Two sixth-grade classes in Ipswich, Massachusetts, lost a week of instruction while taking field tests, and they want to be paid for their time.
“But for now the test is still in its trial period and Laroche’s 37 students are among the 81,000 that spent two 75-minute periods in March and two 90-minute periods this past week completing the test.
“This time would have otherwise been spent writing and solving and graphing inequalities from real-life situations.
“During class last Monday, May 19, a teacher jokingly mentioned that the students should get paid for taking the test since their participation helps the PARCC and at the end of class the students pressed Laroche further on the idea.
“The kids proceeded to tell me that PARCC is going to be making money from the test, so they should get paid as guinea pigs for helping them out in creating this test,” said Laroche. “So I said, ‘OK, if that’s the case and you guys feel strongly then there are venues and things you can do to voice your opinion, and one would be to write a letter and have some support behind that letter with petition.”
“At 8 p.m. that night Laroche received a shared Google document with an attached letter from A-period student Brett Beaulieu, who asked that he and his peers be compensated for their assistance.
“I thought it was unfair that we weren’t paid for anything and we didn’t volunteer for anything,” said Beaulieu. “It was as if we said, ‘Oh we can do it for free.’”
“Beaulieu used his math skills in the letter, determining that the two classes would collectively earn $1,628 at minimum wage for their 330 minutes of work. He then went on to figure out how many school supplies that amount could buy: 22 new Big Ideas MATH Common Core Student Edition Green textbooks or 8,689 Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils.
“Even better, this could buy our school 175,000 sheets of 8 ½” by 11″ paper, and 270 TI-108 calculators,” Beaulieu wrote.
“On Tuesday, May 20 he gathered over 50 signatures from students, as well as from assistant principal Kathy McMahon, principal David Fabrizio and Laroche.”
The students wrote to PARCC, Arne Duncan, and Massachusetts Secretary of Education Matthew Malone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good idea.
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I have often wished that our politicians had the math skills of A-period student Brett Beaulieu!
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Two separate studies put the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at between 4 and 6 trillion dollars to date:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html
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Don’t forget the HUMAN COST!
As of May 29, 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there were 4,487 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 32,223 wounded in action (WIA) as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. !5,000 service men and women who lost legs and arms. PTSD and suicisdes.
As of April 4, 2014, there have been 2,178 U.S. military deaths in the war in Afghanistan and additional 132 fatalities in the broader Operation Enduring Freedom outside Afghanistan. 1,802 of these deaths inside Afghanistan have been the result of hostile action. 19 964 American service members have been wounded in action during the war. In addition there are 1,173 U.S. civilian contractor fatalities.
Since the start of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, 19,964 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department.
Add all coalition casualties (fatalities/wounded) plus Iraqi and Afghan civilian and military casualties. Hundreds of thousands.
Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rice should be tried and convicted of war crimes. This is the true Bush legacy.
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The following are the results of scientific surveys of war-related deaths conducted in Iraq alone by various organizations:
Iraq Family Health Survey 151,000 violent deaths March 2003 to June 2006
Lancet survey 601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths March 2003 to June 2006
Opinion Research Business survey 1,033,000 deaths as a result of the conflict March 2003 to August 2007
PLOS Medicine Survey[1] Approximately 500,000 deaths in Iraq as direct or indirect result of the war. March 2003 to June, 2011
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So, let’s put that into perspective. A million seconds is about 11.5 days. A trillion seconds is about 126,755 years! (For comparison consider that the earliest cuneiform writing dates to about 5,500 years ago.) At the lower estimate, we have spent as much on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as there are seconds in 126,755 years.
Many people say that ultimately, these wars were about oil. When our puppet Saddam Hussein, a big oil producer, started playing nice-nice with Russia, another big oil producer, and made it clear that he had his eyes on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also big oil producers, we started looking for an excuse to invade his country.
So, how much energy independence would 4 trillion dollars have bought us?
