<p>Yeah me too, Scubachick. It’s very sad. As I said on the first page, Common Core trumps all. Gotta nail those tests next year.</p>
<p>@ clarimom-
I don’t think anyone was bashing all teachers or public school teachers, they were complaining about what schools can be like, the rigidity of administration, the adoption de facto of Asian style teaching methods that are all about standardized tests and that those tests can cripple even the most dedicated teachers. Common core was designed to try and make sure kids are learning what they are supposed to, the problem is that in many places it is about the standardized tests that come with the common core to supposedly assess the kids, that has become everything. In that case it isn’t the teacher’s fault, it is the administrators and politicians who have decided to turn education into standardized testing, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the not to near future we have what they have in Asia and elsewhere, where your entire future is determined by standardized test scores and where things like the ability to analyze written text, to write essays, to learn about art, is totally thrown out the window and that is pathetic, to say the least, it is literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater.</p>
<p>I also will admit that I am not unbiased, I was one of the kids who didn’t always see the best of teachers or their methods, I was out there somewhere on the right of the bell curve, and school did not do me well, I was one of the kids, to quote the so called gifted coordinator of my local schools when asking about what they did (in reference to my son) whom they 'don’t have to do much work with and blow out test scores,we are delighted to have them", I coasted through school, wasn’t challenged, and quite frankly, many of the teachers could not care less and treated a really bright kid, not as a challenge, but as an annoyance (and this was not an inner city school, this was a suburban school, supposedly one of the better ones). I also have heard the frustration of teachers who did teach in public schools, that not only were the state and local administrators making their life difficult, they also complained that teachers through the teacher’s union wanted more standard curricula, in effect forcing teachers to teach to some standard the union approved of (these were their words, not mine)…</p>
<p>The real enemy here is the idea that somehow anything you do in school has to have direct ROI, where ROI is standardized test scores, and the obsession around standardized testing shows at the high school level, where the rage du jour is having a ton of AP classes and having kids take them…Art? Only matters if it is an AP class…music? Well,okay, maybe for the football team. I cannot blame teachers alone, I won’t, but there are a lot of forces here, and quite frankly some of it is plain laziness. It is a lot easier to measure progress by numbers on a standardized test, but does that really mean anything? Schools are dumping hours of homework a night on kids, with some weird idea that quantity=quality, when every study says it doesn’t do anything except try to create the impression of rigor. The stupidity is the one size fits all, everything is about rote learning, which is all standardized tests can measure, and that is sad. The tests were designed to make sure that kids met some base standard, they weren’t supposed to be a be all and end all, but that is what they have turned into. </p>
<p>I agree musicprnt, and as I said, when you have teacher evaluations tied to these very flawed standardized tests, and people’s jobs are at stake, as they are here in NY (and this was completely Andrew Cuomo’s doing - don’t know what Gov. Christie has done in NJ, but I suspect there’s probably something similar going on, knowing him), an already bad situation becomes much worse.</p>
<p>@ @mom -
Yep, same thing here in NJ I hear, been a lot of talk about what they are doing. While I understand where they are coming with teacher evaluations and such, the idea behind it, the problem is they have created a system designed to make gifted teachers walk away and leave those perfectly happy teaching to the test. What really scares me is despite issues with schools we have been talking about for many years, those same schools produced dreamers and mavericks who helped change the world, literally, and I wonder if this brave new world where standardized tests determine everything, if we will create, not a world of RIchard Feynmans (who would have ripped the standardized test approach, big time, he despised rote learning and standardized anything), but of corporate accountants and finance types who generally lack imagination or care about anything but numbers on a spreadsheet because that is what they learned in school. When you have schools where poetry or literature don’t count unless it is worth points on a standardized test, or where history is reduced to "The Civil War was between the a)North and South b)East and West C)South and west or D)none of the above <em>sigh</em>. I just hope this turns out to be another short lived experiment, because otherwise, I feel badly about the future, might as well turn kids into robots. </p>
