In the article Stop the Madness, written by Diane Ravitch, she elaborates on the issue of exceptionally high test taking. Teachers teach towards their test and as a result, are lazy. These faculty members, especially the teachers, worry more about the final test scores their students receive than if their students are grasping and fully understanding the educational topics. This is because the test grades that the students earn is how teachers are judged and ranked in the system. Therefore, in order to achieve these ideal scores, they are using the same tests and classwork every year.
I just do not understand why the main focus of our education has to be all about test. I feel as if my classmates and I were like lab rats, being used for discovery and research, just so the school can gain recognition and reap the rewards for producing good test scores. Many districts use strict curricula’s that publishing companies produce to “promise” outstanding grades if you buy their products and complete them all. When you try to force that on the teachers, it is frustrating to them because they have the freedom of teaching taken away from them and are given a set of rules to produce better test results. Because many teachers and other educators are being forced to move away from teaching in their own preferred style, they must follow a set pace so that their instruction to the students is to what the district mandates instead of responding to the students need.
So society is said to be meritocratic, as everybody can achieve if they want to. Durkheim (2002) Believes that there are fixed rules for all and by transmitting the norms and values across society, it is then fair and meritocratic. Marxists on the other hand believe that meritocracy is a myth and that it hides the truth of the inequality in society. Sociologists argue that the processes in school such as the hidden curriculum helps to keep society unequal. The hidden curriculum has a big influence on pupils, its one thing to teach the child educationally but if the child is treated unjustly (no voice) by the school system then a much more negative message is given to those pupils about the nature of society.
Grading in Special Education by Susan M. Brookhart looks at a different grading strategy. She thinks students in special education need to be graded based upon their goals in their Individual Education Plan's (IEP). Brookhart expresses that grading students in special education at a lower level then everyone else is unfair to both students in special education and to those not in special education. This is an interesting article/book for parents to read because it gives them some ideas of questions to bring up to their child's case mangers on different ways to grade their children in special
Instead of learning some actual useful information, teachers fret over the test rather than about how much that student is actually absorbing into their head. It has become a practice to ‘teach the test’ in today’s teaching world. Tests like SAT, ACT and AP have you pay quite a bit and don’t even show you what you did wrong, blocking out the possibility of even trying to learn from your mistakes. It is believed to be a clever tactic used to gain more profit, students keep coming back to prove they are worth more with those silly numbers. They stress day and night over these overrated tests, like previously stated channeling out the imagination, curiosity and good will.
The ideal was to establish a set of basic academic standards that all students should achieve, hold the schools accountable for meeting these standards for all students, ←and→ then give educators the choice of how to meet the standards. The way NCLB is currently being administered must be fixed, otherwise we will have both new ←and→ seasoned talented teachers leaving the profession in droves. Although reading ←and→ math tests would remain in the administration's proposal, schools could also include student performance in other subjects as part of overall measurements of progress. Critics say that the current education law has narrowed the curriculum for students:→ Many teachers zero in on math ←and→ reading at the expense of other subjects to help students prepare for the required tests. (Douglas) Students need a well-rounded education," the blueprint declares, and it cites disciplines including history, civics, foreign languages, and the arts.
The authors emphasize in this chapter that, “An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing” (17). This shows the power of incentives and how they cause people to cheat through third grade teachers in Chicago Public Schools. They explain that in order to gain honorable status within a school, teachers must have their class perform well on standardized testing. Because they want recognition and possible a greater wage, teacher are pressured to cheat to help their students
Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary of Education, criticizes the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education policy agenda for following what she calls the “disaster” of Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy. Government control of education, she notes, has only led public schools to rely heavily on standardized test scores. Ravitch warns that, under the Obama administration, teachers are provided incentives and raises based on test performance, which results in class time being spent teaching test-taking skills or teaching to the test rather than on rich curriculum. Additionally, Ravitch criticizes the Obama administration’s reliance on charter schools as a way of reforming underperforming public schools, explaining that charters don’t answer the real challenges that face low-income or non-native speaking student populations. In the end, she warns that the outcome will produce students who are not able to comprehend complex knowledge and schools that limit history, science, the arts, civics, and many other components of the curriculum that provide college preparatory instruction.
The scientific basis of the golden rule is in the mutuality of gains from trade, in the demand, generated by the engines of supply, in the expanded opportunity created by growth, in the usual and still growing economic futility of war (Gilder, 9). The author discusses that Adam Smith, the founding father of Scientific Management, wrote in his book The Wealth of Nations, that the productive powers were very important to the rank of the people. However, Smith’s followers beginning with David Ricardo became engrossed with statistics and distributions. “This mode of thinking, prominent in foundation-funded reports, best selling economics texts, newspaper columns, and political platforms, is harmless enough on the surface. But its deeper effect is to challenge the golden rule of capitalism, to pervert the relation between rich and poor, and to depict the system as “a zero-sum game” in which every gain for someone implies a loss for someone else, and wealth is seen once again to create poverty” (Gilder, 10).
As a student, there are many events that test your integrity in the classrooms. Taking a test is a great example. Although sometimes it may be simple to cheat, it is so much more rewarding to have earned the “A” yourself. Proving to yourself that you have learned what you know, and that cheating is superfluous. Clara Rivera of the Los Angeles Times stated “Some high schools act on their own to punish students whose scores (SAT scores) have been canceled, sometimes with suspension if they admit to cheating.” (Rivera 3.)