On average, it costs about $30,000 to outfit a home with solar panels. There are about 125 million homes in the United States. If we use the lower (conservative) estimate of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have put solar panels on the roof of every home and still have had $250 billion left over!!!
You can, of course, consider other trade-offs. A beginning teacher’s salary in the U.S. is, on average, $35,672. So, that money would have paid 112 million beginning teacher’s salaries.
None of this is difficult math. Even a congressperson could do it.
BTW, a group of baboons is called a flange, a troop, or a congress. The last of these terms is unfair to baboons.
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“Congress: The last of these terms is unfair to baboons”.
Priceless!
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Love it! A new way to fund public schools but only for those kids who want to participate. If they don’t choose to earn the revenue, they don’t have to take the tests. Appoint only students as accountants and paymasters and student councils can decide where to invest – playground, school supplies, end of year celebration. Hooray for Beaulieu, her family, friends and teachers!
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I love your idea of student governance deciding how to use the money! Democracy in action. Between the math and the civics, these students will learn FAR more than they would on those tests.
In Utah, the ENTIRE STATE field tested the tests this year. Imagine the money!
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I just wish that there was some way for this to happen without to students missing out on classes….I still think that it is a great program but imagine if the student didn’t have to give on classes in order to do it.
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I can’t find this story on the PARCC Twitter feed. It’s all raves over there 🙂
Everybody loves the PARCC test!
Maybe when they get the certified letter…
https://twitter.com/PARCCPlace
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PARCC. Spell that backward.
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PARCC just awarded administration of its tests to Pearson, the sole bidder. Pearson will earn over a billion dollars for this in the first three years.
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And lets not forget that this is taxpayer money intended for providing the best learning opportunities possible for our students. Institutionalized crime at its most damaging. Instead we get a set of useless and crappy tests. the only upshot is that I believe the PARCC/SBAC roll out in 2015 will trigger the Great Parent Revolt that we’ve been waiting for.
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well, said, NY Teacher!
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This is an issue that requires serious attention. In the information age, children being forced to take this test is the equivalent of children being chained to machines on the factory floor in the early 20th century. Their labor is being used for product development, as well as data mining, by a for-profit company and they are not being compensated for it. Their responses should be considered their intellectual property. I recommend Jaron Lanier’s book Who Owns the Future to give some insight into the important issue of data ownership.
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Who wants to lay odds this teacher gets reprimanded or fired?
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They’ll probably do a perp walk in handcuffs lead by Pearson goons.
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The principal and department head at this teacher’s school signed the petition. I’m hopeful that means that they’re supportive of the idea and the teacher.
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It’s funny, it hadn’t even occurred to me that, of course, schools (and students) are not getting paid for administering PARCC field tests. About 20 years ago my middle school used to field test standardized tests and we did get goodies from it. For example, I have a strong memory of associating a bubble test we did one spring with shiny new textbooks we got to use in language arts the following year. Of course, at the time, people complained about the waste of time and the hiring out of students to get supplies for the school. And they were right. But now we are supposed to believe that donating time to these tests is a civic duty.
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I recall getting “gifts” of Bic pens in 1970.
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NAEP gives the students each an NAEP pencil. Talk about generous! (sarcasm)
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What a great idea- make them pay. Corporations have shifted nearly all of their research & development costs to taxpayers in other industries and have profited handsomely. (e.g., the internet, air flight, our electrical grid, etc. These taxpayer subsidized projects are given away to corporations free and with no strings attached. Field testing & validating standardized tests depended on government grants to university professors who wrote them and followed up with years of validation & re-validation. (I refer to quality assessments that have undergone rigorous analyses & peer review before publishers marketed them). Assessments such as the Stanford-Binet, the Woodcock-Johnson, the Brigance and many, many, many more provided compensation to the schools & families who gave permission to be part of their field tests.
