Testing to Create Dropouts: knockout piece!

[LWolf]

I'm risking a quick sinking here in GD. This is one of the best pieces I've read on high stakes testing and what it's doing to our students and to our public schools:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0338/hentoff.php

Anthony Alvarado was a New York City schools chancellor who knew a lot about how to motivate a student to learn how to learn so that it becomes a lifelong adventure. During his tenure, I visited Alvarado's office at the old Board of Education Livingston Street building in Brooklyn. The citywide reading scores had just come in, and there had been a significant rise.

But Tony seemed down, and I asked him why. "When," he said, "do you teach them how to think?" He knew the false positives of collective high test scores in a school or district or in the system. As Andrew Wolf wrote in The New York Sun (October 4-6, 2002): "The best schools are not necessarily those that score highest, but rather those that achieve the greatest improvement of their individual students."

Wolf continued: "Only if we look at the schools by this measure can we evaluate the efficacy of the curriculum and teaching methods they employ."

In the October 25, 2002, Voice, I wrote about disturbing early signs of educational dysfunction in the new chancellor, Joel Klein. In a September 25 front-page story in The New York Times, Klein had been quoted as saying briskly: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators." That alone was an ominous augury for the future, but then Klein actually said that he had no objections to teachers "teaching to the test. . . . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability and we need to conform our efforts."

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

[RC]

1. The Right cannot afford to have a generation of kids

that can think and reason.
Peace may break out.
People can ride bikes because they want to instead of that being all they can afford.
Our streets would be safe after dark.
Crime would go down as the employment rate goes up.
Think of the possibilities when we cooperate with each other for common goals instead of killing each other for what we want.

[InkAddict]

2. I vaguely remember a time like that

but then again, I was one of those "crazy" middle school adolescents in a 9th period Art class. On turning our stools upside down on the table for the cleaning crew before the final bell rang, the intercom so rudely interrupted to say that those childhood innocences had died with the man on a street in Dallas. I can remember; it's absolutely unbelieveable that Bu$h doesn't! As for his kid - he must have always parroted and pranced to Poppy's promise/avocation to return America to his royal relatives or bust! Looks like BUST, and I'm hoping to celebrate wildly!

What I did learn was to question stories too pat and tidy for their complexity. An SRA Lab drilled us weekly in reading comprehension and vocabulary. My fundie mom, heaven help her, believed it was the New Math, for which I served as a guinea pig for Yale's new method, that had ruined the educational processes. However, I learned the Whiffenpooh song/legends from Dad, Mass. born, and sent to Yale for training during the WWII. The college express route was shut down due to his illness, but I did manage to get there, though I'd already read most of the books on the lit. reading lists as well as Quo Vadis, Exodus, Common Sense. Romance novels? YUCK, but hey everyone needs to make a living.

I am surely living in interesting times...Thanks Confu!

I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!

[LWolf]

3. When you can't win elections honestly, you:

1. Scrub the voter rolls of possible opposition.
2. Mess with the count.
3. Force out-of-cycle redistricting.
4. Recall governors elected fairly to install your puppet.
5. Set up your buddy who makes voting machines to own the vote with
no paper trail for accountability.
6. Make sure every child in the nation is well-indoctrinated with
the listen, bubble the choice I tell you to, and whatever you do,
don't question me about it philosophy before they come of voting
age.

"Well, it's one, two, three, what are we learning here?
Don't ask me I don't really know.
Just wanna make it past "Go."
And it's five, six, seven,
Now, don't be late.
There ain't no time to wonder why.
We're all gonna cry."