It is interesting that at the beginning of the chapter, Gallagher states "Test scores may be rising, but that's at least partly as a result of states lowering standards to meet the law's demand that all students become proficient by 2014." This is crazy! How can you lower the standards from one year to the next and change the proficiency standards. How are they going to honestly say in 2014 that students are proficient when they've all been held to different standards? I find this interesting as well because this year the Math graduation test is changing to be based on the GPS standards. It has previously been mostly QCC and the students joke about it being so easy because it is math at a 7-8th grade level. Now this year all of a sudden it is going to be crazy hard. Well, from what I heard, in previos years students had to make an 800 to pass but this year (because it is going to be much harder) the students only have to make a 200 to pass. Hmmm, so we are making the questions harder so it looks like we are holding students to a higher standard but we are lowering the standard at the same time. I am very curious to see how this plays out at the end of the year.
The chapter also mentioned penalizing schools for not meeting proficiency and I honestly think this leads to more "cheating the system." I totally disagree with this. I also thought the statistics given throughout the chapter were pretty interesting and sad. The decline in literacy is not only going to hinder individuals but it is going to affect businesses and the direction of our Nation. The information given about Finnish education was enlightening. It makes you wonder how they make it work and if it works as well as indicated then why aren't we doing something similar? No more than 1/2 an hour of homework a night! I think even our students would buy into that :-)
I also thought it was neat that Gallagher gave a list of 101 books he found his reluctant readers like to read. This list can give ideas for books to have in the classroom and readily available to our students.
I agree partially when it comes to the math curriculum being changed. It seems to me, although I have limited experience in the current classroom, that there has been a lot of change in the world of mathematics in recent years. Some good, some bad, but the goal is to uniform the math curriculum across the country. It has been confusing and the end of course test changes have not been implemented correctly and the changes have been too drastic but I think that we are headed in the right direction and that the end of course test from my experience thus far this year in the placements will be an accurate test on the material being recovered.
ReplyDeleteI like the uniformity idea as well but it doesn't seem fair to hold 1 graduation class to one standard and then the next year it is completely different. How can you compare one to the other but yet they do. I worry about my students passing because it is so different and for now since it is the first Graduation Test using all GPS and not QCC. We don't have materials yet to even help prepare for it so it makes it more difficult to make sure we are covering everything to the extent that it should be covered.
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