WFFaithful
Well-known member
1) Republicans tend to be right on 1 with huge opposition from Democrats.
3) Testing = feedback. I hear a lot of complaints that Republicans are pushing too much testing. Testing during the year gives feedback teachers can, but often don't, use, to help individual students. Testing at the end of the year is a good way to get data on a teacher's performance.
4) I think both parties are against this. It would require more money, ruling out Republicans. It would require more of the teachers, ruling out the Democrats.
At least 10% of school days are spent administering state or district mandatory tests. This is an absurd waste of resources. There are many flaws in the current testing model which by its very nature place students at a disadvantage in demonstrating their true knowledge.
This is a straw man. The issue isn't the testing, but creating a testing system that better accounts for how teaching, learning, and curricula actually work on a local level while accounting for variation in school funding, parent participation, and student ses.
A significant issue, IMO, is that the firms that receive government funding and state grants have little experience in an average American public school classroom. Their models, I believe, reflect this.
Testing, as it is now, would better quantify the effectiveness of an assembly line than it does a classroom or teacher.
This.
You need to know what your students know and don't know to help them. Testing can show you on which types of questions mistakes were made. It, at least in mathematics, can also show you what the specific mistakes were. Having that information can definitely make you a more effective teacher.
If you require a state or district required test for you as a teacher to know what your students know and don't know, then you are extremely out of touch with your students. Also, we shouldn't be testing students' ability to navigate through the various "types of questions" that testing companies use to trick students. We need to know what the student knows, and a good teacher is well aware of this without broad standardized testing.
The thing that is setting them up to be behind is not the testing, it is the circumstances in which they are living. The testing just lets us see how far behind they are which hopefully allows us to do something about it. It lets us know when we are making progress in closing the gap and when the gap is increasing. If you have different standards for kids in tough environments you are lowering expectations for them and their teachers.
Once again, each child is different. As a teacher you should recognize this. Differentiation to meet the various needs of all students is not lowering expectations, but it is setting up each student to succeed. The bootstraps method works for some kids, but not most.