It’s always amusing to see non-educators have hot juicy takes on education. It’s not always dumb. Sometimes there are good pts made. But usually those come (i. in person ii. from people actually concerned with education rather than using it as a punching bag to prove some overall political pt.).
For those actually curious, many Utah schools are moving to a standards based grading model. Some of you in Davis, Jordan, Granite, Canyons, and Alpine have perhaps already seen this? Grades are shown 0-4 rather Than F-A. They’re based on current student mastery of knowledge, skills, and dispositions identified by teacher teams. The pros to this is that rather than play the pts game for a grade, students and teachers focus on what’s truly important and parents can better support their learners. There are a bunch of cons, most of them logistical. Grading programs don’t easily produce 0-4 grades, secondary using a 0-4 scale doesn’t always translate nicely for colleges, many parents don’t understand 0-4 grading, some teacher teams don’t collaborate as well and haven’t agreed yet on what’s essential, etc. But this is a pretty big change from grading in the past.
Many schools are offering additional reading and writing programs over the summer. Some of it comes from left over Covid funds that weren’t included in last session’s tax cuts. We await the results of these programs.
There’s always chatter about changing secondary start times to be later. But that really clashes with extra curricular parents. No one wants sportsball practices to go late. And honestly, supervising late games in the spring when it’s still cold sucks. But seriously, if you want to see some gains in secondary? Get rid of the 2.5 month break over summer and start school 1 hr later. All the research I’ve seen supports this… the public probably won’t… but meh.
I also think we should boost the trade schools. Most secondary schools already have some programs. All your major districts along the Wasatch front have trade schools. I think we’ve gone overboard with college preparedness. One can make a great living being an electrician. Why go to 4 years of college and incur massive debt when you could knock out a bunch of your education at a trade school in high school?
Btw, if we really want to improve education, we need to stop giving handouts to private and charter schools. These schools for the most part, perform far worse than your median public school. I did some work early in the grading system in utah. Our top 20 schools? Majority public. Our bottom 20? Majority charter/private. There was one in particular that was a Mormon fundamentalist school in Davis County. *Shocked* that they sucked big time at science, math, and reading/writing
View: https://twitter.com/joshcowenmsu/status/1671561074980667396?s=46&t=QT7YFlZ_IlHq81PpZAhKgw
