This is about second graders. SECOND GRADERS. Small kids! I mean, huh? What kind of a horrible school does this kind of thing? I don’t care what “high stakes” these idiots think are involved in the testing, you don’t do this kind of vile shit to second graders.
You talked how super horrible Soviet schools here.
My first teacher was a huge bully (and good at teaching and controlling the class), but even she would never have thought of such a thing.
It’s like something from “Вредные Советы” Остера on how (not) to teach.
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I’m shocked that anybody can think this will help kids learn to read. Insane.
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Wow. That’s awful awful awful. That’s even awful to do to adults or college students. I would never do such a thing. And to do it to 2nd grades is inexcusable. Kids just love water days and water events. It’s so sad to be barred from them because of some stupid test.
And there tests produce nothing–no knowledge, no analysis, no thought. I have had many students who are absolutely flummoxed when they have to write anything longer than a paragraph…and even that paragraph is riddled with bizarre errors. But they all know how to fill in a stupid bubble form. Ridiculous.
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Imagine explaining to a second-grader why he has to be left behind while all his friends are going to the party. This is simply cruel.
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Why would you believe this document isn’t the work of an internet troll?
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I trust the source blog. Plus, who has the time to create such a long document for such minimal attention?
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The blogger supplies no provenance for the document. The authors of “Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools” are three people who would generate a much longer document on the subject for minimal attention.
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I agree that the people who go on about the so-called “high-stakes testing” are weird and often unhinged.
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I don’t know. High-stakes testing exists and it has had an adverse effect on public education. I really would like the next President to do something about rolling back the frequency and the structure of these tests.
Standardized testing has long existed but it wasn’t until George Bush II’s presidency that it became this frequent and connected to public funding. When I was young, we took standardized state-based tests in 2nd, 6th, and 11th grades if I’m remembering correctly. Now children take them multiple times a year and entire curricula are based on raising scores as students drill and drill for tests. I am saddened that Obama did nothing to roll this back.
I don’t think I’m unhinged about it but I believe standardized as they are currently administered are a huge problem in American education.
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These tests only become a problem when irresponsible teachers choose to take children’s education hostage to get rid of a performance metric they dislike. I also have performance measurements I don’t like. For instance, I don’t enjoy being graded on service because I’m bored with service. But I don’t announce that I will now deliver low-quality education until this measurement is removed. Which is what the teachers who “teach to the test” do. They choose to drill and do nothing else. Why they make that choice remains to be discovered. Part of the reason might be that drilling is easy.
The entire debate is dishonest in the extreme. If teachers act responsibly and don’t solve their problems at students’ expense, there is no reason students need to even notice that these tests exist.
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Because my son’s primary school came up with just as hideous an idea – a special ‘Golden Assembly’ to give out good behaviour certificates for all the pupils who hadn’t been in any trouble during the term. Kids who were to attend got to invite their parents, kids who’d committed any misdemeanour had to sit in a classroom during the event and their parents weren’t allowed to come to the assembly,so all the other families knew whose kids had been naughty. This event was later altered and eventually dropped, after a number of parental complaints, ours amongst them.
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Ridiculous. And also very Soviet in nature. We had these kinds of things all the time.
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I wonder if the bullying is the point for these teachers or a way to allocate the scarce resource of water and popsicles by some “virtuous” method.
There’s certainly no pedagogical value in this.
I remember “forgetting” to read and record a number of books for a class pizza party because my peers were assholes. And I read way more than allotted number of books. 
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Read two Russian nice posts connected to education in another way. 🙂
Откровения польских учебников…
http://naiwen.livejournal.com/1471469.html
На рынке ( бабушки и внуки… Лингвистическое.)
http://algalagan.livejournal.com/310512.html
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That’s the first time I heard Korchak was a Jew. He was presented as a Pole back in the USSR.
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God forbid there’s a student who receives a maximum score on both the beginning year and end year assessments (how do you explain to your child that the reason they’re being punished is because they did better than they should have?) Or the student who has a bad day and happens to do worse. Or the student who just happens to be behind the expected benchmark–which is often a horrible benchmark anyway, especially if it’s Common Core. The end of the school year is often when kids begin to flag out. Why the hell would anybody do this to them?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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