46 of the 50 states agreed to work for common education standards through a project of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Texas is one of four states not agreeing. News comes from a report in the venerable Education Week (and to me directly via e-mail from Steve Schafersman at Texas Citizens for Science).
National standards for education are prohibited in the U.S. by law and tradition. Education standards traditionally have been set by each of the more than 15,000 local school districts. After the 1957 Sputnik education cleanup, and after the 1983 report of the Excellence in Education Commission, the nation has seen a drive to get at least state-wide standards, though a jealous regard for federalism still prevents national standards.
Almost all other industrialized nations have a set of national standards set by the national government, against which progress may be measured. All the industrialized nations who score higher than U.S. students in international education comparisons, have standards mandated by a national group.
So if it’s an internationally recognized way of improving education, as part of their continuing war on education, and their war on science and evolution theory, the Texas State Board of Education takes the Neanderthal stance, avoiding cooperation with the 92% of the states working to improve American education.
You couldn’t make up villains like this.
We stopped education in Texas high schools yesterday to test students’ proficiency with the English language. English is a difficult enough subject that it merits its own testing day, so as not to discombobulate students for the other Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests.
All controversy aside, it’s a grind.
Yours truly won the straw that got to make sure students made it to the restroom from their testing rooms, and back, without discussing the contents of the exam or sneaking off a cell-phone conversation or text message. (Yes, testing rules require that students check in phones and other devices during the test.) Classes in bathroom monitoring and cell-phone jamming cannot be far away at America’s great institutions of learning about teaching.
And you think teachers are overpaid? In Belgium the restroom attendants get tips. Same at the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Not in Texas schools.
Dallas ISD and the Texas Education Agency had monitors to make sure our testing was secure enough, though I’m not certain such pains are taken to make sure the tests work. Our school is targeted for “reconstitution” if there are not dramatic improvements in TAKS scores in math and science, so the monitors hunt for errors. One wishes that wearing orange would keep the guns from being aimed at one, but one suspects it would only improve one’s targetability.
So we take it all seriously. One would hate to have been the cause of the demise of a community school for having committed some grand error in monitoring bathrooms.
It was one day of testing, but it cost us more than that. Schedules were rearranged Monday so that instead of our usual block scheduling, each student got a briefer session with her or his English teacher for last minute review and pep talk. Faculty meetings were for test administration instructions (required by regulation or law).
Math, science and social studies tests come at the end of April and early May. Other tests dot the weeks until then. One teacher noted in a meeting last year that testing season marks the end of the education year, since little can be done once testing starts eating up the calendar in such huge chunks.
“Time on task,” Checker Finn used to note. When students spend time on a task, they learn it. Measure what students spend their time doing, you’ll figure out what they’re good at.
In Texas, it appears, we teach testing.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaking about math illiteracy.
Oh, I admit it. Sometimes I troll the blogosphere looking for provocation. And sometimes my trolling nets turn up good stuff.
At Joe Carter’s Evangelical Outpost, I found a link to “Latin You Should Know” from Neat-o-rama, When Joe sticks to the factual stuff, sometimes he’s right on.