Now we are getting closer to seeing eye-to-eye.
I am all for letting kids fail that choose to fail. I have no time in my day for kids that are given every opportunity to do the right thing but choose not to over and over. They are dragging the rest of the class and school down, and the sooner we are shed of them, the better. This does not mean I am unsympathetic to a kid that is busting his/her butt to make it. My simplified world view is society has no use for people that make no attempt to fit in, and the sooner these kids learn the lesson, the better. Let them come back a year or two later, or let them take a G.E.D. once they understand how the world really works.
Perhaps I mispoke... but there are people that will use every test score, or every report (as linked above) to make a point regardless of the context of the scores or the report- and that is not even considering the accuracy issue. Attributing this to you without a direct link was wrong, and I apologize.
I wish parents would get laughed out of court, but they aren't. The tests themselves are attacked. Where do you think "English as a Second Language" policies came from? Parents upset the tests were biased, therefore depriving their children equal education.
It would be difficult to return to the standards of 30 years ago, mainly because the world is irrevocably different than it was. Still... I wish we could narrow our focus a bit to pure academics and ignore the moral issues that seem to dominate our thinking.
