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Houston School Board Moves to Adopt New Student Promotion Plan

The Associated Press


HOUSTON April 9 — City schools are dropping a policy that required city high school students to pass such core courses as English and math before they moved to the next grade.
The board of the Houston Independent School District on Thursday gave preliminary approval to a new promotion policy that school officials hope will keep struggling students from getting discouraged and help cut the district's dropout rate.

More than 5,000 freshmen and sophomores who would have been held back under the old policy will now be promoted.

"The ninth grade has become a bottleneck year," Abe Saavedra, the school district's executive deputy superintendent, told the Houston Chronicle in Friday's editions.

He said 43 percent of the district's freshmen are over age. More than one-third of 10th-graders have failed at least one grade.

But the change does not amount to social promotion, the district's trustees said, because those students still will have to pass classes they failed before they graduate. Instead, they said, the new promotion policy offers more flexibility and avoids branding students as failures when they fail just one class.

Board members had added the core course requirement a year ago.

"I view this policy ahead of us as compassionate high standards," said district trustee Dianne Johnson.

The Houston district's educators plan to use $8.8 million in additional federal money for more tutoring, summer school and other programs aimed at helping students pass the classes they've failed, Saavedra said.

Surrounding school districts require their ninth- and 10th-graders to pass their core classes to move on.

Board members were expected to give the proposal final approval next month.

This is further proof that the public school system is broken, and why other countries are scoring much high on math and science than the U.S.

[QUOTE=mattboy_slim]!!! Here is the "What the ****" quote of the day !!!
Did you just make this up?? I remember with a great degree of accuracy the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was around 25%. [/QUOTE]
In numbers, not percentage.

[QUOTE=Telemakhos]In numbers, not percentage.[/QUOTE]


LOL, well wow, our population stayed EXACTLY the same - you know it! Yes sir, no population increase around these parts!

You failed to make the case - everyone knows the economy is doing very well.

Nos.

Yet people are still losing jobs, and the jobs being created are very low paying and mostly temporary.

Bush took the biggest budget surplus in U.S. history and turned it into the biggest budget deficit in U.S. history.

EDIT
Damn this is so stupid. This bickering goes nowhere. Politics suck. Society sucks. People suck. I am going to resume my life.

People are always going to lose jobs. The President cannot force any employer to not fire their employees. If a company can't afford to keep their workers, then they need to do something as a company, not blame the government. If a company cannot afford to keep keep their workers then they were doing something wrong in the first place by not making themselves a strong enough company. Microsoft has enough cash to run the business for 5 years with absolutely no revenue. If Linux were to ever become serious desktop competition, Microsoft could drop the price of their software to $0 to compete, and stay afloat for 5 years, enough time to crush the Linux competition. If a company cannot run like that, then it is the fault of the company, not the fault of the government.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 308,000 in March to 130.5 million,
seasonally adjusted. The over-the-month increase in employment included gains
in construction, retail trade, and health care and social assistance. The
number of factory jobs was unchanged in March. Since August 2003, payroll
employment has risen by 759,000.

That is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I would hardly call that temporary labor. Read for yourself Tele, I don't know where you are getting your numbers, but they are skewed: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

i agree with you when you say freeloaders should get nothing. If your not workin at any job, or tryin to get a job you should get nothin. Matboy your story is touching but would not a little help from the government have helped the situation with your mother going to school and making her life better? Saying that leeches should get nothing and destroying the help system also shoots those in the foot who are trying to be like your mother and raise their life out of the gutter

Mi Lo Fu, we did not get ANY Federal assistance, and we did it. There is no reason that others cannot do the same.

What would you've done if your mother had gotten sick, Mattboy?

She had health insurance through her employer, she would have been fine. Even if not, I wouldn't expect the government (my neighbors taxes) to pay for it.

15%! Where do I sign up? I'm paying about 30% when it's all said and done... Damn...

heh think that would be with immigration O_o but thats just stuff we buy, its about 20-40% off your pay, depending on how much you make.