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Posted on 08/03/2011 8:30:23 AM PDT by flowerplough
An unidentified educator claims that the difficulty of the tests not only puts teachers' jobs in jeopardy, but crushes students' spirits as well.
Is there ever a worthy explanation as to why a teacher would help her students cheat on a test?
According to a veteran Philadelphia teacher, yes, there is.
“I wanted them to succeed, because I believe their continued failure on these terrible tests crushes their spirit,” the unidentified teacher told the Notebook.org, a Philadelphia Public School site that serves as an independent voice for parents, educators and students. The teacher says she regularly provided assistance including definitions to unfamiliar words, comments on writing samples during tests, and says that she even discussed reading passages that they didn’t understand.
“They’d have a hard time, and I’d break it down for them,” she said she did it in response to receiving intense pressure from administrators to raise scores at her former school.
In a city made up of 43.2 percent Blacks and with the possibility of schools being shut down and teachers losing their jobs, she says cheating was “widespread” and “constant” amongst almost all of her students who were “poor and African-American.”
“Math teachers were sitting down in the seat next to the children, with a pencil, actually working out problems with them. I saw that many times,” she said.
In Pennsylvania the annual testing regimen is spread out over weeks involving six sections scheduled to take approximately eight hours to complete. The unidentified teacher came forward amid a publication of a 2009 report that identified dozens of schools across Pennsylvania and Philadelphia having statically suspicious test results on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA).
(Excerpt) Read more at bet.com ...
Our pampered kids will be competing with Indian and Chinese kids who get tough love from the parents and teachers.
Or perhaps just self-serving corruption.
Would it help if the tests were written in ebonics?
So the black kids are too dumb to learn it. Why aren’t the teachers being called racists? I guess to the black community they’re heroines for helping the kids get through school even though they didn’t learn anything. That’s the stupid logic of liberalism.
W was wrong.
“Crushes their spirits”?
I read a study done of “self esteem” and academic performance a few years ago, and it revealed that the students with the highest self esteem also had the lowest academic achievement rates. As self esteem dropped, academic performance rose. Pride in performance rose, but that’s different from the basic idea of “hey, I’m wonderful just as I am.”
So the problem with these kids is not that they have too little “self esteem,” but they have too much of it and it’s not based on any contact with outside reality. Tests are a reality check and this might lower their self-esteem and actually make them do something proactive (such as study) for once in their lives.
It is no accident that the dumbest students and most failing schools coincide with places where liberal politics have run without challenge for decades.
It has nothing to do with “Diversity” it has to do with bleeding hearts creating a dependency class, and stealing any chance for success by failed policies and misguided notions of “compassion”.
What hard liberals never can understand, is that sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do, is NOTHING at all. Telling someone “NO” is not innately uncompassionate or cruel, at times it is the most compassionate thing you can do. Saying yes to someone who needs to hear a no is the easy, cowardly and weak answer.
Never occcured to the teacher to invest in her teaching skills so the students could learn, or to find their pathway to learning. Just teach cheating! Then send them to the next teacher, HOPING he/she will CHANGE the pattern that he/she has already set.
“I wanted them to succeed, because I believe their continued failure on these terrible tests crushes their spirit,”
Hey, how about teaching them the subjects so they can pass the tests?
Perhaps some low expectations, but also bad attitudes and, in many cases, low IQ.
The underlying assumption of the testing legislation is that just about EVERY kid WOULD BE ABLE to score high on the test with sufficient instruction. It appears that a percentage are unable to score adequately regardless of how much money is spent.
Part of the solution might be to mandate that no teacher could be hired who was not able to score well on standardized tests in any subject she might be tasked to teach, but that would be struck down as racist.
I’ve had plenty of failing students. It takes work. It takes time and it takes effort. But they can get over the hump if you, as a teacher, know how to prepare your students.
That the test is difficult, is really a measure of your skill and dedication.
Should your butt as a teacher be on the line? Absolutely. Is it possible to get your kids over the line? Yes, but that would take actual work rather then taking the easy way out which robs the kids of an actual education.
“I wanted them to succeed”
Wellllll......”them” didn’t succeed because you failed to do your JOB. You didn’t teach them the information “them” needed to know.
Either “them” failed for not learning, or the teachers failed for not teaching “them”.
As it stands now, “them” failed, and the teachers failed.
Nothing new here. Just affirmative action doing what it is supposed to do.
“According to a veteran Philadelphia teacher.
“I wanted them to succeed, because I believe their continued failure on these terrible tests crushes their spirit,” the unidentified teacher told the Notebook.org, a Philadelphia Public School site that serves as an independent voice for parents, educators and students. The teacher says she regularly provided assistance including definitions to unfamiliar words, comments on writing samples during tests, and says that she even discussed reading passages that they didn’t understand.
