teaching

Sharon Otterman’s recent NY Times article (“Tests for Pupils, But the Grades Go to Teachers”) mentions that New York City’s new teacher assessments will be task-oriented. The New York State English tests have had such tasks for years. They’re very fudge-able. These tasks are graded on a “rubric” which is subjective. Every year when I attended training for test graders different people would score the practice tests differently. And every year someone from the district office would invariably say, “Please give the children the benefit of the doubt.” In other words, please cheat.

Here’s one of President Obama’s goals for the reauthorization of NCLB:

Recognize and reward schools that increase student achievement and close achievement gaps —and recognize and reward districts and states that turn around their lowest-performing schools.

http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/faq/accountability.pdf

Translation: Let’s have lots more test prep. Here’s a possible argument in favor of such an approach: Why NOT have more test prep? If it leads to higher scores then that means children are reading better. Right?

I've been asked: How can we support foreign language instruction in this country when so many children do poorly in English? The answer: We start too late. Literacy acquisition begins very early: long before the school years. By the time they enter kindergarten children are already on the right track or they're flailing. The biggest predictor of failure? Poverty. Economically disadvantaged children are surrounded by adults who have not had the benefit of a college education. A child who doesn't hear enriched vocabularies enters school with a deficit.

The media is filled with reports based on bad science. Unfortunately, the general public hasn’t been trained to separate the chaff from the grain. So I’m here to help. A recent report published by Eric A. Hanusek for the National Bureau of Economic Research claims that the quality of a teacher can impact a student’s earnings potential by as much as $400,000. The report was discussed (uncritically, I might add) on CNN. There’s one problem with Hanusek’s work: It’s bogus.

When any such report has been issued, questions must be asked:

No parent wants to see their child stumble along in life. No parent wants to see their child fail. Much like a coach on a sports team, parents sometimes will watch their child go along in life and, having the advantage of watching from the sidelines, see the mistakes they are making and what consequences lie ahead. We want to rush in and guide them in the way they should do. The difficulty is letting your child go headlong into that mistake as they attempt to spread their wings and fly.