In three weeks, students at over 3,600 schools in New York State will receive a nasty surprise. They mistakenly believe that, for this school year at least, they are done taking tests. When they least expect it, the number 2 pencils and bubble sheets will reappear. When I was in elementary school, June brought Field […]
I’m busting out my old grad school textbooks for this one… Performance Task: As complex challenges that mirror the issues and problems faced by adults, they are authentic. Ranging in length from short-term tasks to long-term, multistaged projects, they require a product or performance (Wiggins & McTighe, 14f) Even at my high-performing, relatively affluent school, […]
Unlike so many schools in New York City (including both schools where I taught previously), my current school is not under the gun in terms of raising test scores. So why did I just receive two stacks of New York State test prep books? Let’s end the illusion that standardized tests are authentic measures of […]
The New York City school system has all sorts of quirks, in part because it’s so massive that it makes a nice microcosm. I remember being a kid and occasionally hearing adults talk about moving to a different suburb for “better schools.” It all seemed very amorphous, like they could just have easily moved to […]
I so easily could have ended up on the other side of this reform debate. My story was straight out of the Educators4Excellence playbook: after graduating from an Ivy, I entered urban education because I had been so inspired by W.E.B. DuBois’s writings on teaching in the Reconstructionist South (I had a major in Intellectual […]
Recent Comments