Sobering, but…

(US losing its #1 spot in college graduates)
The head of the College Board sounds the alarm.

We must ask if our public education policies make sense. Many don’t. Is college readiness the right goal for every student? And if so, how can we graduate high school students who don’t have basic arithmetic skills?

Yesterday I spoke with a lovely and dedicated woman who is a math tutor for college students at a community college. Her story is sobering. Her young students people ‘graduated’ from high school but do NOT have basic elementary arithmetic skills. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing. Many of them grew up on calculators with teachers who thought that was OK.

We must ask if our public education policies make sense. Many don’t.

So, the Huffington story is sobering–b

(Diane Ravitch on Race To The Top and evaluating teachers).

In all of these moves to evaluate students and teachers on the basis of testing, we assume that the tests are valid and the results reliable. This is a major assumption that needs to be explored. Fast.

My experience with testing students with disabilities and the use of accommodations and modifications concerns me greatly–as the use is often inconsistent and the validity of test results is assumed. Again, we need to explore this assumption. Fast.