Morgan's Smith's NYT piece In Texas, a Backlash Against Student Testing provides more great news that the standardized testing craze is cresting. Robert Scott, the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, said that student testing has become a “perversion of its original intent" and that he plans to start “reeling it back.” For his comments, Scott received a standing ovation from 4,000 educators. The Smith article also reconrts the courageous resistance of educators, all of the way up to the superintendent level, and how one parent took action after testing stressed out her child. Upon looking at what was happening at the school, she found that her child's class was just a "work sheet distribution center." As we praise this new realism, should we not all do some soul searching? Very few of us have shown enough guts in resisting the damage that the bubble-in mania has inflicted on kids.-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
In a report I did about "Misconceptions of Achievement Testing" (google it) I quoted a May 8 2005 Cox news story reporting from the University of Iowa Lindquist Center on testing:
Experts in the Lindquist Center … expect the No Child Left Behind to run its course, confident the politically driven pendulum will swing back to a more reasonable view of the value of testing. Dunbar predicts public support will wane because of results that don’t seem to make sense. “The tests,” Dunbar said, “will lose credibility.”
Posted by: zoniedude | February 09, 2012 at 12:03 PM