I can’t imagine this happening in this country what with No Child Left Behind and it’s push for higher test scores. We’re too honest for that.
While several School Committee members seem satisfied with the district’s response to testing violations at Goddard School of Science and Technology, others want more information, they said yesterday. Superintendent Melinda J. Boone, however, defended the steps she has laid out.
The state commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education announced Thursday that his department would nullify Goddard’s scores because his department found that school staff “reviewed student work on the assessment, coached students to add to their responses, scribed answers or portions of answers that were not worded by students, and provided scrap paper for students to use during test,” according to a Jan. 19 letter from Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester to Ms. Boone.
When he wrote of teachers who had “scribed answers,” he was referring to teachers who work with students who cannot write and who are supposed to transcribe the students’ answers verbatim, according to Jonathan Palumbo, a state spokesman. The investigation did not find any evidence of testing irregularities in previous years, he said.
[…]
“We live in a country now that unless there’s evidence of a head rolling under a bus somewhere, something hasn’t happened, but I think the consequences for this school were huge, and they were real,” she said.
Students who cannot write. Hmm…
My wife is in college getting her degree in education (pedagogy) and in art history and I don’t want her to ever get the feeling that she has to pass an illiterate student.
To that effect I’m going to train to teach English Literacy at the free public library and deal with her referrals. (I’m on a handicapped pension so I can’t earn any money.)
Learning how to read is essential to avoiding becoming mere cannon fodder.
If you don’t have the words, you don’t have the basic equipment to think with, never mind memes, grammar, syntax or the semiotics of any language.
I thank the gods that I learned how to read French at three and was done with it by four (French is extremely easy to learn,) and learned English by nine (English is a bitch to learn to translate because, unlike French where listening to a word tell you how to spell it, English pronunciation is nearly aleatory and eccentric.
What a sad bunch of doublespeak no wonder kids have a hard time learning.
The state of the Education establishment in the country today.
Probably if we devoted more of our tax money to education it would fix problems such as this.
Uncle Dave…what’s with the comment at the end? Students who cannot write. Hmm….
My son is 8 years old and “cannot write” due to his physical disability. Professor Stephen W. Hawking cannot write, but I’m sure you wouldn’t challenge him to an IQ test or question his test scores because someone else wrote his answers or he used a computer to input the information.
This isn’t the first time this has happened…it’s inevitable with NCLB. A handful of special-needs kids (who will never meet standards) or non-english speakers (who will, eventually) can wreck a school’s numbers, costing them significant funding.
Lets face it, education is an endeavor best left to the individual or family given the sorry state of teacher competency. Just check out the average GRE scores for the different grad courses of study and you will not be surprised that education applicants score at the bottom end in verbal and quantitative reasoning.
I discovered I had equaled or surpassed many of my teachers’ knowledge grasp by about the 5th grade. Thankfully, my parents then sent me to a school where about half of my instructors had a PhD.
How can a child excel when she is being taught by a dullard? I’m surprised the teachers are able to come up with the correct answers.
Here we go with a bunch of comments about how stupid American kids are. Judging by the way we gave our standard of living away to Communists I’d say it applies to more than just kids.
#7
Hard to argue with that.
I used to work for a large school district here in California, this happens here. A Charter school got in deep trouble when it was discovered that the Teachers were pressured by the Principle to “assist” the students to make sure test scores were improved.
I also found out one day that they don’t even teach kids cursive handwriting anymore. The kids at the high school I worked at, couldn’t even read it. Their signatures were printed.
Sad…
O’Really,
He wasn’t talking about the ability of using a pen and paper to write. Your example of Hawking is a good example of a writer who uses other means than a traditional methods to write.
#4: I took the article’s mention of not being able to write to mean the kids were so poorly educated that they weren’t able to write coherently. You’re take on it didn’t occur to me. If that’s what the author meant, the line wasn’t written clearly.
On the other hand, if your meaning is what was intended, why would there be a problem with a teacher helping the student in this way? Unless it meant the teacher improved upon what the student told him.
