Posts Tagged ‘education’

I’m Old Enough to Remember When the Idea of Mississippi Schools Being Top Notch Would Be a Joke

Posted: May 8, 2025 by datechguy in education
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Not anymore:

Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country.

You read that right. Mississippi is taking names.

In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi.1 By 2024, only four states had fewer.

When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results2 for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:

  • Fourth grade math: 1st
  • Fourth grade reading: 1st
  • Eighth grade math: 1st
  • Eighth grade reading: 4th

And they’re not alone:

Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off.

So how did this happen?

How did Mississippi go from 49th in the country a decade ago to near the top today? And what can other states learn from it? 

According to a recent piece by Grace Brazeale, a policy associate with the advocacy group Mississippi First, the state implemented a series of changes starting with the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. That law funded the state department of education to hire, train and deploy literacy coaches to the 50 lowest-performing schools. It also required schools to administer universal screenings to identify students with reading deficiencies early and to communicate those results to parents, and it required schools to hold back students who were not reaching a certain threshold by third grade. 

Remember for all my life Mississippi was a punchline now it’s a success story for education. Amazing what can happen when you don’t focus on being woke and deal with reading and writing. I’ll give Glenn Reynolds the last word:

To be fair, for nearly all those years when Mississippi was a joke, it was ruled by Democrats.

Crusading for cursive writing

Posted: January 16, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Pennsylvania—like 28 other states—does not require students to write in cursive lettering.

Fortunately, at least one Pennsylvania politician is mounting a campaign to force students to learn how to write in cursive.

State Rep. Joe Adams, a Republican representing an area near Scranton, thinks it should be mandated and has proposed legislation to do so.

A former school superintendent, Adams said he believes it is important enough to find time to teach it, and he said so do experts in education, neurology, and psychology who offer up brain science and historical reasons to support the idea. He also gave some practical reasons.

“You can’t open a bank account without signing your name. You can’t buy a property or get a credit card without having to be able to sign your name,” Adams said. He added that a person’s signature can be a unique identifier that could be one thing artificial intelligence cannot reproduce.
“All those things pointed me to saying, this makes great sense,” Adams said.

Pennsylvania’s Education Secretary Khalid Mumin doesn’t consider cursive instruction to be vital.

“Secretary Mumin encourages schools to determine the best paths for their students to learn to communicate effectively in writing and achieve success, regardless of the mode of writing used to get there,” Education Department spokesman Taj Magruder Adams told PennLive.com.

Cumberland Valley, located in southern Pennsylvania near the Maryland border, decided to reintroduce cursive writing into the curriculum.

Robyn Euker, Cumberland Valley’s director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, said the district chose to require cursive instruction after noticing an increasing number of students with poor handwriting in the upper grades.

When the district was looking to adopt a new literacy curriculum, she said, it decided to buy the cursive writing supplement to address the handwriting concern.

Two years later, Euker said the feedback she had received was positive.

“I think it’s a little bit of a creative outlet for students,” she said.
Euker also said it seems beneficial for students with reading and writing issues. Writing in cursive has fewer starts and stops than in print. Words appear as one block instead of a series of separate letters, which can help students with dyslexia.

Given the benefits, including allowing students to read handwritten cards from older relatives, Euker said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more states require it.”

After all, it’s not an instruction that needs to be taught repeatedly. Once students learn it, the neuropathways allow them to associate a manuscript letter with how it looks in cursive and understand what is written, said Lynn Baynum, chair of Shippensburg University’s Teacher Education Department.

“When we first began teaching cursive a hundred years ago, we didn’t understand it was a pattern of associations we were doing to create a literate society,” Baynum said. “It’s also why keyboarding is important to teach, too, because we don’t want students slowing down their ability to communicate because they have to find a letter on the keyboard.”

Teaching cursive is a no-brainer to me.

Yes You can Blame the US and the UK and Australia and Yes Even Israel in a Fram Oil Filter sort of way

Posted: November 7, 2023 by datechguy in culture, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, middle east
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King Richard (Disguised): Oh, now I remember. How does your loyalty to Richard set on a killer of knights, a poacher of the king’s deer and an outlaw?

Robin Hood: Those I’ve killed died from misusing the trust that Richard left them. And the worst rogue of these is the king’s own brother.

King Richard (Disguised): Oh, then you blame Prince John.

King Richard (Disguised): No, I blame Richard. His task was defending his people instead of deserting them to fight in foreign lands.

The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938

Since the beginning of the Israel Hamas War I have seen a concerted effort to blame Israel and the west:

  • For the Hamas Attacks
  • For the Reactions on Western Campus
  • For the Response to Mass Protests
  • For the open antisemitism in the west

Now of course Hamas did the attack and the slaughter than brought this all on but when it comes to blaming the west let’s to the chase. They have a point.

  • I blame the west for ignoring the problem of Radical Islam in General and Hamas in particular.
  • I blame the west for allowing illegal migration bringing supporters of Jew slaughter to their lands
  • I blame the west for not enforcing their own laws against those who came illegally or even legally.
  • I blame the west for punishing those who objected to these double standards.
  • I blame the west for silencing any who warned about what was happening (see Spencer & Geller et/al)
  • I blame the west for attacking their own civilization for trifles (see microaggressions) but ignoring actual crimes of others.
  • I blame the west for letting their educational systems be taken over by those who hate us.
  • I blame the west for letting themselves be paid off
  • I blame the west for playing the “moral equivalence” game
  • I blame the west for funding the Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular without control or audit of the funds or materials.
  • I blame the west for not supporting those opposing the Mullahs in Iran
  • I blame the west for not taking out the Mullahs when they had armies both to the east and the west of them
  • I blame the west in general and the Biden Administration in particular for funding Iran
  • I blame the west for pressuring Israel to stop fighting back for the sake of peace and quiet.

And most important of all

  • I blame the west for doing all these things while there was still a chance of stopping this at a low cost.

And I don’t leave out Israel from the blame game

  • I blame Israel for deluding themselves that you could contain Hamas
  • I blame Israel and Israelis for pretending that the Palestinians want peace
  • I blame Israel for giving back Gaza, legitimately won in war with Egypt, to the Palestinians.

But most of all

  • I blame Israel for not finishing the job nine years ago when Hamas hit them or frankly any of the other dozen times that Hamas attacks and they let it go.

I actually had “giving Egypt back the Sinai” on this list but you can argue that an active peace with Egypt was worth it of course actually given Israel’s nuclear deterrence and active peace with Egypt was going to be the norm anyways, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here.

So if you want to blame the US or blame the UK or blame Australia or even blame Israel, you do have a point in the sense that all of these that have happened were preventable so you are basically making the Fram oil filter argument from the 1970’s ads.

Israel and the west decided they wanted to pay the price later and are now doing so.

DaTechGuy’s (Nearly) Daily Pintastic NE posts: Homebrews and Circuit Meltdown brought to you by North Metro Tech Wakefield MA

Posted: September 17, 2023 by datechguy in education, entertainment, fun, pinball, short films/interviews, special events
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Thanks to a nasty fall I’m home on Sunday night and off my right foot to post more homebrew videos.

Here is the homebrew room with machines in place:

Homebrew machines are cool but the coolest of them all is Circuit Meltdown not just because it’s a nice game but because it was built as a school project by the North Metro Tech highschool in Wakefield Mass.

Here is my interview with their teacher Brian Caven:

My battery ran out so I ran back to my room and grabbed my spare as he was showing someone the guts and we continued:

Again this machine was designed and built by the kids in his class and here they are:

I suspect none of these kids are going to be short of jobs in a few years.

Pintastic NE 2023 The Story So Far

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