<p>Ironically, often kids who are homeschooled or are even unschooled, blow out the standardized tests, yet seem to have learned something other than facts to be regurgitated on an exam. Jean Piaget and Holt must be turning over in their graves with this teaching to the test mania.</p>
<p><a href=“http://creativity-online.com/work/americans-for-the-arts-raisin-brahms/848”>http://creativity-online.com/work/americans-for-the-arts-raisin-brahms/848</a>
Thought you all would appreciate this video- hope the link works 
</p>
<p>I guess what upset me were statements like “by the end of the day he wanted to go find the teacher’s union offices and firebomb it” and “I hope the people in the town roast the idiot alive”. There is so much violence in the world today that I respectfully request that we stay away from making statements like that. It really bothered me.</p>
<p>@ Clarimom-
I think you are being a tad sensitive, those are metaphors to describe people’s feelings. Saying “I hope the people in the town roast the idiot alive” was not referring to literally doing it, it was referring to roasting the person, as in giving them an earful and more…and the first one is in the same line of “I was so angry at him for looking at that girl in a bikini when I am 8 months pregnant, I wanted to kill him”. It is designed to show a level of feeling, not about physical acts</p>
<p>Sorry, musicprnt, I totally disagree. Talking about firebombing the teacher’s union office is just out of line and inappropriate. That is a violent physical act, not a feeling. Maybe you feel I’m being sensitive, but I feel your words are hurtful. With all the shooting and violence in schools, you have to realize statements like that can be hurtful to people, whether you think so or not. Perhaps having relatives in Columbine, or having to practice “Intruder Alerts” and safety drills in school, or even at times being a bit worried about a particular student’s mental state in school has made me more sensitive, but I truly believe I’d rather that than being insensitive to others. I don’t want this to carry on, so I’m not going to say any more on this thread, but I am disappointed you would just brush my request off as being “a tad sensitive.”</p>
<p>I have to agree with Clairmom on this. Words are powerful tools.</p>
<p>Just wanted to add, that from my observations, it is the parents themselves who are mainly to blame for this shift towards testing and away from the arts.</p>
<p>I have three daughters. All attended the same public high school in our very urban, top scoring school in the nation. It is a very unique alternative school, where the arts and independence are the focus. The waiting list to get in is in the hundreds. Students can leave campus at any time in the day. No locks (even though they were mandated by the state two years ago), no Pledge of Allegiance in the morning.</p>
<p>Between the time my eldest entered 6th grade there (it is a combined middle/high school) to when my youngest graduated last year, i had dealings with this schools for 13 years. I watched it change. In 2000, it was still the school the founders–hippies in 1972–had started. Over the years i saw how kids no longer all came to school on bikes, foot and bus, but were dropped off in minivans. an astounding change. More and more parents insisted on more testing, mandatory courses and rules, and calling teachers about their students’ grades (at this school, students traditionally did everything themselves). Students who really didn’t belong there started attending at the insistence of their parents, simply because the school was ranked #1 one year on one of those national rankings. It has totally changed the school, for the worse. The teachers know it and don’t like it. Teachers are far more open at this school with students, so the students knew very well that the the teachers want to continue the 13 plays per year, all kinds of musical events, and all kinds of learning alternatives. But slowly the school has been mandated every year to inch towards total conformity. Now, parents at the school request more conformity to the other high schools, whereas 12 years ago no parent would have dreamt requesting that. The parents of today are polar opposites of the parents from 12 years ago. </p>
<p>It’s the parents’ fault. They ruined this gem.</p>
<p>woodwinds, I’m sorry this has happened in your kids’ particular school, and the changes there do seem to have been parent-driven. But there are many many parents in NYS public school districts who do not want this and never did. They are extremely unhappy about it and are revolting in massive numbers, attending community forums throughout the state and blasting the policies of Andrew Cuomo and John King (Commissioner of Ed.), who are basically turning a deaf ear to their concerns (they’ve made some very superficial concessions, but it’s total BS and everyone knows it). And further proof is in the thousands and thousands throughout the state who “opted out” of the Math test just this past week as well as the ELA test two weeks ago. These changes were shoved down everyone’s throat by Albany, and many parents are very angry about it.</p>
