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Surely there are provisions for some of the rural, poorer school districts to do the tests on paper?
I work in 4 rural poor districts. They all have high speed internet.
Most rural towns have high speed internet now; we don't use homing pigeons anymore
Now Texas does do robinhood school financing so maybe that makes a difference.
The schools have smartboards, computer labs, chromebooks/iPads.
Math/Reading remediation is online as well and picked by TEA for all schools to use.
This past school year was the pilot for the EOC Algebra I online only tests.
Up until then both online/paper were offered.
Texas has been working on getting all schools connected for a number of years.
Robinhood financing played a major part in us getting to this point.
And that's why I'm a big backer of that. Rural/poor schools are not being left behind.
There's always exceptions though but Texas is pretty far ahead when it comes to education/internet.
One school where I sub:
population: 1200
school population (k-12): 159
median income of town $$23K
Title 1 school
80% are on free/reduced lunch
Last edited by HappyTexan; 08-15-2013 at 09:27 AM..
Obama says his goal is to give high speed internet access to 99% of the schools.
NCES says 93% already have high speed internet access.
And this area is an area managed by states, not the Fed and not the FCC.
The bigger hinderance to all this push for online learning is that many poor students do NOT have internet access at home.
So homework cannot be given as online. All projects are done during school hours because of that.
The FCC is working on changing their Lifeline program to provide broadband access as well as phone access to the poor.
And the FCC will need to raise the USF charge to cover that.
The big audit they did was part of getting ready for this and they are already piloting this in some cities.
Except Obama doesn't have the authority to dictate that the FCC add a new tax onto people's mobile phone bills.
They are an independent agency.
This constant whining by Obama that he'll go around the law to do things is getting old.
A president is supposed to lead. He's not the only president to ever have gridlock in Congress.
Others still get things done. Johnson was up against Southern Democrats even in his own party to try and get civil rights legislation passed. He WORKED at it, made phone calls, made speeches, bent some arms....and succeeded without whining and crying. He did NOT circumvent Congress or the Constitution in the process.
State tests are moving to online only. It saves a lot of money right there.
If schools were as lacking as the President says why would they do that ?
I already answered this question in post #42:
Quote:
Florida's EOC exams are all online. At my former high school - enrollment of approx. 2000 - all 9th, 10th, and 11th graders are tested, along with seniors who are retaking tests that they have not yet passed - 3/4ths of the school needs to be online for one or more tests in the spring. Right now, the school can only test a few hundred at a time, due to insufficient bandwidth. In addition, the information technology teachers lose about 5 weeks of instructional time every year because their computer labs are appropriated for testing. And, when testing is going on, educational use of the Internet cannot take place because it slows down the testing. This situation is replicated at almost all of the 50+ high schools in my district.
Perhaps you don't understand how much school wide testing disrupts learning in every school. When 1500 students have to be tested in groups of 200-300, what should take 3 hours on one day is spread out over a week or more. Miami-Dade students take state-mandated tests multiple times during the school year. Plus, the Florida legislature has mandated industry certification tests for all non-college bound students - those are all online tests and are very graphic intensive. At my former school, only 100 students at a time can be tested, any more and the computers freeze. Again, this situation is replicated at almost all of the 50+ high schools in Miami-Dade. Major testing, which happens multiple times per year in Florida, disrupts the leaning environment for days, for every high school in Florida.
If schools are expected to utilize the advantages of online testing/learning/textbooks/etc., they have got to be equipped with state of the art technology AND with the support personnel that every business that relies on technology employs. The President's initiative is necessary and, at the cost of $4/yr/cell phone user, cheap.
If schools are expected to utilize the advantages of online testing/learning/textbooks/etc., they have got to be equipped with state of the art technology AND with the support personnel that every business that relies on technology employs. The President's initiative is necessary and, at the cost of $4/yr/cell phone user, cheap.
Why isn't Florida working on fixing that ?
Texas did.
Our tests take 5 days spread out over the month of April.
They are given in the morning only.
Those testing days are built into the school calendar for mandatory attendance.
Was Florida just planning to stay like this forever ?
Does Florida not have a plan to get all their classrooms into the "21st century" ?
Texas has high property taxes and the ISDs take most of it. And we have robinhood financing to subsidize the poorer districts.
And Florida was a model regarding the Virtual Schools concept. I'm surprised the state did that while letting individual schools fall behind.
My schools has a volunteer "work' day. We all showed up and wired the school at NO cost to the taxpayers.
When we are debt by almost 17 TRILLION, there are ALWAYS ways to get things done cheaper.
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