My Goal in Blogging

I started this blog in May of 2008, shortly after my election to the School Committee, because I believed it was very important to both provide the community with an opportunity to share their thoughts with me about our schools and to provide me with an opportunity for me to ask questions and share my thoughts and reasoning. I have found the conversation generated on my blog to be extremely helpful to me in learning community views on many issues. I appreciate the many people who have taken the time to share their views. I believe it is critical to the quality of our public schools to have a public discussion of our community priorities, concerns and aspirations.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Few Students Show Proficiency in Science, Tests Show

This article (from The New York Times) is very interesting, though depressing - showing that American students are much less proficient in science than in other disciplines (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/education/26test.html).  As many of my blog readers likely know, K to 12 science education is one of our district goals for this year, and I am hopeful that we will see some improvements to science education (especially in our elementary schools) in the upcoming year. 

UPDATE:  Here's another article summarizing the same study (http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20110125/US.Report.Card.Science/).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

On Jan 18 you posted information and links about the delayed Supt interviews because of the weather. In the spirit of fairness, shouldn't you post an updated notice about the Maria Geryk interview? I know you commented on it in an unrelated post, but if people don't read those particular comments they might miss it. I don't want to tell you what to do, but I think the rescheduled (2x) interview for a supt candidate would merit a special post for those readers who don't read the comments. Thank you!

Ed said...

Also, along similar lines, about 25% of the military recruits failed the basic knowledge exam - questions like if "if 2+X=4, what is the value of X?"

http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/2011/jan11/military-exam.html

I know this comes from a very political source, but they have way too much to loose fabricating things, and there are way too many people who would love to make an issue of it, so I consider it credible.

And furthermore, regardless of what we may personally think of our military and/or those who choose to serve, one needs to remember that one must either have graduated high school or have a GED in order to even take the test in the first place.

I know this is a self-selected population sample, but still the basic numbers are large enough to be relevant.

And the Pentagon estimates that 75% of young people are ineligible to even take the test because they either didn't graduate high school, have a criminal record, or are medically unfit with 25% being "obese?"

At age 19?!?

This is downright scary...

Anonymous said...

Why are we surprised?