<p>It is an interesting discussion, and I think in context of everything I know, to quote Pogo, “I have seen the enemy and it is us”. It isn’t that I don’t agree with momof2violinists about so called ‘educators’ (and I have that in parentheses for a reason, it is about a certain type) whose answer to supposed ills is rigid, dogmatic teaching based around numbers and lockstep teaching, that among other things, makes it easier for teachers, or the politicians who are either the tea bagger types who think learning is the three R’s, or worse, want simple answers to a complex problem and then come up with stuff, well meaning or not, that makes it even worse.</p>
<p>That said, a lot of this is being driven by parents, which in turn is driven by the incredibly changing world we are in. I am too young to remember it, but read about what happened when Sputnik was launched, and suddenly everyone felt the US was lagging behind in science education (there was truth to that), and suddenly, schools that couldn’t get 5 bucks to teach math and science were flooded with funding. What we are seeing today is the result in large part of fear, of a globalized world, where now you have, for example, the rise of Asian countries whose students, thanks to systems of teaching to the test, and education systems that are based almost entirely on those tests and tracking kids, who score very highly on globalized tests, and it is a kind of new sputnik, in that people are scared of being left behind, so what happens is instead of looking at what makes for effective education, de facto they are copying what they see as a model of success, which is basically adopting rote education based around standardized tests and putting incredible pressure on kids. Woodwinds is right, for all the noise that parents are making about too much homework and such, how many of them are really complaining, how many of them go to school boards or write letters to people like Cuomo and King in Woodwinds case.</p>
<p>For all its faults, the crazy way we do education at a state and local level paid off. It does leave kids behind, inner city and rural schools in general are much poorer education venues then those in burbs and well off city districts, but it also means there was room for different approaches. When you centralize education, as most countries do, you now end up with NCLB, with all the good intentions in the world, that led to a bureaucratic mess. Core standards were supposed to be flexible, but they turn into rigid mandates from a central government with very little flexibility. </p>
<p>One of the things that made the US education system work was that without that rigidity, there is room for creativity and analysis and teaching things that ‘aren’t important’ ie on tests, and it showed, I had to laugh when they told me there were now international tests supposedly testing creativity and thinking outside the box, it is an oxymoron, because such tests have ‘right’ answers, since they are standardized, and that is not creativity (on the other hand, if they gave tests based on things like Fermimath, which is an incredible thing, truly creative,I would agreee…with that leeway, there are room for mavericks, and it is mavericks, not the kids who follow the beaten path, do great on standardized tests, do everything to 'get on the path to success", who end up revolutionizing things. This new trend is disturbing, because these new standards are adopting the same mode that stifled creativity and imagination, you end up with factory schools turning out a standard product. John Holt might have been a radical, with his critique of the “prussian education factory” we got thanks to people like Horace Mann, but he was right in other ways.</p>
<p>The irony is seen in Woodwinds story. The school in question was founded on hippy ideals, which generally were against rote education and mass product to produce ‘good workers’, and probably because of that it turned out students who did very well…it was the hippiness that made the schools do what they did. Yet now we have parents, obsessed with getting their kids into the “#1 school”, who want to destroy it, they want a school I would bet that obsesses about gpa, SAT scores, AP classes and EC’s, which was totally against why the school was founded. Parents give lip service to creativity and such, but in the end, they get obsessed with the game, and if kids at X school have 2 hours of homework a day, why doesn’t their school? If school Y offer 10 AP classes, why doesn’t theirs? Parents buy into the bs that if you don’t track kids from the time they are little, if they don’t have a gpa of 4.0, if they try something outside their comfort zone and they don’t do well, it will ruin them, and it is pathetic…so we can’t entirely blame nitwits like the administrator in question (though, quite honestly, it also makes me wonder what schools of education are teaching, if someone who is supposedly trained believes that allowing kindergartners to put on a play is going to take away from their education, it may be time to seriously start redoing ed programs at colleges if this is what they teach), or the educrats or whatever, because a lot of this is parents buying into the hype that the only path to success is to copy what goes on in places like India and China and Korea (ironically, especially in China, parents are questioning the teaching methods there and want an education system more like the American system).</p>
