Back to School

Staff meetings and such Wed-Fri. I'm rested and raring to go.

Aw, dem cute li'l puggles....

Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.

Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

And they are smart, too, with a neo-cortex that dwarfs ours, as a proportion of total brain mass.

just checking

Only one of the eastern PA schools- Central HS in Philly, has a substantial percentage of subsidized lunches. Taken as a whole the rankings might mean that a) the wealthiest school districts in PA aren't all that good, even by their own (testing) standards and b) the struggling districts in PA don't have a chance of making the list.

I wouldn't suggest that these tests are the only measure of a school, of course. But it is interesting.

I note that Pennridge, Palisades, Easton, Hunterdon, CB west, and New Hope-Solebury all failed to turn up on the list.

This is interesting, and worth thinking about (from the person who crunched the data):

AP, IB and Cambridge are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations. Studies by U.S. Department of Education senior researcher Clifford Adelman in 1999 and 2005 showed that the best predictors of college graduation were not good high school grades or test scores, but whether or not a student had an intense academic experience in high school. Such experiences were produced by taking higher-level math and English courses and struggling with the demands of college-level courses like AP or IB. Several other studies looked at hundreds of thousands of students in California and Texas and found if they had passing scores on AP exams they were more likely to do well academically in college. In the latest Texas study, even low-performing, low-income students who got only a 2 on an AP test did significantly better in college than similar students who did not take AP in high school.

To send a student off to college without having had an AP, IB or Cambridge course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels. It is dumb, and in my view a form of educational malpractice. But most American high schools still do it. I don't think such schools should be rewarded because they have artificially high AP or IB passing rates achieved by making certain just their best students take the tests.

Damn, more rain.

I can't believe it.

Something I can believe is how poor Pennsylvania's showing is on Newsweek's list of the best public high schools in America. 19 schools. That doesn't seem to compare well with states of similar size (e.g. Ohio with 25 schools, NC with over 50). Eastern PA is represented by Council Rock North, Central Bucks East, Central Philadelphia, Conestoga (in Radnor), and Masterton Lab (in Philly). That's it for one of the wealthier regions in the northeatern US.

Basically, the rankings reflect the total number of International Baccalaureate, Cambridge, and AP tests divided by number of seniors. The top rankings are almost all southern schools- I wonder what sort of student body they have. There is a lot of interesting information embedded in this chart.

You can sort by clicking on the columns, and there is information on the relative wealth of the school districts.