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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This was on another thread and spells out exactly why we are sending our kids to a private HS.  After k-8 at our public what this teacher spelled out is why we are leaving a highly-rated public  My kids test off the charts and have straight As...but this is exactly what I hate about our County:

“I teach at a school where everything is online: textbooks, supplementary lessons, and student work submissions. We're expected to teach a portion of the content for a few minutes before allowing the students to do the rest on their own.

We have very high standardized test scores relative to the rest of the state, but any teacher in the building will tell you that our program does more harm than good. The program has taught our kids how to test; that's it. They spend each period skimming the text, memorizing the key terms, and regurgitating the information on the chapter summary assessments. They can pass a multiple choice test with no problem, but can barely put five original sentences together if asked to do some expository writing about what they read. So much focus on the computer has crippled their [b]social skills and situational awareness[/b]. [b]They can't problem solve worth a damn[/b], and they struggle with anything abstract. We're not allowed to modify the curriculum in any way, so we can't add things that would mitigate these issues. As long as the test scores are high, everyone's okay with us churning out drones year after year.“[/quote]

+1  Teaching to the test really is a terrible thing. At least if they do that, they should teach to a worthier type of test that uses logic, like the SATs or math competitions.

Though I still don't want to spend lots of $$ for private even if on average they do a better job with autonomy and creativity. Frankly, I'm not sure they do a better job with problem solving, especially in math and science. Situational awareness is an easy one, I plan on having my kids watch Seinfeld when they get home from school.[/quote]

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