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.
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