According to a report released last week, less than half of the 2019 Los Angeles Unified School District graduating class will be eligible to attend one of the state’s public universities. There are 15 essential “A–G” courses, including English, math, and science that students need to get a C or better in to be eligible, and just 49 percent could hack it. Overall, the graduation rate is 76.6 percent.Oh, I'm not going to challenge his numbers. Let's just stipulate that they're right. What I challenge is his implication that less than half of LAUSD students' meeting CSU/UC "A-G" requirements is a bad thing.
Grad rate numbers for students in Los Angeles should come with a giant asterisk after it because the district offers credit recovery classes, which help pad the count. Typically, these courses are online, rigor-free, and require little effort to get a passing grade. In 2016, the American Institutes for Research released the results of a study on the effect of these courses for Algebra 1, and found that they failed to improve students’ general comprehension of the content.Toss in grade inflation, too, and Larry's point is spot on.
Hotels in California may no longer be able to provide guests with tiny bottles of shampoo, conditioner, lotion, or other personal care products.*sigh*
Assembly Bill 1162 passed the Natural Resources committee on Monday by a vote of 6-3 (two Assemblymembers did not vote.)
The bill would ban “lodging establishments”, including hotels, motels, resorts, bed and breakfasts, and vacation rentals, from offering small plastic bottles holding 12 ounces or under of product in rooms or public spaces. Instead, the establishments could offer “bulk dispensers” that could be used by a number of people. The goal is to cut down on the amount of plastic containers thrown away by guests and operators. The law wouldn’t apply to nursing homes, hospitals, long-term rentals, or hosted rentals...
If AB 1162 becomes law, lodging establishments would be inspected and owners/operators would face fines if they’re caught violating the law. The fine amount hasn’t been set yet, although the Natural Resources committee recommended setting a fine of $500 for the second and subsequent violations, with fines not exceeding $2,000 a year.
A Florida teenager's goal to do well on the SAT ended up paying off -- and then some -- when he discovered he'd earned a perfect score of 1,600 on the test....Good job, kid!
Less than 1 percent of the 2.1 million students who took the SAT in 2018 scored between 1,400 and 1,600, according to the College Board's most recent total group report. Harrison was the first student in Pinellas County to earn a perfect SAT score since 2013, according to FOX13...
Harrison said while he may have achieved a perfect score, he's focused on his other activities and newfound tutoring business. After graduating from high school, the 17-year-old is looking to go on to college to study statistics.
Irshad Manji thinks young people in American society have become too easily offended.Gonna have to reprogram just about every leftie out there.
“I’m here to propose that while more and more schools are teaching young people how not to be offensive, they also need to be teaching a new generation how not to be offended,” Manji — an educator who recently released her third book, Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times — says in a video for Time.
Discussions about what is and isn’t “politically correct” have dominated social media in recent years, but Manji believes “giving offense is the price of diversity, not an impediment to diversity.”
This is why she suggests schools should teach the next generation of adults — who will undoubtedly be debating politics and other polarizing issues — how not to feel insulted when faced with differing viewpoints.
“Teaching young people how not to be offended is to equip them to embrace people as complex individuals and not just as mascots of this or that tribe,” says Manji. “We grow by engaging those with whom we disagree. When we take offense, we’re in [a] reactive mode, and we miss opportunities to ask people why they believe what they do.”
Taylor found these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic trash per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. "What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned," she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect.So others can pretend that they are doing something "for the environment", I have to be inconvenienced every single time I go to the store. Wonderful.
Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. "So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags," Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year.
Plastic haters, it's time to brace yourselves. A bunch of studies find that paper bags are actually worse for the environment. They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals, fuel and heavy machinery. While paper is biodegradable and avoids some of the problems of plastic, Taylor says, the huge increase of paper, together with the uptick in plastic trash bags, means banning plastic shopping bags increases greenhouse gas emissions. That said, these bans do reduce nonbiodegradable litter...
A 2011 study by the U.K. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once. The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment...
The most environment-friendly way to carry groceries is to use the same bag over and over again. According to the Danish study, the best reusable ones are made from polyester or plastics like polypropylene. Those still have to be used dozens and dozens of times to be greener than plastic grocery bags, which have the smallest carbon footprint for a single use.
In much of the country a powerful energy boom is providing a serious stimulus to economic growth. But in California, where fossil fuels are considered about as toxic as tobacco, we are lurching toward an anticipated energy shortage that will further exacerbate the state’s already deep geographic and class divisions.How can a 1st-world economy like California even function under 3rd-world utility conditions? And let's not forget about the impact on the people themselves:
California, in a typical feat of “virtue signaling,” has committed the state to getting half of its electrical power from renewables such as wind and solar, up from 16 percent today, within the next decade. This drive has meant the rapid abandonment of electricity generated by nuclear power as well as natural, gas which together comprised nearly 70 percent of all electricity production in 2015.
