Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Randi Weingarten have co-authored a terrific article about why little children should not be subjected to standardized testing.
They write:
Young kids learn actively, through hands-on experiences in the real world. They develop skills over time through a process of building ideas. But this process is not always linear and is not quantifiable; expecting young children to know specific facts or skills at specified ages is not compatible with how they learn. It emphasizes right and wrong answers instead of the developmental progressions that typify their learning.
Young children need opportunities to engage in active, age-appropriate, play-based learning. They need to figure out how things work, explore, question and have fun.
Such experiences have been shown to have significant educational and social benefits for children. And studies show that early childhood education provides a high rate of return for society’s investment.
They explain that standardized testing is counter-productive for young children.
This should be read by policymakers, especially in Washington, D.C., and state legislatures.
Parents don’t need to read it, because they already know that standardized testing is inappropriate to “measure” their child’s readiness for college-and-careers, or for anything else.
Early childhood educators know it too. They have issued statement after statement decrying the insistence by policymakers that little children who barely know how to hold a pencil should pick a bubble.
It is time to stop labeling children as “successes” or “failures” based on what the testing industry determines is right for their age.
One day, we will see similar articles about standardized testing for students in grades 3-12.
Standardized tests have their uses for older children, but only as an audit function, not as a measure of the knowledge and skills of individual children.
Students should be tested primarily by their teachers, who know what they were taught. The teachers can get instant feedback and use the information from their tests to help students who need help, and to recognize where their teaching didn’t click.
Isn’t it amazing that we became a great nation without standardized testing?
The nation’s mad love affair with standardized testing reaches the height of absurdity when children in the early grades and in pre-kindergarten are subjected to the tests.
Carlsson-Paige and Weingarten are right: Stop now. Let the children learn and play and develop as healthy, happy human beings.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can we please get a megaphone and remind parents of NY State that ESL children are not only mandated to take the standardized federally reportable test known as the New York State English as a Second Language Aptitude Test (NYSESLAT) starting in kindergarten, but that by law, they are NOT (that’s “NOT” with a capital “N”) allowed to opt out.
John King was lying when he said that no K-2 child should take a standardized test.
Of course, he was not referring to other people’s immigrant English language learning children.
Don’t get me wrong: I believe such children need testing periodically to aid the teacher in what to sprial back in and re-teach and what to move forward with. But teachers have been using tests as such for centuries. . . nothing new about that. Tests are for teachers, students and familes. Tests are not for employment policies and employment worthiness.
If you want to assess those things, and you should, then judge a teacher by their pedagogy and professionalism, and there are metrics that process those characteristics accurately.
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“. . . there are metrics that process those characteristics accurately.”
Got to disagree with you on that thought, Robert.
Those who sell and use those “metrics” may claim that they “process those characteristics accurately”, but that doesn’t mean that they actually do. Metrics imply measurement and therefore any “metric” suffers the epistemological and ontological limitations in attempting to quantify the qualities one has in “doing” the teaching and learning process.
Could they maybe be a part of the conversations? I might accede to that as long as those “metrics” are that and that only and not some final “number”, some final “say” in an evaluation.
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Duane, I agree!
Here are some suggestions:
1. local scores
2. formative assessment numbers
3. anecdotals
4. student feedback
5. parent feedback
6. peer review
7. administrative review
8. conference log notes citing specific student strengths and weaknesses (as long as notes do not clow down using ones extremities to move about the room, student to student, and use one’s arms and hands to aid the students)
9. diagnostic and summative assessments chosen by teacher and the school, not by the state of fedearl government
10. video taping chosen teacher-selected sessions or vignettes and undergoing peer and administrative critiques
What I am saying is that we should put “metrics” back into the local hands and control of local communities: within the classroom, within the school, within the disctrict, and withing the muncipalities.
The Daneilson framework is acutally not so bad, but when it is used for empoyment determination puposes, it is catastrophic. I strongly oppose a few of her rubrics, such as, for example, having not one behavorial problem in the room in order to achieve a “4”, which is the highest ranking. Some of her rubrics are from another planet in another galaxy; most are not bad.
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https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1697/text
It’s great, but I wish someone would look at the early childhood bills being proposed.
Knowing what we know after a decade of ed reform, is anyone concerned about the language in these bills relating to “assessments and accountability”?
These are VERY small children. This is another grant program that is predicated on state’s administering “assessments”.
Shouldn’t Miller and Harkin be questioned on what “assessments” they’re planning, particularly given Miller’s devotion and fealty to ed reform lobbyists?
Can we get ahead of this one, instead of playing catch up?
