Jets, ratings and peeves

In case you’re wondering why we seem to have a lot more business jets flying around the airport, we know the answer. Starting Wednesday, members of the Citation Jet Pilot Association will meet in Austin and land in Georgetown. The Citation is a Cessna business jet and upwards of 150 of these beautiful airplanes are expected to come and go during the week. Since that’s more airplanes than the airport ramp can hold, the shorter, east-west runway will turn into a temporary airplane parking lot for a few days. It will be an interesting sight, all that money lined up wing tip to wing tip.

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It was good to see that our school ratings have started to rise after those embarrassing ratings before Covid. You will remember those F and D schools and how distressed we became about that. As the ratings are being phased back in after Covid, schools that score in the F or D range are just not rated at all for the moment. The test data were released, but the state didn’t assign a grade this time. So schools earn A or B or C or nothing.

At some point the F and D ratings will come back, but I wonder — why not make this temporary system permanent? Rather than tag schools with the scarlet F and have kids saddled with the knowledge that they are in an F school, why not have them in a school that is striving to get into the rating category, a mark of accomplishment? The downside, it seems, may be that the F rating is more motivating. It sure got Georgetown motivated. What do you think?

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Time for a pet peeve. Gifted and Talented programs. Get rid of them. Keep the courses, but drop the name. It’s terrible.

To use the modern slam, it’s binary. If your daughter isn’t in the Gifted and Talented group, she is, the name implies, in the ungifted and untalented group. But can that be true? Of course not. The only reason to have such an exclusionary name is for bragging. So let’s drop the brag name and pick one that is not a silent, implied judgment.