This is evidently a very common phenomenon in the educational system. It appears that I as well as many of the educators don't understand it.
I love my home state dearly, but Louisiana is, unfortunately, way behind on public education--though not in all areas. When I moved to Texas 10 years ago, I went from teaching high school students who struggled to write a complete sentence to middle schoolers who read (and understand) The Hobbit and Fahrenheit 451. I'll be the first to admit that my English teachers in high school were excellent, but my math instruction was bush league. And math did not come easily to me. With all of that being said, I'm a definite believer in public schools. Communities with poor public schools often turn into poor communities. That's true in Texas, as well. I chose to live in a city where I can work in the public schools and feel more than comfortable with the education my daughters will receive here.
I went to Scotlandville Magnet before the neighborhood kids were reinfused into the student body. It was an excellent school. Politics bungled it up though by adding neighborhood kids back to the mix and giving every highschool a magnet tag. I guess Baton Rouge High is the last quality public school in BR? I know the folks in Scotlandville were happy about getting a community school back, though...
My Dad was a principal and he said if you went to a school and it was good you could thank the principal. If you went to the school and it was bad you could blame the principal. And his reasoning was the Principal hires the teachers. If he lets teachers who are not qualified get tenure then it will hurt the school for many years. If you get a principal that hires good teachers and supports them it will be a good school. And if he had a bad teacher with tenure he would just document the u know what out of them so he could get rid of them. But it was much more difficult. Man he can tell stories about school things for hours. I sure hope all our guys get qualified. We need them at LSU.
I wonder since the ACT and SAT are national tests, can a student go across state lines and take the same test on the next Saturday. The more you take it the better the odds of passing (if you are close to begin with, if not your flushing $$$ down the toilet). This is assuming the dates above are different in each state.
There is a waiting period after you take the examination. And since they are national tests you probably cannot do what you stated above. Edit: The test dates are the same nationally for the ACT. I'm not sure about the SAT. http://www.actstudent.org/regist/currentdates.html
I think the dates are the same nationally because they probably want to be able to administer the same(basically) tests on the same day to keep kids from cheating in any way. I know for AP tests that they are all administed at the exact same time across the nation. As for testing and school, there are always the underachievers who don't do homework but ace all the tests. There are the kids who work their butts off and get nervous on tests or just aren't that smart. I think I'm ranked 12th in my class with a 4.22 and I got a 1360 SAT/29 ACT so I guess that corresponds about right. Test scores aren't always indicative of intelligence, in some cases, it's just about what classes you have taken. Some schools teach in different orders(Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II or Algebra, Algebra II, Geometry, etc.) so that will affect what you have learned at a certain grade level. Some kids have the opportunity to take AP classes that greatly accelerate their knowledge of a certain subject while others can't. Colleges look at the whole package and now with the SAT IIs, they can see more about a student in a specific subject. When I visited LSU the average ACT was 25 I think, not sure on SAT and I think GPA was like 3.5 unaugmented. It's probably online somewhere or in one of my packets. As for public schools, I think that my city is an exception. There are plenty of kids who are unmotivated, don't apply themselves, start trouble, etc. but they are put in P classes while the others are put in magnet programs, honors programs, or AP programs. Most cities are ruined by all the smart kids going to private schools and the rest in public schools creating a vicious cycle.
You reminded me or why there are strict rules in test settings about no snacks, soft drinks, etc. There were kids caught cheating (Years back) using M & M's. One color indicated "A", another, "B". Pretty creative huh. :hihi: Good point and, there're two things I can promise you about the Public School System: 1/ They were initially geared to "Teach to the middle" but now we do/spend far more $$, resources, etc. on the "Underachievers" as a rule, and 2/ Deseg didn't bring the "Underachievers up" rather brought more of the upper-middle achievers down.
This is the main failure of the public school system. They seem to set standards for the lowest common denominator instead of the average. They waste attention on making the underachievers feel good about themselves. Some children should be left behind, if they become an anchor on the typically average students, much less the gifted. Thus the flight to private schools with higher criteria. In the 60's, in the public education I went through, 80 percent of the students went through a curriculum designed to make them capable high school graduates. 10 percent underachievers went into special ed. "slow learners" classes designed to give them extra help and prevent them from holding back the achieving students. 10 percent overachievers went into special ed. "accelerated" classes designed to prep them for college coursework and to keep them from becoming bored with the average curriculum. Troublemaking students, meaning petty criminals, were simply expelled. A three-tiered system, based upon performance still makes sense to me.