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If we extend this thinking just a little bit, we can see why standardized testing is an inappropriate measure for some special education students whose cognitive development is similar to that of young children.
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Finally!!
Damage control is too late to stop the Common Core. the Union endorsed a program without any knowledge of it or input by teachers. At least we know that there will be no testing of the fetus (for the time being)
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“Young kids learn actively, through hands-on experiences in the real world. They develop skills over time through a process of building ideas. But this process is not always linear and is not quantifiable; expecting young children to know specific facts or skills at specified ages is not compatible with how they learn. It emphasizes right and wrong answers instead of the developmental progressions that typify their learning. ”
A good question is, is there some point at which children stop learning this way? From my experience working with middle school students, many still learn best through hands-on experiences in the real world, and although reading and writing adds to this experience and help organize it, they still develop skills and even knowledge through a building of ideas that is not necessarily linear or quantifiable. In fact, at my age I still learn this way. I think there is a danger in emphasizing the unsuitability of CommonCore testing only for the youngest students. (Just as I believe that smaller class size is important at all levels and not just in the primary grades.) I am afraid that this emphasis might foster a perception that the kind of high stakes testing that narrows the curriculum and forces teaching to the test is fine except for the youngest children, and this is not true, in my opinion.
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I agree. As Diane suggests in her post, standardized testing is wrong for grades 3-12 as well as k-2. Kids do learn by hands-on trial and error, collaborative interaction with peers and adults, following their interests and intuition(which is erratic, may be engrossing for 12 mins, then abandoned for an hour or 3 days, then interest reappears, not regimented). But, for other people’s children, not for their own children, the billionaires and policy princes think it fine to test and test, rank and rank, reduce learning to filling in bubbling and teaching to spouting the short-answer to look for on the upcoming test. Disgraceful. And it’s not about their being wrong vis a vis how kids learn, as if they have a legit theory worth trying. This is an educational strategy to enhance the pct sector at the expense of the public sector in the many ways we’ve been following.
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My fifth grader objects to the tests they’re being given to evaluate teachers because the kids are tested on material they haven’t learned yet. I suppose they need a baseline score to evaluate “value-added” but he of course doesn’t care about that, and he’s the one taking the test.
He thinks the tests aren’t “fair”.
It’s a really simple objection and it’s also true. From HIS perspective, testing him on material he hasn’t been given isn’t fair.
I agree with him. I wouldn’t sit for a test unless I had learned the material.
It’s a shame because he likes school and trusts the adults in his school. He doesn’t know that this comes from politicians at the state and federal level. He now believes his teachers aren’t treating him fairly.
I continue to be amazed at how reckless ed reformers are with children. Are there any adults in that “movement”? Why are they so careless? Why isn’t any thought given to the children’s reactions to this nuttiness? How did they think kids would react to this?
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Fascinating, Ira!
When I was being educated, effort was usually a separate grade and could raise an actual project or test grade. This practice was used to reflect the human side of learning.
How has it come to be that this human aspect has been ignored by the reformers in their testing and number crunching frenzy?
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Robert,
Not meaning to “pick on you” but a couple of the things you have written in this particular post have hit me in a certain way. Let’s see if I can flesh this one out.
“. . effort was usually a separate grade and could raise an actual project or test grade.”
So deeply ingrained in our cultural habitus* surrounding schooling and education is the concept of “grades”. Grades as a natural and normal function of the schooling process. Grades as a mechanism (albeit a very simple and limited one) to supposedly discern good from bad academic behaviors (no not “achievement” either). Grades that are accepted as true and good. Grades that we accept as labels being attached to us as descriptions of ourselves. Grades as the way things just are. Grades that can (supposedly) accurately reflect effort, skill, knowledge, abilities, and so on.
The logical epistemological and ontological invalidities involved in determining “grades” should automatically and immediately make evident that the wise course of action should be identifying the “grading” of students as false and harmful and be rejected for the educational malpractices that they are. But our cultural habitus makes it almost impossible to throw off the “chains of grades” forged willingly by ourselves through cooperation with educators and society in general.
In a not so minor fashion we have enslaved ourselves through the falsehoods and inanities that are grades.
*From Wiki: Habitus refers to lifestyle, the values, the dispositions and expectation of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. Perhaps in more basic terms, the habitus could be understood as a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste.[1] The particular contents of the habitus are a complex result of embodying social structures—such as the gender, race, and class discrimination embedded in welfare reforms—that are then reproduced through tastes, preferences, and actions for future embodiment.[2] The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that are prevalent within other disciplines of social science research, as it relativizes the notion of an actors ‘best interest’ through attention to the cultural definition of ‘best’.[3] It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion ‘field’, which describes the dialectical relationship between individual agents (habitus) and the contextual environment (field).