Thanks to Arne’s accountability scam, taxpayers are now paying for rushed, poorly designed tests & loads of student personal information and giving all of it free to profiteers. These are the same people who clamor for tax breaks and lobby for loopholes in the tax code. Taxpayers deserve to be compensated for opening markets for these corporate deadbeats.
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“Corporations have shifted nearly all of their research & development costs to taxpayers in other industries and have profited handsomely. (e.g., the internet, air flight, our electrical grid, etc. ”
During one period of my life I had to buy a private, individual health insurance policy. The insurance company sent me a survey. I don’t fill those out because I’m not their data collection volunteer. They then sent me a letter and said I had to return the survey. I felt like billing them for opening and reading two letters.
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For the same reason, when clerks ask for a zip, say, “no”. When they ask for a phone number, say, “unlisted”.
Businesses can hire marketing researchers.
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I’ve always thought they should pay my elementary and middle school kids for taking those tests. No one benefits, except for the 1%. Using my kids. It’s criminal and should stop.
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I think that the NAEP should also pay schools. We’ve had to do the NAEP at my school twice since I came there six years ago. The kids don’t even know that they’re doing it until the day of the test, so parents can’t even opt out. It interrupts several hours of classes because we’re missing a third of our students. And this is all done for free–the school gets no money to my knowledge, the counselors have to proctor the test, and all the kids get is an NAEP pencil. The kids hate it and think it’s useless (as do I).
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NEAP is one the most annoying things i ever had to do while in high school. It is just you put it, it takes up several needless hours toiling away at a piece of paper that can only affect my school in a negative way.
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A wonderful idea which should be taken further. I hope an online petition ( to Obama, Duncan et al) is started requesting, demanding payment for services rendered. I would sign it and help it go viral.
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Taxpayers (you) paid the PARCC and SBAC consortia 350 million dollars to develop these tests. Taxpayers are now footing the bill for field testing them. So, the testing companies didn’t have to pay to do the development, and they don’t have to pay to do the field testing, but they will reap the rewards for administering them.
It pays to own politicians. That’s why the big educational materials monopolists have purchased a great many legislative and administrative windup toys.
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I agree with these kids. It also seems that these tests fall under laws that cover the use of human subjects in research. Parental consent should be required and whether or not to take part should be up to the student and guardian.
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these tests fall under laws that cover the use of human subjects in research
yes yes yes
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I really love reading your posts, Robert! Kids are being used as guinea pigs and they should be paid for field tests, which is why I opted out all four of my kids. Has anyone heard about SAGE field tests and the report that strange colors and sounds are programmed in some of the tests? Here is the link I’m talking about. I can’t confirm this a hoax or not, and I wouldn’t normally post, but I find it strange that teachers and parents cannot view tests. (There is another video with a mother whose daughter confirms this on her test as well.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJEGP1qWzy0&feature=youtu.be
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Momoffive, you must be from Utah! I am as well, and so I have heard of the SAGE, of course. For those outside of Utah, it’s our new CC-aligned tests. Utah left the SBAC consortium two years ago. The Utah tests were written by AIR. However, several of my teacher friends are going to write questions this summer, so I don’t know how much AIR did, although the state paid a LOT of money for it.
Did you know that the ENTIRE set of tests this year, including the ELA test that took most students TWO WEEKS to complete, was a field test? All of the students in Utah, grades 3-12, were guinea pigs for these tests. Most of my colleagues don’t see anything wrong with it, but I think it’s unconscionable to hinge school grades on a test that hasn’t even been tried yet, and equally unconscionable to force an entire state of children to test their tests without pay.
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I should add that Florida is going to pay $5 million dollars to Utah to use the test next year–the test that Utah students field tested for free. I can just about guarantee that no Utah student will see that money in their actual classrooms–it will get no further than state and district offices.
