Suburban Life Publications
Mar 30, 2009
Kudos to Pleasantdale for winning so many awards! I am sure the hours and hours of test prep is paying off. Unfortunately, test scores don’t mean anything when you have one-third of a cohort failing their grade level curriculum and many of the district's children reading below grade level.
Pleasantdale needs to shift their focus from standardized test prep to mastering the Illinois learning standards. The current School Board fails to recognize that a standardized test merely ranks the students against their peers. What is does not evaluate is critical thinking, creativity and the ability to transfer knowledge from one subject area to the next. Pleasantdale School administrators rely solely on test scores to put kids in more challenging classes without teacher input.
This takes away the teacher’s ability to evaluate students and makes them dependent on test scores instead of their own instincts. All this dependency on testing leads to stagnation in the classroom and is boring and unchallenging to the students. It’s time to move away from pumping their fists into the air to shout out another accolade and get down to the business of really teaching kids.
Pleasantdale is too dependent on parents to do their job by putting more teaching responsibility on the parents while they focus on raising the test scores. Our teachers are our greatest asset, not money or new programs. I support the election of a new school board and feel the slate of candidates comprised of Valentin, O’Halloran, Scaletta-Nelson and Rak is what that district needs to get learning back on track. Mary Jo Slivinski, Willow Springs
Thursday, April 2, 2009
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5 comments:
I heard Leandra Sedlack say at the Forum that they really look at the test scores in great detail. Does the Board get a different set of test scores than are posted on the web-site. Those scores are all averages. We have kids in our district who are getting perfect scores on the Explore tests. There must be some pretty low test scores to bring the average down into the 75 or 80 range, given that they already took out the low scores. How about posting all the individual scores to see how the entire school is doing? Speaking of scores, does the fact that we score so well against other schools in the State on ISAT mean that much? Illinois typically ranks in the lower half of the country in education. Is being at the upper end of the bottom half all that impressive?
Dr. Wik already did that when he posted our 6th graders test scores on his website. Only he forgot to remove the kids names when he posted it for all the world to see. When it was pointed out to the board and admin, he took it down. Never even an apology from the school to the families or the kids involved. Goes to show you Dr. Fredsdorf only cares about the test scores and not the kids.
This was a letter to the editor, not an article written by the Suburban life. I you have portrayed it to look as if the paper wrote it... will you be posting all the other letters to the editor that have been in the paper the last week?
There were also a lot of letters to the editor supporting the incumbents!!!
This is a blog for the NEW candidates running for the Board of Education. If the incumbents want their letters to the editor posted, they would need to create their own blog. Thanks for your 8 comments to us so far this evening.
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