Pressing the right buttons
A clever kid finds a way to use a "clever" calculator:
Texas Instruments is replacing thousands of calculators issued to students in Virginia after a sixth-grader discovered that pressing a certain two keys converts decimals into fractions. That would have given students an unfair advantage on Virginia's standardized tests, which require youngsters to know how to make such conversions with pencil and paper.
At the request of the state education department two years ago, Texas Instruments had disabled the decimal-to-fraction key and left it blank on calculators intended for middle school students.
But in January, Dakota Brown, a 12-year-old at Carver Middle School in suburban Richmond's Chesterfield County, figured out that by pressing two other keys on his state-approved TI-30 Xa SE VA, he could change decimals into fractions anyway...
Calls to the boy's school and his parents to arrange an interview with the youngster were not immediately returned. But Chesterfield County school officials held a low-key ceremony to honor him, and Texas Instruments sent him a graphing calculator, "which he loved," said Lois Williams, the state administrator in charge of middle-school math.
Perhaps Dakota's looking at a possible future in the testing and QA departments at Texas Instruments. After all, no one there caught this.
Florida schools improve
Florida improves but the carping continues:
Despite tougher standards and the first-time inclusion of disabled students, Florida's schools generally maintained their state-assigned grades in reports released by Gov. Jeb Bush on Wednesday.
Bush also announced a potentially dramatic change in how the state's schools are judged by the federal No Child Left Behind act. The changes could mean that more than 60 percent of Florida schools may avoid federal retribution for failing to show improvement compared with only 23 percent last year.
The state grades are given after analyzing a number of measurements, including FCAT scores and the improvement of each student as he or she moves from grade to grade.
Bush said "the good news continues" and portrayed the grades as an ongoing step toward rectifying a public school system neglected for years.
The good news is immediately followed by criticism:
Democrats repeated their attacks on the grading system, saying they rely too much on the FCAT and ignore the needs of individual students in a diverse state. House Democratic Leader Chris Smith, D-Fort Lauderdale said school grades fail to acknowledge that the state's teachers' pay, average class size and graduation rates still rank near the bottom of the 50 states.
"It is one thing to declare success and another to truly achieve it," Smith said. "Unfortunately, the system adopted by the governor and Republicans is one that bases a child's lifetime of education on a standardized test on a single day; a horrible way to grade Florida's educational system."
Okay, suggest a better assessment to use for grading the educational system. But remember, the assessment has to be cheap (for a cash-strapped system), reliable (since there are high-stakes decisions being made), objective (to avoid possibility of biases) and standardized (so that schools can be compared to one another.)
I'm waiting, Mr. Smith."
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