Summary: The state standards and goal to get all students proficient by 2014 is an unrealistic and harmful goal. When students only prepare to take the state tests during their time at school, learning and in-depth thinking is not taking place.
I have always heard of teachers not liking the NCLB, but I honestly have never read anything on the subject (Does this make me a bad EDUC major??). After reading into the subject, I do not know why educators would agree to set up a system like this and let it continue. It is obviously faulty and set up to make students fail.
This following quote made me very disheartened. I believe literature brings many universal truths that people can connect to and relate to, bringing interest to learning about reading, thus sparking in literary techniques and other standards that need to be hit. If they are just reading short stories and only reading it for "shallow" test preparation, they will end up hating the reading and they will have a poor understanding of texts and interpretation of them.
"From California to New York, I have been approached by numerous teachers who have told me that in this drive to raise test scores, they are no longer allowed to teach novels. In an attempt to raise reading scores, school districts across the country are removing book from kids."
Is the Common Core Initiative helping to fix these problem found with state standards? Marzano stated, "To cover all this content, you would have to change schooling from K-12 to K-22." My question is, What to other countries higher on the ladder do? They must do something in order to increase their scores, which is what these standards are all about.
Sternberg made a great point that facts are constantly changing. For subjects such as math, science, or reading, I do not think there is a problem. For the sciences in particular, I could see that memorizing facts could be a bad thing. Studying for a text with facts could turn out to be useless for the students' futures. Like Sternberg said, there needs to be integration of "creativity, common sense, wisdom, ethics, dedication, honesty, teamwork, hard work, knowing how to win and how to lose, a sense of fair play, and lifelong learning."
I liked this phrase, "WYTIWYG" (pronounced "witty-wig"): What You Test Is What You Get. :)
Gallagher, Kelly. (2009). Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Portland, ME: Stenthouse. Print.
Gallagher, Kelly. (2009). Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Portland, ME: Stenthouse. Print.
You raise some great questions here. First, NCLB is government legislation, which means that teachers were not involved in creating it or making it law. Second, common core will change testing in that states will be forced to once again rewrite their state tests so that they match the standards. This will impact NCLB because it effect test scores. NCLB comes to fruition in 2014 (the magic year where EVERY child...even those on IEPs...will be performing on grade level in both reading and math) which will likely mean new legislation replacing it in the next couple of years. If you are interested I have a short article that explains NCLB in more depth. My Comm Arts I class reads it each semester.
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