Teaching and learning will still suffer despite proposed “flexibility” in NCLB

08-11-2011

Blog by Adam Heenan/Classroom Sooth

Since I started teaching, I've always looked forward to the first day of the year. I never sleep the night before, but it is not an anxious time, it is an exciting time. I am even a little jealous of Track E teachers that get to start a month earlier than I. The anxiety doesn't come in September, but it usually begins in January, and that doesn't have to do with the end of winter break, but rather a beginning of the "Testing Season." Testing Season, formerly known as "spring," is the time of the year when all the really valuable learning that had been going on through December is then set aside for preparing students to take high stakes exams. These tests tests do not inform instruction - we do not see results until the following autumn- they only serve to incorrectly label what students in a certain zip-code cannot do. It is a time-wasting disjuncture of the school year calendar that tells us nothing about what our students really know and really can do. (more...)

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Teaching and learning will still suffer despite proposed “flexibility” in NCLB

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