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Yes. The American Institutes for Research, or AIR (the folks with the contract to provide test item development for Smarter Balanced) “worked with Utah educators” to develop the Utah Common Core tests, which are called the SAGE system, and those tests will be licensed to Florida for 1 year while AIR “works with Florida educators” to develop the state’s own Common Core test. It’s important that Florida asserted its right to control its own educational system, but Florida remains under an NCLB waiver, so it must abide by the rules of that waiver, which include having “college and career ready standards,” a school rating system based on tests, and VAM. And so, despite Rick Scott’s states’ rights talk, Florida remains, basically, in thrall to federal micromanagement of its assessment system, standards, and school and teacher evaluations.
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Now we’re talking! Go kids!
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Please take the time to read, sign, and circulate the petition entitled:
STOP COMMON CORE TESTING.
4,400 letters/emails sent to Congress and President Obama to date.
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/?m=5265435
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How can we sign this to give support?
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I think they should be paid and anyone who uses the tests should be charged a price that reflects the full cost of the resources that went into producing the test.
My question is if the instructional week is 330 minutes long. That seems a bit short to me.
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I just quickly did the math, and we have 360 instructional minutes per DAY, for 1800 minutes a week. I did NOT count the five minutes of passing per class or the 30 minute lunch in my calculation.
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I thought there were many more instructional minutes in a week, which is why I was curious about the claim that students missed a week of instruction because of the 330 minutes of testing. Perhaps it was a week of instruction in a single subject?
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Most likely a week of a specific class. It’s still not right, regardless of how much time it takes. I had a person at the state office argue that students don’t REALLY miss three weeks of school because of testing, because they don’t miss all day, every day, to test. What this person did not take into account that kids are FRIED after one of these tests, both mentally and emotionally. My AP kids couldn’t even focus on the reviews for the AP tests that we were doing. The AP test was scheduled during the end of level math tests, so a bunch of kids had to miss my class later to make up the end of level test. I had a student that missed my class for almost two weeks because he was making up end of level testing. It’s appalling.
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Awesome! I hope that the kids prevail.
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This is, of course, a purely symbolic act.
The testing companies negotiate fees with the states. Those fees are based upon some calculation of cost, revenue, and profit. Increase the cost to the testing company, and the testing company will pass this along in increased charges for its services.
Here are some real actions: Opt out. End the testing, which has NO INSTRUCTIONAL VALUE WHATSOEVER.
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It is a little more than symbolic. It will force the public school system to confront the real cost of producing the exams and will transfer at least some income from the taxpayers that pay for the exams to students taking these tests.
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Educators are contracted with their districts not testing companies. Do taxpayers really want to pay their educators to work for testing companies ridiculous numbers of days throughout the school year?
Some educators are administering 20 or more standardized test throughout the school year. That equates to almost a month of employment spent working for the testing companies. It is time to put a stop to these tests. Check out how the frequency of testing has increased in this WP article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/09/11-key-questions-on-standardized-testing-for-congress-to-answer/.
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If the REAL costs were passed along to the states, including paying students for field testing, then perhaps states would drop the tests, because they would be too expensive. Hey, I can dream…
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The real costs are in time lost and curricula and pedagogy distorted. See my note below.
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Of course, Bob, but that’s not what the legislatures care about, so we have to convince them of the absurdity of this is to use cold, hard, dollars.
Four years ago, a bill came up in my state to tie all teachers’ salaries to test scores. I testified before the committee, stating that I represented non-tested subjects (I teach social studies). I emphasized that if they wanted to tie test scores to evaluations, they would have to test EVERY subject, and mentioned the enormous costs of all of that testing. The bill failed, and I’m pretty sure it was because of the fear of the cost, NOT because of the ridiculous instructional time all of that testing would take.
Politicians don’t care about people generally. But money? They can understand that.
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Another PARCC Mugging
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariate College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) needs to be scrapped. Here are a few of the reasons why:
1.The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists in world knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of declarative memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested cover almost no world knowledge and so the tests based on those standards miss much of what constitutes attainment in this subject. Imagine a test of biology that left out almost all world knowledge about biology and covered only biology “skills” like—I don’t know—slide-staining ability—and you’ll get what I mean here. This has been a problem with all of these summative standardized tests in ELA since their inception.
