Low Standards Start Here

What really is accountability, or the point of it, when it’s being imposed upon an outsider group looking within? When businesses and state bureaucracies get involved in a child’s education there are too many things that are compromised as standardization becomes the leading reform and curriculum gets diluted. In this study, conducted in Texas, concerns were brought to the damage that standardization is imposing on children, especially African Americans and Latinos.
According to McNeil, “standardization reduces the quality and quantity of what is taught and learned in schools…diminished the role of teachers, and distanced students from active learning” (505). Research was conducted on magnet schools and their positive impact on student learning. Magnet schools have a structure that is designed to not monitor the credentialing process and procedural and behavioral management and instead focus on a positive, multiracial environment. Unfortunately, the state imposed various reforms on the entire district, not excluding magnet schools, which resulted in the reduction of the quality of teaching. Classes no longer functioned as safe and creative spaces where the students and teachers could interact with one another on a more personal level because the business of testing had to take place. I can recall taking the WKCE or the Terra Nova when I was in MPS and thinking “what is this all about” while teachers scramble to cram in as much information into their daily lessons to “prepare” for these standardized tests. I don’t remember any of it and definitely feel like it was a waste of my time and the teacher’s time.
I think there are other ways to measure teacher and administrator performance without making students pay for it. I’d like to do a PBL unit on this and ask students how they would respond to this dilemma and what they would use to rate their professors. Shouldn’t rating be done by students and parents…isn’t that a better way of measuring employee performance and school quality. Isn’t that what universities do and they seem to function pretty effectively??!! McNeil really points to the seriousness of this issue and how we must further investigate “from the inside out the ways increasingly differentiated power relations are changing systems of schooling and the ways those systems are shaping what is taught and learned.” There is such a disconnect from what the child is learning to the decisions that are being made by policymakers that if we don’t close this divide this problem will only perpetuate and whatever we do as teachers will only lead us to the same conclusions. McNeil says that the consequences of standardization and accountability are twofold: shifting of curriculum decisions into the power of technical experts who have a political agenda to “reduce democratic governance of schooling,” and second, which is caused by the first, is the rearranging by class and race which is further maintaining the social classes as they are and maintaining differing curriculums for each class.

Problem Based Learning Rocks my Socks

Kids Take On “The Test”

PBL is a great way to motivate students on improving their standardized test scores, which is something that is so boring and weighing down for the classroom and the administration. Although I don’t agree with standardized tests sometimes you have to work within the system to make it work for you and these students definitely took that initiative and used it to their learning advancement. Students are placed as the educators through PBL because it gives them control over their learning and allows them to break it down in a way most relevant to them. It also brought the class together not only for the benefit of individual test performance but on school spirit. If these students can make standardized testing fun then there is hope for us teachers who will have to face the WKCE, local, state and national standards, all the while trying to prepare students for the “real world.”
I like the use of outside resources-from the librarian to an educational consultant-it makes it so much more real to the students and they feel like they are critical co-investigators (as Freire talks about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed) along with the teacher.