Follow the Bouncing Budget

Joy found this winged fairy cat for me ... The copyright belongs to the artist. I think the best series of such stories was written by Ursula K. Leguin; we never meet the tomcat who fathered the litter of winged kits ... Momma kitty is quite mundane and content to remain with her human while her offspring explore the world.

I normally don't discuss school on the blog -- this site is meant for more enjoyable subjects, like dolls and cats and faires. However, real life has a way of creeping up and ambushing you in very annoying ways ... and, at least for the near future, in rather dramatic ways.

It seems that the government wants to balance the budget ... and they're willing to sacrifice the futures of millions of Americans. Since those Americans can't vote for years, if not decades, then they feel the protests of millions of teachers and parents don't count for much. After all, the country (state, school district) needs to balance the budget. We still have to meet the higher education standards; all they tell us is "Learn to do more with less." Uh-huh ... I have yet to see a veteran politician come into a real classroom; when they visit, the districts take them to the schools for the best and brightest, where the kids have to go through a selection process in order to enter the school -- and where, if a kid doesn't measure up, he or she can be sent back to the home school at the end of the year ... It used to be at the end of a semester, until the home schools protested that they shouldn't be used as a dumping ground just before test time.

Our high-stakes test in ELA (English-Language Arts) happens on March 1. It worries me, since we've had such mixed results. I think the kids will pull off the passing scores ... but I don't know whether we will reach the 15% commended rate. Right now, they're trying to round up the 95% of the class that we believe can pass -- or at least need to take the test, so we don't lose points for non-participation. It's a numbers game with heavy consequences if a school doesn't hit the mark set by the government ... few, if any, of whom were educators -- or who had their kids in public schools.