McLearn, is the result of corporatised education. Students are burgers. Standardisation of core processes, efficiency through scale, externalise cost.
In TN if you admit you even saw the student test you are fired even if you read it to somebody.
Of course nobody has any opinions about the test because in order to have opinions you have to have seen the test which automatically means you just resigned.
Th fight in TN is over value added. Even if the student scored superior the question is did they make as much progress as the state expected. If the answer is no for your class, no one has to accept you as teacher. So far as I can see that ends tenure.
Don’t miss the real culprit here — high stakes testing.
The conservative obsession for standardized testing is killing our traditional American progressive educational values of independent thinking and innovation.
Thanks to conservative educational philosophy, it’s all about reward or punishment based on filling in those little back dots with a #2 pencil exactly as the study guide tells you to.
Worse, it puts intense demands on teachers to increase test scores when most of the problem is caused by crap that takes place outside the classroom.
>traditional American progressive educational values of independent thinking and innovation.
You mean not firing any teachers no matter how incompetent, and paying all the same salary regardless of subject taught.
Hi UD,
I didn’t read all the comments due to general lack of time in life, but I just had to mention that some smart kids do have trouble writing. I have a son with an Autism Spectrum Disorder who has a terrible time writing. He is super-smart, but has fine-motor issues and so his handwriting looks like absolute shit. At first I thought it was just plain laziness or sloppiness, but no matter what we did he just couldn’t write neatly (and believe me, I made him practice like I was a Chinese mother). So, the school gives him a scribe for taking certain tests (like the NCLB required ones)…
Gee, a few years ago the complaint was the passing of students who weren’t ready.
Today, teachers are either forced or pressured into making their students pass the test. NOTE, there is nothing about learning the concepts, just passing the test. The Superintendent admits the teachers were pressured, yet the wrath comes down on “incompetent teachers”.
I surpassed my 5th grade teacher’s knowledge in math in 5th grade. It was really pathetic.
My ninth and tenth grade teacher, however, was wonderful. She knew a lot about math. She was also working on her PhD which was overkill for teaching at the high school level. I had her for both Algebra and Geometry. I didn’t repeat her course; I took two different classes from her.
In Florida we’ve got FCAT for seeing if the students learned anything — to grade the school. The teacher’s union hates it because they only want seniority to determine promotions. For a couple of years the scores kept getting higher and higher, but they were only painting themselves into a corner. There’s a limit as to how flagrant you can get before the public figure it out despite the news media.
The scores crashed when a new supervisor of FCAT came in and required more honesty. Burn, baby, burn!
I think the “No Child Left Behind” motto was actually invented by Dick Cheney. And he was really referring to getting them thru school faster, and into the volunteer military. Because there are only just so many jobs open at Burger World, that that level of education qualifies anyone for. But the services will take just about anyone who can point a rifle. In fact I think they prefer them NOT to be too smart. Because anyone with brains might think twice, before sacrificing their lives to protect Arab oil fields, overseas. Not that their sacrifice isn’t appreciated. But, most of us never asked them to volunteer. And most of them, went in with a overly glorified sense of adventure, in their heads. And the notion that it would pay better than Burger World. But the customers there, don’t shoot you, when they’re unsatisfied. So perhaps the safer choice, would be the better one, in the long run. But you have to be able to do the math, to make this distinction. And most can’t do that either. Long term quality of life decisions, aren’t something they school you in, in the United States. It would interfere with too many institutions who base their success on us not being good at making wise choices.
Maybe the US should do as the Muslims to, to steer their untamed youth into sacrificing their life for a cause. And promise them 70 virgins, if they graduate from school with high honors. Not that they’ll actually get the 70 virgins. But then the terrorist bombers very likely don’t either. I’m sure THAT heaven ran out of virgins long ago. Hey, we lie about Santa Claus, to make them behave, when they’re young. So what’s so terrible about lying to them, about another impractical reward, to get them to learn more? What are they going to do? Get a law degree and suit their parents, for breach of contract?