This comment from a teacher who read the post “For Shame, Commissioner King.” That post described how the state commissioner in New York requires special education students to take examinations they can’t read.
The teacher writes:
“I am often asked to proctor extended time testing on our all-too-frequent assessment days (quarterly interims, ACTs, PSAEs, practice for all of the above, etc.). I have been told it’s because I “get it” by our very talented, also very frustrated, special education team. By “get it,” they mean that, as a traditionally-certified teacher (in a charter network which favors TFAers) who attended an actual school of education, I have taken a few required classes on student learning differences and understand that not all kids can be lumped into a mediocre average and expected to achieve the same baseline level of understanding given “optimal input” and prison-like management. My husband works in mental health, so I am also inappropriately (illegally) consulted on student psychological issues far outside my job as a Latin teacher. It amazes me how clueless, or maybe worse, how careless, our schools have become with these students. Our school has an AMAZING special education team, yet they are ignored, forgotten about, and not consulted when it comes to the students they know best. Many have left or are leaving to take their talent elsewhere, and who could blame them?
“When I proctored my first extended time interim (a totally unnecessary in-network assessment incentivized by bonuses for both students and teachers whose scores compete with other schools in our network), I was shocked and appalled at what we do to our kids who already struggle to stay focused on one narrow task and sit still in their normal 45-minute class periods. We put them all in a room together, and make them sit still and silent for four hours. It was miserable for me, and I can only imagine how miserable it was for them. One student managed to pull a dollar bill out of his pocket, and studied it intently for a good 10 or 15 minutes during his math exam, no doubt running out of time when it came to actually completing the test. Knowing this student, I’m sure something in his exam inspired some spark of curiosity that he couldn’t ignore. This type of exploration might have been acknowledged positively, could have lent itself to a “teachable moment” to help students see some cross-curricular connections between printed money and history or culture (I’m going to pretend he was reading the Latin). But instead, I was expected to silently discipline the student after the test for not “focusing hard enough” on his pointless, soulless, disconnected interim exam.
“I hate where we are headed. I hate how little schools are allowed to appreciate real, connected learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. I hate to see brilliance stifled by enforced mediocrity. I feel so lucky to have attended schools before this wave of “reform,” but heartbroken for so many of my students who trust their futures to a system that is ultimately failing to help them reach their human potential, because being human is too messy, too hard to assign convenient numerical values to, and apparently undesirable to our policymakers and their corporate sponsors.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We really need to make the point loud and clear that students are individuals. They are not the same. We shouldn’t want them to be the same. They are not “data”. Teachers aren’t “data”. We are all human beings with all kinds of needs that simply can’t be enumerated on a multiple choice or extended response test. There is not enough time to do all that data collection and to deal with all the other (more important) needs that children and teachers have … and will have for the rest of their lives. Public schools aren’t perfect any more than any endeavor is perfect. However, this bizarre push and fascination with “accountability” that means little to nothing is tearing down the parts of teaching that were good to excellent.
This brings to mind a book “Henry’s Awful Mistake”. Take a look.
You can click on Amazon and “look inside” this book. It is a book that, imo, depicts what the testanistas are doing to our schools. There is an old saying … “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
— Abraham Maslow
I recall reading that “Common Core Coleman” was also once a Classicist as a student.
Et tu, David?
The last paragraph brilliantly sums up the problems we have in our education system. It is much easier for policy makers to point their fingers at teachers and schools and attempt to create a “one size fits all” solution, than to tackle complex issues that are quite possibly beyond the realm of comprehension for most of them.
Reblogged this on The Indignant Teacher and commented:
I Hate Where We Are Heading, Too…Is There Anyone Who Doesn’t?
Reblogged via dianeravitch.net
Take a look at a question given to ec students whose IQ’s are below 70.
This question is not exact but is cloned from a released state sample question.
A city plans to renovate an overgrown and rodent plagued area of town.
The function r(x) = 4〖(2.0)〗^x models the population of rodents in the area after x months before any rodents were eliminated.
The function s(x)=〖 2(2.0)〗^x models the number of rodents eliminated from the population after x months.
Which function f(x) models the total number of rodents in the area after x months?
The ec teacher that gave this to me said that the actual sample question used rabbits on a farm.
My answer to the ec teacher was ‘Who Cares?”
I must admit I am mystified by all the complaints about public education.
I recall living through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s that the new thinking in education was
a. Revisionist history (e.g. Howard Zinn)
b. Phonics (I think this is just recognizing whole words at a time and not
sounding out letters)
c. “new math” (the old ways of teaching math were bad and new ways were
suggested – I don’t know what the new ways were).
d. …
We were told that professional educators believed these were the new
ways to teach. I don’t if these “new” methods took seed.
Now 20 years later, there
is an apparent revolt against public education. I volunteer in the
classroom in 8th grade math, and from my prospective at a school
for at-risk kids, the teachers I see are B+ to A. I would have any I
have met teach my kids. Therefore, from my limited perspective,
teachers are not the problem.
Content and how to teach is a different matter but the teachers are good to excellent
from everything I have seen.
How has the content and the methods of teaching changed in the past 40 years?
This is a history problem. I’m betting Diane has written on this subject in a book.
If so, please tell me the title.
You list quite succinctly three of the common complaints about the public education system. Adopting Zinn’s critique of American policy choices has gutted the curriculum of what virtues the US constitutional system has. Phonics is the reverse of what you say. It means sounding out words rather than learning to recognize whole words. I learned “whole word” method, and thus when I got to grad school had to learn for the first time about sounds and syllables (although I read quite competently). The new math attempted to stimulate students’ minds with a more sophisticated approach to mathematical thinking that was contained in rote memorization of addition and subtraction facts and of the multiplication tables. Students couldn’t master the sophisticated math concepts but didn’t learn instantaneous recall of arithmetic either. These are serious charges, and subject to correction by others on this blog, they are true. Students grow up not knowing why they should support the constitution but rather thinking that the view of justice of a communist like Zinn is the normal ethical stance toward the USA. They come out of school not reading well because they have to sound out everything. They leave school with limited ability to do arithmetic in their heads. The comprehensive critique thus is that kids leave school ignorant of what they should know, or need to know for a civil society to function. Can’t read, can’t calculate, and thus can’t work to support themselves, and thus can’t enjoy the benefits of freedom but become dependent on EBT cards, section 8 housing, and can’t see through political demagoguery. The public schools, it is claimed, “dropped the ball” pedagogically, and that spawned an educational reform movement which is supposed to remedy the supposed glaring omissions of good public education, but that has degenerated into “privatization,” while the public schools have embraced their own kind of reform, namely the CCSS, which if the students could actually meet them, might be quite wonderful, but the testing for those CCSS is being handled by private organizations by on line testing BEFORE the CCSS have been implemented in curriculum. In addition, with the depression of the previous years, tax revenues have decreased locally, and school districts want to save money by hiring young teachers but can’t get rid of the old high money teachers without figuring out a way to evaluate them that will guarantee their failure. Thus there are attacks on the public school systems which seem to be designed to destroy them, and there is nothing to replace them but hit or miss charters. Who would take the time and invest the money in becoming a career teacher without assurance of fair evaluation? MEANWHILE, the poor, whom to educate requires massive support in addition to just good instruction, are slowly being resegregated. Welcome to the world of contemporary education, where rich systems and charters skim off the best students and leave the rest to founder in the mud of ignorance and defeat of hopes the prey of the sharks of privatization. That’s the short version.
“than” was contained in rote arithmetic.