Congratulations to Anne Carroll and ALL those who have directly or indirectly affected this progress! I was cheering along with everyone else as I scrolled down reading these great scores ... until I got to this:
* Unless we receive adequate funding from the legislature this year, our momentum is at risk. We just can't continue to do more with less.
If we learned anything from this recent progress it should be that it's not about money. It's about having relevant and explicit learning objectives (free of political agendas and other irrelevant nonsense), allowing the dedicated classroom teachers' creativity to identify the best ways to teach them, and measuring the students' progress against those objectives with tests that accurately measure that progress. Once this model is in place, it doesn't take progressively larger annual budgets to make it work.
And to the poster who lamented that we're "teaching the test," let me say that there's nothing wrong with "teaching the test." I've been doing it for 30 years in the private sector. The key is to have valid, relevant, explicit learning objectives. When the test items are then written directly from those objectives, then it's an accurate measurement of whether or not the students learned what it is you wanted them to learn. So consequently, you're not really "teaching the test," you're teaching the learning objectives and the test matches those objectives. All the No Child Left Behind Act (which was designed with the help and approval of Ted Kennedy by the way) was intended to do was to set this as an operating principle, and then let the states and local school boards decide the details.
I would say to people who oppose this Act for allegedly administrative reasons (not enough money!) that their logic is flawed and their motives are suspect. But any alleged educator who opposes this ACT on principle, shouldn't be in the education business because they're incompetent.
Dennis Tester Mac-Groveland
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