N orfolk, VA.--It's hard to tell exactly when the Norfolk Public Schools hit rock bottom, but 1998 was particularly dismal across the board Just 38 percent of third graders passed the state's Standards of Learning, or SOL, test in English 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient in mathematics and a mere 18 percent of high schoolers passed Virginia and U. S. history. For John Simpson, who took over as superintendent that same year with a mandate to boost achievement for all of the district's 37,000 students, the only solution was to completely shake things up. When I arrived, people were unhappy, but many of them had the attitude that given a fairly poor and high-minority population, that might be all that they could do, ... There was no room for excuses anymore.
Quotes about graders (16 Quotes)
They are all baseball oriented. You can tell they have played baseball awhile. Now when you step here and are playing 11th and 12th graders you're going to (have some losses). They seem to accept it, but they also know every game they play they should be in the game.
We (NRCS) went to Wiley, Alta Vista and Lamar Middle School to speak to sixth graders about conservation practices,
Many seventh graders I know in Illinois, as well as around the Nation, are studying the Constitution. I was pretty impressed with the quality of education our children are receiving because they had not expected me to ask them about it.
Data analysis serves as a process that underpins scientific inquiry. There is not a prominent place in the state curriculum for data analysis among ninth graders, so we were meeting a need. Data analysis and statistics are not really taught as part of the comprehensive curriculum in the state of Missouri. We wanted to give the kids a chance to work with statistics. Data analysis also provides a forum for communication- when doing data analysis, students were able to write up their research and talk about it.
We've made great strides in raising academic achievement during the past seven years. I am especially proud that Washington led the nation last year in reading scores for African-American fourth graders. African-American eighth graders in Washington scored better in math than in all but three states. We are closing the achievement gap.
Not everybody can afford to play club soccer. But with just about every school in the Valley having middle school soccer it gives them up to three extra years of soccer as some schools allow sixth graders to play.
As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
We want to make children more comfortable with taking the test. We are focusing a lot more on the writing sample the third graders will have to do.
We try to include school children, especially seventh graders who are taking Texas History, in our activities. We know how important it is for them to learn the history of the town in which they live.
The toughest part for us is being so far ahead of where they are, we have to stop, ... We forget that even though we're dealing with 9th-through-12th graders, they've never played so we have to evaluate ourselves as a staff. Take tackling. Some of them are learning and you talk to them, try to teach them and they have that far away look in their eyes and you have to go over it again.
But you are losing enrollment. Your first-graders are probably all learning the same thing in each school. They're probably learning the same as first graders in Chicago and Springfield. The differences come in grades 9-12. Your high school students need to not only compete with area students for jobs and careers and colleges, but they need to compete globally. If they are not going to college, they need skills.
When first graders shoot first graders, it's time for Congress to do what's right for America's families.
They're young and they're just enjoying the sport. They're just having fun with it and paying attention so I think more eighth graders will come out for the team. Pus, football players who see what great shape their teammates are in during fall workouts will want to come out too.
I was so sad to read recently that 32 percent of fourth- graders say they never read a book for pleasure,