Gay Marriage

[kandrathe]

If a person is emotionally or physically incapable of passing high school then obviously it is wrong to put them in that position of failure. They will need some special program of life skills training, and will possibly be a ward of the state their entire lives. A job for the parents and social workers. If they can gain some benefit from associating with peers then it makes sense to run the programs through the schools, but to expect that someone severely handicapped will keep up with a HS curriculum is nonsense. I'm sure Mit knew that.

A very common criticism of MCAS testing is that 'teachers will start to teach towards the test.' If the goal is to assure students attain a certain skillset, I'm wondering why this is such a bad thing.

True. Testing is not a fire and forget activity and requires continuous work to make the test relevant and somewhat unpredictable. It needs to test that the education objectives have been met. I guess it depends on whether the teachers are teaching the subject matter, or just how to guess more or less the correct answers. I'm one of those ruthless SOB's that build mostly essay and complex tests that are hard to pass if you don't know the material.