were going to kill Bin Laden, but rage only gets you so far when you are hurt like that, you need something to care about, something with life in it -- who leaves children behind anyway? So Bush signed that paper, it became a national goal and we all felt good.

Results?  Epic Fail.

The test is only for two areas. Math and Reading. There is a single standardized test for each of those, which is given every year. The objective was to come up with educational strategies which would bring students up to grade level within twelve years. Math came up some. A steady if disheartening amount every year. Reading basically flatlined.

Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders (effect size = 0.22 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade. -- NBER Working Paper No. 15531

Where the Wild Things Are...

Chess is a Wild game I've only been playing for a short time, but I've gained enough understanding to realize that the angles of ...