This may not end well. California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Picker suggested recently that we could soon return “the kind of crisis we faced in 2000 and 2001.” The rapid abandonment of existing reliable energy sources makes the state, in the estimate of the Institute for Energy Research, “vulnerable to rolling blackouts.”
The price of our leaders’ green virtue will fall particularly hard on working-class Californians who already suffer the nation’s highest rate of people living in poverty. They also tend to live in less-temperate geographies such as the Inland Empire, the high desert and the Central Valley. Expect the recent moves to expand the ranks of the million Californians who suffer from “energy poverty,” defined as spending 10 percent or more of their household income on energy-related expenses.How does California become Green-topia? By ignoring reality:
Our economic dependency is worsened by the fact that California, once a major energy exporter, has adopted a bizarre policy that restricts not only local production but restricts imports from places such as North Dakota and Texas. Instead of embracing these Trump-leaning states, our leaders seem happier to get most of our crude oil shipped in forward-looking despotisms like Saudi Arabia.
California has taken bold action by shuttering its coal plants, planning to shut down the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant so it can increase its share of renewable energy, or that’s what the Greenies out there want to believe. In reality, the Golden State simply imports electricity generated by coal, natural gas, and nuclear facilities from Arizona and Nevada and pretends they are “green energy” leaders.This doesn't sound like a winning strategy.
In fact, no other state imports more electricity than does California...
California’s policies promoting renewables at the expense of dispatchable generation place it in an odd predicament, it must pay other states to take the excess electricity generated by renewables when their generation is high, and it must also pay other states for their power when renewable generation is low.
The Green New Deal—proposed in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D–Mass.)—would require a vast expansion of coercive government power in order to achieve its goal: "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources" in only 10 years.Practically speaking, this is impossible. So why would people push this at all? Answer: it's not for power-generation purposes, it's for power purposes. Their own power.
The plan, which has been endorsed as of this writing by at least six Democratic presidential candidates, would not only require a complete reordering of the American economy; it could happen only by trampling over property rights, local and state control, and the autonomy of the American private sector...
Since the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, power would have to be shifted via high-voltage transmission lines quickly from place to place across the whole country to prevent local blackouts. The proposed solution to that problem is the North American Supergrid, consisting of about 50,000 miles of high-voltage power lines. Yet these also tend to provoke considerable landowner and environmental activist opposition. For example, it took the American Electric Power Company 14 years to obtain approval for a 90-mile high-voltage transmission project in West Virginia and Virginia.
To bypass objections to building a national supergrid, the Climate Institute suggests that Congress grant eminent domain authority to regional transmission organizations—i.e., independent bureaucracies that operate power transmission assets and provide wholesale transmission services within a defined geographic region. Handing the right to seize people's property to such entities might be an efficient way to get things done, but they are not elected bodies and their possession of such powers might not be constitutional...
The only presently operating offshore wind farm is Deepwater Wind near the coast of Rhode Island. It consists of five turbines rated at 30 megawatts total. Proposed in 2008, that project began operating eight years later. A 2016 plan for powering the United States with 100 percent renewable energy, devised by a team of Stanford and Berkeley researchers, would require building 156,200 5-megawatt offshore turbines. (This plan, by the way, is the closest thing we have to a roadmap for 100 percent renewable energy—and even it suggests a timeframe of 30 years, rather than 10, at a cost of $14 trillion.)
The prospects for onshore wind power are somewhat better. There are about 96 gigawatts of such capacity currently installed. Fulfilling the Stanford plan—which calls for 328,000 new 5-megawatt onshore turbines—would require only a 17-fold increase over the next decade.
Solar photovoltaic farms currently installed in the U.S. meanwhile have a total capacity of 60 gigawatts. According to the Stanford plan's calculations, the country would need to build another 2,324 gigawatts—at a rate of 234 gigawatts per year. In a December 2018 report, the Solar Energy Industries Association said it actually expects installations to rise to 14 gigawatts per year by 2023.
The Ontario government is considering implementing mandatory annual math testing for all teachers in the province.
Teachers would be required to pass the test in order to continue teaching. It would apply to teachers of both primary and secondary school, even if they do not primarily teach mathematics, senior government sources told The Canadian Press.
