The 4 December issue of RRT contained what I found dismal news about education in Montana; State Supt. Arntzen showed 44% of students proficient in reading and 39% in Mathematics! Good grief! (Does this explain why sometimes at IGA a clerk needs a calculator to compute the cost of two $0.98 bakery items?)
In the same assessment framework that provided these test data, I wonder how Roundup fared and hope someone in our schools’ administration will put our town’s or county’s results in this column.
It interested me that Supt. Arntzen’s response was action to improve teachers in these disciplines, without, of course, suggesting that they are below par. Having spent many years teaching in universities, I came early to realize that when a student didn’t perform well, it was the instructor’s fault. University administrators, too, were swift to pounce on an instructor if s/he awarded a raft of low grades. The implication was that students were rather like helpless little sponges, and it was the faculty’s task to discover the path into the learning centers of each head.
That’s quite another topic, though, and I would like to see how Roundup scored in the assessment cited.
Larry Stanfel-Roundup
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