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Glass Houses
01/04/09
04:12:31 pm, Categories: Announcements [A] 
"a strenuous three-hour test that weeds out about 90 percent of those who take it."
Joanna Cohen, a student at the School at Columbia University who peppers her sentences with words like “amiable” and “headway” and spits out math formulas faster than the teacher can write on the board, sipped on mint tea at her desk (most of her classmates preferred Pepsi or Mountain Dew). She smiled as she looked at her high score on the practice exam.
Teachers College at Columbia is the anti-testing bastion if not of the nation certainly of New York City. Some of the toughest criticism of and opposition to Chacellor Joel Klein’s efforts to use tests, in part, to evaluate schools and teachers has come from its ranks. They’re conspicuously silent, however, on high-stakes testing used by one of its ed school counterparts to determine the education futures of students from the School at Columbia.
teacherken’s Double Life
I’ve been highly amused over the last year by teacherken aka Ken Bernstein’s righteous opposition to the use of tests in evaluating the performance of public schools.
This is what teacherken said in November in the Daily Kos in opposition to Arne Duncan’s nomination (and the possible nomination of others) for Secretary of Education:
"I shudder to think what they might mean for the future of public education. "I would hope that whoever is in charge, that we move away from our obsession with testing and refocus on the learning needs of the individual students."
What’s interesting is that the school where Bernstein teaches, Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, requires one-third of its students to pass math and language arts tests in order to gain admission.
I did my thesis and dissertation research in Prince George’s County Public Schools and I can tell you that students at Eleanor Roosevelt enjoy a distinct advantage in terms of the quality of teachers and facilities as compared to other schools in the county. Apparently, teacherken doesn’t shudder over distributing scarce education resources on the basis of the types of tests he vehemently professes to oppose, which shine a spotlight on schools that aren’t doing quite as well as ERHS.
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3 comments
1. the blog name is teacherken all lower case, one word. The way you spell it is a music teacher in California
2. Only about 1/3 of our students at Eleanor Roosevelt get in by competitive admission to our science and tech program, which is one of three such (Flowers and Oxon Hill) in PG County Schools. In fact, even though I teach AP Us Govt and Politics for half of my 6 classes, less than 1/2 of my students are from that science and tech program. Some are local kids who happen to be good enough students. My other three classes do not even qualify as honors classes - just ordinary kids from the geographic attendance area.
Feel free to attack me all you want. But then you ought to try to get your facts straight.
Have a nice day.
Wherever I have taught, and this is my third school, I have always taught a mixture of levels of kids, including classes with a special ed teacher as well as classes with the highest level students. And regardless of the level of my students, I challenge them as much as I can. Perhaps that is why even my ordinary level and lower students pass the state test in government at an exceedingly high level, including students who do not pass my course.
Have a nice day.
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