School Accountability
The Texas Education Agency releases its 2006 accountability ratings for public schools throughout the Lone Star State.
How did your district perform this year? Look it up yourself; I'm feeling lazy today.
Meanwhile, the TEA will investigate several school districts where suspected TAKS cheating occurred, including the Brownsville and Rio Grande City districts.
And Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez, who taught high school in the Valley, says the focus on standardized testing hurts our children's education:
How did your district perform this year? Look it up yourself; I'm feeling lazy today.
Meanwhile, the TEA will investigate several school districts where suspected TAKS cheating occurred, including the Brownsville and Rio Grande City districts.
And Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez, who taught high school in the Valley, says the focus on standardized testing hurts our children's education:
[Tests are] completely changing the way teachers teach and students learn. Practice-test drills are common, teachers tell me, and they also complain they have to suppress their creative juices as supervisors demand they play it safe with dumbed-down, rigid curriculums. ...
But something even more troubling than these misplaced priorities is happening in our schools — a growing culture of cheating. And it's contaminating not only students, but also teachers, principals and higher-ups. ...
I've said it before: We're graduating kids who don't know anything but how to game the system on a standardized test. And until state legislators decide to do something about it, the situation will only deteriorate.
posted by Mack T. Harrison at 12:20 PM
2 Comments:
My apologies, but I've never been a fan of Macarena's work. She garnered a lot of interest because of the plagiarism scandal.
I have kind of mixed emotions on standardized tests. While I do believe that is becoming the central focus of our schools, I also believe that we need some kind of standard to tell us how our schools are performing. I do not think that you can argue that we need to hold our schools accountable and thus need reports on how they are performing. What we do need is to make sure this does not become the sole driving force for our educational institutions and make sure that all facets of education our imbedded within our students. Maybe we should have some kind of accountability for the schools on how they implement these tests?
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