Roxana Useda ENC 1101 Professor Cash November 30, 2012 Why Trust the FCAT? Have you ever felt when taking the FCAT you are wasting your time? Over the years students have been required to take a test that will evaluate them on how well they do. The FCAT is given to obtain an insight on how much students are learning on three main subjects, science, reading, and math every year. Despite the benefits teachers and schools obtain, standardized testing like the FCAT is not effective in evaluating student’s performance because not all students learn at the same level, they fall under pressure, and they are being taught just for the test which prevents from learning skills that are yet to be learned.
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.
People in poorer communities tend to face harder obstacles like a bad home life, hard economic times, and influences that push dropping out of school. These students also have to deal with old, out-of-date school supplies like textbooks-even their teachers tend to not be as qualified as teachers in wealthier school districts. Furthermore, due to standardized testing, teachers in these poorer school districts tend to teach to the test by teaching with the drill-and-kill method where kids are being taught by memorizing certain multiple choice questions and answers (Neill 29-35). Surprisingly, high-stakes test like promotion tests are the main contributors to retention of students- most of which have learning disabilities. Retention, though, has proved to not help students academically.
Passing a standardized test is a skill that can be taught, but does not truly measure what a student has learned in the classroom; therefore standardized tests should not be used as a tool to measure students knowledge because students have more to offer than just filling in bubbles. Standardized tests don’t provide information that is useful in the future, resulting in students losing interest in learning because its not fun. The average student does not enjoy being cooped up in classroom for four hours filling in bubbles. This is when students think that the school is a reflection of standardized tests and they no longer want to learn. The information used in standardized tests has no importance in the real world.
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.
On the website isbe.net it reveals a chart that clearly shows that on the ACT we are performing below average on Math, English, Science, and Reading. Morton offers tutoring for kids during supervision so it’s not like they’re not trying to boost it up its just the way they are isn’t working. Kids don’t want to go learn when they have free period? Also they take tests to see what students need extra help on but if you actually look closely to a student taking the test they’re just marking random letters so they can be done and go home. Morton needs a new system for the students but one can’t confront the system without obstacles.
Many teachers do not like “catching plagiarists and bringing them to academic justice.” As she states, it is not hard to just cite the author that originally had the information you are using (Bojar). Plagiarism is becoming a big problem in the school system. Many students do not understand what needs to be cited and what does not. The school system should teach students the proper way to cite, and they should teach them that copy and pasting is not writing a paper. According Bojar to students at the community college have a hard time juggling classes along with his or her family and a job.
Also, according to Dalile from Huffington Post, 90% of students in schools are more ecstatic when they have art. Supposingly, art and musics aren’t known as core classes or classes of importance causing those subjects to the abolishment in schools. Schools also will believe art and music are unnecessary and would think cutting those classes would benefit the school, which mostly doesn’t and has kids who don’t excel in subjects like English or math to have no
She states multiple times that the children within the education system are being cheated every day because they are not being forced to read more difficult books. “Such benefits are denied to the young reader exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral equations as well as to the student encouraged to come up with reductive, wrong-headed readings of mulitlayered texts” (Prose 97). The reader can blatantly see that Prose thinks negatively of the high school curriculum that today's students face. It seems clear that Prose does not want to hide her personal view or feelings, so she starts her essay out in a way that we do not have to read between the lines to get a sense of how she feels about what she is writing. She uses more emotional language when she says, "The intense loyalty adults harbor for books first encountered in youth is one probable reason for the otherwise baffling longevity of vintage mediocre novels, books that teachers may themselves have read in adolescence"(Prose
As a result, children could fail their exam or could not find a job in the future. In addition, the author also argues that it is difficult to control children through texting. Children usually use the messages as codes to hide some things. As a result, parents hardly to understand and control their children. Both authors mention the using of abbreviations in messages.