None of the Above

A "test prep" reading passage for third-graders about how a Bangladeshi boy created floating schools for children who could not travel to school because of annual flooding was followed by several questions. The last question asked why the author most likely wrote the passage.  The correct answer was missing.  After all, the author most likely wrote this passage because he got paid to by a big corporation despite his probable lack of teaching experience.

The other questions were poorly constructed.  One asked which word best described the boy: nervous, angry, kind or scared.  Clearly, kind was the best out of those choices but kind is actually a terrible choice.  Off the top of my head, better ones include innovative, creative, and determined.

Another question asked what causes floods:

A. heavy rains
B. overflowing rivers
C. too many people
D. both AND B

At first glance the answer seems to be D.  But then I realized that it is the heavy rains which cause the overflowing rivers.  So is the answer really just A?  Or are they looking for the immediate cause, in which case the answer is B?  After all, rivers can overflow without heavy rains - if, for example, a dam breaks.  But such a possibility was not discussed in the text.  Standardized testing does not reward overthinking.  It rewards being able to predict what the testers were thinking. 

And ultimately, it rewards the companies which get paid the big bucks to create poorly designed curricula and poorly designed tests.  Yes, Pearson, I'm talking about you.

How do you feel about the rise of high-stakes testing and the increasingly lucrative privatization of the test-creation business?

How The New Curriculum + The Common Core = Less Reading

As I've mentioned before, I volunteer at my daughters' public school, entirely parent-run library.  This year, as we sat down with the administration to arrange the class schedule, we were informed that teachers had been approaching the administration and requesting that they only bring their classes to the library every other week, rather than every week.  The reason?  The new curriculum.  Whether it's due to the curriculum itself requiring more time, or the fact that the teachers are - rightly - overwhelmed by being handed a new curriculum with no time to review it before using it (in fact, our school did not even have the ELA curriculum on the first day of school and as of now is only in possession of Unit 1; rumor has it that other units are not even written yet!), it is just sad that the alleged raising of standards results in teachers feeling that they don't have time to allow their students - many of whom do not or cannot go to the public library - to choose their own books.

One last word about the Common Core.  I got a peek at the kindergarten ELA curriculum the other day.  The curriculum our school is using is Ready-Gen by - who else? - Pearson, it of the completely mismanaged G&T testing.  It includes such gems as having 5-year-olds draw pictures of past-tense verbs like "quacked" and "flapped"  (the first unit is on ducks), words like "distance" (not a short or long distance, just distance), leaves little space for the children to write, and what space there is are lines that are too small for typically-oversized kindergarten handwriting.  I almost cried.

How is the Common Core working out in your school?