Nice to see that you link to Powells.com instead of amazon.com (altho powell’s did try to pull some nonsense with its employees a couple of years ago). I’d rather my money go there than amazon.

http://www.realityzone.com/hiddenagenda2.html

Might have been a mouse but I was thinking phonetically, and the absurd is always present in these tests….and on drop-out rates, I appreciate you seeking the data, but when so much of the school year is directed towards test taking, I believe, as a teacher that a good portion of our students experience test burnout and just bubble in the tests, thereby compounding the AYP problem, and furthering punitive consequences that could include privatization under NCLB.

We need to scrap NCLB and start all over again with ESEA. Although I do like AFT’s idea of assessing schools individually with parent and teacher collaborative efforts that determine school accountability. And we need to get the military out of our schools (Section 9528 of NCLB) and protect student privacy!

I’m in Local 1021 btw.

I think the servers are groaning.

What also needs to be addressed in the school privatization scheme are the links between exploding prison populations and NCLB consequences (dropout rates),and also the growing miltiarization of our schools. As labor loses good jobs to overseas sweatshops our youth are faced with severely limited choices. The military is often seen as a good potential, and the military may be used to pacify nations that house the sweatshops and slave-labor that American anti-union corporations love so much.

But, as an aside, my favorite testing story comes from one of the first years NCLB enveloped our public education system. During a standardized test in my 8th grade English class, an inner-city youth-of-color raised his hand and asked me to help him define a word in the test packet. He said, “This is an animal right?” I looked at the word, it was ‘mousse’. And I said to him, as instructed by the testing administrators, “Well, just try your best, I can’t help you define words in the test.” But I thought it was quite profound that a child who grew up in difficult Los Angeles projects was able to think so easily and so demonstrably of a cold-climate animal that he had never seen in real life, let alone not recognize a French dessert that is … well… shall we say… out of his class and his parent/guardians price range.

I think he got that answer wrong.

On your first graf, I have heard anecdotes about NCLB causing dropouts, but I haven’t seen research that bears it out. Almost along the same lines, I’ve read that some states use 3rd grade test score results to project how many prison beds they’ll need in 15 or 20 years.

On your 2nd graf, cold-weather animal is moose. But maybe the kid was thinking of mouse?

http://www.crooksandliars.com/