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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Werebat" data-source="post: 6478411" data-attributes="member: 40158">Thanks.  And I do remember you.I sorta dropped out of r.g.f.d. when I had a kid and got divorced (around about the same time).  I've since met someone wonderful and had three children with them (and my oldest son basically lives with me, although I pay child support to his mother, which is another story entirely).  It's been an interesting decade and a half, but I can't complain overall.These days a lot of my writing goes into letters to local papers about the bad things going on with public schooling policy at the state and national level.  I actually got put on temporary administrative leave last year for one of the letters I wrote to several local papers, in which I pointed out a serious flaw in the local state graduation requirement involving standardized tests.  Essentially, as the policy was written, it was in the best interests of any student who tended to score poorly on the battery of standardized tests being used as a barrier to high school graduation (and they knew who they were, as the same tests were used periodically throughout their school careers) to intentionally bomb said tests in their Junior year in order for it to be easier for them to show "improvement" on the retake.  The administrator responsible for putting me on leave never mentioned the article, of course (he accused me of "coaching" students to bomb the test, but was never able to produce any such students), but everyone knew what the action was really about, and as I hear it he ended up getting reprimanded (freedom of speech and all that -- in fact, the editor of one of the local papers offered to run a story about the situation, which I discretely let the district's lawyer find out about).  It's worth noting that the policy was scrapped last year when a young woman from one of our wealthier districts missed the cut score by 2 points and was denied a diploma, and it was pointed out that many other students who scored lower than she did on their retakes but had demonstrated adequate "improvement" from their original scores WERE given diplomas.  This was essentially the exact flaw I had pointed out in the letter that led to my administrative leave.Interesting times for public schools, these.  That's another discussion, of course.</blockquote>

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