Sunday, April 25, 2004
Go on, ask me how many times I've used a matrix since I last studied for the AIMS...
I’m sure I’m not the only person who was deterred by the dry “legalese” language of the No Child Left Behind excerpts we were to read for this week. I definitely did some skimming, and had to backtrack and reread things a few times to be sure that I was actually making sense of the words, rather than just letting my eyes run over them. It was because I was doing this, thinking hard about the sense of each statement, that I became interested in the particular words that are being used in this document to describe the objectives of the act. Mainly, I found myself intrigued by statements like the one indicating that the act will provide “an enriched and accelerated educational program” while at the same time, it will ensure that all children will “reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.”
My attention was also caught by the constant references to how local schools needed to somehow be made accountable (as though they are not now…?) for the education of their students, and the sort of implication throughout the document that teachers aren’t any good at what they do, and all need to be retrained, or possibly replaced with members of the armed forces. But mainly, it was that stuff right in the beginning that got me going. Reaching “proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and…assessments” sure sounds like teaching to a test, to me. And I believe that that is incompatible with any kind of “enriched” educational program. Honestly, I can not say enough bad things about the AIMS test. A brief overview of my loathing for that “academic assessment” would include a mention of how I myself failed the math portion twice before passing, and barely slipped by on the language sections, though I generally am a very good test-taker, and have done extremely well on other standardized tests in the past. I’d have to note that the valedictorian for my graduating class, a truly brilliant young woman who has the intelligence and drive and mental stamina to be pursuing an architecture degree right now, never did finish passing all the sections of AIMS. I’d have to go on at length about how the results of AIMS and other standardized tests are almost as good at showing ethnicity and class differences between schools as actual demographic surveys, since minorities and underprivileged students tend to do very poorly on such “academic achievement standards and...assessments.” How is that going to stack up with the goal of “closing the achievement gap…especially…between minority and nonminority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers”?
Maybe if we pound trivial, taught-to-the-test information into their brains enough, we –can- close that gap between students who do poorly on standardized tests as a result of their backgrounds rather than through any deficiency in intelligence or desire to learn… But then what will we have? On the one hand, it’d be great if everyone could pass those damn assessments, because then we could stop pretending that there are real mental differences between different groups of people… and I’m sure that having that nicely stamped high school diploma would help a bunch of kids get better jobs, or into better training programs. But I don’t think that that would be an education. Certainly, it wouldn’t be an “enriched” one.
My attention was also caught by the constant references to how local schools needed to somehow be made accountable (as though they are not now…?) for the education of their students, and the sort of implication throughout the document that teachers aren’t any good at what they do, and all need to be retrained, or possibly replaced with members of the armed forces. But mainly, it was that stuff right in the beginning that got me going. Reaching “proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and…assessments” sure sounds like teaching to a test, to me. And I believe that that is incompatible with any kind of “enriched” educational program. Honestly, I can not say enough bad things about the AIMS test. A brief overview of my loathing for that “academic assessment” would include a mention of how I myself failed the math portion twice before passing, and barely slipped by on the language sections, though I generally am a very good test-taker, and have done extremely well on other standardized tests in the past. I’d have to note that the valedictorian for my graduating class, a truly brilliant young woman who has the intelligence and drive and mental stamina to be pursuing an architecture degree right now, never did finish passing all the sections of AIMS. I’d have to go on at length about how the results of AIMS and other standardized tests are almost as good at showing ethnicity and class differences between schools as actual demographic surveys, since minorities and underprivileged students tend to do very poorly on such “academic achievement standards and...assessments.” How is that going to stack up with the goal of “closing the achievement gap…especially…between minority and nonminority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers”?
Maybe if we pound trivial, taught-to-the-test information into their brains enough, we –can- close that gap between students who do poorly on standardized tests as a result of their backgrounds rather than through any deficiency in intelligence or desire to learn… But then what will we have? On the one hand, it’d be great if everyone could pass those damn assessments, because then we could stop pretending that there are real mental differences between different groups of people… and I’m sure that having that nicely stamped high school diploma would help a bunch of kids get better jobs, or into better training programs. But I don’t think that that would be an education. Certainly, it wouldn’t be an “enriched” one.
