Wicat Systems Inc, Orem, Utah should get the redoubtable H Ross Perot onto its board forthwith: attentive subscribers will recall that Perot it was, with his School Board hat on, who declared that Texas schoolkids were becoming a bunch of illiterate jocks whose arithmetic started and ended with the ability to add up the football and baseball scores, and that those who didn’t come up to scratch in the classroom wouldn’t make the team either; Wicat’s Educational Learning Systems – 68000-based Unix machines with special software – have been in use in Texas schools for a couple of years now, and Wicat is over the moon that recent results for the state-mandated (Perot-mandated, no doubt) Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills test have now been tabulated for the Pharr San Juan Alamo Independent School District in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, showing that the number of fifth grade students achieving passing scores on the test more than doubled in some areas, and that in 16 schools, over 2,500 students in grades three and five where Wicat’s curriculum and testing products were used scored astounding increases on the test, with grades three and five showing an increase of 50% overall in the number of students passing, and the percentage passing the writing test soared to 83% in 1987 from 41% in 1986 – but it’s all so unscientific, dammit, now we’ll never know whether it was the computers or Perot’s threat of no swot, no sport that led to the great leap forward.
WICAT’S EDUCATIONAL LEARNING SYSTEMS RESPONSIBLE FOR IMPROVEMENT IN PERFORMANCE OF TEXAS SCHOOLCHILDREN?
