This is a great piece supporting the indictment of High Stakes Testing. “A plague has been sweeping through American schools, wiping out the most innovative instruction and beating down some of the best teachers and administrators. Ironically, that plague has been unleashed in the name of improving schools. Invoking such terms as “tougher standards,” “accountability,” and “raising the bar,” people with little understanding of how children learn have imposed a heavy-handed, top-down, test-driven version of school reform that is lowering the quality of education in this country,” wrote education critic Alfie Kohn, from his novels, The Schools our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards,” and The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools. ***“The bottom line is that standardized testing can continue only with the consent and cooperation of the educators who allow those tests to be distributed in their schools – and the parents who permit their children to take them. If we withhold that consent, if we refuse to cooperate, then the testing process grinds to a halt. That is what happened in Japan. That is what can happen in the United States if we understand the urgency of the situation,” said Kohn.***
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 18:53:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015