While testing a group of 10th graders for their STAAR exam, I got an email from our testing coordinator. “Congratulations, you have been selected to administer the TSIA tests.” If you aren’t in education you have no idea what either of those two tests are. Many of us in education barely know. In addition to all of this we have three more STAAR tests in early May and the more driven students have AP exams around that time as well.

The TSIA stands the the Texas State Initiative Assessment. It is given to students before they graduate to determine if they need to take remedial classes at a community college before they can take the courses that really count.

Since January 1st, we have taken mock STAARs for the five different STAAR exams, we took a field test for the English STAAR because we were fortunate enough to have the state of Texas choose our school to give that exam. We have administered the SAT, both English STAAR exams, and the TSIA, AP Exams, and the other three STAAR tests will come between now and the end of the school year.

Students are told they have to pass all five STAAR tests in order to graduate. They are told they have to pass the TSIA in order to avoid paying for remedial classes that don’t count towards any degree. Teachers are told that they have to follow all of the rules or their teaching certificate could get pulled or we get drawn and quartered.

It obviously gets to the point where we have to ask exactly what we are measuring. I think all of us get it on a certain level. We want to see what students have learned. We want to make sure teachers are teaching the curriculum. We want to know if students have the skills they need to succeed in the real world. All of these are reasonable points and reasonable questions to ask.

What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on a child. What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on those teaching those children. What isn’t reasonable is designing a test where students sit for five hours fighting off fatigue and boredom to try to master a difficult test. Apparently, too many students are passing. So, the state is dramatically altering each STAAR test to make them more challenging. This is all happening during a pandemic.

Silly me, but I thought the whole point was to test whether students had mastered the skills necessary to succeed in the real world or in college. Has that changed dramatically in the last several years? Are we really adjusting to the changing times or are we simply punishing educators and kids for cracking the code to beat the test?

Meanwhile, the anxiety gets ratcheted up. A typical ninth grade student (at the tender age of 14 or 15) will take practice tests for three different STAAR tests, will take common based assessments each six weeks in all four core subject areas, will take three different STAAR exams, and will sit for the school day PSAT. That assumes they aren’t taking any AP exams. If you do the math, that’s more than 30 high stakes tests. One might wonder if you have time to do anything else.

Testing is also big business. One is free to wonder whether we really are making education better or simply filling the pockets of some powerful donors. Any good teacher wants to know that what they are doing is successful. We want to know that students are learning and that what they are learning is useful. In many cases, we are capable of doing that on our own or people within our district are capable of designing tests that can do that. They won’t take five hours we don’t have to scare the kids and threaten them. We just want to know what they know. That’s pretty easy right?

… round and round, round and round. The Governor on the bus goes, “screw you all, screw you all.”

Texas Republican Governor is trying to be the cutest governor on the block.

Here’s his mean idea.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that Texas will begin busing and flying migrants to Washington, D.C in response to the Biden administration’s plan to lift a Trump-era policy used to turn away more than a million asylum seekers at the border.

The move is intended to “help local officials whose communities are overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants,” Abbott said at a news conference.

Good Lord, what’s he trying to do? Get Texas kicked off the UN’s Human Rights Council?

Eastern European counties are welcoming Ukrainians with open arms.  And Texas is going to put parents and children on busses to Washington? That’s a 30 hour drive. Who is going to pay for that? And if he send them on an airplane, who is going to pay for that?

He’s just mean.

The so-called Trump immigration reform didn’t do diddle squat except for imprisoning people and separating them from their children (which Greg truly enjoyed watching).  Doing away with them won’t cause a difference either.

It’s election time. Abbott is only upping the levels of meanness of the Republican Party.

Has anybody checked recently to see if Abbott casts a reflection in a mirror?

I think I’ve told you that there have been five examples of voter fraud in my county in the past 30 years that I know of.

One was a guy who voted in two different states in three election cycles and was running for office in one of them. Two were a conspiracy to vote elderly African American people by mail in the Republican primary. Two others attempted to vote twice in the same election on the same day, and one of them went home to change clothes, put on a wig and a baseball cap, and thought they “wouldn’t recognize” him. They all have one thing in common: they were all Republicans. The last two were vocal Trump supporters. None were prosecuted by the Republican district attorney.

And now with Mark Meadows and his wife wanting us to believe they live in a trailer on a remote mountain top, it’s fun to keep adding to that list.

Matt Mowers is a former Trump aide who is now running for Congress in New Hampshire. In 2016, he cast a ballot in the GOP primary in New Hampshire, where he was director of Chris Christie’s campaign.

And then …

Four months later, after Christie’s bid fizzled, Mowers cast another ballot in New Jersey’s Republican presidential primary, using his parents’ address to re-register in his home state, documents The Associated Press obtained through a public records request show.

Republicans are scrambling to his defense, calling it a “gray area” of the law. You know, like there’s 50 Shades Of Gray Travel Tours of the country to vote in every state’s primary in the same election year.  I dunno. It looks like a troublesome display of tomfoolery to me.

And I know this is kinda mean, but if you shaved his head, he’s a solid ringer for Stephen Miller. It creeps me out.

