On Tuesday 29 August 2006 14:30, Alan M. Evans wrote: >On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 10:31, Gene Heskett wrote: >> I was fortunate in that my grammer school education took place in the >> State of Iowa, where, back in the 40's, we were extremely proud of >> being the most literate state in the union with a 99.9% literacy rate. >> No educational system is doing its students any life favors when the >> high school graduating class is composed of 20+% functionally >> illiterate students, but they graduate anyway because of the un-funded >> no child left behind act. > >To be fair, graduating underperforming students has been a problem for >much longer than we've had No Child Left Behind. > >And 99.9% seems an awfully high literacy rate for any sample the size of >a state, even one that's proud of it. Perhaps Iowa residents, despite >excellent language comprehension, weren't so good at statistics? I lived there for my first 25 years, and never met anyone except an old recent emmigrant german farmer that signed his checks with an x mark but wrote the check in german. The checks were always good, but his speech was littered with germanisms... He died before I got wanderlust. And we were pretty good at statistics thank you. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
