Hugh's Worthless Blog

Today stltoday.com (i.e. the Post-Dispatch) had a very informative article posted about the new Missouri standards from the Department of Elementary & Seconary Education for rating the performance of schools. The new system (called the MSIP5 )  uses a 140 point system to rate all the school districts to determine how well they are doing. The Post article lists all the schools in a big chart that could be sorted either alphabetically or by percentage, but you truly cannot see the big picture without charting them all out like I did above. A similar article on KMOX contained hardly any data at all. In reality the vast majority of the school districts are doing a fine job with 43 out of 53 fulfilling 80% of the requirements and 47 out of 53 fulfilling 70% of the requirements. There are only six districts not meeting at least 70% of the state goals. Three of those are very close, Ferguson-Florissant at 69.3%, University City at 66.8% and Jennings at 65.7%. To meet 70% (the lev...

Now that the vast majority of the students who wanted to transfer out of the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens are preparing to start school in new districts, I thought the insanity would start to die down. But I was mistaken! Not just one, but two organizations are helping parents file suit against both the Mehlville and the Kirkwood school districts for not allowing their children to attend there. The NAACP is filing suit against both Mehlville and Kirkwood, and the CEAM  is just filing against Mehlville . Does anybody really think Mehlville and Kirkwood did anything maliciously wrong trying to limit how many students could enroll in their districts? I thought trying to limit class sizes to state recommended ratios was a good thing! The outcome here is making Normandy appear like the brilliant district now by picking a "free transportation" district large enough and far enough away so that the supply of available slots was greater than the demand for the slo...