Final Word: The beginning of March Madness
Mar 21, 2013, 7:10 PM | Updated: 7:10 pm
If your coworker is running a little late today, it’s probably not car trouble. It’s day one for the NCAA basketball tournament.
I dropped off my last bracket RIGHT before the deadline this morning. I am in three pools and I don’t even care what happens! But you can’t help but get in to the spirit of the thing.
Gives you something to keep score about and it’s a great reason to play hooky from work. Hey, those players are skipping school, right?
Fallon to ‘Tonight’
The New York Times is reporting that Jimmy Fallon will in fact replace Jay Leno as the “Tonight Show” host, and the move for the Tonight Studios to New York City from LA is further proof that that change is a WHEN, not an IF scenario.
As unfunny as I think Leno usually is, I get uncomfortable watching Fallon unless he is doing one of his bits, like “Slow Jamming the News with Brian Williams.” Neither guy is much of an interviewer, and I have a hard time staying up that late anyway.
I would rather watch reruns of Carson over either!
Common Core
In the “its not a good idea unless it’s mine” category, the Arizona legislature is poised to dump the Common Core standards proposed for Arizona’s K-12 schools.
Common Core standards would have taken effect this fall and would replace AIMS as the state’s current achievement test.
The Tea Party and some Republicans rallied against it, saying that Common Core is an effort by the feds to meddle in state’s rights. Yes, there were some national groups involved in getting Common Core adopted in 46 states (46, that’s right), groups including the national Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the non-profit group Achieve, but was developed over a number of years, by, get this, teachers, parents and other education experts to beef up standards for math, reading and writing.
They were actually concerned about student achievement, not who got the credit for teaching them.
The current Arizona test sets the standard for high school graduation at a tenth-grade level. In Arizona, 22 percent of kids don’t graduate on time anyway, and of those, 53 percent don’t qualify to enroll directly in a state university.
Are those numbers indicative of a system that is working? I think we can do better, no matter WHOSE idea it is.