Second, much of attainment in ELA consists in procedural knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of procedural memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested define skills so vaguely and so generally that they cannot be validly operationalized for testing purposes as written.
Third, nothing that students do on these exams EVEN REMOTELY resembles real reading and writing as it is actually done in the real world. The test consists largely of what I call New Criticism Lite, or New Criticism for Dummies—inane exercises on identification of examples of literary elements that for the most part skip over entirely what is being communicated in the piece of writing. In other words, these are tests of literature that for the most part skip over the literature, tests of the reading of informative texts that for the most part skip over the content of those texts. Since what is done on these tests does not resemble, even remotely, what actual readers and writers do in the real world when they actually read and write, the tests, ipso facto, cannot be valid tests of real reading and writing.
Fourth, standard standardized test development practice requires that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that the test correlates strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested, both generally and specifically (that is, with regard to specific materials and/or skills being tested). No such validation was done for these tests. NONE. And as they are written, based on the standards they are based upon, none COULD BE done. Where is the independent measure of proficiency in CCSS.Literacy.ELA.11-12.4b against which the items in PARCC that are supposed to measure that standard on this test have been validated? Answer: There is no such measure. None. And PARCC has not been validated against it, obviously LOL. So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment—that they have been independently validated.
2. The test formats are inappropriate.
First, the tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and EBSR). These item types are most appropriate for testing very low-level skills (e.g., recall of factual detail). However, on these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers, these days, all insist on answer choices all being plausible. Well, what does plausible mean? Well, at a minimum, plausible means “reasonable.” So, the questions are supposed to deal with higher-order thinking, and the wrong answers are all supposed to be plausible, so the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky, all because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments–that objective question formats are generally not great for testing higher-order thinking, for example. For many of the sample released questions, there is, arguably, no answer among the answer choices that is correct or more than one answer that is correct, or the question simply is not, arguably, actually answerable as written.
Second, at the early grades, the tests end up being as much a test of keyboarding skills as of attainment in ELA. The online testing format is entirely inappropriate for most third graders.
3. The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—have instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive. The results of these tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use. Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.
4. The tests have enormous incurred costs and opportunity costs.
First, they steal away valuable instructional time. Administrators at many schools now report that they spend as much as a third of the school year preparing students to take these tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent on test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping.
Second, they have enormous cost in dollars. In 2010-11, the US spent 1.7 billion on state standardized testing alone. Under CCSS, this increases. The PARCC contract by itself is worth over a billion dollars to Pearson in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of SBAC and the other state tests (another billion and a half?), to that. No one, to my knowledge, has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that will be necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs probably run to 50 or 60 billion. This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, of no instructional value? IF THE ANSWER TO THAT IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR A SCHOOL OR AN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-MAKING DESK.
5. The tests distort curricula and pedagogy.
The tests drive how and what people teach, and they drive much of what is created by curriculum developers. This is a vast subject, so I won’t go into it in this brief note. Suffice it to say that the distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog.
6. The tests are abusive and demotivating.
Our prime directive as educators is to nurture intrinsic motivation—to create independent, life-long learners. The tests create climates of anxiety and fear. Both science and common sense teach that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like this testing system are highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. The summative standardized testing system is a really, really backward extrinsic punishment and reward approach to motivation. It reminds me of the line from the alphabet in the Puritan New England Primer, the first textbook published on these shores:
F
The idle Fool
Is whip’t in school.
7. The tests have shown no positive results.
We have had more than a decade, now, of standards-and-testing-based accountability under NCLB. We have seen only miniscule increases in outcomes, and those are well within the margin of error of the calculations. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen SOME improvement!!! And that suggests that the testing has actually DECREASED OUTCOMES, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, “Gee, we should to a lot more of that.”