You got it. Excessively high self esteem is just as bad as excessively high self-confidence. Too much self-confidence and you attempt things that get you killed. Too much self-esteem and you fail to see any need to work hard to improve yourself. Too much self esteem, in the sense of what you feel entitled to have, also leads to criminality ("Hey, I deserve good stuff, so I'll just take it").
Training to help them deal with the US Gov't and society in their future adult lives?
One needs scientific notation to adequately express the stupidity of modern “educators”.
Some things are hard.
Some kids might not ever get it. (And given the quality of our “educators,” it’s not all the fault of the child.)
My curse: “May educators be operated on by those students that were helped by cheating.”
When I went to back to college there was a black woman in the class with 3 kids.
She told me she would study at home in her kitchen but complained that the kids were all around, interupting her constantly. She also complained to me all her friends would call and she found she couldn’t get off the phone with them, (same as she did just before class).
She ‘had to’ give up studying before even getting started and come to class totally unprepared.
The class was Algebra and of course she was failing. She never studied at a study room in college, saying that was too much time to give up.
The teacher often paired us up together in the classroom for problem solving she would give us during the classes.
At home I studied incessantly, consequently was getting high marks and so you know what, the teacher was angry at me for NOT helping this woman ‘pass’ the tests.
I couldn’t believe it.
Isn’t it interesting that there have been excellent public schools which had all Black students and cheating was not allowed? Look up “Dunbar” in Washington D.C. and see what was accomplished there in the 20s and 30s.
But now we expect Black kids to be dumber than a box of rocks and are rarely disappointed.
My first university teaching job was at a university most of you would know because of their basketball prowess. Just before the end of my first semester, two members of the basketball team came in and asked for their copy of the econ final exam. I said it wasn't for two more weeks and they said they knew that but they wanted an advanced copy to study. I said no and, after five minutes of arguing, they left. Two minutes after that one of the most liberal econ profs was in my office hotter than a two dollar pistol wanting to know why I wouldn't give them a copy of the final. I told him I don't do those kind of things...it would not be fair to the other students.
I was then given a lecture on how these were disadvantage people who need a break to get through college...that I needed to have compassion for them.
Really?
I proceeded to tell him that these two ball players were not good enough to make it in the NBA so they were going to have to find a non-sports job. So they get hired because they have a University degree. Within a few hours, that employer is going to know they can't even form a proper English sentence, let alone be worth their wage. They will be fired. But the real cost is not losing their job. The real cost is that any future graduate from that university will likely be passed over by that employer, shutting the door on those who earned their degree.
He looked at me...smoke coming from under his collar...and stormed out of the room. He could not defend his position.
I never had another basketball player in my class.
Remember that Steinmetz scandal in Chicago? This is the same thing. I don’t think that they actually see it as cheating, not unless they actually change the answers.
Changing the answers wasn’t done to help the students, it was done to help the teachers and the school.
“I wanted them to succeed, because I believe their continued failure on these terrible tests crushes their spirit,”
Then, teach something damn it!
The “white” system of learning was developed over thousands of years, and then we just “dropped” blacks in less than 100 years ago.
Is it racist to suggest that blacks and whites may learn differently?
She isn’t talking about “pampered” kids, just the opposite. Kids with no father in the home generally turn out to be a disaster and that is what this teacher is looking at. This is why I recommend orphanages rather than the subsidization of illegitimacy.
I wonder, what did those conducting the study you’ve cited mean by “self esteem”? Is it the bloated, false sense of self-grandiosity that permeates popular culture today? The chest-thumping, “there is no ‘I’ in team but there is ‘M’ and ‘E’, or, as one tee shirt I saw bluntly stated, “It IS all about me!”?
I remember a wise person saying once, “Self esteem comes from setting and achieving personal goals and challenges. In the classroom, the only worthwhile goal, from which esteem could possibly be derived, is mastery or course content/high achievement levels/high grades. Therefore, that study wouldn’t be measuring esteem (according to the quote I’ve cited above), but ego. Also, therefore, the teachers who have denied these students the opportunity to achieve on their own have, not only deprived them any chance of developing self-esteem, they have also perverted the students’ sense of what true self-esteem is and how it is derived. This will simply ensure we continue to see the furtherance of self-centeredness in our culture.
To paraphrase Paul, in his second letter to Timothy, “Know this that in the last days men will be lovers of themselves...”
Back in the day, competition between schools, districts, states, and even nations seemed to keep people on their toes. And I believe education was a flaming success by every measure back then. It didn't have to be enforced from on high.
But of course, that was in a land far, far away...
Then came things like busing, the metric system, etc. etc. ad infinitum.