<p>I remember reading 30 years ago, when everyone was claiming Japan was going to dominate the world, that the Japanese were seriously looking at their education system,because they were concerned that their system of schools was not turning out people creating things, that Japan was known as people who took other people’s ideas rather than created their own, and they specifically were trying to see how they could create an education system that would encourage mavericks and radical innovators…and they were looking at the US system, ironically…</p>
<p>The other big irony that is lost on educators and parents is that often parents who are homeschooling or unschooling end up with kids who blow out the tests, but who haven’t been taught to them (I am leaving out the Christian fundamentalist homeschoolers, in large part because they are teaching in ways to stop their kids from learning or truly thinking). My son went to a prep school that someone described, pretty accurately, as “Jewish Liberal” in its focus, it wasn’t, like many other prep schools, focused on getting kids into ivy league schools so they could become investment bankers, lawyers and doctors and CEO’s, yet it routinely turned out kids who did go to high level universities and did do well, but they encouraged kids to find their passions and so forth. Or as in Woodwinds example, schools that were ‘hippy dippy’ instead of being focused on ‘success’, that became #1 schools then suddenly become a victim of their own success. (continued)</p>
<p>(Continued)And yes, Woodwinds is correct, there was a front page article in the NY TImes this week about schools spending inordinate amount of time on test prep, they literally have passed laws in NY state limiting how much time schools can spend on direct test prep, so you can’t say they are wrong, because if schools are not teaching to the test, why would they need such a law? Some districts have passed rules limiting homework (though fat chance of that, even at the school my son went to, that was pretty liberal, they still were burying kids in homework). We are adopting methods that seem to promote ‘success’, based on standardized testing to determine everything, but do we really want this? Do we want to become a country focused on only ‘what is important’, do we want to mimic education systems that supposedly turn out highly educated people, but who cannot create well and are usually followers, not leaders? </p>
<p>The only positive sign I see is that standard schooling may finally be facing serious competition that will give parents choice. Most private schools are too expensive for many parents to affort (though they are no panacea, many of them are just as rigid as public schools are becoming), but I think electronic and virtual education is poised to make a difference, whether parents homeschool or use virtual stuff to try and give their kids alternatives. The public schools IMO are just too bound by politics and fear (and the eternal drive to cut costs) into this rigid model of teaching , and while some teachers are too blame, I also know that good teachers are just as frustrated (the teachers at my son’s old private school, who were what I call true teachers, taught there, even though they made a lot less money, because they had the freedom)…Politicians see in black and white, and unfortunately so does the media and through them, many people, that education is about cramming in facts to do great on standardized tests. It is funny how on standardized math and science exams the US places so lowly, yet you look at fundamental breakthroughs in science and math, including Nobel prizes, you see people from the US winning a disproportionate amount, whereas from countries with ‘model systems’ where they blow out these tests, you see pretty much nothing, but you can’t get this across to people, all they see is “the US finished X place in science and math, well behind A,B,C, D”. </p>
