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Testing and NCLB

The Puppet Masters

ALECpuppetmasters ALEC, which stands for American Legislative Exchange Council, is the most influential corporate-funded political force operating in America today, one that has worked to dilute collective bargaining rights and privatize public education. Yet ALEC is more or less unknown in teacher circles. ALEC creates legislation for elected officials to introduce in their states as their own brainchildren. ALEC’s strategy: “spread the unions thin ‘by playing offense’ with decoy legislation.” Spreading the unions thin has resulted in radical changes to classroom teachers’ everyday lives. Continue reading →

CNN Story on Teacher Pay and Test Scores Misleads Readers

wrong-way Yesterday CNN’s blog, Schools of Thought, posted a story on teacher evaluations entitled, “Ohio links teacher pay to test scores.“ While not categorically untrue, this blog seriously misleads by simplification. The writer suggests that teacher evaluation legislation is sudden and the result of Governor Kasich’s efforts, when in fact, the development of a framework and [...] Continue reading →

That Unfortunate Rite of Spring

test Unfortunately my enjoyment of spring is not all that it should be. It’s not reduced by bad weather or a stuffy head. It’s not reduced by something that occurs naturally, like rag weed or pollen. There’s something unnatural that creeps into my life every spring, ruining my mood on perfectly good spring days. That something is standardized testing. Continue reading →

What the latest revelations on test cheating really mean

test-cheating The resulting news story appears to be intended to be alarmist, implying that cheating is rampant in our schools. It is fortunate that the journalists in Ohio at least have restrained from reporting the names of the specific schools flagged, since suspicions would have been unfairly cast on hundreds of improperly flagged schools. The irregularities in such schools likely arose simply because there was a large change in the actual students taking the test from year to year. Continue reading →

Linda Darling-Hammond gets to the heart of education policy problems

“Why is Congress Redlining Our Schools?” is Linda Darling-Hammond’s incisive piece on No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the marginalization of our poorest children in the Nation (www.thenation.com) magazine’s most recent issue. There are many things in the Darling-Hammond piece that surprised me, such as why the U.S. ranks so low in international education rankings – poverty! – and how the Reagan revolution dismantled reforms that really worked in the 1970s. Continue reading →

The OGT Is My Michigan Game

One of those countless Friday after-work discussions we have with our teaching colleagues has stuck in my mind for the past year. “We’re the only profession in the world,” stated a fellow teacher, “where we are judged not by how we perform, but by how other people perform.” That stopped me in my tracks. Usually [...] Continue reading →