Reblog: Ewww Michigan

So with the bad economy and government budget shortfalls many states have cut their funding for education.  It's the standard less teachers or aides with larger class sizes, less extracurricular activities, even worse special education, and sometimes closing and combining schools.  This has happened everywhere, from California to Maryland and unfortunately (and obviously) it means worse education for children. Currently Michigan is in the lead for horrific cuts. Gov. Rick Snyder released his plan in April and it contains an "unprecedented push toward for-profit schools, dubious online curricula, and budget cuts and anti-union measures that would make the public teaching profession ever more insecure."  Read the Mother Jones article Michigan's Radical Assault on Public Education for more information.

Personally I just can't wrap my head around the logic of defunding education.  It's a necessary service that when done well substantially improves not just the individual, but all of society.  Also we can look at history and other countries to see what happens when we fund, or don't fund education, and a lack of funding is never a good thing.  Or at least it's never a good thing in the long term or for the majority of society, short term it saves governments money and creates a poorly educated working force for cheap labor in factories/corporations.  Is that really what the majority of our states and politicians want?


By the way, I swear at some point I'm going to get back to book recommendations, and lists, and providing information of educational techniques and jargon.  There's just all these time sensitive things going on between politics and education that I feel needs to be addressed. 

Re-Blog - News on High Stakes Testing

Recently Marion Brady, a teacher, administrator, and curriculum designer wrote an article for the Washington Post When an Adult Took Standardized Tests Forced on Kids. In it she shares information she received from a friend who took the 10th grade test (this is the one that determines graduation, college potential, and of course teacher and administrator pay, and school funding).

The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”... “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate."...“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

In the article Marion Brady also discusses the recent New York Times story Principles Protest Increased Use of Test scores to Evaluate Educators by Michael Winerip.

"President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals’ revolt in history.As of last night, 658 principals around the state had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.Their complaints are many: the evaluation system was put together in slapdash fashion, with no pilot program; there are test scores to evaluate only fourth-through-eighth-grade English and math teachers; and New York tests are so unreliable that they had to be rescaled radically last year, with proficiency rates in math and English dropping 25 percentage points overnight.Mr. Kaplan, who runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, has been evaluating teachers since the education commissioner was a teenager. No matter. He is required by Nassau County officials to attend 10 training sessions, as is Carol Burris, the principal of South Side High School here, who was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State.“It’s education by humiliation,” Mr. Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Examples from Real Life

When I wrote about Reading Levels I explained that different children develop at different speeds and there is no one right level for a child to be on at a specific age or grade.  Now I work with children between the ages of 5 and 10 and see the reality of this every day.  Recently, I had my students make holiday cards for service men and women who would be over seas for the holidays. The results were both adorable and a good example of how children (even ones from similar backgrounds and educated by the same teachers) reach academic benchmarks at different times.

I selected a small collection of cards made by children from kindergarten to 3rd grade that demonstrate the different skills and levels children can be on, even when they are the same age or in the same class.

This card was made by one of my kindergarten students. I helped Megan spell "merry" and "Christmas" but didn't correct her formation of the letters or tell her which letters should be capitalized.  As you can see some of the letters are backwards and they vary a bit in size.  This is all pretty normal for kindergartners.  She did do a very good job writing in a straight line though; better then I would have at her age.

This card was made by another kindergartner.  He decided to interpret a holiday card for soldiers as a soldier card.  He also didn't want any help from teachers with spelling words, but decided to do some letters anyway.  As you can see the letters vary some in size and change between capitalized and lower case letters (pretty much based on his comfort level with writing the different letters).  The boy who made this card is best friends with Danniell, a 1st grader who made the next card.

Danniell didn't receive any help from teachers when making this card; the sentence structure, word choice, and spelling are all his own.  This shows he understands the form letters take, as well as basic spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  His only spelling mistake was "absolutley yors" which is pretty impressive.  Danniell is highly verbal, has an amazing memory, a love for science, and is self-motivated to learn new things. He hasn't had formal testing yet, but it's pretty easy to see he's in the gifted and talented range of academic abilities.  When talking with my teacher friends I often share stories about Danniell and call him my baby genius. (Last year he loved learning about weather and was very interested when we did a month long hurricane tracking project.  Months later he was the only students to retain the information about the general starting points for hurricanes during different times of the year.)

 Amanda, is one of my second graders and one of the less academically inclined of my students. Her penmanship is good for her age, she spelled everything correctly, and she reads within her grade range.  However, she isn't very interested in school or reading.  A lot of the children I work with enjoy reading and play school, Scrabble, and Banana-grams, or practice writing with the white boards, but Amanda doesn't find any of these things interesting.

Violet's in 3rd grade, or 3erd, as she spells it. She didn't receive any help from teachers and spelled "hollyday" the way it sounds, which if this was 300 years ago would have been academically acceptable.  Violet's a good example of an average 3rd grader.  She spells most words correctly, has legible hand writing, and just reached the point where she can read children's chapter books.  She doesn't mind reading or writing, but doesn't love it the way some of her peers do.

This last card is by Anna, another 3rd grader.  She didn't have any help from teachers and spelled "contrey" wrong, but like Violet she spelled it the way it sounds.  These types of misspellings are pretty standard for child in 3rd grade or beyond (unless they have ADHD, dyslexia or some other type of language based special need).  Her handwriting is a bit better then Violet's, and when it comes to reading she has a higher reading level, which is probably most related to her higher print-motivation.

I wish I had more examples from my older students, but they were less interested in completing this activity.  The school also starts tracking students in 4th grade and while my 4th graders have a range of interests, skills, and abilities the 5th grade students are all in the same levels and so are a less diverse example.