"Not all principals embrace the exams in the same way. Brian DeVale, the principal of P.S. 257 in East Williamsburg, is more skeptical, saying he doesn’t believe they accurately measure achievement. He worries that if the tests are harder this year, scores will drop, and schools that earned A’s and B’s on their report cards this year— some 97 percent of elementary and middle schools — will come under scrutiny. “They’ve come up with a capricious, arbitrary system,” he said.
But Mr. Spatola (principal of P.S. 172) defended his laser-beam approach, noting that his school still had art, music and dance instruction. “They are not asking us to teach skills that the children don’t need to know,” he said. “It’s not a test,” he added. “It’s learning.” "
Who is right on the testing issue? If the exams are of high quality, is it okay to teach to the test? Are we setting up kids for failure if we use a "laser-beam approach" to focus students on preparing for testing?
In reality the only skills that kids NEED to learn are critical thinking, some math, and literacy. Everything else is relevant to only some and in some situations. Do we really need to know the capitals of all 50 states? What about the genus, order and species of large mammals? No, not really useful in adult life. If the test is really high quality and makes kids THINK then yes, it's totally OK to teach to the test.
ReplyDeleteWell said, V-Rah! The problem with every standardized assessment I've seen is that they measure a very limited set of skills. To this day, I haven't seen or heard of anyone who gets paid to solve multiple choice questions. Nor can I think of a single problem in my life that has been solved by a standardized test. It's true, diagnosis is somewhat helpful when trying to determine efficacy. But if I look under the hood of my car, run through a checklist, and find that 100% of the parts are there and are in good condition, it doesn't mean a damn thing if the parts are just piled up in a jumble of pieces. Test prep as a curriculum is uninspiring, patronizing, and regressive. I shudder at the thought of all the backbreaking work it takes to make such a flaccid curriculum engaging. I should know: I taught AP for 2 years!
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