NCLB is an unmitigated disaster, a standard FedGov outcome.
WHy,? IT treats all students as they same - they are not.
In our district, Special Ed kids are forced to take the same test as the Advanced PLacement kiddos.
NCLB has nothing to do with treaching or learning, it has to do with control - by the FedGov.
This is an incredibly cruel thing to do. Eventually they will have to deal with someone who has expectations of them that can not be met and that person won't give a damn about their spirits. By then, of course, it will be too late.
So, when these kids get out in the real world is she going to be on the job with them so she can give them the definitions of words they don’t understand?
She wants them to succeed but sends them out not being able to read.
Liberal politicians
Liberal teacher’s unions
Liberal War on Poverty
Liberal philosophy of no standards or consequences
Liberal teachers
Liberal cheating
Liberal whining of why they broke the law.
Liberalism is the reason we are in this mess. The correction will be difficult, but needs to happen, pronto. Those poor black kids are stupid, they are just raised by parents who mostly have never had to support themselves and do not care as they do not struggle to provide their own basic needs.
It erodes from there.
Democrats love this as a permenanent voting bloc has been established and the needy beget the needy, who all vote for the freebies, which equals Government spending, debt and now we...”Have no more road to kick the can” to cite Tom McClintock on Monday.
“Those poor black kids are stupid”, correction, “aren’t stupid”
Self-Esteem is just an image of what Self-Worth actually is.
When you accomplish something, it is much better than feeling good about trying.
That is the $64,000 question.
If kids are learning to read, write and do arithmetic, why are they having problems passing tests?
Let’s get back to the basics and quit wasting time and money pushing the liberal agenda and see if that helps.
Read some of the writings of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, or Alan Keyes. You will find they are as well educated as anyone
I have recently graduated from college. There were several women in similar situations in some of my classes. All of them were determined to succeed and they were an inspiration.
They all had children and lives outside of school. The difference is they made no excuses and made the hard choices.
College is hard especially if you have a family and a job.
Not impossible, I graduated Summa Cum Laude having a full-time job and a family of four. Being one race or another made no difference.
It’s a liberal feel good thingy.
The liberal feels good and the student faces the world after attending a feel good school thingy totally unprepared for the real world where they need to be able to read, write and add without extra assistance they atre used to having from the feel good liberal thingy.
So sad for the student, but the liberal “feels” good and I expect that the liberal feels they did the right thing, at least for themselves.
The Bell Curve strikes again!
“Being one race or another made no difference.”
I agree, but I shouldn’t have to help anyone else in class, especially because of their race, which this teacher was insisting I help her ‘because’... it’s that student’s responsibility to study and pass.
and congratulations on doing fabulously, btw, wow.
Need more teachers like James Earl Jones in “Soul Man” (not a great movie), but this was a great line to the character that was trying to be black:
“If you have to work twice as hard as these little white sh***, you damn well better work twice as hard.”
An argument is when two people
a. agree
b. work together
c. feel differently
d. quarrel
You probably see the problem. The kids now know what an argument is, but the people who made the test apparently believe that they've heard the word "quarrel" before. But they haven't. It's nowhere in the prepared text.
When teachers complain about this kind of set-up, we are told to look at the test in advance and "frontload" the kids so they know that quarrel is another word for argument. But these high-stakes test, we don't get to see in advance. So we really get screwed sometimes. They tell us what they want to test the kids on but they make the questions so bizarre...
If you wanted to keep minorities poor and dependent on government, there would be no better instrument than the current public schools.
It is time to shutter the Department of Education and close all public schools completely and forever.
bell curve outliers
The moral failure of the teachers is the least of it. A system that places teachers in such an untenable position — basically forcing kids to pass tests that they can’t pass — is completely broken. Putting a bunch of teachers in jail isn’t going to fix the system. It’s just a way for the system to chew up more victims.
Replace the districts with charter schools that work. Create a voucher system. Support home schooling. But close down the districts — they can’t be saved.
Now, if they don't know "because," are they going to know primary, export, economy, agricultural, deposits, and located? No, of course not. Again, teachers are told "Well, look at the test in advance and teach them all those words too. And also teach them how countries trade and create wealth."
Again, this is already making it unnecessarily difficult for teacher and student alike. Now imagine those tests being tossed at your kids and you CAN'T see them in advance and be ready to let them know that, while you have taught them what a metaphor is, you now must quickly teach them what is a windmill and a saber, because that's going to be the example the test will use.
Why were you surprised? The teacher probably got in trouble for having too many black students flunk her class, which is why this woman was paired with a good student like you in the first place.
Our US history tests and Civics/Econ tests are a lot like that- they are more tests of vocabulary/literacy than they are about the subject matter....
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