standardized tests

Back to school special: I'd like to note that not every teacher who "moves to a school in the suburbs" does so for bad reasons. Some of them do so after being handed a $10,000 per annum pay cut and a contract with zero chance of a raise for the indefinite future or something else along those lines. In other words, while I strongly agree with Olivia Fantini, she may have some unexamined privilege of her own in blaming teachers for their own victimization. Taxpayers, anti-tax organizations, and the elected officials bought and paid for by them are at the root of most of our problems in…
Testing behemoth ETS announced a re-revised SAT for 2015, trying to stay one step ahead of its rival and the legions of teenagers who game standardized tests. Suggesting the vocabulary section was intended as "a proxy test for wide reading," Chad Orzel says memorizing obscure words is "dumb and pointless, but probably takes less time than getting a large vocabulary the 'right' way." Indeed, in the contemporary college prep atmosphere of clubs, sports, musical instruments, and hours of homework, who has time to read anyway? Even English students are likely to stick to SparkNotes (whose…
The first thing that I saw was this article from nola.com (The Times-Picayune) "New teacher evaluation method being proposed in Jefferson Parish". Let me summarize this article. Basically, one of the local School Board wants to use a learning tool (Interval Testing) as a teacher evaluation tool. The Interval Testing program gives students spaced out evaluations through out the year to help them (and teachers) assess the preparedness of the students. These are non graded assessments and have been shown to help students. Note - the purpose of the implementation of Interval Testing is to…