Friday, Aug. 26, 2011 | 2:02 a.m.
Regarding the Las Vegas Sun’s Tuesday editorial, “Not making the grade: Schools need a better way to determine academic achievement”:
Teachers realize an overreliance on standardized testing is hazardous for students. As a classroom teacher and president of the Nevada State Education Association, my concerns about high-stakes testing have never been about wanting to forgo accountability.
We’ve fought against more standardized testing because such testing assumes that all children learn the same way. Good teaching means knowing how to teach students individually so they can reach their full potential.
If we want children to be more than good test takers, we need to check the role of standardized testing and let teachers teach.
The writer is president of the Nevada State Education Association. Excellent letter and points. Very well said. Standardized tests are not the only measure but they should be factored into the equation. How and when it is done in concert with other ways to measure progress is a challenge facing our educators and leaders. Grades can't be discounted in total as some would like and say. Standards and tests are needed and required to measure skills, knowledege and abilities. If not, what? Carmine A. DiFazio Assessment is extremely important, especially for teachers to determine lesson mastery. Analysis of assessment results yield valuable information to direct lesson planning and implementation. Using a single standardized test to make decisions involving a teacher's future is simply not right. It is playing with someone's life and career. We must come up with other ways, IN ADDITION to the standardized testing results. There are a myriad of other responsibilities a teacher performs in a school year. Those should be given equal weight when determining teacher efficacy.
Teaching is not the same. What a good teacher does is hard to measure. Any teacher who knows their subject can train students to perform on a standardized test. What separates superior teachers from the others is more subjective and you would need a
We've fought against more standardized testing because such testing assumes that all children learn the same way. Good teaching means knowing how to teach students individually so they can reach their full potential. If we want children to be more than
Teaching children how read a recipe; wash, prepare, and measure out the ingredients; and follow the necessary steps of the recipe sets them up to enjoy cooking for themselves someday rather than opting for fast food. Cooking is not just for girls
It is a pivotal time for American children. With high school graduation rates plummeting, drug use on the rise, and teen pregnancy skyrocketing, teaching our youth strong life skills from the beginning is crucial to their success.
They become superior learners; and they outperform all other students in every type of cognitive testing measure. Then, why can't the children on the east side of town study in their native language? ª Ray Muñoz teaches at Cesar Chavez Elementary