There are two things that always get me when watching movies or reading books about the future. Of course, the comical thing is when they get things all wrong. “Back to the Future” told us of a turbulent time when cars flew, kids rode hover boards, and holograms were everywhere. Extremely weird stuff happened. Stuff like the Cubs winning the World Series. Well, that actually turned out to be true, but the other stuff was pure fantasy.

However, nothing quite compares when the crazy stuff predicted in stories of the past actually turns out to be eerily true. “1984” was meant to be a cautionary tale even back then. It chronicled the dangers of propaganda when the government became all powerful and no one was quite sure what was up and what was down.

A lie is still a lie even if it is repeated often. Yet, a lie is more easily believed the more often it is repeated. It seems that Donald Trump and the GOP are bound and determined to get you to believe whatever they would like you to believe on Hunter Biden. They are going to keep pushing that same story about the laptop until you finally believe it.

Of course, the fact that Hunter Biden had a laptop isn’t the lie. The fact that Biden has made deals where he has taken advantage of his father’s position is also not a lie. The idea that either of these two facts point to Biden as being the most corrupt president ever is the lie. The idea is not only false, but is laughable on its face.

Are Hunter Biden’s dealings problematic? I’m sure they are on some level. Nearly every president has had a brother, son, or wayward cousin they wish they could put a muzzle on and keep locked away for their own protection. Billy Carter and Roger Clinton were absolute embarrassments. Heck, George W. Bush was that embarrassment before he cleaned his act up. You’d have to settle for Neil Bush as the black sheep of that family.

Go back far enough and there is a stupid relative or friend that a president wish they didn’t have. Of course, depending on the president, these idiots either provided for temporary humiliation or were much more problematic. Of course, like in the case of Warren Harding, those scandals were much more about their own reaction than what their idiot relatives or friends did.

So, how is this situation any different? Well, on the first note, the people leveling the charge are so guilty it is not even funny. To accuse Hunter Biden of excessively profiting from the presidency or making shady deals is galling when compared to their own behavior. Heck, you could break it down by child and all of them made more combined than all presidential children in history. Ivanka and Jared Kushner probably did more than the others.

Even now, there are propagandists on Twitter trying to convince you that he and his children divested while Hunter Biden profited. Actual facts say otherwise. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth for millions of people. Joseph Goebbels told us how the big lie works. “1984” told us too. Seeing Back to Future’s version of 2015 was hilarious enough. Seeing “1984” actually come to life is anything but hilarious.

Just to remind everybody, myself included, because Republicans continue to blur the line between church and state whenever they need more blur …

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (January 1, 1802)

There’s a new Trump & Company Super PAC called “Preserve our Rights.” There might be just a little tax problem with this new PAC.

The website doesn’t tell you diddle squat about what they want to preserve – they just ask for your email address and then to donate some money to them. Personally, I wouldn’t give them either. They could be for beheading baby kittens for all I can tell by their website.

Whose rights are they talking about, exactly?

Their filing at the FEC does tell us this:

Best I can tell, their PAC is located at a UPS Store and the Suite 395 is a post office box in the metropolitan area of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Here ya go to see for yourself.  Now, there’s something else you’re gonna find out about this location in a minute.

The PAC treasurer, Craig Hagin, is the associate pastor of an Evangelical mega-church in Oklahoma.

And his parents, Kenneth and Lynette Hagin, are the seniors pastors.

As I mentioned before, the Super PAC makes it easy for the faithful to give online.

And so does their church.

Remember how I promised you some fun about where the UPS store is located?  Honey, it’s just down the street from the church.

Now let me tell you about what kind of Christians they are.  They held a conference last year at the church / Bible College.

More than 4,000 people packed an auditorium at Rhema Bible College near Tulsa, Oklahoma, last weekend for the Health and Freedom Conference—an event mixing Christian worship, promotion of QAnon, and messages decrying COVID-19  “fear porn.”

Leaders speaking at the conference included General Michael Flynn, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, several pro-Trump pastors, an assortment of doctors, and many others.

And here’s a sample of what was said there. This is Lin Wood at the Bible College.

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1383709884114341892?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1383709884114341892%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fjulieroys.com%2Fcovid-19-conspiracy-conference%2Fcomment-page-1%2F

I think they’re preserving the right to execute me.  I could be wrong.

Now you’d think they’d have a problem with the IRS. They don’t because they are getting bolder. When you start saying that people need killin’ in a tax-free building, you’d think that would be the end of the line, but apparently it ain’t.

Okay, y’all, if you toss Madison Cawthorn, Roger Stone, and Alex Jones into your Veg-A-Matic and turn it on HIGH, you get something that will make you snort giggle all weekend.

I know it’s April Fool’s Day but – damn – I’ll believe anything that even 2 out of 3 of those guys say.

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1509727328716435459?t=YNSgbmSx2O-KldbMWVLAJw&s=01

Question: how does he know what happens at these orgies unless he’s been there?

By the way, the Sandy Hook parents’ lawsuit in Texas starts on April 25th in the county courthouse in Travis County. Jones made an insulting settlement offer to the parents. They rejected it. Loudly.

I hope your weekend is great.