Best content in ACS Professional Development

Attempts to standardize individual student outcomes are an unhelpful, if not downright harmful, way to promote the development of human beings, he says. Instead, “we need to start with the individual child, instead of what others think [that child] should become.”
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the most fruitful form of education—and the one with the best chance of empowering children to overcome poverty and other disadvantages—offers each child the opportunity to pursue his or her own goals, in a stimulating and supportive environment.
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In the alternate vision, individual differences are not flaws to be fixed; the emphasis instead is on helping all students to identify and develop their areas of interest, and to build on their strengths.
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“Look at what children are interested in or can do, and plan education with that in mind, rather than trying to fix them,”
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Academic standards—whether part of Common Core or not—are subjective, Zhao says, and don’t account for the fact that children naturally develop at different rates, or that learning is more haphazard than linear.
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Even worse, standards can “cause psychological damage to those not judged as good,”
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“standards describe the past, not the future,” and reflect the notion that children must “fit into the world as it is,” he says. “We forget that our children are the creators and owners of the future.”
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Each individual should therefore be free to decide which standard he or she wants to pursue,
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Standards (and their associated tests) often drive the design of a curriculum. Placing a lot of weight on test scores in a few subjects has led to “curriculum narrowing,”
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It is counterproductive because the notion that following a set curriculum will make students “college and career ready” is misguided, he says. Not only is college acceptance “an artificial goal, as if life ends at college,” but there are many types of colleges and majors, requiring different sets of knowledge and skills. That is even more true of careers, especially in a rapidly changing world in which many professions will soon become obsolete and others have yet to be invented.
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The best preparation for that, he adds, is for students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and chart their own educational paths.
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Even the basics—the knowledge that everyone needs in order to function in our society—don’t justify a mandated curriculum, he contends. A broad, flexible curriculum that supports children’s individual interests and strengths is more likely to engage them and promote learning, so that truly essential knowledge becomes “difficult to escape—when individuals want to pursue anything, they must learn the basics, so the basics are sought after, instead of imposed.”
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Another thing to bear in mind, Zhao says, is that schools that provide a learning environment that supports individual needs benefit greatly from harnessing their students’ intrinsic motivation, because they don’t have to work hard to try to overcome resistance to learning.
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The important things standardized tests don't measure - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tandardized-tests-dont-measure

education testing standardized testing assessment pedagogy learning commoncore

shared by Thomas Galvez on 02 Mar 15 -

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I wasn’t smart enough to realize it at the time, but I was seeing a demonstration of something extremely important, that real learning is natural and inherently satisfying. Myrna’s question kicked off genuine learning—self-propelled and successful not because the work was rigorous and the kids had grit, but because it was driven by curiosity, because satisfaction was immediate, because it was real-world rather than theoretical, because it was concrete rather than abstract, because it required initiative and action, and because it was genuinely important, dealing as it did with complex social and psychological issues shaping human behavior
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That’s one of the reasons standardized tests assembled in the office cubicles of Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other test manufacturers can’t do the job that most needs doing. They can’t measure and attach a meaningful number to the quality of original thought
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 “What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we taught what isn’t worth learning.”
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Using the scores on standardized tests
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it’s a sneaky scheme to privatize America’s public schools without broad public dialogue, it’s unethical.
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