At a meeting of the New York State Board of Regents, Chancellor Betty Rosa announces that the Regents exams required for high school graduation will be canceled this year.
This is a wise decision. The exams cannot be given in person. If delivered online, there is no way to know who is taking the exam.
The next year should be a time to rethink the current policy of requiring all students to take the Regents. In the long history of the exams, this policy is fairly recent. The Regents used to be only for students who were college bound or who wanted the distinction of taking and passing them. Making them universal made it necessary to water them down. At the same time, they were an unnecessary hurdle for some students, who did not care about having a Regents diploma.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And in 1992, 359 years after condemning Galileo for claiming that the Earth goes around the Sun, the Church admitted that he was right.
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TOUCHÉ, Bob.
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Right about what?
Certainly not about bowling balls and feathers falling at the same rate.
Everyone knows feathers move faster than bowling balls.
Galileo apparently never saw a falcon diving to catch prey.
And he quite obviously never saw a bowling ball move down a lane in a bowling alley — one of the slowest things on the planet. It takes forrevvvvvvvver.
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“Galileo apparently never saw a falcon diving to catch prey.”
You have tripped on a memory. One of the rare sights in my birding experience has been a peregrine falcon. I have seen a few on the swamps of Florida and on beaches, where they follow ducks and shore birds. There was this one sighting in New Mexico that was memorable. We were hiking in the dry desert at the base of the San Juan Mountains and had just emerged from a box canyon when I spotted him hovering above us. Even without binoculars, you could see that it was a peregrine. Suddenly he took a dive into the box canyon, disappearing into its shadows like a fighter jet. Thanks for stirring this memory.
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🙂
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What are you trying to post?
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The five required exams for graduation were “watered down” via content and or cut score magic.
Common Core/Next-gen algebra K (grade8/9)requires only a true passing score of 35%.
Common Core ELA (grade 11) is despite the CC hype, pretty easy.
Living Environment (grade 9/10) is a very watered down version of previous biology test combined with a low cut score.
Global Studies, a two year world history course (grades 9 & 10), had such a low pass rate that NYSED eliminated all of the freshman year content. Students are only tested on the 10th grade material.
US history ( grade 11) not so sure ????
The non-required Regents tests continue to be reasonably challenging.
All of this was the result of Commissioner Mills decision in 1994/95 to require all students, including the learning disabled and ALL students to pass the five required exams in order to graduate HS. Students are allowed to re-take failed exams multiple times.
Another case of good intentions gone bad. A policy that has done more harm than good. This pause is the right time for the BOR to do the right thing and end the charade.
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“Charade” is correct.
A “house of cards” comes to mind, too.
All cultures have lies and self-deceptions, I suppose. (I don’t know nearly as much as I should about basic anthropology.)
But the sheer MASS and HEIGHT of the TOWER OF LIES many of us have had to populate (in our culture) is swaying quite dangerously in these gale force times. Schools come foremost to mind, just because I’m there all day long… well, I was there. But it’s all over the place.
But, we’re such… nice… people…..(well, a lot of us.)
So we’ve had billions and billions of tons of software, in all its forms.
And, not enough hardware. And, let’s start right off with ventilators when we talk about hardware, because it’s such a personal word, isn’t it. Like “breathing”. How much more personal can it get. Life in the time of intubation.
A former student of mine who is a teacher in NYC (and an all-around nice guy) posted this piece from Slate. I LOVE the title: “America Is a Sham: Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.” It was posted on March 14, which already seems SO long ago, doesn’t it.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-tsa-liquid-purell-paid-leave-rules.html?fbclid=IwAR3Ri9Ej51S6KbUawfP7FAp75GIZbJf17TSX5QaVWEGpK99t1Vth9RQF7cQ
I wrote back: add standardized testing to that list.
Ahh, yup!
And, BTW, have a good day, everyone. The sun was sure out yesterday. Real spring weather!
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algebra I
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I would be giving the state tests all next week and for another week after that, plus another week of make-up testing. This is a great chance to do some reading instead of testing. We have our books, and there are so many scholars here (not charter school students called scholars, real scholars). I, for one, have much to learn.
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You and me both. And I am running out of time, alas. Grateful for the scholars on this blog!
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Nice story about a school district:
“Many children in this rural district come from households too poor to afford a car. So the superintendent embarked on an improvised project, driving 6,000 meals a day out across the county in a small fleet of 70 school buses, dropping each packet off at a stop along the route.
“We absolutely see this as a matter of life and death,” he said. “We have to do it on behalf of our children. It’s just that simple. Families are suffering here.”
We have one rural district in Ohio doing this, also. They’re delivering both work packets and meals by school bus.
Just crazy that public schools are the only functioning public system, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/in-the-poorest-county-in-americas-poorest-state-a-virus-hits-home-hunger-is-rampant
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When I was a kid I was given immunizations in a public school. We literally lined up outside the principal’s office and trooped thru for shots.
You wonder if public schools could serve a public health role in this epidemic. They’re one of the few functioning public systems we have left in this country.
I know everything gets dumped on public schools but everything gets dumped on public schools because all the other public systems have been stripped and gutted and corrupted and they don’t work anymore. We don’t really have a public health system, as we just saw play out.
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