Working on: Heading to bed
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This morning we had a meeting about... oh, stuff. But some interesting stuff came out of our speaker. Two of these points I offer up to you:

The state of Michigan, over the course of K-12 schooling, has 255 state standards. 3,500 benchmarks to meet. 14 subject areas to cover. Assuming something like 9,000 actual instructional contact hours, we would need a school program from grades K-22 to meet all benchmarks.

Secondly, "No Child Left Behind" has a goal of 100% high achievement on testing by the year 2014. Yet, the federal cutoff of "high achievement" is the 40th percentile. By definition, you can't have 100% achieving if you are working with percentiles. I'm not swift at Math, and even I understand that.

Lastly, our president of the school board advised us that for the last 2 years, the state has cut our per-pupil funding to something like 7,000 per pupil. While it's still a lot more than some cities, I don't understand why there's a CUT. Grrr. So my school has decided to cut out transparencies and colored paper. It may be simple to you, but it's irksome to many of us.