At least that's what one NC school district thinks. If you haven't heard about this particular firestorm, which includes standardized tests for KINDERGARTNERS, check it out here.
ARG! What drives me crazy is that I honestly don't feel most teachers are to blame. Both of my kids left ps with giant gaps. dd didn't learn to read or do basic counting. Ds left with no grammar, and he despises reading and writing. But guess what? I don't blame the teachers (well, I blame dd's K teacher for not telling me she was struggling all year and waiting until a month before school ended, but that's it). There was only ONE teacher that I think was awful. And that's in a district that I found frustrating and ineffective- a school district pushing kids into remedial programs in crazy numbers, and teaching almost entirely sight words. The problem is the curriculum they are trying to teach our children. There is too much CREATIVE THINKING required of kids, and not nearly enough direct instruction. It's all discovery based (or as one teacher put it- kids coming up with 'strategies') when they are too young to have anything to pull from, and still in a stage too concrete for that kind of thinking. Kids are expected to make adult connections without adult maturity and adult experiences. The morons who are making up the current pedagogy have so obviously little experience with kids, that I can't even understand how anyone can take it seriously. More testing just mean teachers will get less time to instruct kids across the board- as they fight just to get the kids to pass yet another test (this one which has their own jobs at stake). Don't get me wrong- there are awful teachers out there who need to go. But it's time to focus on the holy curriculum and the psychologists in Universities who write them without consulting childhood educators. (and don't misunderstand me: kids need lots of time to be creative. But asking them to be creative in Math, Spelling, etc just isnt going to teach them anything. We drop our kids off in a sea of knowledge and expect them to find their own way to shore. That's ridiculous.) Just another reason I'm glad my kids are homeschooled.
I'm tutoring a neighbor's sixth grade daughter. They asked me to only prep her for the standardized testing happening this month. To help me know what that entailed, I went to the school website to pull up their testing schedule. In every grade, there is at least one mandatory test per week all year long!!!!! There is no way teachers can be doing anything but "teaching to the test" at this point! I asked to see her report cards and learned that she's failing nearly every subject. When I met with the homeroom teacher (with parent approval), I learned that grades were based on two take home assignments a week as there wasn't time for anything else. Her parents didn't realize how much of the classroom time was spent on testing. I would imagine that most of the district's parents don't either. I was a classroom teacher up until five years ago and testing only happened for one week in the spring. What on earth has happened in those five years?! Thank the Lord my kiddos are out of that system!
oh man articles like this make me glad we homeschool. Not that I have a big aversion to tests, and it is a skill people should learn (how to write a test), but standardized tests are not much of an indicator of how well educated our kids are. There is so much more to it than that.
