Tags for "Standardized Tests"
Posted on Nov 18, 2009 - 10:57 AM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
This is my thirteenth fall as a teacher. This year has been wonderful so far. I have great students, colleagues that I respect, and a curriculum for the majority of my classes that I agree with philosophically.But then ... (think the soundtrack to Jaws) it is time to set professional goals. There is nothing in the year that brings more discomfort than the goal-related meetings, and we have at least three each year. These meetings make me sweat and give me a horrible pain between my right shoulder and my neck, in fact, I am trying to stretch it out as I type.
Here is the issue: my goal needs to be in alignment with the school and district goals. In a nutshell, that means that my goal... The Building Blocks of a Good Education
Posted on Nov 18, 2009 - 02:02 PM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
This week I'll be asking the question. Here it is:What ever happened to Kindergarten?
This past weekend I found myself in Western Massachusetts for an old fashioned Timber House Raising. Now I have to be honest, before this weekend I had no idea what a Timber Hose Raising was. Living in Brooklyn it's not so often you come across someone who decides they're going to build their house and then invites the whole neighborhood over to help. It's even less often that you get to watch a house being build with no metal. But that was exactly what happened. Over the last two years pieces of tree were cut, shaved and carved into lumber, each piece measured and chiseled to fit exactly into the... Standardized Tests “Deny Children a Well-Rounded Education”
Posted on Apr 07, 2010 - 08:05 AM by Sara Schmidt in News Feed
Ministers are stripping primary school children of their basic human right to a well-rounded education, a teachers’ leader warned today.
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said national tests for 10- and 11-year-olds, formerly known as Sats, contravene the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Under the Convention, which Britain signed in 1991, children are entitled to a broad education which develops their “personalities, talents and abilities to their fullest potential.”
Blower told the NUT annual conference in Liverpool that Sats only gave children the right to pass exams, not the right “to be educated in the round.” They reduced children to “little bundles of measurable outputs trained in a mechanistic model of education,” she said, repeating words used last month by the children’s commissioner, Maggie Atkinson.
UK Teachers Take a StandPosted on May 14, 2010 - 03:03 PM by Scott Nine in The Landscape
My first response to news that thousands (yes thousands!) of elementary school teachers in the UK will boycott giving their students standardized tests and instead take them on outings or write creative stories is, "It is about time!"I've long thought that teachers have the most collective power to bring about change if they acted simultaneously to challenge norm referenced tests that rank young kids and mechanize the art of teaching and learning.
The full article can be found UK teachers boycott tests. The Education Policy Debate
Posted on Jun 07, 2010 - 10:26 AM by Dana Bennis in The Landscape
I enjoy reading columns by David Brooks in The New York Times. He's a moderate conservative who promotes a more compassionate, intellectual, and pragmatic form of conservatism than what is often found in politics and the media. Nonetheless, I often disagree with him, and his recent op-ed on education deserves a critical response.He begins by praising Obama's direction on education, saying that Obama is using "federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top." Yet Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program is rewarding $4.5 billion to a limited number of states who receive the most points based on a scoring rubric (PDF) the administration... New assessments - are they better?
Posted on Sep 03, 2010 - 08:44 AM by Dana Bennis in The Landscape
Secretary Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education announced the awarding of $330 million yesterday to two consortia of states under the Race to the Top Assessment program for their proposals to create a new generation of assessments. This is on top of the $4 billion announced in the past months to the state-wide Race to the Top competition. The Department of Education framed the contest as one that would create assessments that help "prepare students for college and the workplace, that more validly measure student knowledge and skills, that better reflect good instructional practices, and that support a culture of continuous improvement in education." The plan is for the assessments... A Fifteen-Year-Old’s Perspective on TestingPosted on Jan 13, 2011 - 12:18 AM by Claire Russell in Pulse
Hello Everyone!Here I am, it is 12:20 in the morning on January 13th 2011, and I am doing homework. Today was a snow day, and I, instead of staying home and doing homework all day, made the somewhat irresponsible decision of going out to my friend's house and having a snowball fight and making a snowman and laughing the whole day away. And now I am mad at myself for it. But, before I fall into such a pit of self loathing, I have to ask myself, why? Why is it so dreadfully important that I, a social fifteen-year-old, stay home out of the beautiful snowy weather and study? And at what point did I become so deeply involved in school that I would be so disappointed in myself for something... Problems With the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers
Posted on Feb 02, 2011 - 09:00 AM by Dana Bennis in Resources
ACT out against SAT - One College Applicant Puts Her Testing Gripes on VideoPosted on Mar 30, 2011 - 05:58 PM by Shawn Strader in Resources
President Obama On High-Stakes TestsPosted on Apr 07, 2011 - 04:36 PM by Dana Bennis in Resources
Living In DialoguePosted on Sep 12, 2011 - 06:16 PM by Shawn Strader in Resources