Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter
Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter
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CAT Tracks for March 11, 2009
WHAT A DRAG IT IS |
...being poor.
With apologies to the Rolling Stones for plagiarizing and paraphrasing a line from one of their songs...
Below is a short little blurb that won't bring enjoyment to the hearts and "minds" of the ever growing number of teacher-hating, teacher-bashing pundits.
Cultural and environmental factors affect learning? Maybe it's not teachers and public schools trying to leave all those children behind???
Where's the fun in that...
The article concludes with...
Ya know...THAT is a statistic that this old ex-teacher would like to know!
How many?
If Cairo's Superintendent of Schools can belabor the meaning of "flurry" to avoid addressing a question, I wanna know the "number" represented by "some"!
Is it 75%? 50%? 25%? 5%? 1%? Point-oh-something%???
Enquiring minds want to know...
From the Detroit News...
Study cites poverty as drag on student achievement
Out-of-school factors are major cause of lagging achievement by minority, poor children, study says.
"some schools are successful despite serving needy kids."
Karen Bouffard / The Detroit News
EAST LANSING -- The nation should focus more on pulling kids out of poverty than on measuring their performance on standardized tests, according to a report released Monday by an education research group.
The analysis by David Berliner, regent's professor of education at Arizona State University, found that out-of-school factors related to poverty are the major cause of the achievement gap that exists between poor and minority students and the rest of the student population.
"(The report) provides powerful evidence for a fact that school employees have known all along -- if you don't solve the problems outside the classroom, you cannot expect all students to be able to achieve inside the classroom," Michigan Education Association President Iris K. Salters said in a statement.
The report, commissioned by the East Lansing-based Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, concluded that the national education policy that is outlined in the federal No Child Left Behind Act wrongly assesses teachers and schools by their students' test scores.
Great Lakes is funded in part by the National Education Association, the parent group of the MEA.
Michael Jahr, spokesman for the right-leaning Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which favors tying teacher pay to students' academic performance, said some schools are successful despite serving needy kids.
