From: "Jeff Shultz" 

About HeadStart.... do the gains evaporate and the kids become substandard
performers, or do they evaporate in the mass of kids doing the same level
work?

If they were expected to do poorly, but instead managed to keep up with the
standard, it sounds like the program did it's job.

--
Jeff Shultz
http://www.wvi.com/~jbshultz
As a student, my job is asking questions.


"Randall Parker"  wrote in message
news:MPG.137e03bb9dd1c15e98a27c{at}news.barkto.com...
> http://www.frontpagemag.com/dh/2000/dh04-19-00.htm
>    Excerpt:
> George W. Bush has made his educational record in Texas, where he ended
> social promotion, a prominent feature of his presidential run. Perhaps
> inspired by this, the Los Angeles Unified School District had decided to
> end the policy as well. What changed its mind was a feasibility study
> that showed that if the policy were implemented it would have to hold
> back 350,000 children, or half of all the students in Los Angeles public
> schools. The vast majority of those affected are poor, Hispanic, and
> black.
> Think of the atrocity that is being committed here. First, the
> "educators" are not educating these children, whose only hope to get
> into the economy is to learn something in school. Instead, they are
> failing. That in itself ought to be a crime. But then the same educators
> have decided to deceive the kids by passing them on to the next grade.
> That is diabolical. We're not going to teach you, but we're going to lie
> to you and tell you that we have. You're not going to find out that
> you've learned nothing until you graduate and go into the job market as
> a functional illiterate, when it's too late. We're going to screw you
> good. And then we're going to run as the "education party"!
> It gets worse. This week, the Los Angeles Unified School District
> proposed a very modest clause in its contract negotiations with the
> teachers' union that would provide a bonus to individual teachers who
> raised student test scores. The union went ballistic. The president of
> the United Teachers of Los Angeles denounced the clause as an "attack on
> teachers" and threatened a strike. In the same negotiations, the
> teachers' union is demanding a 21 percent pay raise for all its
> teachers—competent and incompetent alike. In other words, three months
> after the school district revealed that 350,000 students are learning
> absolutely nothing in its schools, the teachers want a 21 percent pay
> hike as a reward for their failure.
> Enter Gore, the official candidate of the teachers' unions, the
> "education candidate." Gore wants to spend $115 billion on
teacher-union
> acceptable plans for "education reform." He wants to spend $25 billion
> on school buildings and $50 billion on preschools and the rest on more
> teachers to reduce classroom size. But what use are school buildings if
> the schools don't teach and the children aren't learning? Head Start is
> the most highly touted preschool program. Yet every study shows that
> Head Start improves student performance only in the first couple of
> years and then all the gains evaporate.

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