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Duane,
It’s impossible for me to feel picked on. I’ve grown up, grown older, and grown wiser.
Your comments are wonderful.
I think grades are on a spectrum of “measurability” and accuracy.
One needs to have some kind of feedback to determine growth or stagnation. We do want to see results in our students, but the question always becomes how do we define results and success?
Right now, the reformers are answering those questions for us and in the most perverse, immoral way.
Yet, you yourself assess every day whether you like it or not. You don’t like the bag of oranges from the local franchise market, then you return them with your receipt for a full refund because you are not happy with the quality. You don’t like reading the NY Times any more because it is no longer a progressive institution, then you cancel your subscription. You just measured your feelings and you acted upon them.
You find that most of your students are still not mastering the present subjunctive when opinion or uncertainty are the mood in Spanish, then you have to go back and reteach. The sunjunctive mood and direct and indirect pronouns in French and Spanish are my personal enemies, but I am determined to conquer them!
Don’t get me wrong: Bringing back oranges in a fee market is NOT to be equated with picking and choosing education, which I see as none other than a public trust and societal responsbility. Charter and vouchers are not the solution!
But we assess and change routes in everything we do. Socialists do. Capitalists do. In beteweeners do. It is part and parcel in bettering the quality of life, yet it should never be done, this “grading system”, at the expense of the student or in denigration of the teacher and adminsitrator. NEVER!
If we did not assess, we would be been destroyed a long time ago by the random haphazard of the course of human events, no?
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Robert,
Yes, the subjunctive and object, and in French and Spanish, reflexive pronouns can be quite a bugaboo. One does not have to completely “master” these concepts right off the bat in learning a second language but at least hopefully understand knowing what they are, recognizing the differences in meaning that many of these very “small” words have and continuing to struggle through the learning through using in all ways, reading, writing, listening and speaking. I tell my students that learning a second language is unlike any other subject that they will encounter. A year in a foreign language class of five hours per week is like being in a country for ten, yep only ten days. It takes a lot to learn a second language.
I agree with you that we are constantly assessing our environment, being, selves, others, situations. No doubt.
But I am trying to hash out the distinctions between “grading”, testing and assessing. Assessing, yes, teacher made testing, yes. Grading, which to me means sorting and ranking students and labeling them, NO. No because to do so is to cause harm to many students through their internalizations of those monikers into their self perception. One cannot expect a young person to have the abilities to countermand what “the authorities”, whether parents, teachers, other adults and even other children say about them, in telling them that they are average, less than average or even the dreaded F word, failure. And it is that aspect of grading that seems especially pernicious, malicious to me!
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Duane,
I agree with all that you state.
Grades, however, are a quantitative representation for what a student did well and still needs help in. Grades for ranking, labeling, or evaluating teachers is a very poor practice.
Grades as feedback are productive, no?
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“Standardized tests have their uses for older children, but only as an audit function, not as a measure of the knowledge and skills of individual children.”
I had the same reaction, dianarog11. Getting my hands dirty has always been a very effective way of learning. Just because I can talk about abstract concepts doesn’t mean that I no longer need to rely on the concrete actions of doing something. I am not going to become a great cook if I don’t cook although I might be able to appreciate fine cooking.
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Wendy Lecker wrote a column entitled State-Sanctioned Child Abuse that appeared in the Stamford (CT) Advocate Friday, 11/15/13 that compliments the thoughts of Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Randi Weingarten.
“Dr. Samuel Meisels, director of the University of Nebraska’s Buffett Early Childhood Institute, agrees that a school culture focused on high-stakes tests is exactly the type of environment that we should avoid for children who experience toxic stress. Dr. Marcy Guddemi, head of the Gesell Institute of Child Development maintains that for children under 8, current policies combining an age-inappropriate curriculum with standardized testing are nothing short of child abuse.”
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Lecker-State-sanctioned-child-abuse-4986416.php
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“. . . about why little children should not be subjected to standardized testing.”
Yes, yes, yes!!!
“It is time to stop labeling children as “successes” or “failures” based on what the testing industry determines is right for their age. . . . One day, we will see similar articles about standardized testing for students in grades 3-12. . . . Standardized tests have their uses for older children, but only as an audit function, not as a measure of the knowledge and skills of individual children.”
The baby steps have been taken, Diane, and you have broken into full stride with those statements, except. . . .
The only concern is that standardized tests have any function at all. Standardized tests, due to the inherent epistemological and ontological errors which render any conclusion invalid* should be immediately be dropped, quit being used for the educational malpractice that they are.
