I'd like to compare HISD results to other urban districts in Texas. Obviously it is unfair to compare HISD to Fort Bend, Katy, and the other $$$ suburban districts. I'd bet HISD is the worst school district in Texas. Making Houston Proud!
I live in the Heights and my kids are 2 years away from school age. NO way in hell I'm sending them to HISD. I'll rent an apartment in The Woodlands and drive them up there every day before I'll subject them to public education that is as poor as HISD.
This is exactly the reason why affirmative action has been an utter failure. It is these incompetent students who will fill the racial quotas at universities and jobs and give all minorities a bad name. HISD needs to correct its problems, not boast about it's pathetic performance. HISD needs a massive overhaul, as do these students. I took the TAAS test many years ago and it was a cakewalk. We need to eliminate the excuses (low income, bad neighborhood, poor parents) and demand hard work and performance from these students.
The real tragedy is that if you're too lazy to take AP classes, you don't get to learn anything and are stuck going over remedial stuff aimed at getting test scores up (even if you have consistently exhibited mastery of them). My last two years of high school were a complete waste of time.
Is HISD that bad guys, there has to be some good in that school district some where. How much of Houston does it actually cover, is it the largest school district in Houston or Texas? Why is Bellaire recommended? I'm asking these questions because I plan to move to Houston one day and have children there as well.
If you think poor parents is a bad excuse, then you are crazy. The work ethic starts at home and unfortunately, that's a problem HISD will never be able too fix. Ask any teacher who teaches in a low income area how hard it is to deal with students whose parents don't respect the value of education. Its almost a losing cause. As far as another one of your rants on affirmative action, this issue is totally separate. This article is about kids who have very little chance of graduating let alone getting into a decent college. You can't get into Harvard or UT for that matter through affirmative action when you score a friggin 600 on your SAT. It's a totally separate issue. This is talking about bottom of the barrel students. Lil Pun I think HISD is the third largest school district behind Chicago's and L.A.'s.
Yeah, I agree with this. And it's not just bad parents. How about parents that aren't ever home? Especially when you have single parent families. HISD is supposed to teach math, science, english, etc. It can't waste its time teaching character and life skills.
Well....TV is a bad influence! Media! Bad! Clean it up! That's why basketball is a good thing. You learn a lot of stuff...good influence.
Here is where I get lit up. The problem lies with selfish parents that have material desires. Children need a parent at home. They don't need day care. They learn habits and sh!tty manners when they are tikes and their parents are absent for their childhood. This generation of parents is a worthless pile of human debris. One parent at home, one at work. That's how things should be. I don't give a flip if it's the husband or the wife. Oh yeah another problem is because nowadays a husband leaves the f4cking seat up and the wife files for divorce. Or the wife gains 5 pounds and the husband files for divorce. People get married and they see divorce as an option going into the institution of marriage. It makes me wanna puke. Also the schools suck because of political correctness but I will go into that later. I am sure there will be some of you folks out there that want to defend why you and your spouse work but save it. I don't want to hear it. It's my belief that kids are stupid today, on the average (36% of soph's? passed?) because of poor parenting and outward blame. TV is a bad influence? F4cking tell your kids to turn it off. It is not the media's fault, it's the parents. pathetic.
My wife was a teacher for 5 years....she ultimately quit to stay home with our son. Fortunately, my practice developed quickly enough to afford that. She says if she ever goes back to work, she would not return to teaching....her number one frustration was the parents. Parents who did not give one tinker's damn about their kids education. She had parents come up and literally say, "I don't have time to read with my kid/help with homework/etc...I don't have time to discipline him/her...etc." Basically, they don't have time to be a parent. That's not good enough. The schools can only do so much. We are just now confirming what we've known all along...parental involvement is the number one influence in a child's life. Children who are beaten by their parents....they beat their kids when they grow up. Children who don't have a father figure...are like 10X more likely to end up in jail than those who did. If there's no security at home, there's no basis for confidence in performing well at school or anywhere else. There is no more important job than taking care of your kids...absolutely NOTHING is more important, once you have kids. But the world says that kids are too much trouble...you deserve a break...you deserve this and that...responsibility is lame....commitments are made to be broken...kids are flexible...they'll get over it. And then we wonder why we get test results like these...we wonder why we have kids on all sorts of medications to control their moods...we wonder why we have kids turning schools into shooting ranges.
