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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nI listened the other day, as I do most days, to talk radio host Dennis Prager. He lamented on this Independence Day that American children just don\u2019t sing patriotic songs anymore \u2013 and he\u2019s quite right. Dennis\u2019s point reminded me of something in my historical archives \u2013 a program of instruction for Arbor Day in New York State Schools. The program is a 16-page guide from the Dept. of Public Instruction that outlines activities and themes that schools might cover on the celebration of Arbor Day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nNear the end of that program is a list of songs that school-children could sing:<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Following that, there was an \u201cexercise on the American Flag.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember, folks, this was for *Arbor Day*. That our current celebrations of American holidays pales in comparison to what we\u2019ve done in the past for even fairly unimportant holidays, shows how much we have, to quote Virginia Slims, come a long way, baby \u2013 and that\u2019s not always a good thing. The inimitable Suzie Creamcheese, who blogs at The Wall, passed on yet another tidbit about Hillsborough County. Hillsborough County, Florida \u2013 for those of us outside the state, we can just think of this as the greater-Tampa area \u2013 has a grade inflation problem. A big one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \nAs The Tampa Tribune opined a few weeks ago:<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt used to be that a 4.0 grade-point average was considered a perfect \u201cA,\u201d but the numbers posted by some recent Hillsborough high school graduates have been positively stratospheric \u2013 including the county\u2019s top GPA of 8.68 earned by a student at King High School who was this year\u2019s numbers leader. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \nWho knew there was even such a thing as being more than doubly perfect?\u201d<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, Tribune editors, if you hadn\u2019t realize by now that Superintendent Elia and her administration think *they\u2019re* doubly-perfect, now you do. See, they\u2019re just passing on to the students the back-patting that\u2019s given administrators in Hillsborough County a grievous case of bursitis over the last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Later in the piece \u2013 and it\u2019s a must-read \u2013 we see real evidence of grade inflation from the mouths of babes:<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs one Chamberlain High School student recently put it: \u201cIn our class, anything under a 5.0 is considered mediocre to sucky.\u201d And here we thought a 5.0 was better than perfect. The district would provide considerable more transparency and accountability if it ceased monkeying with the labels and scoring systems and simply made high school courses appropriately hard and fair. Schools should give extra credit to students who push themselves the extra mile, but there\u2019s no need to pile it on so thick.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \nA sensible suggestion, no doubt.<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n In an absolutely useless rebuttal to the Tribune\u2019s editorial, Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia, back-patter extraordinaire and anything but a scholar, explained to we who are so intellectually deficient, why these GPAs are so high: \u201cThe Tribune\u2019s June 14th editorial is yet another unnecessarily harsh jab at the public schools.\u201d Actually, Ms. Elia, it\u2019s a fair treatment of a glaring problem with your terrible administration. She went on to explain to we who are ignorant dolts and the like why, exactly, these GPAs are so gosh-darn high: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n\u201cThere\u2019s a simple reason the GPAs are higher: Students take more classes and more challenging classes. Good for them.\u201d<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, Superintendent Elia \u2013 and since you\u2019ve weighted those class grades so outrageously, your students wind up with GPAs that mirror Mary Lou Retton\u2019s scores on the floor exercise. Your system created the problem, then you tell us that we\u2019re dumb for not realizing how the system works. If you want to know why I don\u2019t live in this otherwise wonderful part of Florida, there ya go. <\/p>\n\n\n\n April Griffin’s endorsement of Stephen Gorham<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On a more local note, there\u2019s a bit of news out of New Hartford, New York regarding public information requests. The blog New Hartford, NY Online, an offshoot of the New Hartford Concerned Citizens, would like to see New Hartford Central School comply with the Freedom of Information Laws \u2013 or FOIL, for short. They say: \u201cThat\u2019s right; it is a law, but the New Hartford Central School just doesn\u2019t seem to think they need to comply. We have received emails from our readers asking us when we think we might get a copy of the Employees Union Contract that was approved by the school board in January. The clock keeps ticking\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hopefully their clock has a fresh battery, because it may have to tick for quite some time before the district responds. One is sometimes driven to think that FOIL, to public school administrators, is just something you make hats out of in ed school. And on Fault Lines, the Greater Utica Blog, we learned that the Utica City Schools administration is pushing a $187 million dollar bond. Says one Ms. Bernadette Eichler in the Utica O-D: \u201cOver the years, I have worked with brilliant, creative and caring administrators, teachers, members of the Utica Board of Education, college staff and community members. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Their wisdom, leadership, support and ideas did indeed bring the students in the Utica district to a higher level of academic achievement. These abilities and talents also created a stimulating environment for learning, as well as provide opportunities for students to explore and try new ideas. Now this leadership and support groups of Utica have an unbelievable opportunity to once again demonstrate their wisdom and talents by supporting the $187.6 million bond issue.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \nFault Lines mashes the nail right on the head:<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWow. These are the same people who studied a project for months that they could not carry out, shuffled administrators like they were a deck of cards, couldn\u2019t keep student schedules straight, ran out of textbooks, and spent a ton of money at Proctor and now want to spend more at the same school. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can play this Education for the Aughts Podcast by clicking on the triangular \u2018play\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":999,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions\/999"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstclasseducation.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}