*as proven by Noel Wilson in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
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And for those who don’t know Wilson’s work (or my Quixotic Quest to rid the world of the educational malpractices that are educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students) read on for a summary.
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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“It is time to stop labeling children as “successes” or “failures” based on. . . ”
It’s just plain time to stop labeling children at all!!
See the last two paragraphs of the above summary of Wilson’s work to understand why. Wouldn’t you love to be labelled a “failure” while going to school where there is supposed to be a nurturing environment. Doesn’t seem too nurturing to me!
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Didn’t Ms. Weingarten help Chris Christie develop a rubric for evaluating teachers that included standardized test scores? And now she is saying she believes standardized tests are bad for kids? Does she normally flip flop this much?
I’m sorry, but if she wants to be taken seriously, she needs to take a stand and stick with it.
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She did the same in New Haven, CT
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Wendy, are you the attorney for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity in NY State?
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Sorry, Robert. I don’t know how to put my reply below your question. Yes, I am.
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oops- I guess I did figure that out!
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I just saw you in Ossining. You spoke brilliantly and powerfully. You must be just as angry as the rest of us for the most part.
I posed the question about the feds spending too much on war (57% of the federal budget) and not enough on public education (6%).
You said it’s not a federal obligation, but a state one.
I agree. But funny how the feds are driving policy and curriculum anyway, but getting the states to “legally” do their bidding for them.
Wendy, I would like to get Ossining’s story of underfunding from the state onto this blog . . . . .
For those of you reading, NY state owes my district between 36 and 40 million dollars divided up over 6 years. . . .
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Thanks, Robert. Why don’t we continue this offline? wlecker@edlawcenter.org
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Wendy, I met one of your colleagues who took doen my e-mail address. . . . sorry that I cannot remember his name. It was the guy who stood at the podium, short brown hair parted to one side, about 5 foot 6, and in his late 40s to early 50’s . . . . .
You have no idea how much I would like to continue this conversation with you offline . . . .
artwork88@aol.com
Speak to you . . . . .
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It’s a little late for Weingarten to pose as a leader of the march against high stakes testing, when she has been a prime enabler of the so-called education reform for which high stakes exams are the fulcrum.
Whether it’s her acceptance of Gates and Broad money, and the premises that follow from that, her pushing the Common Corporate Standards and bogus teacher evaluations upon the teachers she claims to represent, her continuing support for mayoral control of urban school districts, her passivity in the face of charter expansion (after all, as head of the UFT in New York, she opened her own charter schools with Broad money, taking space from a local public school), her helicoptering in to negotiate sell-out contracts in city after city… you get the picture.
Don’t listen to what she says; watch what she does.
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Here comes dandy Randi again, dressed up as Clara Barton, going into the fields to dress and nurse the wounds of all the injured and casualties harmed by the very canons and artillery she executed, side by side with the reformers. . . .
As Carol King once sung (this directed toward Ms. Weingarten’s notorious credibility): “Well it’s too late baby, now it’s too late, but we really did try to make it . . . . . . “
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Great imagery. I miss you!
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Linda, I don’t have as much time to comment or read the blog during the school year.
😦
I am working 14 hour days and have taken on numerous parent workshops this year. I comment when I can, and your snappy, quit witted powerful commentary is missed.
Keep on packing those sucker punches with your keyboard!
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Michael and Robert, Randi’s self-serving mistake in endorsing the CCSS is an emergency that must be addressed.
She has deflected popular resistance to corporate reform, and focused it against the teacher unions. Parents look for answers, and they see in editorials that the CCSS is supported by Duncan, Bush, Gates, Obama and the teacher unions.
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I agree.
Parents now need to confront Weingarten. . . . Little might she know that many of then are as educated and as bright as she.
This should be fun.
Popcorn, anyone?
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Reblogged this on Timbered Classrooms….
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As egregious as the thought of subjecting our littlest children to standardized testing is, we must question the testing that begins in grade three and continues, non-stop, through 12th grade. There is no magic developmental leap that makes this somehow appropriate in 3rd grade or 4th or even 8th. I see this in my own children, and for years in the middle grades. The high stakes graduation exams that some states are newly implementing are horrific. I use NY State as an example to show parents that even in a state where people were used to graduation exams, parents are now objecting to CCSS aligned exit exams. It shows parents in other states that indeed, something is very, very awry.
My 9th grader had her friends over for her 15th birthday last night, and as they sat around the fire pit and roasted marshmallows for s’mores, I observed these extremely intelligent, bookish, engineering and science club type of kids discussing school & high stakes tests. One friend turned to me and asked, Don’t the adults get it yet?” I sadly answered that not enough do. We need to encourage our kids to write op eds to their school and local papers, and to educate the grown-ups in their lives. This generation gets it, but I hope we don’t have to wait that long for change.
