Wow, all across the country parents are finally standing up against standardized testing. These tests are a waste of time and money. They do not show what a child really knows, but what they can memorize in the weeks before the testing. The teachers are being forced to teach to the tests. These tests are being used for placement for children, and issues with teachers That is just another reason to homeschool our children. I am not sure who these people are exactly who make up these tests and who decides the correct answers, but,whoever they are they really do not think about a question before they ask it, and then believe that they have the right and only answer.
Speaking from experience when one of my children was being asked questions before going into kindergarten, one of the questions was how many wheels on a bicycle. My child answered 4 and was marked wrong. I had to explain that she had training wheels on her bike making it 4 wheels. Another great question was how many wheels on a wheelbarrow. What about the child who lives in the city. Maybe at 5 years old they have not seen one. The funny part is that even when you ask some adults they have to think for a minute and some say 3.
The point is that there is finally a growing movement to stop these tests without parent's being able to see these and their results. Children are being made upset and very nervous about these tests and it is time to stop. Another great reason to take control of your child's education.
As a senior citizen and educator (public and in home), I have witnessed many changes in our educational system. When one compares the quality of education in our past with the present, one finds the current system is a failure. In fact, home educators are outperforming public schools, and this is true even if the home educator holds no degrees. Yet many educators are busy defending the current system, and insisting that the government needs to regulate home educators as well.
ReplyDeleteFor example; one of the arguments is that "we are teaching children how to think by teaching them what to think". That when a child is punished (given a bad grade) for getting the right answer using the old math method instead of new math method, it is reasoned that they are teaching him/ her how to think. They continue this process of reasoning by showing how in the U.S. addresses are designated by streets, and in Japan by blocks. They thus deduce that there are many truths when they need to conclude that there are many points of view (some better than others).
In Robert Hillmann's documented article one can read the following:
Under the old system children were taught, in their history classes, about how people came to America in search of religious freedom and how they fought a revolutionary war to escape tyranny. They were also taught about the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. This was to come to an end. In order for a two-class society to properly function the lower class would have to forgo more than just a liberal education—they would also have to give up their individual rights. In order to achieve this, the history of the Republic could no longer be taught the way it he had been in the past. Walter Karp, contributing editor of Harper's magazine, commenting on industrial education stated that, "With economic "interdependence" as its subject and a "socialized" worker as its goal the new "democratic" curriculum had little place for history. For political history, which recounts the diverse deeds of men, there was to be no place at all."39 The National Education Association (NEA) went so far as to advocate the elimination of all history courses and replacing them with social study courses.40Karp noted that:
To replace political history with Deweyite social studies was the perfect means of meeting the educational requirements of the powerful. In social studies, American youngsters would learn that America was chiefly an industrial system and not a republic at all, that a "good citizen" is a worker who gets up when the alarm clock rings and speeds to his job on time. In social studies, too, they would learn that the "real" history of America is the "development" of American industry--history without politics in it, which teaches the most corrupt of political lessons, that politics does not matter.
41
By 1911 Dewey and the others realized that this particular attempt to radically alter the public landscape had failed and that it would be necessary to make their attack from another direction.42 That same year Albert Bushnell Hart wrote that, "One of the chief obstacles in the way of a better international understanding is the patriotic historian who brings into the limelight the prowess and conquest of his own race of people as against rival races."43 Hart, an Anglophile, had his own ax to grind in this matter. Coming from the Ruskin school of thought, he believed that the history books should be slanted in such a way as to make a union between the United States and the British Commonwealth more desirable to Americans.44
Source http://www.sovereignty.net/p/gov/hillmann-book2.html