Hades in a hand-basket (Part III)

Hello again, blogfans!

In this installment, we'll look at "No Child Left Behind" and see why it's not doing what it was intended to do. As usual, good intentions and lofty goals backfire when they're not undergirded by common sense!

"No Child Left Behind" is a program that was designed to increase accountability in school systems primarily by ensuring that standardized testing was administered and reported accurately. Since NCLB, the TAKS in Texas has become the primary focus of the entire school year and, as far as everyone, administrators, teachers, AND students are concerned, the school year is over after the last TAKS test has been administered.

THAT happened on May 2nd this year. The last day of school is June 5th.

This begs a question. What's the PURPOSE of school in the first place? Are students sent there to learn what they'll need to succeed in their future, or are we more concerned with teaching them how to pass a test? NCLB makes the answer simple; they need to know how to pass a test! Whether they're actually LEARNING what they need to know is completely secondary!

It's a sad state of affairs!

So, do standardized tests have their place? Of course! What is that place? To find out where students are in their academic development so that stuff they are "not getting" but need to know can be re-taught. Standardized tests today are given NOT to test students, but to test school systems, administrators and teachers; it's completely backwards from what it should be!

Students are tired of testing all the time and teachers are tired of "teaching to the test" when there's so much more to cover!

The bottom line: we're burning the kids out with all this testing all the time and they don't enjoy school anymore! What they don't enjoy they will not participate in! What they don't participate in, they will not get! It's a viscious circle and NCLB created it!

When will they ever learn!