Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Persuasive Essays by Ms. Zubiri's Period 5 English class - December 2010

                                          Why Is Headgear an Issue at Venice High?
                                                                By Edgar Gutierrez

        Wearing hats, beanies, or any type of headgear shouldn’t be an issue at Venice High School. Staff assumes that hats are gang-related, but not all students are related to gangs. Just because a student wears a specific hat doesn’t mean they are in a gang.
    People believe this issue relates to gangs for the reason that members wear these type of  caps. It’s true that certain gangs do wear certain hats, but it’s not right to judge a person by the way they dress. Most of the students at Venice High don’t like the fact they get their hats taken away and are made to bring their parents to pick up the hat. In the winter season many students get cold and decide to wear beanies. Same with the summer, many students wear baseball caps for prevent sun burns. Staff should be less strict about this hat issue and more strict on other problems like drugs, alcohol, bullying, and violence.
    Most of Venice High School fights are started by gangs not by hats. Wearing hats or any headwear doesn’t mean you gang-related. This rule should change and only be applied to those that are gang-related. Many students would agree on banning this rule, but its up to the school board, and district.
                                                                                          

                                             More Students Should Graduate from High School
                                                                By Yadira Castaneda
                               The Los Angeles Unified School District should make sure that more students are graduating from high school.

Monday, December 13, 2010

A View of Standardized Testing by a Test Scorer

Teacher Dennis Danziger passed along this eye-opening article that starts like this:

Standardized testing has become central to education policy in the United States. After dramatically expanding in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing has been further enshrined by the Obama administration’s $3.4 billion “Race to the Top” grants. Given the ongoing debate over these policies, it might be useful to hear about the experiences of a hidden sector of the education workforce: those of us who make our living scoring these tests. Our viewpoint is instructive, as it reveals the many contradictions and absurdities built into a test-scoring system run by for-profit companies and beholden to school administrators and government officials with a stake in producing inflated numbers.

by: Dan DiMaggio