A SV family wanted their son's science test graded fairly. It became a battle | Hacker News Reader

A SV family wanted their son's science test graded fairly. It became a battle

sfchronicle.com

13 pointsapparent7 comments

How the school district can defend an answer that is not only counterfactual but disagrees with the publisher's answer key is what is mind-boggling. It's the triumph of bureaucracy over facts.

Crazy to get mad at the family for taking pictures of the test questions they were challenging. How else can you challenge the test if you can't have a copy of it that you can point to?

Also, if they were so worried about test questions becoming "unusable" in the future, they should have thought about what would happen when the news media reported on their mistakes.

Secrecy seems to be the norm in many school districts. They don’t want filming, or parents auditing classes, or to stream what’s happening in the classroom to parents, or whatever. They don’t want to answer questions. They don’t want to share the curriculum. They don’t want to share student’s medical records with their own parents.

It all adds up to a disturbing wall that keeps parents out of their own children’s lives. It’s a whole culture rather than just a one off thing about this incident or others.

I once heard a teacher say that she doesn't want parents to volunteer in her class because sometimes they "spy" on teachers. I guess anyone would want to be able to do their job without any critical feedback, but you'd think that someone who cares a lot about education would want to do the best job they can. That typically involves getting feedback from the people being served.

Do you invite random untrained strangers to audit your job performance?

Definitely not. But parents of kids in the class are not random.

Also, while they may lack a teacher's credential, they may have other (and in many cases, at least around here) more rigorous advanced degrees. It is fairly well-known that education majors enter college with the lowest average SAT scores and exit with the highest GPAs.

Parents who are volunteering in the classroom are not there "to audit" the teacher's performance. They are there to help. If they notice the teacher is incompetent, they would be crazy to ignore that fact.

I have seen so many ELA handouts with typos come home with my kid. And a teacher recently multiplied 5 x 7 in class and got 30. If my basic skills were this bad, I wouldn't want anyone but children (who might not know the difference) around to judge me.

I'm really surprised the school and the district doubled down when they were wrong. Even if light is not always generated by combustion, B is a less wrong answer than C, and it's pretty straightforward to establish that oxygen is consumed in a typical combustion, not produced.

The school also erred in taking an adversarial tone over the photos the family took.

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