Jeff Bryant: Who Is Failing Our Students?

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1. drext727 says:

   December 16, 2014 at 1:15 pm

   Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.

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2. Bob Shepherd says:

   December 16, 2014 at 1:23 pm

   It’s not the passing marks, it’s the tests themselves. The ELA tests are a joke, and parents and teachers and administrators should demand their release. Time for examination of the examinations and assessing the assessors.

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   • Tim says:

     December 16, 2014 at 2:09 pm

     I couldn’t agree more–with the extensive stand-alone field testing that occurs in NYS, it is high time that A. field questions are removed from the actual exams, and B. the entirety of each exam be made public within 30 days of the final administration date. “Test security” is no longer a valid excuse.

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3. Gordon Wilder says:

   December 16, 2014 at 1:50 pm

   Yet once again: Do not confuse me with facts. My mind is already made up.
   The mind set of some of our politicians.

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   • MathVale says:

     December 16, 2014 at 5:42 pm

     The argument I hear from politicians and reformers is essentially “we can not stop doing the wrong thing, just because what we have been doing is wrong”.

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4. Jeff Bryant says:

   December 16, 2014 at 2:08 pm

   Thanks Diane!

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5. Sad Teacher says:

   December 16, 2014 at 5:07 pm

   The Common Core is developmentally inappropriate and much harder, at least for my grade level. The new PARCC tests will be very hard to pass, with the added stress of also being a computer test. Add to that all of the practice testing that must be done. I have much less time to teach much harder concepts with my first test being in February! February in Ohio is a snowy, icy mess with very frequent 2 hour delays and cancellations!!!

   It is all a well thought out recipe for failure, for students and teachers alike. I am so grateful to be close to retirement. My stress level is through the roof. I could have never completed a full career in teaching with the stresses that have now become the “norm” on my daily routine with my students. I would have never made it. I don’t know how the younger teachers will survive this madness. I feel very sorry for them. It has all gotten so crazy! As I’ve said many times before, the children are the ones who will suffer. Young people will not touch this career with a ten foot pole.

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6. debmeier says:

   December 16, 2014 at 5:24 pm

   ear Diane,

   Tis indeed, amazing.

   We count on our public stupidity over and over. Of course if you raise the passing score it’s harder to pass. Thus rigor just means harder. A harder test is harder. That takes cqre of that.

   The following story is not factually true, but it’s actually true.

   Imagine:

   A group of pioneering Americans wanted a way they could, through children, identify their parents SES (social-economic status). Absurd, yes? But several enterprising companies decided to try to do it. Like ETS, MacMillan, McGraw-Hill etc. At first they called them IQ tests, and then over time they renamed them achievement tests.

   And lo and behold they found that they could develop test items that precisely differentiated children by their families net worth. And they could do this while simultaneously providing test items and alternative answers that were more or less within the domain being tested. There’d be some measurement error, of course. But probably considerably less than if they sent home a form asking parents to provide this information.

   Yes, that’s what we have. It’s an amazing feat.

   And in yearly pre-tests they make sure that the items continue to fall in the same pre-determined way, providing the same information about SES (and thus sorting the children as eqrly as 4 and 5 years old, into their proper slots).

   (ps Nick–for WEB?)

   ,

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7. Jane Wilson says:

   December 18, 2014 at 1:52 pm

   I have a different reaction to the Common Core Standards. I agree they are unnecessarily complex and the language is bloated. I read one implementation guide for New York which was 264 pages long on the Module “Counting to 5” for 5th grade. How ridiculous is that. What I have found is, at their core- the thinking behind the standards in Math up to grades 3-4-5 is actually excellent. I teach students who are between ages 18-21 who are incarcerated as adults in a maximum security prison. I use the standards to assess where my students place in the core skills they missed in school. Most of them place in the early elementary grades. It is sad, but I find the scope and sequence of introducing the skills they need to be refreshingly appropriate. I also find they help teachers who were just used to putting down a worksheet that required subtraction problems to stop and reflect on the thinking skill that are required for a child to master subtraction. I think the thinking behind the standards are excellent and force teaches to address the thinking required behind learning- but the pacing is all crazy and too fast. If they would let teachers start at the ground and work through the standards for a few years without being labeled failures- we could figure out how long it takes for different children to get to different places.

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