Forum Index
»
DC Public and Public Charter Schools
Testing Madness
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
|
Michelle Rhee is planning more testing for DCPS students. Is this what you want for your kids?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/ |
Anonymous
Anonymous
| And this is why I will try to leave DCPS. |
Anonymous
| This is why we went private after 6 years in DCPS. |
Anonymous
|
It's so strange, since Rhee has bent over backwards to attract more affluent parents to the system.
Does she not understand that this will drive parents away in droves? |
Anonymous
| Apparently not. Perhaps we should tell her! |
Anonymous
|
Don't worry, her people monitor these boards.
Ever been in a meeting with one of them? They can't put down the blackberry for 3 minutes. It's especially wonderful when they do it while the children are around. Nothing like fielding the "I guess he didn't like our performance much" question from a 9 year old. "No honey, you were great. It's just that he's waiting on a donor kidney or maybe it's the nuclear launch codes and just couldn't focus on you for 3 minutes." |
Anonymous
|
Here's a resource that might be useful for parents that are concerned about the excessive use of testing in DCPS:
http://www.fairtest.org/ |
Anonymous
| Perhaps we could start by letting our City Council members know what we think about all this testing? |
Anonymous
| I'm fine with teaching to the test if the test itself is good measure of learning. But this seems like overkill in the sense of looking for a data source that proves (adults') points. Like NAEP figures. Sure, DC was the most-improved, but we're also still near dead last in proficiency. I don't want to hear [bleep] about improvement in test scores until we catch up with MoCo and NoVa. There are other signs of social progress that can and should be measured. Like college preparadness, kindergarten readiness, dropout rates. If Rhee and Fenty themselves take the tests (like their kids do), then I'd be willing to consider merits of yet more testing. |
Anonymous
| That's one of the reasons why we switched to private. |
Anonymous
|
What's so bad about the proposed additional testing?
Especially math for kids in grads K through 2. If I'm reading things correctly right now there is no mandated mathtesting for kidsin grads k -2. Of COURSE teachers do their own strt of year assessments anyhow -- but it's probably a good idea to standardize them. |
Anonymous
|
"What's so bad about the proposed additional testing?"
For me, it makes sense if you have a bunch of kids coming in to K or pre-K will very little school readiness, and you need to measure where they are at and track how well they get up to speed to make sure they obtain basic skills . But it makes very little sense in schools like JKLM, where kids are coming in at a very high level of school readiness - in my view, if they are ready to learn, they should just learn rather that sitting through mind-numbing drills to teach to the test. |
SAM2
Member Offline
Member Offline
My (limited) understanding is that it's not the testing itself that's the problem, but rather how the test results are used. Teachers & schools are rated based on how their students perform on those tests, and those ratings affect budgets, salaries, and jobs. (Bad test scores mean bad ratings.) Because teachers & schools face big incentives to have students perform well on the tests, many end up spending all their time drilling students to take the tests rather than actually teaching them in more productive ways. If schools were told that the tests are being used to hand out more money, so that schools with low test scores will get more funding and teachers will get better pay (perhaps a bonus for having the tougher job of teaching at-risk students), then I suspect teachers would spend a lot less time prepping students for the tests. And lots fewer parents would be complaining about the tests. Here's a recent Valarie Strauss post that touched on these issues: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/dc-schools/jay-mathews-and-rhee-you-a.html#more . |
Anonymous
|
For teachers to have a variety of assessment instruments available to use to develop learning activities that are appropriate for individual students is fine.
To mandate a rigid schedule of assessments for all students that are of dubious validity and reliability which are mainly used to evaluate teachers rather then address the needs of students is not a good thing, because it wastes time in class that could be used for learning. It also causes unnecessary stress to students, especially those in the primary grades. |