8. The tests will worsen the achievement and gender gaps.
Both the achievement and gender gaps in educational performance are largely due to motivational issues, and these tests and the curricula and pedagogical strategies tied to them are extremely demotivating. They create new expectations and new hurdles that will widen existing gaps, not close them. Ten percent fewer boys than girls, BTW, received a proficient score on the NY CCSS exams–this in a time when 60 percent of kids in college and 3/5ths of people in MA programs are female. The CCSS exams drive more regimentation and standardization of curricula, which will further turn off kids already turned off by school, causing more to turn out and drop out.
This message not brought to you by
PARCC: Spell that backward
notSmarter, imBalanced
AIRy nonsense
CTB McGraw-SkillDrill
MAP to nowhere
Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test (SCCAT)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us”)
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Personally I think that this is a cry to the future…If students are starting to step up and take charge in their education and know what they can and cannot get away with then who is to say what can happen? If a student comes to you and says that they think things should change it must be pretty obvious for them to pick up on it…so why not give it a try, it could end up with as much success as this.
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This is my great hope. I meet many bright, bright kids–ones who see through what is being asked of them.
IF the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth succeeds in regimenting education–turning it into mastery of the bullet list in preparation for the test–our best and brightest will rebel against this. In their rebellion lies our hope. The darkness that is Ed Deform will not last forever. Perhaps, when it has done its worst, something beautiful will be born of its ruin. Perhaps people will have learned lessons from this era of dehumanization and regimentation. Perhaps.
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But is there reason to wait until education has fallen to its lowest point and try to rise up out of the wreckage? why not salvage what we have created instead of trying to start anew?
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During this dark time, there will be many who will continue teaching and nurturing, who will continue, say, teaching writing instead of teaching InstaWritingfortheTest.
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This is true, but what of the students then? do we just let them follow like sheep to slaughter, or do we teach them how to stand on there own two feet and walk? as much help and influence as they have teachers are not the only one in the situation that need help.
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Come to think of it, I wonder if Federal regulations regarding testing on human subjects apply to this kind of things, as well? You know, things like “informed consent” and formal review of methods. 10 CFR 745 Protection of Human Subjects comes to mind.
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Love it! Smart kid.
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Boston Globe describes new MTA president: quote: “A self-described social justice activist from the liberal college town of Northampton, Madeloni was until recently a complete unknown in political circles. But her upset election last month as president of the 110,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association has already jolted lawmakers and officials worried about the dawn of a more adversarial relationship with the state’s largest union. The 57-year-old former psychologist turned teacher won her race by openly criticizing the current union president, Paul Toner, for his record of negotiating with — rather than fighting — officials on the development of teacher assessments and the Common Core, a set of national education standards adopted in Massachusetts and 43 other states.”
We need more backbone from the teachers to help support these students.
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During the past two summers, I have taken — and passed — the 4 subtests for the CSET (California Subject Examinations for Teachers) in English in an effort to add single subject authorization to my bilingual multiple subject credential. In recent months, Pearson has been emailing me offering me compensation to field test CSET questions. I have promptly deleted the emails as I have no interest in commuting on a Saturday morning to sit for a test that I do not need to take. However, I have wondered why adults are offered compensation to field test questions and my middle school students are not.
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Link to field test information:
http://www.pearsonvue.com/espilot/cset.asp
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LOVE this idea! Capitalism at its best!
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What a brilliant way to fund education. These children should not only be applauded, they should be employed as it is obvious they are just about college and career ready. The notion that they did not volunteer for these tests and that the testing companies will indeed profit from their toil is spot on. I appreciate the consideration that went into what the testing wages could purchase for the school. This exercise was a real life application to skills garnered in class at their best. The skills of advocacy, communication, planning, calculating and putting a plan into action are demonstrated very clearly in this account. I hope that teachers capitalized enthusiastically on this teachable moment. This was a fun article to read and gave me hope that some teachers actively include their students’ ideas when it comes to instruction.
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