teaching malinche

A couple of items of note for our kids!

Our kids won’t waste time on two completely different end of the year assessments that take up hours of class time!  As you probably know, the old assessments took 10-30 hours of classroom time, depending on the year of instruction and whether your child is an English language learner.  The old tests are primarily multiple choice, and teachers and parents have no way of seeing what their kids actually got wrong.  I have lots of issues with multiple choice state tests, but that’s another post for another day.

The Governor is defying the bizarre mandates of No Child Left Behind that dictate that all kids have to be tested every year, with the cost being passed down to states and local districts for testing materials and the companies that score them.

 So now our kids will be taking the Common Core assessments as a practice run – something that many of us in the teaching profession are still questioning, and parents should be questioning as well.

The pros and cons continue, and I will write more as I have more answers . . .

As I continue to question the Common Core, I continue to hear that 8 year olds will be asked to write essays on computers.  Are teachers and parents and child experts being asked if this is even appropriate?  Who is deciding this?  Who is holding them accountable?

Here is an article that delineates some of the issues of technological testing in the context of Louisiana:

Although the above article is fairly positive, I remain negative – particularly in light of the questionable spending of districts on technology in lieu of more experienced teachers, higher teacher student ratios, librarians and art teachers. (More on the iPad scandal in LA – kids hacking computers – hooray – they are smart!)

I’m currently reading “The Smartest Kids in the World” by Amanda Ripley, who followed three American teenagers who lived as foreign exchange students in Korea, Finland and Poland, three countries that remarkably improved their public education through focusing on high quality teacher training, creating equity among schools, delaying tracking so as to give all kids high quality educative experiences through age 16, giving more resources to poorer kids and kids with disabilities, etc., etc.  I’m loving the book, as a cultural examination of how schools and students can really demonstrate improvement within the framework of their history and populations, and smart research-based policies (as the Finns say, they got their great educational ideas from the United States – too bad Americans don’t listen to their best educators and their own research).

And finally, Diane Ravitch’s book just came out with all of the answers of what we should be doing to improve our kids’ education, to save the honorable profession of teaching, and to preserve democracy.  It’s called Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.

I missed her speaking with Linda Darling-Hammond the other night at Stanford, but I’ve been getting the reports from my teacher friends who went.  Here is an interview of her with Michael Krasny from Monday morning – this is a very sharp and compelling interview – Andrew and I listened to it last night.  Great questions and great answers on all the topics that are important in the policies affecting our kids today.

Maestra Malinche