No Child Left Behind...just Education Itself...

[acroyear]

"We've wasted whole days taking tests when we could have been learning something new. And some of the tests had nothing to do with us, but were just supposed to tell the school system how well it was doing." -- 11th-grader Jay Nickel.

And its going to get worse as increasingly every dollar a school system desparately needs is tied to "performance", ignoring the catch-22 that if they don't have the resources to pay good teachers to keep them teaching (far too many quit within 5 years) and to provide up to date supplies and textbooks, they can't teach and their students suffer and then they do poorly on the tests and then their funding gets cut...

*sigh*

and to make matters worse, the "new" SAT, which dropped the analogies section supposedly because it used too many culturally-defined words, still has that problem of words that aren't important vocabulary but are just things one *might* (and more likely might not) have been exposed to

And if the samples put out by the College Board are any measure, I don't think the new test is going to be exactly sensitive to cultural or social differences. The answer to one of the sentence completions in the official prep book is "treacly" -- a word I never heard until I was in my forties and my English wife made a treacle pudding. -- same article

this comment was interesting

Apart from those issues, my biggest problem with the writing test is that it could cement some bad writing habits. It will reinforce the belief -- already firmly rooted among a growing number of my students who've been trained to pass the Virginia SOL exam -- that popping off one draft of a five-paragraph essay is all it takes to be a solid writer. Filling up a page or two, instead of analyzing in depth and crafting and polishing, will be the idea.

See, I've kinda always seen it as being that. Everybody did that sort of thing while I was in school. To be perfectly honest, with having to churn out 3 or 4 of these a month plus practice the maths for science and math classes, plus the 3.6 extracurricular activities everybody's involved, who has time to do anything more than the first draft? And now, with 3 more subjects / day than I had, and more after-school options, its gotten worse, not better.

Comments

[cozit.livejournal.com]

The middle school I work at has a "Testing Assistant"... whose stated primary job is to do all the mess of work around the Md. State Assessments (MSAs), and a few other miscellaneous standardized tests through the school year (not all are administered to all students). Portions of the year (like right now), she's running around trying to make sure everything works the way it should, papers where they belong, pencils and other testing equipment available, teachers who are proctoring know what they're supposed to be doing, classrooms have no 'hints' of any sort displayed during the test, etc.

Of course, she also helps out in the office when things aren't as test oriented as they are these few weeks (and it usually looks like that's her primary job... but it's not the *reason* behind her paycheck). *g* She's an incredibly nice woman... and dedicated enough to be insane enough to work extra hours about now, to make sure all those things that can't be done until almost the last minute (mostly record-keeping stuff before, during and after the testing) gets done when it needs to be.

But just think... if that money was spent on yet another assistant, or a half-time teacher to work with small groups of kids in need of help....

Accountability stinks to do, is inefficient in many ways, but kinda has to be done to justify the expenditure (among other things)... can't win with or without it, either way.