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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 ...
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....
“As W put it, the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Triple Ditto; as you beat me to the money quote.!!!
Type a little slower next time please!!!!
"In the preceding paragraph, locate and identify the example that illustrates the underlying motivation of the protagonist." My 12 year olds would do a lot better if it said "Why did Ponyboy and Johnny run away?" (Especially given that for most of them, English is a second language.)
““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,”
So, when they fail in life, because they basically had someone do everything for them in school, they won’t feel bad? Firstly NCLB is a failure- expecting 100% of all students to pass all the time is an essentially stupid proposition to begin with. No human, mechanical or electrical enterprise is 100% efficient. Secondly, education should focus on matters as achievement, excellence, and virtue, not wastes of time and money, such self-esteem and diversity.
Finally, this teacher in the article is doing no one any good. If you taught the material, that’s all you can do, and all that is right to do. It may suck to watch your students fail over and over. I had a student once who had my class 4 times- the student simply refused to do the assignments and in each case, failed. But I wasn’t going to pass that student- that would be wrong. It would be damaging to the student- they learned they could nothing and get by; it would be damaging to the next teacher in the next class for the same reason, plus nothing to build on for the next class; and lastly, damaging to me- I would have to lower my ethical standards. The teacher in the article has none, in my opinion.
“You can tell the test question was written by some Ph.D. who doesn’t realize that most people don’t talk like he does:”
That’s because he hasn’t actually set foot in a public school classroom since 1983...and may well never set foot in a college classroom because he’s too busy turning out reams of useless “research” for publication.
Thank you.
It was a lot of hard work.
Taking online classes is a way to eliminate the race factor but it requires more self-discipline. - a trait this woman appears to be without.
"Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end." - Robert Fripp, King Crimson
If self-discipline were desired as much as self-esteem, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Integrity left the scene when shame was destroyed.
Yes, and then it's all the fault of "The Man." One of the characteristics of people who fail this way is that they always blame someone else, and unfortunately, a lot of blacks have been brought up to blame the boogey-man figure of the "white man." Blaming somebody else further insulates them from a reality check.
They rated them on how they view themselves. The worse they were academically, the better they saw themselves.
Yes, what you’re hearing here is not really teacher concern for students, but teacher concern for their jobs, which they obviously were not doing very well.
It’s true that the attitudes of the students can make it more difficult...somebody who thinks he’s cool just the way he is, even though he’s 15 and can’t read or add a couple of figures, is certainly going to be hard to teach. And as you say, it takes actual work.
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