The Controversial Comma and Millions and Millions Of Dollars

I'll freely admit that punctuation is not my strength when writing this blog and it bothers me.  When writing my last post I knew exactly what I wanted to say but became a little frustrated because I know the placement of the commas was probably wrong.  Know this, I decided to check with my part time consultant, part time editor, and full time spouse on the matter.  When she read the text the first thing she told me is I had to change punctuation in a particular place to a question mark.  After that change she said you are starting a new sentence so the first letter of the word needs to be capitalized.  Thanks I said and then I asked her about the placement of my commas.  She looked at me and said there is a lot of controversy about the use of the comma and what you have looks fine so just go with it.  Being curious about the comma controversy I decided to do a little research.  The first reference I checked state that the comma has been around since the 3rd century BC during the Byzantine period.  A second source I found stated that Aldus Manutius developed the comma during the 1400's as he was working on the slash mark that eventually was reduced in size to a comma.  With two very distinct time periods claiming the invention of the comma I beginning to see my wife's point about this controversy.  I decided to continue my investigation and came across a comment that said that half the time the comma is not used enough and half the time the comma is used to often.  Well great, now what do I do.  I know, I'll just put a comma where I want to and hopefully no one will notice if I used it incorrectly.

I received a message from a new reader of my blog not too long ago and it seemed that he was a little critical because he thought I "favored the teachers."  I know this critic as he is the offspring of Schackie and Virg from Bay City.  I also know that he has probably only read two of my posts so hopefully he'll reconsider his position should he choose to continue reading my blog.  For naming purposes, I'll refer to him as Mout (it rhymes with ought) and hopefully he'll continue to share his opinion with me.

All right, time to move on to the millions and millions of dollars.  If you've read this blog for any length of time you know that I'm not a fan of politicians and the pointy headed intellectuals that feed the politicians with the nonsense that comes out of their mouths especially when it comes to mandatory statewide testing.  So today I decided to find out what it costs the tax payers in the state of Indiana to fund the Indiana Stupid Testing and Evaluation Process (ISTEP) plus some of the other mandatory tests.  Here is what I found and please note that the dollar figures are for a two year period.  Also note that while these companies gave a proposal to the state of Indiana I'm not sure if their proposal was actually accepted as of this date.

A British company called Pearson will be responsible for preparing the ISTEP and IRead3 tests.  This task was formerly the responsibility of CTB-McGraw Hill put they lost the renewal due to the controversy surrounding the last ISTEP testing process.  Pearson's bid for creating the actual ISTEP test was $38,000,000 and their bid for creating the IRead3 test was $7,500.000.

CTB-McGraw Hill has proposed a total cost of $60,000,000 to prepare the practice tests to take the actual tests.  Here is a breakdown of their costs.

• Science (Kindergarten through 2nd grade) - $7,000,000.
• Social Studies (Kindergarten through 2nd grade) - $7,000,000.
• English (3rd grade through 10th grade) - $13,000,000.
• Math (3rd grade through 10th grade) - $11,000,000.
• Science (3rd grade through 10th grade) - $11,000,000.
• Social Studies (3rd grad through 10th grade) - $11,000,000.

A company called Questar Assessment will create the high school end-of-course exams for $7,500,000 and the alternate assessment for students with special needs for $5,000,000.

Also participating is a company called College Board.  They write the SAT and Advance Placement test and they will create a graduation exam for $10,700,000 plus a test that would determine whether students are ready for college for $624,381.

A New York City-based company called Amplify will write practice English tests for Kindergarten through 2nd grade for $3,000,000.

Finally, Strategic Measurement and Evaluation, and Indiana-based company will write practice math tests for Kindergarten through 2nd grade for $900,000.

When I shared this list with my part time editor, part time consultant, and full time spouse she simply said, "and exactly what were the final results of all this money being spent?"  "The test results show only very minor increases in test scores."  For the record, ISTEP in Indiana was first administered in 1988 and that was twenty seven years ago.  Here we are about to start the 2015/2016 and what do we have to show for obscene amounts of money Indiana spent on testing?  Indiana is still ranked near the bottom in education on a national level.  Many, many years ago Jefferson Airplane, with Grace Slick doing the vocals, produced a song called Volunteers.  Here are a part of the lyrics, "Hey now it's time for you and me, got a revolution, got to revolution," and tax payers need to put a stop to this obscene waste of tax payers dollars.

One last item.  I talked to Gnu a few days ago.  We'll start the new year with six scholars.  There will be three from last year (EM, Uh-Uh-Uh, and Grr!) and three new scholars and one of the three is a girl.  MiniJ, who we thought would return, is not as apparently this parental unit(s) moved again. If it is true that his parental unit(s) moved this will be his fourth school in the past year. 

I'll be back in the classroom on July 30th.  The scholars will arrive on August 3rd.  I'm out.  Thanks for sticking around.