Reply to "Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]RI.3.10 By the end of the year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 2-3 text complexity band independently and proficiently.

This standard is pretty silly. [b]It assumes that every student comes to a class at the same level. [/b] Real teachers who work in real schools know that this is very rare.  It's a pointless standard.  [/quote]

No, it doesn't. All it says is that you have to be able to do this by the end of the year to meet the standard. If you can't do it, then you don't meet the standard. I find it very difficult to argue with a standard that basically says that by the end of third grade, third-graders should be able to read informational texts written at the third-grade level.[/quote]

So if a student comes to a teacher reading 2 or 3 years below grade level, I am supposed to meet that standard by March or April?  I have had one or two students, language learners, who were able to jump several reading levels in one year, but it's very rare.  It's reasonable to expect growth, but it's not reasonable to think all students will read at the same level by the end (or middle) of the year.

Therefore, it's a meaningless standard.[/quote]

No, you have it backward. If the standard for a 3rd grader said that every third grader must read at a first grade level by the end of third grade such that nearly everyone could meet the standard, that would be a meaningless standard. But it would allow you to crow that all your students are meeting the standards!

I think what you are trying to say is that you want the standard to be something like "every child should improve by x reading levels by the end of the year," but that seems too vague to be meaningful, no? Perhaps as a corollary to a standard that says "for students entering the grade significantly below grade level, it is expected that they at a minimum improve by ____"? But again, that doesn't make the existing standards meaningless, but it does allow recognition for improvement of kids who are severely behind.

BTW -- the student is being measured against the standard, not you. So I think your beef is with IMPACT and the like. Not the standards, but the way the standards are being used to measure teachers instead of the students they teach. In which case you are correct and for the purposes of evaluating teachers, there should be a measurement of growth, not gross achievement. And BTW, that should include growth of those students who far exceed the standards already.[/quote]

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