Reply #82: I am a hostage of the NCLB Act. Name the ransom and I'll PAY it! [View All]

[alcuno]

In all of my teaching career, this is one of the most fucked up pieces of legislation I have ever seen. I never curse, but for this I'll make an exception.

The list of things wrong is too long to go in to. My current favorite came with the discovery of the following "allowable" procedures. We get to plaster our classrooms, including the desktops, with formulas, charts, and algorithms and keep them up for the tests.

I'm a math teacher and I'm basically being paid for test preparation. The top students, those with a history of "meeting standards," are essentially off the hook. They get real teaching and real course content. Everyone else who was borderline or below the standard is spending nearly two days each week practicing with open-ended questions and computer driven test prep.

A whole lot of companies are making a whole lot of money on this racket and it's just a big joke in the schools. I'm currently in the proces of taping to every desktop in my room tons of information JUST short of the actual test answers.

Teachers aren't stupid and we're more than willing to game this idiotic system. Is it cheating? No, it's perfectly allowable under the guidelines. What a sham and what a shame. And me, I'm guilt free.