The consideration of the annual test for all teachers comes after the government passed legislation Wednesday that will require all aspiring teachers in Ontario to pass a math test before receiving their licence to teach...Do we know that teachers can't? Do we know which teachers can't?
"How can we expect our students to do the math when our teachers can't?" a government source said.
A federal court permitted a lawsuit to proceed against an Illinois school district that allows high school boys to use girls’ locker rooms, restrooms and showers in order to accommodate transgender students.Who in their right mind thinks it's OK for boys to be in the girls' bathrooms or locker rooms at school, and vice versa? Who thinks this is "reasonable"?
But girls who don’t want to be seen naked by boys got bad news: The judge ruled that they have no right to “visual bodily privacy” if the government says so...
U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso is letting Title IX and religious freedom claims go forward while throwing out other claims. Tom Petersen, director of community relations for the district, emphasized that “only three” claims are going forward.
“The District will continue to defend our practices that affirm and support the identity of all our students,” he wrote in an email to The College Fix...
They (the plaintiffs) also claimed the school district has “conveyed to students” they are “bigoted and intolerant” if they object to the school policy. Some have suffered “actual heckling” from other students, which dissuaded them from “asking to use a private locker room,” while the district has blocked some from using private facilities.
This “bigoted” allegation is why the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim under the free exercise clause is also moving forward. Alonso called it the kind of “subtle departure” from “facially” neutral laws that the Supreme Court has frowned upon...
Perhaps most troubling for high school girls who are anxious about their developing bodies, the judge said they enjoy no right to not be seen naked by the opposite sex.
Jasmine Lane, who’s completing a teacher education program, knows how it feels to work hard and fail.There are several excellent comments on that post about giving students work at their own level, and grading them on effort or improvement. But the most cogent point to me came near the end of Joanne's post:
At her low-performing school, where only 12 percent of students were at grade level in math, teachers gave students work at “your level.”
Teachers “don’t have the moral authority” to tell students their standardized test scores don’t matter, Lane writes. That sets students up to have their confidence shattered.Kicking the can down the road should not be an educational plan.
A high school robotics team from Minnesota built its greatest creation yet, one that has changed a 2-year-old boy's life. Farmington Public Schools' "Rogue Robotics Team" made an electric wheelchair for a toddler named Cillian Jackson. Cillian has a rare genetic condition that affects his mobility. Similar chairs can cost up to $20,000 and his parents' insurance didn't cover it.
So the family reached out to the Rogue Robotics Team. The group of high school students received help from the University of Delaware's GoBabyGo program, which creates custom vehicles for children with limited mobility. GoBabyGo can create a mobility device that looks like a race car or a Disney princess-mobile.
"I would say [it took] a couple of weeks working after school," Coach Spencer Elvebak, told CBS News. "The GoBabyGo program gave us some great resources to use, but we did have to make quite a few customizations to accommodate for Cillian's specific needs," Elvebak said.
Rogue Robotics gave Cillian's family the gift just before Christmas and posted a video on Facebook of the 2-year-old using the chair for the first time.
Parents and teachers hate SBG because the sheer volume of grades is overwhelming.Our school district uses an online student information system that allows me to post students' grades for each assignment/test/quiz/project/etc., and allows parents to log on to see these grades. The overall grade is just some linear combination of those individual components, and my guess is that 99% neither understand nor care about the individual grades. They want to know "how their kid is doing" in the aggregate.
Rather than getting an A in English and a B in math, a child receives a grade of 1-4 (or similar) for every single standard in English and the same for math, etc. Looking at one grade level for a rough measure we find there are roughly 80 English/Language Arts standards alone!
The argument is made by proponents of SBG that then parents will know if their kid knows quadratic equations but doesn’t understand exponential equations. But parents will have to be able to decipher the jargon used in the standards. For example: Use tiling to show in a concrete case that the area of a rectangle with whole-number side lengths a and b + c is the sum of a × b and a × c. Use area models to represent the distributive property in mathematical reasoning.
(CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.MD.C.7.C)
Now, how many people can understand that?
In the case of the frustration and burden placed on teachers, they often must show evidence of each student’s mastery of each concept. And if a test question covers three standards and another question covers two different standards, then they have to track all of that information for every student in their class. 25 math standards times 25 students times 10 tests…. Well, you get the picture.
Of course, the ed tech companies are poised and ready to solve that problem! Teachers, just turn your teaching over to the ed tech companies! They can provide you – for a few taxpayers’ dollars – with nice computer-based programs that even produce gradebook reports to track all of the standards, with each student’s proficiency included. Phew! Now teachers won’t have to teach anything above and beyond the basic common standards. Where would be the motivation to do so?