<p>musicprnt, you are exactly right. Politicians react to what they perceive their constituents want. On this issue, i haven’t seen any difference in how the two political parties react. Many of the mandates came from the state. For years, our unique high school was able to bypass or ignore many of these mandates–the Pledge of Allegiance is one example–by keeping policies quiet and not making an event of them. For example, the Pledge would be said on the day the Superintendent was visiting. No students would ever mention to the superintendent that they normally didn’t say it. I’m sure the Superintendent knew, but never said anything about it. However, when a PARENT started to complain, well, the school board could no longer ignore it. Another year, the senior class decided to get small flasks as their senior gift/memorabilia (instead of getting a class ring). There was no alcohol in them, so I saw no harm. But then one of these new-to-the-school parents not only complained but went to the press and made a public event out of it. So, the principal had to ask the senior class to choose another senior gift. Many parents argued with that parent who went to the press, and she ended up apologizing for her stupidity. She hadn’t realized, like many other parents, that she was part of the problem, moving the state politicians towards required complete conformity, more testing, etc.</p>
<p>@ woodwinds-
Yep, and the problem is politicians don’t necessarily have the best interests of the kids in mind, it is about political expediency. With education, there is an incredible feedback circuit that often causes the problems we see. For example, for years we have been hearing about how US students don’t do well on international standardized tests, so the media plays this up, so then we see cries about how bad the education system is. We hear how students overseas have many hours of homework, so that must be the solution, so schools start dumping on the homework, as proof of ‘rigor’. Others blame the problems with school cost on ‘frills’, how schools should be about ‘the real things’, so we see classes and programs cut in things like gifted education and art. The management experts say you cannot tell how effective education is without measuring it, so suddenly we come up with rafts of standardized tests…but then the downside of that comes up, the teaching to the test, or worse, the way that schools will cheat to boost test scores, and it is ignored. And we expect parents,who want their kids to do well, to figure out what to do, they are being told that homework and testing and such is the answer, so they kind of go along with it…but then they see the problems, kids in high school stressed to the breaking point, not sleeping, they see standardized test prep taking over in the schools, other things cut, but by that point it is out of their hands, the politicians and policy people have stepped in and turned it into a juggernaut that is hard to stop. There was an article in the NY Times how they have passed rules limiting how much time can be spent teaching to the test, but it basically said it is worthless, that teachers and administrators know that test scores now are pretty much what they are rated on.</p>
<p>The whole culture of standardized tests smacks to me of what HL Mencken said many years ago, when he said that to every problem there is a solution, simple, straightforward and dead wrong…the copying of what is done in other places is like that to me, the solution to the problem is copying what others have done, rather than actually defining the problem, setting the goals and finding things that actually work, that are backed up by studies and are fine tuned, what I see is a one sized fits all aproach that has nothing behind it other than one dimension, standardized test scores.</p>
<p>I’m just relieved that I was able to open enroll my 7 year old into an arts school. They perform a play every week based on the book they just read. And have weekly dance classes. We are so excited. They draw from a diverse economic background and kids come out balanced in english and math and science. More so than other standard schools. And it’s public. It’s only rates a 6 on great schools.org but even I can see that those numbers can’t compare to what my oldest went through which was shut up and sit at your desk.</p>
<p>And ironically my oldest teen is an amazing test taker. I don’t think that his education has anything to do with his act score. He got an 8 on the writing and his English teachers hate him.lol</p>
<p>@ cellomom-
One of the ironies of all the hype about standardized testing, teaching to the tests, the need for ‘standardized curricula’ that often turns into standardized tests being the ultimate measure is that kids who are homeschooled, who don’t base their education on standardized tests or rigid curricula, often do better on the tests than kids in the schools, and unschoolers, whom ‘professional educators’ make the sign of the cross and get the garlic and wooden stakes ready for, often do really well, yet their education is non standard. Everyone is looking for simple solutions, and there aren’t any, and what they are doing IMO is sacrificing the good part of the education system at the altar of something that may or may not be relevant (put it this way, Singapore students blow out the international tests, yet as a country, as prosperous as it is, it is not exactly known as a place where they create much, you don’t see the Googles or Teslas or anything close to it happening there.</p>
