“ACADEMICALLY WEAK STUDENTS” DON’T TEST WELL
Months after Illinois officials closed a loophole used to keep academically weak 11th-graders from taking state exams, high school scores plummeted to the lowest level in a decade.
Why did those nasty state officials close that loophole ? Didn’t they realize that “academically weak students” don’t test well ? The various high school administrators certainly knew that.
I wonder who the “academically weak students” were ? Were they the students in special education ? The students who were chronically truant? Students on academic probation ? Limited English-speaking students?
Why did high school administrators from virtually every high school in Illinois decide not to test those students? Was it because they feared that their school’s test scores would be lowered ? Were they worried about the “academically weak students” self-esteem when those students saw their test scores?
Were the high school administrators wrong when they previously excluded the weak students from the tests? Does the fact that virtually every high school previously excluded their weak students mean that it was the right thing to do? Is the state expecting too much from these schools and from the weak students?
I have so many questions about this issue and I’m going to attempt to find out exactly what types of students were excluded from the tests. I suppose there is some comfort in knowing that school administrators were smart enough to know that weak students don’t test well.
This whole story does offer a solution to our current “educational crisis”. We just need to let our administrators test only the best students in the schools. I’m sure our state legislators can come up with some legal language that suits that purpose. They’re experts at creating useful loopholes. Just ask the retired teachers of Illinois. Loopholes have allowed the State legislators of Illinois to underfund the teachers’ pension by millions of dollars even though the State Constitution required them to fund every last penny. If state legislators can pull this off and restore the testing loopholes, then I suggest Illinois needs to change their state slogan from “Land of Lincoln” to “Land of Loopholes”.
