You are here: Home / Archives for test prep

What would Disney learn in school today?

October 24, 2010 by
What Would Walt Disney Learn in School Today? In Teacher Magazine, Anthony S. Colucci suggests that our schools “would shun minds similar to those of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Walt Disney.”

Would we give (Disney) an outlet to express his creativity or, better yet, foster it? What would his school day consist of? Would he draw a sketch of Mickey Mouse, only to be ridiculed by his teacher because he should have been practicing his times tables?

I am sure that in today’s high-stakes testing environment, Disney’s creativity would be stifled by countless hours of basic reading instruction. He might not even have an art class due to funding shortfalls and a resulting budget that clearly places the arts at the bottom of the priority list.

Short-sighted administrators reject “critical thinking, creative thinking, and problem solving” as “fluff,” writes Colucci, who teaches gifted elementary students. Teachers are forced to spend time on mindless test prep instead.

Teaching reading and math basics to students who’ve already mastered the basics is a  waste of time, even if the only goal is boosting test scores. But I don’t think schools of any era have been set up to nurture geniuses.

Walt Disney developed his artistic talent by taking private art classes on Saturdays and in night school. He dropped out of high school to serve as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I.

Thomas Edison attended school only for a few months.

He was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own.

. . . At thirteen he took a job as a newsboy, selling newspapers and candy on the local railroad that ran through Port Huron to Detroit.

As a 10-year-old boy, Albert Einstein read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid’s Elements with a family friend. Einstein left high school early, complaining “the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.” (Depending in which account you believe, he ran away or used a doctor’s note.) Unlike Disney and Edison, Einstein went on to study at a university.

It’s very hard for any conventional school to cater to the needs of a 10-year-old who is  turned on by Kant and Euclid. Geniuses have to make their own way.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Good schools only for the 'gifted'

July 28, 2010 by

I think Sara Mead is exactly right in The Real Problem with NY’s “Gifted” Tests for Kindergarteners on her Ed Week blog.

She links to a New York Times’ story on “how the city’s gifted assessment serves to lock in educational inequities between low-income children and middle-class and affluent families who can pay to prep their youngsters for the test.”

But the core issue here is NOT the use of test prep providers by middle class parents, the validity of the “gifted” designation for kindergarteners, or the developmental appropriateness of the tests used. The real problem is that New York City — and too many other places — use the “gifted” designation as a way to ration access to quality educational opportunities, and that kids who don’t win the “gifted” lottery too often don’t have access to good public schools that enable them to fulfill their potential.

What she said.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Extra study, higher scores

April 28, 2010 by

Eve Moskowitz — “Evil” Moskowitz to her many enemies –  is profiled in New York magazine. A former New York City councilwoman, she founded a high-scoring, all-minority charter school, Harlem Success Academy, which is expanding rapidly.

Harlem Success Academy’s first class of third-graders outperformed “all but seven of the city’s 788 elementary schools, including perennial high fliers like P.S. 6 and P.S. 321″ and “trounced every third grade in Mamaroneck, Chappaqua, and Rye.”

. . . in contrast to their drill-and-kill competition, Moskowitz says her teachers prepped their third-graders a mere ten minutes per day … plus some added time over winter break, she confides upon reflection, when the children had but two days off: Christmas and New Year’s. . . . After some red-flag internal assessments, Paul Fucaloro kept “the bottom 25 percent” an hour past their normal 4:30 p.m. dismissal — four days a week, six weeks before each test. “The real slow ones,” he says, stayed an additional 30 minutes, till six o’clock: a ten-hour-plus day for 8- and 9-year-olds. Meanwhile, much of the class convened on Saturday mornings from September on.

The schools also provide enrichment, including “classes in chess and dancing, Greenmarket field trips, 150 science experiments per year. Their art is shown off at Sotheby’s, their essays at Barnes & Noble. It’s a college-bound culture, stem to stern.”

Moskowitz wanted to create schools “where I’d want to send my own children,” and now she has, the magazine notes. “Harlem Success Academy 3 enrolls Dillon, 7, and Hannah, 5, the lone white students there.”