<p>I have to admit we have given into the pressure a bit. Scholarships are hard to come by these days and you need a lot higher scores now to get any merit aid. My son’s teachers didn’t even know he needed a 29/30 act score to get scholarships. And those are tiny ones. We’re hoping our son gets there and we’re forced to pressure him to not only study and do well but to prepare for auditions next year because we just can’t afford it otherwise. He will receive no financial aid and our college savings were pitiful.</p>
<p>@ cellomom-</p>
<p>I can’t blame parents, they don’t make the system, and colleges and universities, who should know better, are happily playing the game. They deny it, but they love this current mania, because in the end they are the ultimate consumer and drive what happens. Schools claim to ‘absolutely hate’ standardized testing, teach to the test, yet they are hypocrites, because what do schools do? The proudly boast of SAT scores, AP’s taken, class rank and so forth of kids coming into the school,yet you don’t really hear of real accomplishments, you hear a laundry list like “out incoming students are also active, they played sports in high school, they were school leaders, they volunteered at places like soup kitchens”, yet does that really show anything about the kids? Kids and parents see this,and they know that the image of the beancounter checking off lists “hmmm, 2300 SAT’s, check, near 4.0 GPA, check, 8 AP classes, check, prequisite EC’s, check” has a lot of truth to it, and it is pathetic. Do schools admit some unique kids? Of course, but in the end they have become the bane of creative thinking, the beancounter/statistics/finance mindset that reduces everything to numbers. Schools whine and claim with so many kids trying to gain admission, that they need these kind of things to segregate kids, yet that is them creating the game they publicly often claim they don’t like. </p>
<p>Are they really attracting the best and brightest, or are they attracting students who are good at playing the game? One of the ironies of the US college system is that it has attracted a lot of foreign students, especially in the STEM area, in large part because of the record of what these colleges have turned out, in terms of nobel prize winners, people who really have made a difference in the world, created new things, it is recognized what these schools did was something, that often is lacking at the schools at home (one of the biggest is the traditions of academic freedom and at least to some extent, to explore new ideas). Lot of these kids end up staying here and being part of the culture of places like Google, Intel, etc. Yet now are colleges and universities seem to be moving towards the model of the schools in those countries, where everything is based on standardized test scores tracking kids to get the ones who do best on the tests into the most pretigious universities, which is a kind of class system that determines what you can do in life, and to me that is pathetic. One of the scary things is even though, for example, the Ivies are pretty good with financial aid, schools have become so expensive that parents, as cellomom said, are trying to play the game because at most places, that is the only way to get decent scholarships, what they claim parents can afford is based in formulas from I don’t know where, it certainly doesn’t take in cost of living or tax loads (put it this way, according to the parental contribution, I should be able to pay for 2 kids going to college full ride, something I assure I cannot, even if I had no expenses, my take home pay after taxes would not allow me to do that…and I do have expenses…)</p>
<p>It also saddens me, because a lot comes out of the kids who aren’t necessarily the best students or whatnot. The guy who founded my company, which now is one of the biggest of its kind in the world (and this in roughly a dozen years of existence), went to a state school (I believe in chemical engineering), was not a great student in high school, wasn’t distinguished in college particularly, got an MBA from a Cal state school, and look what he did, and that story is all over the place. Edison would be a reject according to the current vogue, Einstein would be a dolt, and that saddens me. On the other hand, it also could be the loss to the competitive schools, could be that going down the road the state schools, the lesser competitive ones who may wise up and try to find the kids who are the creative ones if not the most high scoring on tests, that turn out the great innovators.CCNY in NYC, that is part of the NY City public college system, was once known as the “poor man’s Harvard”, when those who couldn’t afford private college or were locked out because of discrimination could get a good education for free (it no longer is, but it is still way, way cheaper than anything else out there),and I believe it still has the largest number of Nobel prize winners among its graduates:)</p>