Niki Hayes sent a link to a short piece on McCain's & Obama's education advisors posted at the ASCD blog (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development).
They're asking for comments.
I'm thinking of just cutting and pasting Anne Marie's comment and signing my name to it.
Speaking of the ASCD, Niki likes their smartbrief, which you can sign up for here.
Thank you Carolyn and Niki!!
ReplyDeleteI'm sending the link to friends and family.
I don't know how I managed to link to Anne Marie's comment --- oh!
ReplyDeleteI see what I did; I meant to link to Alma Wiggins-Woodward's comment.
I'll update the post.
I also like Jennifer's comment on Singapore.
oh-wait -- sheesh
ReplyDeletethat is the most confusing Comment thread I've ever seen.
It IS Anne Marie I was attempting to cite:
Parents should have an outside assessment of their children. This should be voluntary for all parents to have their child independently tested. They would find out that the state assessments are often times flawed and their child is not proficient. This would help parents see the truth and in turn put pressure on the school to improve
I've wanted the feds to provide a means of independent assessment forever -- independent meaning we can decide to assess or not, and the people who score the exam aren't working for our school districts or for companies hired by our school districts.
Ideally, I'd like to see something like the SATs, only your kids would take the test every year if you chose. We have a lot of tests that could serve this purpose; the ITBS comes to mind.
At present, homeschoolers & determined "afterschoolers" can give their kids the ITBS, but it's difficult. I spent a great deal of time tracking down the only two companies in the country that would sell the test to me, and I needed the help of kitchen table math commenters to do so.
I would like to see the federal government make it EASY to elect to give your child the test. Ideally, the government would spread the word about the test & make it a VERY simple matter for parents to administer it at home.
It would probably be a good idea to charge a fee covering the cost -- ?
(I don't know enough about incentives, etc. to be able to tell how one could prevent the various interests from damaging the tests.)
I wonder if this is something the PTO could work on???