OK, I'm convinced. I am for accountability in education, but you can now count me among those who think we're so obsessed with testing students that we don't have the time to teach them anything or, more important, give them the desire to learn. We have the state ready to release massive amounts of data:
The state, for the first time, will put each of Indiana's 2,000 schools in one of five categories to measure progress. The classifications are required under a law approved by the 1999 General Assembly.
But some of this data, we are told, may be confusing, and some of the state's efforts might conflict with the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind act. There is, apparently, at least some good news about that:
Indiana is one of only a handful of states whose student testing programs have been approved by the government.Most of the other states may lose federal money unless they improve quickly.
The teachers I remember and cherish aren't the ones who taught me specific things. The ones who gave the most to me were the ones who had a passion for their subject and passed it to me, along with a passion for knowledge itself. And they saw potential in me I wasn't even aware of and made me live up to it. Good teachers create magic.
I know those kind of teachers are still out there, but I honestly don't know how they have the time or energy to create the magic these days.
Comments
Education has always been dear to my heart. I have had good teachers and bad, but everyone had a slightly different style. Presentation of material is key to it being retained. When federal and state laws begin micro managing what and how things are taught we run into problems. I want a divers educated work force. No one school can teach everything about a subject to a person have it be retained. The portion of history I learned was different from that my wife was taught. This has come in handy when playing trivia pursuit (she knows answers I don