It is relevant to all of us who work with those children day in and day out. Experience with children counts for EVERYTHING! The way that you communicate with children is unique and different from the way that you communicate with adults and the way that you communicate with a grade one students is completely different than the way that you communicate with a grade 5 student.
I teach grades K-6. My schedule is a hodge podge everyday. I have to transition from teaching a K class to a grade three class to a grade five class and then a grade two. There is only five minutes in between. Part of the transition that goes on for me is to adjust my thinking, my way of communicating, my expectations, my way of critiquing. Everything shifts to be developmentally appropriate with those kids that are sitting in front of me. It isn’t just about the information that is being put out. it has everything to do with the way the information is put out.
People who design tests had better understand the population that is taking the test. When they don’t we end up with PARCC. Of course, there are many who believe that the test is designed to fail. If that is truly the case then they have done a great job.
“What has not worked in 14 years will not work in the next 14. Let’s call a failure, a failure” Note that despite profound professional misgivings, he was coerced into compliance by the threat of losing the district’s funding. Like teachers who have been censured for merely answering questions about opting out, the use of force is necessary to override the professional opinions of those in the best position to have one.
I DO understand your point as experience is always valuable. However, this is not solely an issue about teaching and how to direct the efforts of K-6 kids. Can we not agree that there are specialists in all fields and that the combination of different qualifications and experiences is more powerful than one that does not?
This particular discussion was the impact of tests on students. You are correct that one should be keenly aware of the results on the classroom and ascertain the need to transform or abandon a particular format. To do that with a degree of success, the input of various people is important. And equally important is the part of having all parts of the puzzle on a similar page. This type of discussion highlights how this appears to be quite difficult. The teachers who are dealing with the children on a daily basis reject the proposals and qualify the entire process in rather unsavory terms. Educrats, corporate vultures, profiteers are probably among the most charitable. Yet, the people on “the other side” are not necessarily untrained or unqualified to know how tests could and should be designed, and they may be well-educated in the scientific approaches to … measure “stuff.” And people who have developed those skills are not necessarily heartless “educrats” who entered the field to line their pockets.
Again, there is no substitute for experience gained in front of a classroom. This should be respected and valued. It is, however, only one facet of education, and should not be a sine qua non condition for having a voice in the process.
Fwiw, how relevant is the classroom experience of Diane Ravitch, Randi Weingarten, or current union leaders?
But back to the PARCC test, if it is indeed such a incredible departure of what a reasonable test should be, would it not be easy to develop a better one? And, for the record, it is one thing to welcome attempts to establish standards and measure the accomplishment, and quite another to support what has come from the efforts of Pearson. I believe that was has been missed here is that I think the PARCC is a test that reflects the skills of the people hired to develop it. I think that whoever made the choice could have done a better job.
On a last note, I always find it strange that the service providers in education have usually been opposed or offered a lukewarm reception to tests such as the SAT but embraced products such as the AP. Go figure! And while I am it, what do teachers think of tests such at the farmers’ ERB?
Agree. It might come as a shock to you but any teacher who has a masters degree (and that is most) understands how to gather data and what good data collection looks like and what it does not look like. We recognize bad science and we do that with the added convictions of our experience with kids. The teachers are not being given a voice in this process. In fact, they are being silenced and disciplined for expressing opinions about CC and PARCC. In my district the truth is being “adjusted” when parents ask if they can opt out their children. A teacher I know who has children in the system wanted to opt out her child from PARCC and was told she could not (which she interpreted as a veiled threat from the superintendent).
I don’t know what this means. You’re going to have to dumb it down for me. I’m just an art teacher.
EPTR, you might decide to name one of your art pieces Sine Qua Non as a variance to Ceci n’est pas une pipe!
On a serious note, I used it as a shortcut for “an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary.” I should have know better as foreign languages are banned from CC. I should leave Latin to Bush in South America!
I did not say that teachers are de facto (/insert smile) unable to understand data or recognize voodoo statistics as the non-sense they are. My point was it takes a number of collaborative skills to develop solutions, and that it works better when the participants have different skills and expertise but share a common objective.
xiggi,
On that we can agree. Unfortunately, we have to make sure that all involved parties are in fact trying to look out for the welfare of the child. Teachers believe that this is not the case in this situation. And some parents are starting to get onboard.
If MA really has a great test in place, why change it? Could it be to justify the position of an administrator and his/her staff? It’s not even change for change’s sake, but for the sake of a particular set of power players.
I notice that Xiggy likes to compare US kids’ test scores to their counterparts’ in Europe. Yet in Europe, educational theories don’t change with every new administrator that comes down the pike. Traditional ideas and methods, developed over the years by teachers, tend to dominate, not those dreamed up by administrators (who also gain to profit financially).
Having more people involved is always a good idea. Open discussions between parents and educators should be fruitful. If this opens better dialogues with the powers-to-be, that would even be better!
I watched the video and found the absence of diversity quite remarkable. I think they might want to revisit the message to be more representative of our population. It might be different in Mass.
Katliamom, I plead guilty for the sin of comparing a couple of education systems in Europe to ours. Part of that was prompted by having cousins of the same age who were going through their own systems in Belgium. The other part was to be able to study the organization of a national system that offered dichotomies as the country is divided by two (three in fact) and a public system of education that places both government and private schools on a quasi equal footing. The small country of 10-11 million people presents a magnificent insight as how separate systems can function.
Along the way, an observer can also note how inaccurate the perceptions and reports of the organization of the system are when surfacing in the United States. Part of that is because it conflicts with our views of “exceptionalism” and that our country suffers from the negative impact of immigration and systemic poverty. Other misrepresentations surface about the impact of tracking at an earlier age.
All that set aside, I see no reason to disagree with the value of traditional methods developed over many years. After all, there is a reason why the conservative education (think Catholic school) remains the most dominant and sought-after education in Belgium, and this despite having to defend their academic turf from “modern” attacks. I guess even Belgium has its share of reform-minded educrats!
All in all, I do think that we can learn from making efforts at looking at the rest of the world with a more open mind, and not dismiss systems that have worked “pretty” well in other parts of the world. Rest assured that there is no perfection in the education system of Belgium (nor Finland) … there are many people who complain about the difficulty in obtaining a seat in the “right school” and many people who adopt the “other” language to seek to leave a more “diverse” school behind.
In the meantime, correct comparisons and analyses are helpful.
I didn’t have to go any further than reading that there is no recess for kids in kindergarten to promote a more engaged learning environment. This is absolute madness.
There was some kindergarten somewhere that canceled a traditional spring play because it took time away from making the kindergarteners “college and career ready”, according to the principal. Ridiculous.