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Todd Finley

Fighting the Tests - 7 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...ftt.htm

Standardized Testing

shared by Todd Finley on 19 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Todd Finley on 19 Feb 10
     
    The Phi Delta Kappan by Alfie Kohn is old (2001). However, the author's argument against standardized testing continues to inspire.
Sheri Edwards

CMS Test results invite scrutiny - CharlotteObserver.com - 0 views

www.charlotteobserver.com/...853533.html

charlotteobserver testing assessment standards national

shared by Sheri Edwards on 27 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Staff at both schools will collect 10- to 15-percent pay hikes based on this year's scores, money that goes away next year. The raises, paid for by county commissioners eager to see kids succeed at low-performing schools, illustrate the rewards and penalties that can hang on test scores.
  • In 2006, a principal split Garinger into five academies with specialized themes. The New Technology school emerged strong, but the rest of the campus struggled.
  • She was convinced the dismal pass rate could change but believed many needed stronger skills to pass exams. “We really had to put the brakes on things,” she said. That meant letting strong students go straight into the EOC classes. But weaker ones took a semester or more of preparatory classes designed to boost their reading, math or science skills.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Observer analysis shows an unusually large number of Garinger International students sidestepped EOC courses in 2008-09. (See box.)
  • This year the school added juniors, which meant enrollment grew by almost 50 percent. Yet the school gave 46 fewer tests.
  • In English I, which all ninth-graders must take, Garinger International's pass rate went from 67 to 81 percent.
  • the only thing we have to vary is the time it takes to attain the standards. We do not all learn at the same rate.
  • It sounds like the principal is trying to help all her kids be successful. Why must that be cause for suspicion??
  • Sheri Edwards on 27 Jul 09
     
    What do you think?
Leslie Healey

Students Know Good Teaching When They Get It, Survey Finds - NYTimes.com - 11 views

www.nytimes.com/...11education.html

teaching writing SAT learning teen

shared by Leslie Healey on 11 Dec 10 - No Cached
    • Leslie Healey
      Leslie Healey on 11 Dec 10
       
      we are teaching an added SAT review class to all juniors this year--there has been much consternation about the conflict between teaching to a test in SAT and our methods teaching lit and writing in the Brit Lit course.
  • One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics. Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers. “Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.”
Donalyn Miller

U.S. Plans Major Changes in How Students Are Tested - NYTimes.com - 9 views

www.nytimes.com/...03testing.html

standardized testing education reform

shared by Donalyn Miller on 04 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Donalyn Miller on 04 Sep 10
     
    This article describes a national initiative to overhaul the design of our current standardized testing system.
Mark Smith

t r u t h o u t | "Value-Added" Assessment: Tool for Improvement or Educational "Nuclea... - 4 views

www.truth-out.org/ducational-nuclear-option63244

shared by Mark Smith on 16 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The growing enthusiasm over value-added assessment, however, belies what is actually a damaging policy for public education. Value-added assessment promises, rather, to dismantle teachers' unions, deintellectualize teachers' jobs, to refashion schools according to corporate-profit-making initiatives and to burn out experienced teachers at ever faster rates. What its proponents fail to realize is that value added contributes to the destruction of public education by 1) participating in a broader corporate reform scheme of privatization and 2) objectifying knowledge, or turning knowledge into "things," that is, units that can be measured, compared and transmitted at the expense of genuine learning.
    • Mark Smith
      Mark Smith on 16 Sep 10
       
      Amen!
  • There are two basically different ideas of educational value at play in this debate. For proponents of value-added assessment, standardized tests contain certain, verifiable and numerically quantifiable knowledge. The tests are mistakenly thought to be objective.
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