May 14, Dr. Doug Christensen, Commissioner of Education for the state of Nebraska, will be the guest on Room 101 on May 14. Doctor Christensen recently resigned as commissioner after disagreements with the state legislature over assessment legislation.
The following was my response to a gentleman in California who wanted to know if there were any articles or studies done on HOW standardized tests were made and why they were so secretive. This is what I wrote to him:
The STAR test, along with many around the country, are highly controversial right now. But what is really the nature of the tests themselves? How are they created and are they appropriate tools for our kids' "measurement"? There was one study done that showed the STAR is mostly above grade level and even 2 or more.
An outright investigation into how they are made has not been done to my knowledge, but Gerald Bracey's book, "How to Not Get Statistically Snookered" is a great source to use as an insight into how these companies manipulate these tests to do what they want.
We are pulling our child out of public schools due to NCLBA. With NCLBA turning kids into test-takers, parents who want to instead instill a love of learning in their child should have the option of receiving vouchers to place their children in private schools.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic education plan, what we need are higher standards in the classroom, meaningful discipline, a return to rigorous curricula (including proper grammar instruction, the study of foreign languages and a return to primary sources in history rather than watered-down textbooks), better teachers, more parental and community involvement and greater flexibility to address local needs. These would begin the process of reforming American education. As it stands, it is highly unlikely that that expectations saddled to NCLB will be fulfilled.
"Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation." -- John F. Kennedy
David Brooks of the NYTimes wrote this brilliant piece in today's paper: A small excerpt below...aka: Why teaching to the test won't help our children.
We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.
The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?......
A $1 billion-a-year reading program that has been a pillar of the Bush administration's education plan doesn't have much impact on the reading skills of the young students it's supposed to help, a long-awaited federal study shows.
The results, issued Thursday, could serve as a knockout punch for the 6-year-old Reading First program — Congress has already slashed funding 60%. Reading First last year was the subject of a congressional investigation into whether top advisers improperly benefited from contracts for textbooks and testing materials they designed, and whether the advisers kept some textbook publishers from qualifying for funding.
Advocates of Reading First, an integral part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, have long maintained that its emphasis on phonics, scripted instruction by teachers and regular, detailed analyses of children's skills, would raise reading achievement, especially among the low-income kids it targets. But the new study by the U.S. Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) shows that children in schools receiving Reading First funding had virtually no better reading skills than those in schools that didn't get the funding.
My child has made all A's this year in first grade, and I don't want her labeled a failure based on one test..the CRCT
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Priscilla Webber-Sepulveda
As a special education teacher , I have seen firsthand how counterproductive and damaging this legislation can be! Get rid of it!
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Ingrid Weir
Watch the movie, "Idiocracy" to see where we are headed with asinine programs such as this.
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Carla Benard
Every year I give up more of my curriculum to test preparation. Instead of turning out better prepared students, I am forced to water down and summarize everything. No real time to dig in and give them more to think about.
One seldom hears about The Nuremberg Precedent in education except in history class discussions of the post-World War II trials of Nazis. Some Nazi leaders said they could not have known the consequences of their policies and orders and others said they were just following orders. Their judges said "that's not good enough."
The body count from No Child Left Behind grows daily and one wonders when the perpetrators will be called to account. In a decent nation, the larger society holds the government accountable. In a program like NCLB, the government holds the citizenry accountable.
Now comes Carl Chew, a 6th grade science teacher in Seattle who has decided to say "enough." That last sentence might at some point be altered to read "former 6th grade science teacher." On April 15, Mr. Chew refused to administer the WASL, the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, which serves to satisfy the NCLB testing requirements.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
I'm just glad this doesn't go on the realm of education...
(more foxes in front of the henhouses... - promoted by philipkovacs)
FYI: The DOE has launched a new web site called Doing What Works “dedicated to helping educators identify and make use of effective teaching practices.”It relies “primarily on the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate and recommend practices that are supported by rigorous research.”
The DOE defines Research-Based/Research-Proven Practice as “a practice that…has been found to be effective in improving education through high-quality, rigorous research.”
As you read through the site – and listen to the videos – you will become nauseated reading, and listening to, the number of times the terms “research”, “research-based”, and “rigorous research” are used. I found no quantitative evidence or links of such. We need to take their word for it.
Particularly interesting was the claim that to assure quality and utility… “Some materials are created...by the U.S. Department of Education and its contractors... The materials are reviewed by content experts to ensure they are consistent with the research. Experts include one or more representatives of the group that conducted the initial review for IES, one or more independent content experts, and experts in the Department’s contracting organizations.”
Of course, the DOE (in the video) also claims that NCLB is designed to "hold schools accountable for helping all students read and do math and science at grade level by 2014." (They still don't know what grade level means!)
I guess DWW is as research-based and as the components of Reading First.
I couldn't figure out why former substitute teacher and now comptroller of education elevates math and science over history. Then I realized it was to protect her boss.
If you don't know, you can't act...and this thing called democracy, we'll, it's more of a sham then a dream.
This is about opening our conversations up to a much larger audience. It is about encouraging local teachers, administrators, students, policy makers, and concerned citizens to talk to one another about changing our schools.