I know it sounds like conservative blame the victim b.s. RR, but if kids don't study, they won't learn. If they don't have parents who encourage studying, they are at risk. You can't expect teachers to be miracle workers, or schools in general. The ciriculum is meant for kids to take time away from school to spend on their school work. The school can't be there twenty four hours.
Both my parents spent more than 30 years each in HISD - my dad 37. They have hated the testing since it was started along with no-pass-no-play for a variety of reasons but the main reason being that now public schools spend more than 50 percent of classroom time teaching students how to pass the test. This is the very antithesis of what education is supposed to be. Instead of teaching kids how to learn and grow mentally, they are teaching them how to take a single test. There have been numerous college groups around the country who have asked school districts to suspend this practice because they said it makes kids LESS prepared for college. They complain that professors often have to re-teach things that should have been taught in high school. There is no question that parental involvement (or lack thereof) is the key factor to educating children. Of course, unlike some who would like to distill it down to "those parents are bad" or "this is all affirmative action's fault," most educators will tell you the problem is incredibly complex and involves poverty, psychological factors, transportation, budgetary issues and literally dozens of other factors. But, the truth is testing is taking education in the wrong direction whether parents are involved or not. As usual, we've tried to take an incredibly complex problem and government issue a blanket solution and, predictably, it is failing.
Jeff, I agree that it is more than the parents are bad. It's hard for two parents to have time to instill good values when they are getting home at 6:00pm, and have to provide other basic needs before they can started on working on school work. As you state there are many mitigating factors and I apologize for lumping all parents into stringent categories. As far as this testing is concerned, I also agree with you 100%. Since Bush has implemented his plan on payment for performance, and really even before Bush, school districts has placed sole emphasis on getting these kids to pass tests, and that is a terrible way to teach kids. But this is the Bush MBA program for running the government, payment for performance.
for the record...i'm not sure that i'm saying all parents are bad...but i'm certainly not saying that all parents are responsible. blame whatever you want for that. i think it's a societal problem...but ultimately, decisions i make for my children are MY decisions. I'm held accountable for those decisions.
Huh? I hope you know "blaming the victim" is a weak-ass defense. Always has been, I learned that in Sociology class. Conservatives usually blame public schools and say at private schools are the easy answer. I'm not saying that.
For what it's worth, 10th graders in the Dallas Independent School district had a similar passing rate for the science section of the test, roughly 52%. I'm not a fan of this kind of testing, though. I don't think it necessarily gives an accurate picture of knowledge, and the tests do often prevent teachers from teaching in a way that could best impart the required knowledge. As for the reasons for the low scores or for low achievement at large city school districts, though, I don't think you can lay the blame at any one thing. Like everything else, it's a combination of things, some of which have been mentioned, that contribute to the problems. I do wonder why these big, property-tax rich districts like Dallas cann't educate students, though. How can a district like Plano get that much better results spending less money per student? I wish the answer was something simple like spending more money in Dallas, but I don't think that's going to get the results we desire.
Jeff, I could not disagree with you more. Students and teachers must be held accountable for their performance, and unfortunately, there is no better way to do this than standardized testing. This is no different than taking the GMAT for business school, the MCAT for med school, the CPA exam, the Bar exam, the GRE's etc. etc. Without a gauge of performance and a goal to reach for, students' education lacks organization and discipline. What is lost in your argument is how *EASY* the TAKS test truly is. It's laughable. They've dumbed the test down to something a primate could pass. There is absolutely no excuse for failing this test. None. I simply do not buy the poverty, social influence, psychological, parental argument one bit. This is yet another excuse by people who perpetually underperform what is expected of them. This is the convenient cop-out that the 'victims' typically cite as evidence of their oppression. It's an excuse and must be labeled as such. Our school system must be held accountable for the level of education it provides its students. Standardized testing is the proper way to administer this. There comes a point when excuses must be eliminated for students to grow.
