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 ...
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.
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