Our children are far underestimated by the powers that be. And the kids know it. Now that the parents are catching on, the urban, suburban, and rural parents of all colors, socio-economic levels, and backgrounds will find that we are stronger standing together.
As Benjamin Franklin wisely said, “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”
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My daughter, before she entered kindergarten, was identified as behind in language development. She was given an IQ test by the school psychologist and because she was very shy we were allowed to stay with her. She literally sat on my lap.
Some of the questions were outdated/inappropriate, even the psychologist agreed they needed revision.
For example: What do you find in a bottle? My daughter answered “a note”, the correct answer “milk”. When I was young the milkman delivered milk in bottles, but the milk I bought was in cartons. I thought her answer was perfect, but it was marked wrong.
Another: What happens on holidays? She answered ” We go to parades”. My older daughters were in a baton corps and we went to parades every holiday. I’m not sure what the answer was, but hers was incorrect.
This one was a dilly. Where do you find money? I assume the answer was “a bank” or perhaps “a wallet”. She answered “on the floor”. The reason she said this was that her sisters had paper routes. They would collect their payments from the customers by leaving an envelope. When they got the envelope back, they would tear it open looking for the bills. Sometimes the change would drop on the floor and they would let their little sister keep the coins. So “on the floor” was her reality. Obviously the wrong answer.
My daughter was not quite 5. I’m surprised her IQ was a 105, but I’m sure it was much higher in reality. Despite a processing issue, she received a Regents Diploma with High Distinction in High School and graduated from college with a BA in Psychology.
However, she’s still not good with money.
Testing little ones whose reality is not that of an adult, or even an older child, is counter productive. They still have use of an imagination which a formal education stifles as they advance in age. They haven’t learned to give the “correct” answers yet.
And that’s their charm.
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I just listened to Bill Moyers and Jill Stein was speaking. She mentioned what many of us seem to know… that both democratic and republican politicians are really representing the corporations. So whatever is good for the corporation is what is to be followed by an entire nation. This cycle must be broken as politicians need to work for the majority of the people – not a minority of small and uber wealthy citizens running corporations. If we are to restore sanity in education and put the “public” back into it, “we the people” must realize that simply choosing the “a” or “b” bubble on the voter’s ballot may not be enough because the mainstream candidates are representing only the best interests of corporations these days. Stein mentioned something worth considering… we who oppose what is happening to the “public” in public education are representative of the “non 1 percenters” of the population. Stein said that if just 3 percent of the 99 percent were active in politics and opposed and fought the supposedly “done deal” reforms tooth and nail, the “we the people” could be put back into politics. Imagine if a nation of 99 percenters all wrote-in the same candidate on an election ballot… what would happen? It may be a bit dramatic this suggestion, but for the love of this nation, we the people need to speak and to figure out how to put the “checks and balances” back in our government. Our nation’s children are being so harmed by an institution that is supposed to enable them to thrive – public school! How can this be!
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This is the MD Mandated Abuse Reporter form…
Click to access form180.pdf
imagine if this form were REVISED not to report a parent or caregiver but to report the person/s who create high stakes tests and who hold school districts hostage via federal money and who mandate using high stakes tests( (if you need and take Fed money then your students take these tests) .. and all that it encompasses on every single public school student in the nation. Imagine if administrators were able to also report the abuse inflicted on teachers as a result of “all these forms”.. and while we are at it, why not let teachers report how these reforms are abusing principals and administrators who teachers barely know (unless they are being reprimanded based on data) because they are holed up in their offices completing massive loads of punitive paperwork and collecting reams of useless data. Imagine!
Each state has its own “mandated abuse reporter form”… Is it time to create a similar form – an imaginary one in the form a a petition – revised to reflect those mandating RTTT/COMMON CORE LINKED TO HIGH STAKES TESTS ???? Every year there is a story about the child suicide rate in Japan over these high stakes tests. Is this what we want for our nation’s students, teachers, administrators?
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What a brilliant idea. The main evidence that public schools are failing (besides rising illiteracy rates in the major cities of the US) are low scores on standardized tests. Solution? Get rid of the tests.
I’ve got a better idea for early childhood evaluation. How about a nationwide school choice program, where the personal assessment of parents can guide what schools their children attend and what they’re taught there? Allowing parents to opt out of the failing public school system and choose schools that best serve their children is the best way to educate American schoolchildren. Mind, it’s not such a good plan for all those overpaid untouchable teachers in rubber rooms, but then maybe it’s time we thought of student needs over union demands.
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