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Posts Tagged ‘High Stakes Testing’
Watch this Brilliant Man!
Saturday, September 4th, 2010TAKE ACTION ON MAY 29: Join the Postcard Campaign to End High Stakes Testing! (from Perimeter Primate)
Friday, May 21st, 2010Punishing and firing teachers, and punishing and closing schools is not a way to improve public education! Parents, teachers, students, and concerned citizens have initiated a postcard campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama to end the use of high stakes testing.
On the campaign trail in Wisconsin on February 28, 2008, Michelle Obama said, ”No Child Behind is strangling the life out of most schools.” She added,”If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee that.” Thousands and thousands of Americans agree with her criticism.
MICHELLE OBAMA CAN HELP END THE RELIANCE ON HIGH STAKE STANDARDIZED TESTS.
On May 29, 2010, get everyone you know to send postcards to the First Lady. Affix a 28-cent stamp to a postcard and address it to:
First Lady Michelle Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Send the postcard with this message (modify if sent by students):
Dear Mrs. Obama,
We want the same education for our children that you provide for Malia and Sasha. Our child is not a test score.
Please tell the President to end the use of high stakes standardized tests!
Sincerely,
Your name
Your address
Citizenry Anyone?
Saturday, March 27th, 2010In the end, teachers must understand what is happening to teaching in this country and know what they can do to be a public intellectual assisting in the development of the nations next generation of active, democratic citizenry.
I came upon this novel take by Candace Cofield on the dangers of teaching to the test and fast-track teacher training: they are detrimental to the teacher’s role as “public intellectual” (like the ring of that), whose primary charge is to prepare students to become responsible citizens in our democratic society.
As a part of this system, teachers are charged with the responsibility of preparing students to be independent, life-long learners, since civic participation demands that citizens stay abreast of current events, but also have knowledge of what preceded that contributes to the modern context.
To do so requires teachers themselves to be more than teachers of a specific academic content area, but also intellectuals who see themselves engaging in public debate and dialogue. They need to know how to create a learning environment that promotes discussion, problem-solving, appreciation for a diversity of perspectives, tolerance, and a focus on social justice.
Isn’t this the kind of teaching the government should be promoting?
Or is having an informed citizenry precisely what it doesn’t want?
Opting Out
Thursday, February 18th, 2010I went to an informational meeting for the parents of incoming special ed kindergartners and was struck by:
- the increased enrollment (max 30) we are guaranteed to see in the general ed classroom, and
- the emphasis on the state standards to which the state and district will hold our children
The thought of my already anxious boy taking inappropriate and stressful state tests is more than I can stomach, so I have done a little research and found the following item in a state testing FAQ.
Can the IEP team exempt my child from participating in state or districtwide assessments?No. The role of the IEP team is to determine how your child can participate most appropriately in the assessments. Currently, California Education Code allows parents/guardians to submit a written request to the principal of the child’s school if they do not want their child to take any or all parts of the STAR tests. Parents of children with disabilities must follow the regular school process to exercise this option. Parents cannot exempt their child from the CAHSEE. However, there are potentially significant consequences for your child’s school if a large number of students do not participate in the assessments. You should fully discuss the accommodations and/or modifications to enable your child to participate with the other members of the IEP team.
What these “consequences” may be are of no concern to me and shouldn’t be to any parent. What I can say as a resource specialist teacher who has had the unfortunate duty of administering inappropriate state tests to special ed students is that for many if not most of them it has been an excruciating experience.
Will my son be taking state tests when he reaches second grade? Yes if he can absolutely handle them; no if he cannot.
Virtual Twins
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009At the risk of blogging this Edweek article by Leslie A. Maxwell into the ground…
A national study released today
casts doubt on whether the academic performance of students in charter schools is any better than that of their peers in regular public schools.
Looking at 2,403 charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia, researchers at Stanford University found that students in more than 80 percent of charter schools either performed the same as—or worse than—students in traditional public schools on mathematics tests.
Specifically, researchers at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that:
• Thirty-seven percent of the taxpayer-funded but largely independent schools posted gains that were “significantly below” what their students would have realized if they had enrolled in their local traditional public schools instead.
• Forty-six percent of charters produced learning gains that were indistinguishable from their local public schools’.
• Seventeen percent of charters posted growth that exceeded that of their regular public school equivalents by a “significant amount.”
“If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters,” said Margaret E. Raymond, the director of the center and the study’s lead author. “That’s a red flag.”
To produce the study, “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States,” researchers used student-level longitudinal data from each of the participating states and the District of Columbia. They created a “virtual twin” from local public schools that matched each charter school student’s profile according to race and ethnicity, eligibility for the federal subsidized-meals program, participation in special education programs, English-language proficiency, and starting test scores.
So if student A performs better than his virtual twin A-2 at two different public schools, and student B performs better than his virtual twin B-2 at two different charter schools does it say that:
the tougher questions that we still need to answer relate to why some teachers and some schools in both sectors do better than others in the same sector
as Jeffrey R. Henig, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University claims? Or does it mean that you can’t compare kids (or teachers or schools) accurately with standardized tests?
More
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009I found this link in Diane Ravitch’s blog. Thanks to the Daily News for its critical examination of New York’s inflated testing results:
It’s the state exam version of grade inflation.
Soaring scores on the state math test don’t necessarily add up to better schools or smarter kids.
That’s because it has gotten easier to teach to the test as the questions have gotten easier to predict, a Daily News analysis revealed.
And, the tests may also be easier.
“It’s the lesson of the financial crisis, and it’s the lesson here – you can’t just trust the numbers, you have to look at what the numbers mean,” said Columbia University sociology doctorate student Jennifer Jennings.
“If you can always make pretty good guesses about what’s going to be on the state tests, teachers aren’t stupid and we’re putting them under a whole lot of pressure, so basically they’re strategic about what they teach.”