Obama to reward colleges of education whose grads get students to raise test scores. More testing??

[madfloridian]

You have got to be kidding me. I can't believe that with all the outrage from parents and teachers over the high pressure testing that he is going to add more of it.

It bothers me that Obama and Duncan support Teach for America strongly whose recruits have 5 weeks training in teaching. It bothers me that after all the attacks on teachers to the point that many GOOD teachers are losing their careers due to ed "reform"......that there is now a new front in the war on public education.

Now they are going after the colleges and universities and rewarding them if their graduates get students to have higher test scores.

No other country has this much high-stakes standardized testing. It seems like the testing companies have a stranglehold on our Democrats.

Obama plans new regulation on colleges of education

The Obama administration’s obsession with standardized test scores knows no bounds. The newest example: a plan to spend millions of dollars to reward those colleges of education whose graduates, among other things, are successful in raising their students’ standardized test scores.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan hopes to have a draft regulation ready by this summer and implement this program sometime within the next year, according to this story by my colleague, Lyndsey Layton. She quoted Duncan as saying: “Programs that are producing teachers where students are less successful, they either need to change or do something else, go out of business.”

The administration’s move will please school reformers and anger critics, such as Carol Burris, an award-winning principal in New York, who said:

“So what will this incentivize? Schools of education trying to help their students get jobs in more successful schools, rather than schools with at-risk kids or schools that are struggling. It will incentivize schools of education focusing on how to teach for the test. It is designed to reward the so-called teacher training programs such as Relay and Match, which are led by the charter school community. These schools focus on teaching test prep techniques. This is one more bow to the charter chains who are now getting into the teacher preparation business. This is one more example of a bad policy that comes from a Department of Education that has no understanding of teaching and learning”.

The White House policy director had this to say, and it leaves no doubt of their support of the testing and more testing policy. No doubt at all.

“What happens in the classroom matters. It doesn’t just matter — it’s the whole ballgame.” So using student outcomes to evaluate teacher preparation programs “is really fundamental to making sure we’re successful,” Muñoz said. “We believe that’s a concept … whose time has come.”

This makes it clear that test scores are the goal. Not learning for the sake of learning....but how the student scores on a test.