I was driving into school the other day listening to NPR (National Public Radio) and they had a commentary regarding testing. Get this, the federal gov't TESTS Head Start programs/kids! Head start kids are preschoolers folks! Before the age of five for goodness sake! What am I missing???? How can the gov't justify this??? They want to know how well their programs are doing so they figure if they test the little tikes, they will get an idea of how well the kids are learning. These are LITTLE kids folks . . . is it really necessary for them to be tested so young???
Read/listen to it here.
Maybe I'm in a negative mood right now since we just finished MCAS this week (the English Language Arts portion - the rest is taken the end of May and beginning of June). I'm annoyed at this standardized test that my students need to take in order to graduate from high school. I don't believe a test is the answer to all the problems with public education. The politicians seem to think it's the best answer but they don't know/understand what we deal with every single day in our classrooms. If a student receives an A in my World History class, the state basically says, "Yeah, that's fine BUT they need to receive a specific score on OUR test to determine if they will graduate from high school???" So, our opinion doesn't count and our grades don't count for anything. And, they wonder why teachers are not respected - it's because THEY don't respect us (gov't, politicians, etc.). I'm annoyed that for three days, my school was on three hour delay (9th, 11th, and 12th graders came in three hours late) and I lost a ton of curriculum hours from my teaching for a test that only 10th graders have to take. Last, I'm annoyed that I will get stuck proctoring all the MCAS exams and that there are teachers in the building that don't have to proctor ONE test!
Where are all the tests leading? I teach to a test now. I hate it. I have a lot of students have similar learning styles like me - I don't test well. Is life nothing but a standardized test????
According to the state of MA, life is like a standardized test - you never know what ya might get (sorry for the Forrest Gump reference).
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