Free Republic

A New Mexico eighth-grader was suspended from school for letting her classmates know that they could opt out of the state’s new online standardized test. 12-year-old Adelina Silva printed out the forms from her own school’s website and was rewarded with a trip to the principal’s office. Adelina and her mother, Jacqueline Ellvinger, appeared on “Fox and Friends” this morning to explain what happened and why Adelina was punished. “I wanted the parents to know that they had the option to let the student either take the test or not,” Adelina said. …

Philadelphia's public school system has joined several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals." (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3). Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers...

While his eighth-grade classmates took state standardized tests this spring, Tucker Richardson woke up late and played basketball in his Delaware Township driveway. Tucker’s parents, Wendy and Will, are part of a small but growing number of parents nationwide who are ensuring their children do not participate in standardized testing. They are opposed to the practice for myriad reasons, including the stress they believe it brings on young students, discomfort with tests being used to gauge teacher performance, fear that corporate influence is overriding education and concern that test prep is narrowing curricula down to the minimum needed to pass...

Hey, who’s up for a little civilizational-decline anxiety on a slow Tuesday news night? Why, I haven’t wet myself like this over China since that Chinese professor ad during the campaign!After reading this, I’m going to have nightmares like Cartman in that “South Park” episode about the Beijing Olympics. “Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education, referring to the groundbreaking Soviet satellite launching. Mr. Finn, who has visited schools all across China, said, “I’ve seen how relentless the Chinese are at accomplishing goals, and if...

The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing test, predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the test. “The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said. College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success. “The SAT continues to be an excellent predictor of how students will perform,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice...

So many New York City students received extra time and other accommodations on a respected national test this year that several testing experts are saying the results should be considered invalid. On the test known as the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, New York state gave accommodations to more fourth-graders than any other state in the nation, and New York City gave more help than any of the ten other major cities that participate in a separate city-by-city comparison. On three of four tests the accommodation rate hovered around 20%. On the last — a fourth-grade...

Newspaper says suspected cheating common at charter schools AUSTIN — Suspected cheating on the state's standardized test is particularly prevalent at the state's charter schools, according to an analysis of test scores by The Dallas Morning News. The study flagged answer sheets from classrooms that had many more answers in common than experts say would happen by chance. In the top 50 most egregious cases of likely cheating, 37 of them took place in charter schools, which make up only 2 percent of the state's campuses. One charter school, Jesse Jackson Academy in Houston, was home to the most...