Cue Alice Cooper...

'cause schoooooool's out for summer!

One more day!

Even though one of the mottoes of this school is "Learn many things," little of that goes on in the last week of school. I was subbing for a teacher today and her instructions to me were "They can play games, talk, do whatever." Really? You're not even going to attempt to teach them anything? Another room I walked by was playing SpongeBob on the TV.

On one hand, I can't say I blame them. Grades are turned in, students have checked out, everyone (students & teachers) just want to be done. But if that's the case, why is there still school? It's just a waste of time and money at this point. In fact, I even considered not coming into work tomorrow (the last day) because what will I have to do? But then I justified it because I would be paid for it. That's really a stupid reason.

Here is, probably, the last article of the year. I feel like it is an extremely accurate portrayal of what is wrong with DC school policy, and why what people are doing to fix it goes against everything education stands for.

And on that positive note... I want school to be over too.

A bit of repetition

...but there's not a whole lot to report with 5 days of school left (why is it that many? School should really be over now. Anyway...)

I found this article to be quite poignant. It's a repeat of many things I've already posted (particularly how poverty plays into education, Race to the Top, and unappreciation of teachers), but all are important.

Now that testing is over...

...very little is happening. Every teacher here that I have talked to says there is no point to the last two weeks of school. Especially since their grades are due by the end of this week. What a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.

However, we must remain professional. So "learning" continues as if nothing were wrong. But the students can tell that the teachers want summer vacation to be here just as much as they do.

My schedule is also back to normal (that is, boring). So I read education policy, of course. Here is an interesting article about gifted education, which I think is looked at much less than SPED, and clearly more research needs to be done. But that is the bane of education research in general. Change is so slow to happen. Aaargh.

Parental Units

...can often determine the result of a child's education. It's well known that students from broken homes don't do well in school, and then their children don't, and then their children, and so on down the line through a never-ending cycle.

And on the other side, overachievers are bred by overachievers are bred by overachievers... you get the idea.

And of course, VS does it again, with this article about the same topic.

I am finished with testing nonsense, hooray! Thus I have a lot of free time again. Not so hooray...

Standardization is not standard

More complaints about standardized testing today. Surprise, surprise.

One of the ESL teachers was in the testing coordinator's room today, and he was saying how useless the tests were for his students, since the tests are not written to cater to students whose first language is not English. At this school, there are three levels of ESL students: A, who are *just* learning how to speak, B, who have a pretty good grasp of the language, and X, who know English well enough to be placed into mainstream curricula. This teacher said that the A students by definition should *not* pass the standardized tests. If they do, we have to move them up to B status and then they miss a year of instruction. Yet, their scores count against the school when they fail. Qua? In what universe does that make sense?

While this article does not relate to standardized testing, nor is it by Valerie (amazing! Even more amazing, it's by Jay Matthews, whom I normally detest, and while I'm still not a fan of his writing here, he does make a good point, and this probably should have been a completely separate sentence, but oh well)... it does relate to education policy as a whole, and states why politicians tend to generally ignore it.

This is the last week of testing. Then there are two more weeks of school, in which students will learn nothing and do nothing, because everything they did previously was so they would do well on the tests. So we're going to waste two weeks. Awesome.

Trash Talking Testing

Only a few more days of testing left! It seriously wastes so much time, both for students and for teachers. This article sums it up nicely. Awesome.

It's Friday! Hooray! And less than three weeks of school left!

I'll let Valerie speak for me today

She often lets someone else speak for her, anyway. Here's an article about the obvious but ignored (and mostly easily fixable) problems in educational policy. This one is quite silly and has no real relevance but I found it to be an amusing read.

I proctored again today. Almost finished with stupid testing!