Myra Blackmon, a regular education writer in Athens, Georgia, concludes that our current emphasis on high-stakes testing is the antithesis of good education.
“I am sick to death of these demands for college and career readiness, including terrible policies of grading schools based on test scores, insisting a principal’s performance evaluation be based at least 70 per cent on test scores, and, like South Carolina did last year, making all 11th graders take the ACT college entrance examination, then evaluating them as “not ready” – even though they were still more than a year away from graduation.”
She adds,
“It is not the job of schools to make these experiences available. I did the bulk of my own career exploration through my involvement in Girl Scouts and my church’s youth group. My parents encouraged me to work, and carefully coached me on being a good employee.
“It is the job of the community to provide and support such opportunities, to help kids learn how to apply for a job, to practice interviewing and to try out areas of interest. It is the schools’ job to teach them to count money and make change, but it is the job of family and community to be sure that students understand the true value of money and hard work, to be able to choose quality merchandise, and save money for major purchases.
“We must be serious about this. We simply must stop the severe over-testing and give students real-life opportunities to be prepared for life after high school graduation. We must trust teachers to evaluate their students’ understanding using portfolios, simulation and other assessment techniques.
“If we truly want our high school graduates to be ready for the next steps in their lives, we have to let go of over-testing and support helping them learn and experience the things that will prepare them for life.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Terrorizing students is not a good way to help them love learning. Who knew?
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Today, Ohio’s Plunderbund website, posted a letter from Ohio School Board member,
A. J. Wagner. It is a pointed letter about the failures of the U.S. Dept. of Ed., directed at the top Department managers.
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I don;t think this bodes well for Ohio public schools:
“State Rep. Andrew Brenner, who chairs the House Education Committee, said that if Meyer is worth millions for winning football championships, a superintendent should be paid much more for doing the more important job of educating Ohio’s children.
“I don’t think a million dollars should be left out of this (discussion),” said Brenner, a Powell Republican. He said a higher salary and a large bonus for making improvements across the state might make sense.
“Let’s find somebody else who can come in and do some really innovative things,” he said. “We need to keep everything on the table.”
As you know, Brenner is the publicly-paid employee who announced his opposition to the whole concept of public schools so at least we know where he stands on our schools- he’s opposed.
I think they are looking for one of the national ed reform “rock stars” – the people who call themselves “CEO’s”. It’ll be more chaos and fad-chasing and sending money FROM local school districts TO Columbus and never seeing any of it again in an actual classroom.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/01/pay_the_state_superintendent_1.html#incart_m-rpt-1
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Chiara, a superstar superintendent paid a million dollars should be someone who has actually achieved the reformers’ goals: the achievement gap was closed, the graduation rate is 100%, all students are accepted into 4-year colleges without any need for remedial courses. Who might that reformer be? I think it is Casper the Ghost. Can’t be any big-name reformers because none of them achieved those goals anywhere.
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Definition of a successful reformer superintendent: Someone who makes bold promises, surrounds him/herself with highly paid MBAs or TFA, fires many principals and teachers, closes schools, and leaves. Results: No.
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But Diane, those things you mention – firing teachers and principals, closing schools, then leaving to go do it elsewhere – those ARE the results!
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Pardon my language but I want to take a “dump” on fake college and career readiness.
If I was in high school today, thanks to these flawed and fraudulent high stakes tests designed ti be a tool to destroy community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public education and force our children to attend cruel, autocratic, opaque, for-profit and often fraudulent and worse corporate charter schools, I’d be labeled a failure. I would have been labeled not ready for college or a career as early as kindergarten and that label would have followed me through my life.
And the truth is that back in the 1965 when I barely graduated from high school, I wasn’t ready for college. I was born into a family that lived in poverty. My mother and father were both high school drop outs and my dad often cheated on my mother. My older brother was an alcoholic all of his life, a drug addict at one time, and he spent 15 years in and out of prison. I was also sick a lot as a child struggling to survive, with help from our family doctor, life threatening viruses that wanted to destroy my heart. The doctor won that battle and I lived on into adulthood.
For sure I would have been one of those children that the Psycho Eva Moskowitzes of this world would get rid of so her very high paid job as the CEO of a corporate charter schools would end up with higher test scores than the public schools they are planning to destroy and the Evas would earn even more money as they continued to mistreat and torture small children.
Since I would have been labeled a failure as a child in high school by these greedy, power hungry frauds, I want Eva and Michelle Rhee to explain how I ended up with—after serving in the U.S. Marines and fighting in Vietnam—an AS degree from a community college, and then a BA degree in journalism and an MFA in writing and had a career in both the private and public sector for 45 years.
Is it possible that I wasn’t ready to be college and career ready at 17 or 18 due to the lifestyle environment choices of my parents and family and my poor health as a child?
I want to spit in the face of Bill Gates and all the other autocratic billionaire oligarchs who are turning learning into a torturous gulag for OUR children and not theirs.
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The focus on testing destroys the balance of a comprehensive education. Turning schools into test prep factories narrows curricula, stifles creativity and any spirit of collaboration. Emphasis on testing is counterproductive to producing independent, life long learners and problem solvers. Testing along with punishment has sucked the oxygen of schools across the country causing harm to countless students, teachers and communities.
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The tests are not fraudulent – only the claims of the testocracy are.
The tests in fact have revealed the truth: Test-and-Punish does NOT work. Test-and-Punish CANNOT work. Test-and-Punish is a FAILED policy.
The test-and-punish dog can’t hunt and it can’t even bark. Coleman, King,and Gates are literally dragging the test-and-punish dog around hoping it will come back to life.
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Good point. You can’t test poverty out of students; threats and punishment won’t do it either. If they really examined the issue, they would find standardized tests are not all that revealing. They are fairly predictable, and all the high stakes attributed to them have caused more harm than good to students, teachers, administrators and schools.
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One day politicians will realize that they CANNOT legislate brain development, population diversity, parent support, and student motivation.
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New billionaire-funded charter school promotion organization:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/01/13/netflix-chief-announces-100-million-fund-for-education/?postshare=5611452697317316&tid=ss_tw
It’s the same tiny group of people who run both the government ed agencies and the private sector ed orgs.
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They educate their children as they see fit, why can’t they leave our schools alone? I’d even let them drop their tax obligation at this point just to get them to cease and desist.
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