Forum Index
»
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
School board results?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
+1. How come teachers were the only essential workers who could make this call for themselves. Doctors, nurses, my sister the pharmacist, sanitation’s workers, firefighters, even shelf stockers and Wegmans could unilaterally opt out of showing up and being exposed, if they wanted to keep their jobs. So what makes teachers different? And don’t say because they could do their jobs virtually. Because the level of learning loss we are looking at makes it clear they could not— at least not effectively. |
Anonymous
C'mon. Working in a contained environment all day with a bunch of kids (some of whom have crazy parents who didn't care about the "cold" their kids had) during the first-in-our-lifetime pandemic is the same as stocking the shelf at a 80,000 square foot Wegmans? The sanitation workers had the same chance of picking up covid in the alley as a teacher in close quarters with elementary kids who can't blow their noses on their own? It's time to move on. |
Anonymous
+1. Wish we could have moderate republicans instead of right wing/trump nuts who have ruined the R party. |
Anonymous
| Many of us wish we could have moderate democrats as well. Not counting homework for grading and regrading old assessments based on a future assessment to me is an experiment that isn't well thought out and impacts my kid daily verses some book banning that my kid didn't care about because the majority of students don't even go to the library for books at their school. |
Anonymous
Test retakes are great - they promote learning. |
Anonymous
That's the theory. In actual practice, they promote the opposite. It turns out, the old fashioned way of doing things is the most effective. Students study, learn, are tested, get grades. Everyone knows where they stand. It's clear. |
Anonymous
| You are not understanding There are dozens of talks about this here but SBG replaces grades. There aren't retakes for improvement in skills. You just take the next unit and if you do well on a standard compared to the standard on the last unit, they change your grade for the old test. So lets say you take unit 1 and there is a standard on grammar. You get a C on this standard. Worth noting that you can only get an A,B, C,D, or F. No pluses or minuses assessed so there are 10-25 points between each grade. Depends on whether using 100 scale or 4.0. Then you take unit 2 and there is a section of grammar in this test as well that you get a B on, but it's a different focus. Maybe unit 1 was on capitalization and unit 2 was on punctuation. Since you got a B on punctuation it's assessed that you are improving in grammar and your C from capitalization is changed to a B so now you have 2 B's. You haven't done any extra practice on capitalization or have taken a new test. You just get a new grade because you did well on punctuation. Also all that practice you did between tests you do get grades for, but these grades go away when you take the assessment and get replaced by the assessment and there is no penalty if you don't do any of the practice work. You could have all zeros for practice work and then just have a C on the assessment and that is perfectly fine. No retake allowed and no work to improve that specific skill. Just that skill generally. Grammar, not capitalization. There are so many things wrong with this grading system that people have done entire studies on it and yet FCPS still uses it. |
Anonymous
No, that’s how they work in real life. Students study, some do poorly, either they are stuck with bad grade and do nothing OR they can do some additional work to better learn the material and bring up their grade. I see it working well at the MS and early HS levels. |
Anonymous
This doesn’t make sense. Of course I support reading intervention. But while your kid learns to read through school support, my kid deserves challenging novels and discussion with a different group of kids who don’t have the same problems. |
Anonymous
Nope but while the EL kid is learning English, my kid shouldn’t have to wait for them to come along during class. |
Anonymous
Definitely not, but my kids should have homework regardless if poor parents don’t care to. |
Anonymous
Omg they don’t wait on EL kids. That’s why many of them are so far behind. |
Anonymous
You lost me at “should have homework”, certainly for ES. |
Anonymous
The actual driver for this bizarre way of grading is less teacher workload. Give kids extra chances by falsifying past grades so that teachers have to do less. This way the teacher can spend more time with the student on unit 2 to hopefully help them improve, that is if it actually affects their reputation or if the student requests extra help, and then the teacher and student don't have to revisit old lessons. They can just move forward on unit 2 with more oversight on the student. It reduces the teacher workload so they don't have to backtrack with their teaching or hold extra classes for retakes. Does it help the student with unit 2 punctuation? Maybe. More than likely, they are overlooked for unit 2 unless there is a reason to care about them failing out of the class. This program teaches falsifying information, teaches that tests matter more than effort, grades matter more than learning, and that work in high school isn't any more complex than elementary. No one cares whether you got 1 or 3 things wrong. You got something wrong so it's a B. It also teaches that no one really cares if you learn capitalization or not. |
Anonymous
| The fact that our school board can't realize any of this tell me that they have very little knowledge on how students learn. |