P.S. 172 in Brooklyn, also known as Beacon School of Excellence, also posts very high test scores despite serving many low-income Hispanic students, reports the New York Times.  Like the Success Academies, the school schedules extra learning time for students who need it.

P.S. 172′s principal “finds money for coaches in writing, reading and math. Teachers keep detailed notes on each child, writing down weaknesses and encouraging them to repeat tasks. There is after-school help and Saturday school.” The school hired a speech therapist to figure out why seven or eight students were having language problems; a psychologist recommended how to help. There’s even a dental clinic on campus.

Students at P.S. 172 who need more help stay in their classrooms until 4:45 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, after a short snack break at the regular 3:05 quitting time.

The school benefits from consistent leadership: Jack Spatola has been the principal since 1984, the Times reports. He has a simple formula: “Teach, assess, teach, assess.”

Mr. Spatola attributed the coaches and other extra help to careful budgeting and fighting for every dollar from the Department of Education; the school’s cost per pupil, in fact, is lower than the city’s average.

Years ago, parents asked for their children to be “placed directly in English-only classes, with extra help from teachers of English as a Second Language.” The school dropped bilingual classes.

Anna Phillips of Gotham Schools visited a B-rated school where bored students filled out test-prep workbooks — or played computer games or slept or stared into space. She saw no teaching by teachers, who were “were barely present.”

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

Core standards pushback

April 6, 2010 by

Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top is pushing states to sign on to proposed core standards, but some are pushing back.

Massachusetts, which spent six years creating successful academic standards, lost points in its RTTT application for refusing to commit in advance to “inferior national standards,” write Jim Stergios and Charles Chieppo of Pioneer Institute in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

While educational fads come and go –the governor is pushing “21st century skills” like “global awareness” and “cultural competence,” they complain — the academic standards are a bulwark against backsliding.

The national standards may be better than most state standards, but they’re still dumbing down schools, writes Terrence Moore in Big Government. He wants students to develop “depth of insight into how human beings think, believe, hope, and act.”

I ran a K-12 classical charter school for seven years. Not once did I or any of the teachers look at a state standard in reading or writing (math is something of a different case). The students did no test prep. When our students took the state exams, all they did was complain about how easy and worthless they were and how they wanted to get back to real learning. Every year the high school ranked in the top three in the state, twice coming out first. . . . The way to teach literacy for the twenty-first century turns out to be the same way it has been done in the last thirty centuries of civilization: to hire the brightest and best-educated teachers (usually not those coming out of a school of education considered “certified”), to put in their hands the best works of literature and history and philosophy, to invite young people to have a conversation about what it means to be a human being, and to require those students to work hard and demonstrate good character while doing so.

Test-prepped in K-12, college students can’t read critically, writes Heather Kim, a remedial writing instructor at Berkeley, in the San Francisco Chronicle. Her students rely on strategies for guessing what a passage means. They all did well enough in high school to qualify for California’s flagship state university, which is supposed to be one of the best in the country.

If Moore’s students could ace state tests by discussing literature, I wonder if test prep really helps students pass tests. I was told once by a researcher that test prep didn’t produce higher test scores in Texas; what worked was time spent teaching writing skills.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Test-prepping for 'gifted' kindergarten

November 23, 2009 by

To get their children into “gifted” kindergarten classes, affluent New Yorkers are hiring tutors to test-prep three- and four-year-olds, reports the New York Times.  A “gifted” public education is free, while private school may cost $20,000 a year. So the cost of tutoring seems small by comparison

Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.

New York City uses the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, to decide which children qualify for gifted programs. Applications have soared and the number of children scoring above the 90th percentile has increased from 18 percent to 22 percent.

If demand is so high for “gifted” classes, why not expand them? The easy-to-teach kids can learn in a larger class;  the non-gifted classes could get a bit smaller.

Education Week reports on a National Association for Gifted Children study, which says gifted students’ access to programs varies greatly depending on where they live.

Update:  The intelligence tests given to pre-kindergarteners don’t predict future school performance accurately, write Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Nurture Shock. A few years down the line, only 27 percent of “gifted” students are high performers. That’s because little kids’ brains are developing.

Filed Under: Children, Education Tagged With: , , ,
Newer Posts»