EDU+573+Liberating+Learning+Chapter+3+Carlos

= This is for the assignment Liberating Learning Chapter 3. =

__Liberating Learning Chapter 3__
== 1. After No Child Left Behind was passed into educational law, it triggered a movement for accountability of schools and teachers. High stakes standardized testing has become the norm in order to determine whether students are achieving the benchmarks established by the educational departments across the United States. States decide which standardized test they will administer in order to evaluate their students. Maine used the MEAs for almost a decade in order to assess its students. At the district level, schools created their own local assessments. At the Jay School district, teachers devoted time and energy to create their local assessments by subject and grade level. However, the local assessments were not producing the desired results that educators had envisioned. Part of the issue was that the Maine Department of Education could not design a standardized test that matched the assessments from the local level. Moreover, the local assessments were taking their toll on students’ instructional time. Extra testing time needed to be allocated for such tests. Teachers were also losing professional development time since workshop days were used to grade the essays created by students. The essays were graded collaboratively in order to avoid bias in assigning grades to the students’ essays. This practice was very time consuming. The teachers felt very satisfied because each grade given to each essay was the result of a team’s decision. However, these educational activities proved unproductive since students were evaluated differently by the standardized tests. == == 2. I feel, and this is entirely my opinion, that in the case of high school students who have proven to have the capacity to handle high-level courses, they should be encouraged to advance and take AP courses or college courses. I think that professionals design the courses, and there must be an educational board from the college, which ensures the quality of the courses’ content. I think, and again this is my opinion, that students who are capable of taking AP classes benefit in at least two ways. First, these are students who are overachievers, so they need educational challenges because otherwise, they would be stuck in classes where teachers must teach to the middle because of the wide range of students in the class. Second, I’m assuming that many of these students want to get into colleges of their choice, so proving to these colleges they can handle high level information is a way that AP students can achieve such goal. == == 3. I believe schools need to be held accountable. However, I also believe that accountability needs to start with students and their families. But then again, not every child is fortunate enough to have parents who read to them or have the capacity to help with their homework. The factors of why parents are not involved with their children’s education can be many. Sometimes, parents work very hard and by the time they get home, they only have enough energy to put the kids to bed. In these difficult economic times, such situations have probably increased, becoming yet another factor why children are doing poorly in school. In my opinion, I think that some form of standardized assessment needs to be created. However, the current forms of standardized testing do not factor in things such as not every child learns at the same pace or that the day of the test, not every student may want to try hard or a student might be sick. At Jay, we just recently had a very interesting workshop. Our school principal and one of the teachers showed us the results of the NWEA reading assessments. The results were very revealing. I have known these students since kindergarten, so it is very easy by now to know whether they are dedicated students with hard working attitudes or if they are behavior students who usually need lots of prompts so that they get to work. The interesting facts about the results were that the students who tend to excel academically also went beyond the expectations of the test. It was a group of three students out of twenty. Next, most of the students in the class fell into the “meets the standards” range, which I feel it is very encouraging because they are at the reading level where they should be. Finally, the students who usually do poorly on their class activities did poorly on the reading assessment. The school principal and teacher talked about how these results, which are reported digitally online, can be accessed by any teacher in the district, and analyze them to determine how to help students increase their reading level, or choose books for those students who are at a higher reading level. I feel this is a wonderful approach on how to use students’ assessments. They are used to aid educators in choosing books that may help students increase their reading level, or to help teachers select and assigned more interesting reading material for those students who are reading at higher reading level. However, what Moe and Chubb and many other people like them are proposing is a culture of punishment. Through the entire book, they talk about how the results of standardized testing should be used to keep “good teachers” and get of “the bad ones.” And here is where their logic is flawed because what helps students do well on standardized tests are not variables teachers can control. The teacher of this group that I described, cannot control that three students in the group already have the cognitive ability to read at a higher level or that they students who did poorly have behavior issues. I think what Moe and Chubb are describing about the American educational system and its current state is true, and changes are necessary in order to improve it. Poor teaching is a factor that may be causing the system’s failure. However, in my opinion, they are proposing to use the wrong measuring tool in order to determine teachers’ performance. What I think needs to happen, and this is my opinion, is that the Department of Education needs to develop an assessment tool that actually measures teachers’ performance. The usual assumption is that poor student performance equals poor teaching performance. The public is usually very quick to jump to this conclusion. When it comes to education and students, they frequently put all the responsibility on the teachers’ shoulders. Usually, they leave out many other factors that may affect students’ performance. Factors such as parents’ involvement, community involvement, students’ community environment or whether the content of what students learn in class is relevant to their environment, needs and reality, and teaching quality are only some of the variables that blend together to contribute positively or negatively to students’ success in the American classroom. ==