blog # 10 overview

For the last blog I decided to write an overview/opinion of the multiple topics that we discussed in class. In the 10 short weeks that this class has met, I feel that we have covered a wide variety of issues that affect both the everyday life of an educator, as well as, national education issues. The issues that I found to be most relevant to my daily life as an educator are the impact of out of school factors, standardized testing, and merit based pay/ unions. After teaching in the south side of Chicago for two years, I was aware that ‘OOSF’s’ existed, and that they impacted our kids, but the in-depth discussions helped me to comprehend just how vast and detrimental they really are. For example, I never really stopped to think about the environmental issues that children suffer from; living in lower SES polluted neighborhoods. The standardized testing issue was defiantly a topic that I could relate to in my daily teaching life, working at a charter school that basis staff merit off of test scores. The discussions on this topic that were held in class really opened my eyes to the problems that the ‘standardized testing craze’ has caused. Instead of learning valuable content or exploring elective classes, students in the public school system are being drilled on test taking skills. Lastly, I found our discussions on merit based pay to be interesting and relevant to my current job situation. As I have mentioned before, I work in a charter school that currently uses the merit pay system. This past year, teachers at our school have attempted to unionize, doing away with the whole idea of merit pay. As expected, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding this issue. I found our class discussions concerning merit pay and unions very insightful

blog #9 critical thinking skills

We have had many conversations in class about how standardized testing narrows curriculums down, eliminating enrichment courses, consequently hindering the development of critical thinking skills. Last week I overheard a discussion between two teachers in the teachers’ lounge discussing this very topic and immediately related it to this class. One of the teachers had been to a conference where the speaker was sharing a case study in which elementary, middle and high school students were all given a paperclip and asked to write down as many possible uses for the clip as possible. It was reported that the elementary students were able to come up with over 90 uses, middle school half of that, and the high school was able to come up with one use. The teachers were saying how “sad it is that students lose their sense of creativity as they get older”. As I sat there and listened, I could not help but think that it is not the students that are ‘losing’ their sense of creativity, but rather, they do not have anywhere to use their creative/critical thinking skills. High schools are so focused on standardized testing and complying with no child left behind that they do not foster the use of such skills. To me it almost seems as though the only goal of public schools is to create little standardized test takers. Great if they pick up any other useful knowledge or skills along the way, but as long as they get those scores it is all good. “The state of education in the United States cannot be blamed solely on the teachers, the students, or the government. The real problem lies in educational philosophy and the system of student assessment. The current model suggests that students who can regurgitate a series of memorized facts will remember those facts once the test is complete and will have learned what they are supposed to have learned.” http://www.criticalthinking.com/company/articles/critical-thinking-importance.jsp
This story just affirmed to me that the educational system is doing a disservice to our students.
Additional website on this topic: http://www.edutopia.org/poll-standardized-tests-skills-emphasize