Friday, March 3, 2006

The Korea Times : Children Driven to Learn English

The Korea Times : Children Driven to Learn English

Some people say that teaching privates is easy money in Korea. From articles like this one, I would assume that test materials and test prep development is the way to go.

Just another example of the testing culture gone crazy.

CNN.com - Student�suspended for viewing MySpace posting - Mar 2, 2006

CNN.com - Student�suspended for viewing MySpace posting - Mar 2, 2006

Sniff, Sniff...I smell a Supreme Court case (if it makes it that far).

1 student posted threats against another student on his/her blog. Student gets expelled. Good. He/she deserves it and there is a clear case of this act, outside of the schools walls, will impede the educational process. Case closed.

However, 20 students were suspended for VIEWING the posting (outside of the school on private computers, over private networks, etc). The school is seriously over-stepping their bounds. There's no way that this will hold up to any judicial scrutiny.

With the school's reasoning, someone could send me (student) a letter, with the same content as the blog posting, and as soon as I open the letter, I am guilty.

I'm all for schools regulating what is created or accessed at the school or using school resources. I'm even somewhat ok with schools holding students to a code of conduct when they are participating in extracurricular activities. But I have to draw the line when a school can restrict what a student reads at home.

CNN.com - Huge gaps in state, federal test scores - Mar 3, 2006

CNN.com - Huge gaps in state, federal test scores - Mar 3, 2006

Duuuhhhh!

That's just about my only response. What do you expect when you tell states that "all students have to pass these tests....but you can create the tests yourselves"?

Of course there are other reasons that should not be ignored for the descrepancies in federal and state test scores.

(1) Most schools spend a great deal of time preparing students for the state tests. This means that the students are familiar with both the layout of the test and its contents before taking the test. There was likely zero preparation for the federal test.

(2) Regional differences. I'm going to guess that there are both conceptual and linguistic regional differences that are accounted for in the state tests, but not in the federal tests. This is really the same complaint that I have for the state test (doesn't account for local differences).

(3) State tests often use state norm groups. Federal tests, likely, use national norm groups.

These are just a few possibilities, but in the end we are arguing over 2 useless forms of assessment. Both are a waste of time and money. The testing mentality has serious hurt teachers, students, and communities. This mindset is causing us to de-evolve into industrial mentalities, which will eventually lead to us slipping even more in the international "rankings" that this focus on testing was supposed to address in the first place. Accountability can be achieved without large-scale testing.