Earlier today I posted about a fine article by veteran journalist Gail Robinson, explaining that intense test prep was not enough to help many students. She wrote specifically about the Young Women’s Leadership School in Brooklyn and included a link to a video where the girls were chanting about how test prep would make them succeed.
The story is still listed on the insideschools.org website but the story and the link are gone. Funny how these things happen.
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2 days ago … Energy and optimism burst out of the 2011 video [view below] by students at Young Women’s Leadership School in Brooklyn. Dancing and …
insideschools.org/blog/…/1000706-test–prep-didnt-prevent-score-drop
Luckily, I included in my post the first two paragraphs of her story, which has now apparently been withdrawn, perhaps at the request of funders?
Here they are:
“Energy and optimism burst out of the 2011 video [view below] by students at Young Women’s Leadership School in Brooklyn. Dancing and singing to the tune of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite,” they proclaim, “Test prep goes on and on and on….I am brilliant. I have confidence. Gonna ace these tests.” “This month, many city students will see such optimism ebb when they learn how they scored on the state’s standardized reading and math tests. At Brooklyn’s Young Women’s Leadership, for example, only 24 percent scored well enough to be viewed as “passing” the English test, with less than 15 percent passing the math exam. In the first tests tied to the new Common Core standards, other schools, particularly in poorer parts of the five boroughs or with high percentages of black and Latino students, had similar results.” |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is the public aware of the time and money the education industry and our schools spend on test prep and motivational assemblies? What a waste.
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I’m laughing loudly and my son is asking why… while he sits here contemplating “Parks and Recreation” two weeks before CPS begins again.
Obviously, someone disagrees with the content you posted, Diane. And is using the tools of the Internet to disrupt this sharing.
It has happened to us regularly at substancenews.net for years, usually during some really intense time (like last year’s Chicago strike). The other side is constantly monitoring and manipulating the ‘Net, so we usually copy, paste and save important documents to our hard drives (a few; and large; and not in the “Cloud”…).
One of the most important places where this trickery has been done is with official and semi-official Chicago Public Schools documents. The most outrageous are the monthly “televised” (Cable TV) reports of the Board of Education meetings. They are as heavily censored as the productivity statistics, say for the potato harvest, that I used to laugh about when I was covering Romania (before the Ceausescus celebrated that fatal Christmas of 1989). All totalitarians do this stuff, which is why paper will never go out of fashion.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
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My students are shocked when I tell them that colleges do not care if they pass the Texas test (STAAR) and the scores are not required for college admission.
I tell them they have been lied to about the importance of the tests and that the rich kids in the private schools surrounding our public schools do not take the STAAR. The private school kids do not endure the stress, do not endure the boring test prep and do not waste days taking the test.
The kids get angry, and they should. Pearson, Broad, TFA and charters have enslaved them for profit.
I also tell my students I personally don’t care if they pass or fail; I will still be able to list 5 great things about each and every one of them. They are not a test score–and that holds true whether the score is high or low.
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Private school kids will likely have the stress of PSAT, SAT, ACT exams, three SAT subject exams, multiple AP exams, IB exams, etc. There seem to be enough tests to go around.
I do wish that my university could go back to only requiring a high school diploma for admission, but I understand that graduating from high school no longer indicates very much about the academic preparation of a student. Perhaps that is part of the reason that so many tests are used these days.
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Public school kids have those tests, too, PLUS the additional state testing. I have 9th grade students taking TWO AP classes this year!
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I am glad that your students have the opportunity to take those exams so early. My point is that stressful exams are common for ambitious students and become less stressful with frequency.
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Here’s the Google Cache … get it while it lasts …
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-6TUjmZrOUYJ:insideschools.org/blog/item/1000706-test-prep-didnt-prevent-score-drop+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
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Thank you, Jon…. It’s still up and I downloaded it to read later on today.
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Wow… I was wondering if my ipad stopped working…. Should’ve known better. That video was horrible BTW. I hate thinking how these districts are deceiving the kids.
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Thank you, Jon…. It’s still up and I downloaded it to read later on today.
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Interesting. Several of my grade 5 students attended this school recently. However, all transferred by the end of the school year because parents were totally unsatisfied. They complained of a flimsy curriculum, no real discipline and not feeling safe. Please note all the girls who attended did so because of the wonderful presentation done during Open House in which girl empowerment was stressed as well as an intense math and science program. All the girls who attended Young Women’s were promoted from a certified Gifted & Talented Program in a neighborhood public school. Their complaint was it “wasn’t as challenging as fifth grade!” Hmmmmmm.
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