Scriblerus Club

We Are Partners in Educating Every Child

On Thursday, Deputy Secretary Ray Simon will attend the Fourth Meeting of Ministers of Education in the Western Hemisphere in Scarborough, Trinidad and Tobago. The meeting is held under the aegis of the Organization of American States.

In remarks Dep. Sec. Simon announced that new testing policies will be announced soon to require the testing sequences from first through eigth grade be reversed so that eigth graders will take first grade tests, seventh graders will take second grade tests, and so on.

“We really need to get our testing performances up,” Simon told reporters after the main meeting. “By inverting the testing sequence, we should see dramatic improvements in the upper grades and only marginal downward performance in the lower grades. The beauty of this is that we can prove unequivocally that student performance improves as they progress through school.”

Way to go! Just goes to show the kinds of performance we can get out of our students when we start thinking outside the box!

Waxman’s Report has me seeing red! Here is a Congressman trying to convince us that telling teens not to have sex until marriage is wrong. What is he thinking?

Just because the abstinence programs distort the truth a little bit? And sometimes they outright fabricate a certain Judeo-Christian reality (“God WANTS you to wait until you’re wed”) in order to make a point? Isn’t that just, like, poetic license? It’s not like they’re lying!

I mean, think about it! If we start giving teens the flat, unvarnished truth they’ll be sneaking away in the back seats of cars on back roads and humping like rabbits at the first drop of a belt! If we can’t scare them enough, they’ll wind up like … well … like US!

THEN where will we be??

It’s time to get serious about high school drop-outs.

According to a recent study, almost 30% of students fail to graduate from high school on time. This study concludes that much more work needs to be done.

I couldn’t agree more. We must encourage the slackers and non-conformists in our society to weed themselves out early. It is a critical factor that students from Latino and African-American descent drop out at much higher rates, which can only mean that these students understand the hopelessness of their positions earlier and in greater numbers. We must address the issue of improving the numbers of white, middle-class students who drop out. The sooner we get the bottom half of the students out of the schools, the sooner we will see the improvements in academic performance in this last, critical time period before the ravening generational horde is released on society.

The latest information from the US Department of Education reveals that fully half of America’s children are below average in academic performance. The data reveal that this shameful state extends across every discipline — reading, writing, math, science — and every grade from K thru 12.

How can we, as Proud Americans, allow this shameful level of performance to stand?

The No Child Left Behind Act needs to stop pussy-footing around and start punishing these schools that are below average. Any school that has half (or more) of its students performing at below average should be put on notice that they are failing their students – and their country – and they will be closed in one year if they do not turn the corner on the shame.

Martinus Scriblerus