Thursday, May 15th, 2008...8:26 am
Are There No Poor Houses?
Once again, David Safier over at Blog for Arizona just doesn’t get it. His bleeding heart is once again staining his shirts and making a mess of everything.
According to his post over at Blog for Arizona, he asked Tom Horne about his plans to end social promotion during his live chat that the Star staged yesterday. I don’t know why he thought is was his place to ask our state’s top educator about the natural consequences of that policy. Here is what he asked:
David S (daves): Aren’t you concerned about the potential for raising the dropout rate if we hold students back on a regular basis? The Star article mentioned that as a probable outcome.
Tom H (tomhorneaz): No. It doesn’t do any good to keep students in school if they aren’t learning. Fear of dropouts is sometimes used as an excuse for mediocrity. I categorically reject that.
See, Horne and I agree. We shouldn’t be worried about kids dropping out. I don’t worry about that because, you see, this sort of thing keeps me employed. As a matter of fact, such a policy can lead to more employment as the state would then have to hire hundreds, maybe thousands, more prison guards, probation officers and police after the inevitable rise in crime rates when you have so many young folks with no prospects on our streets. Heck, don’t think of this as an education policy, think of it as a government jobs program. Lefties should love that.
NB - Safier has one more post on Horne’s chat here. By the way, I wrote about the bizarre language and poor grammar on the front page of the Superintendent’s website over two years ago. It’s still there.
6 Comments
May 15th, 2008 at 11:00 am
not to mention more Nancy Graces! lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
May 15th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
To put the answer you quote in context, you should include the following additional question and answer:
Georgia B (gcb1): What are your proposals for the motivation of those students who for whatever reason refuse to improve in performance and become dropouts of no economic worth to our state?
Tom H (tomhorneaz): We have been studying ways to motivate these students. Please look at our website under dropout prevention. We have a list of Arizona programs that have shown success
Saying that fear of dropouts is not a reason to dumb down everyone’s curriculum is not to say I haven’t worked hard to reduce the dropout rate. I created a position for a dropout prevention specialist that didn’t exist when I took office, and she visited schools and prepared a study of best practices in dropout prevention that all schools can imitate. It is on our website http://www.ade.az.gov/asd/dropout/AZModelsofEffectiveStrategiesApp.pdf.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
The above post is why Ted gets a free pass to the convention.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Were you unaware of this Q&A by Horne or did you just kind of forget to mention it? Doesn’t say much for your fellow blogger Safier. Do you think he has an agenda?
May 15th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I dunno, do you, Walt?
May 15th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Safir never said anything about dumbing down the curriculum. There is however some serious concerns about the use of high-stakes tests as a sole determination of graduation and promotion/retention.
Hell, I bet Tom Horne and all but a handful of ADE staff and a few legislators could pass all 3 of the 10th Grade AIMS test. (If you’ve heard Horne speak, you KNOW he doesn’t seem to have completely mastered the English Language)
Tom’s push on the AIMS front clearly pushes aside any real-world application/problem-based education (something that the business community wants to see more of). Instead, ADE wants to punish schools that offer reasonable accommodations for students, ie letting Special Ed students use calculators on their AIMS test (even when using a calculator is a part of the accommodations listed, no REQUIRED as part of their instruction in their IEP)
Horne loves to butt in on how things are done in TUSD in particular. Note is recent butting-in on the whole ethnic studies issue. Districts on the Navajo Reservation have ethnic studies courses, yet Horne failed to go after them and how they spend their funds…..
Horne is a buffoon that is just positioning himself to run for governor….
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