Warning: Snooze Alert!!

Warning: Snooze Alert!!

The Pleasantdale School town hall meeting is coming up and they are going to discuss, are you ready for this, TEST SCORES!! Who woulda thunk it!!

It's hard to believe, but for the third year IN A ROW, they want to drill into your heads their opinion of the importance of test scores. It's no wonder no one shows up for their town hall meetings. Last year only 22 people attended, out of almost 1000 school parents, and the only reason that most of these people attended was because they were already there for the 6th grade parent meeting!

A few months ago Pleasantdale had an evening seminar called Interpreting Your Child's Test Scores. Do you know how many people attended? Four! Wouldn't you think that would be an accurate way to gauge interest on the topic of test scores? Guess not.

Seriously, does our administration really think that the importance of test scores is appropriate town hall meeting material for the majority of our school population? At the December school board meeting the board even admitted the meeting would only be beneficial for 7th and 8th grade parents. If you are a parent of a kindergartener, first or second grader, will this meeting will beneficial to you?

Shouldn't a town hall meeting be beneficial to the ENTIRE community? Our school board is comprised of elected officials to represent and serve the community and whose job is to engage the public in establishing the mission and direction of education. It’s up to them to lead the way in building community involvement and support for public education. They are the district’s vital link to the public – as well as advocates for public education.

Is discussing the current test scores something that will engage the public? Will it build community involvement? Doesn't our school have anything else to talk about other than test scores? Isn't there anything else to proud of?

The highlight this year will be that they are going to pimp out some 8th grade students to tell you how much they love prepping themselves nearly to death and taking dozens of standardized tests. Then they will explain to you how Dr. Wick taught them to find out what problems they got wrong using his ISLIP method and what they can do to get those answers right so the score will go up. It's sad that our administration has to use children as pawns to convince the community of their beliefs. Several weeks ago the middle schoolers spent 2 and a half class periods going over their ISLP and test scores. Can you imagine what this must have been like for those lower scoring kids to learn how poorly they are doing in front of their peers? Talk about social-emotional learning!

Our 8th grade class has been taking Explore practice tests since early October. According to Alfie Kohn, a well recognized expert on education, there is little difference between someone changing a student's wrong answer to the correct one and taking practice test after practice test to get ready for a standardized test. They are both considered CHEATING, only the latter is called legalized cheating.

When students prep continuously for tests, the results are not a true measure of their ability. Test prep skews the results. In  fact, in the case of IQ and psychological tests, it is well accepted that children cannot undergo the same test more than once per year. The second set of results is not considered valid because the results are skewed based on prior familiarity with the questions. How then are our standardized test results valid?

Furthermore, not all good test takers are smart students and not all smart students are good test takers. But when you do something over and over and over, it becomes second nature, kind of like Pavlov's dog. (The phrase "Pavlov's dog" is often used to describe someone who merely reacts to a situation rather than using critical thinking.)

There is a name for this kind of learning - it's called renting or borrowing knowledge. Most Pleasantdale students don't own their knowledge. They can't apply it or even remember it after a short amount of time. That's because they are just borrowing it.

Take for example one of the above level language arts classes over at the middle school. These kids have been analyzing ten vocabulary words a week since the beginning of the year. They have to write each word, provide a definition, use it in a sentence, list a synonym and antonym for the word, determine the root, list what part of speech it is and even draw a picture of meaning of the word. So far this year these kids have learned over a hundred words. Why all this vocabulary? Anyone? Anyone? It's because it is on the standardized tests! Sadly, the above mentioned class recently took a vocabulary test with 100 questions and only ONE student in the class scored above a C-. The rest scored below. Why did these kids do so poorly? It is because they don't OWN the knowledge, they merely borrowed it! Renting or borrowing knowledge to inflate test scores is a phenomenon that is sweeping through many school districts and ours is definitely one of them. Due to the high pressure put on teachers to raise the test scores, creativity, passion and critical thinking have taken a back seat to constant test prep.

Before we go off on anymore tangents, we just wanted to warn you about the upcoming town hall meeting. It's gonna be a real snooze fest. The only good news is that Dr. Fredisdorf will be asking the teachers to go light on the homework that night and not give any major tests the next day.

This will be a great opportunity to spend some quality time with your kids. So go out that night and have some fun!