Posted on 08/07/2013 5:46:32 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The number of New York students passing state reading and math exams dropped drastically this year, education officials reported on Wednesday, unsettling parents, principals and teachers and posing new challenges to a national effort to toughen academic standards.
In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the tests in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department.
The exams were some of the first in the nation to be aligned with a more rigorous set of standards known as the Common Core, which emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving over short answers and memorization. Last year, under an easier test, 47 percent of city students passed in English, and 60 percent in math.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Well, this is an easy one. Drop the standards and then give them a Nobel Peace Prize to show how enlightened and morally superior you are. Problem solved.
Yup this is the last time anyone takes this test.
I teach in Ohio and we also adopted CC. It’s crap. The 9-10 grade and 11-12 grade language arts standards contain almost no specific language. For example, one standard requires students to take part in sustained reading. Define sustained. Is it 10 minutes, one hour, half of a school day? Another favorite standard requires students to take part in sustained research, so along with sustained what is research? Surfing the Yahoo! newsfeed? Consulting primary sources? Accessing peer reviewed papers? It’s just a mess because bad teachers, and there are many, will be able to take advantage of this. Then there is the fact that the 9-10 grade standards are identical, and the 11-12 grade standards are identical. To top it off, both sets of standars’ bands are almost identical to each other!
RACISM!!!
And I’ve heard from many students that half the things on the HS Regents exams weren’t even covered by teachers. This from several different districts.
I think school boards should start testing teachers to see if they can pass the test. BWAHAHAAAA.
Deep analysis and creative problem solving for six-year-old kindergarten students. What a laugh.
Please just pull your kids out, go on line and find a suitable curriculum for your child’s age group. Start your own schools — or better yet, homeschool.
The whole thing is a joke.
Public schools are finished. You want to know why? The teachers aren’t smart enough, talented enough, to teach your kid since they are a product of the same crappy NY public school system - so sorry.
I teach. You would be shocked (or perhaps not) at the amount of teachers who are not comfortable enough with the curriculum to be able to teach it effectively. Oh yeah, the level that I teach.........elementary.
Now if the tests were text messaged and Tweeted perhaps ....
i’m trying to find any reason why Elliot spritzer, Anthony weiner or Michael Bloomberg would want an educated and informed citizenry in new York.
i’m not coming up with with a reason.
In other words there is no right or wrong answer, it is all nuanced. Good way to produce MORE democrap idiots.
In 2010, Barack Obama called for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top,”
which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”
which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”
which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”
which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,
which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
RACISM!
I second that motion!
Ummm,
what’s math?
(I’m kinda knew her)
I thunked pur edukasion was all Bush’s falt.
ALL Teachers should be fired, then offered Non-Union Rehiring.....with a Merit-based performance measurement that shit-cans the crap teachers, and promotes the effective ones.
maybe because their written in cursive????
Common Core, which emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving over short answers and memorization.
Yes, the exact problem most employers are encountering when trying to hire .... candidates don’t know sh!t but can talk for hours about it!
The left just LOVES to provide us with train wreck after train wreck.
They love sudden, major changes to everything in our lives. It totally overwhlems people and they crumble under the assault.
I think Alinsky trained them well.
Common core reminds me of “the new math” craze in the 70s. A waste.
Agree.
Let them try even community college level linear algebra. Boy that was a pain.
Have fun!
Well played!
After the Atlanta Public schools cheating scandal, they probably aren’t as eager to change test scores.
Obviously, these schools are underfunded.
Those of our kids who are not able to enroll in private schools or AP classes will be unable to get into any college.
Out grandchildren in Maryland are thankfully in the STEM program which is exempt from the train wreck that is Common Core.
I believe that Texas is dropping it, and I am shocked that Ohio is just starting it. What a mistake. Our children will suffer all their lives from this.
....Despite the drop in scores, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appeared on Wednesday at a news conference just as he had in years when results were rosier. He rejected criticisms of the tests, calling the results “very good news” and chiding the news media for focusing on the decline.
Something is very very wrong with this picture.
Isn’t it interesting how most of the social pathologies benefit the Democrats? Women who are married and have kids vote Republican. Poor and ignorant people vote Democrat. People who are self-sufficient vote Republican. People who are dependent on the state vote Democrat.
The test given was not hard, the students are illiterate and the teachers are abysmal failures. The government has done a stellar job dumbing down an already lazy and unmotivated student body.
Buffalo, Rochester and Yonkers had the worst scores. This is an embarassment to the Empire State.
I passed every one of my state Regents tests with stellar scores. My parochial school was teaching far above what the public schools were teaching.
Congratulations Cuomo. You’re doing a wonderful job at destroying my state.
bump
A caution about AP classes: They are very liberal! If your grandchildren plan on taking them, after-school them very well and prepare them for logical argument. I was going to get my AP certification for US gov this summer, but that bladder infection I thought I had in January turned out to be little blessing #3 lol!
Let me preface this post with this: I have never, nor will I ever, cheat on standardized exams. While it is illegal and I have too much to lose, it is morally wrong and I wouldn’t do it regardless of the law.
It is extremely easy to cheat on state exams, as well as AP exams and the SAT and the ACT. Many school systems have a cheating culture and the more successful students know on which side thier bread is buttered. Yes, the good kids who never get into trouble cheat! They aren’t talking. Superintendents and principals aren’t talking either. You see, the system is set up for cheating. If you’ve read Atlas Shrugged (my appologies for not knowing how to do italics), it’s similar to when Hank Rearden was told by a gov regulator that the gov expected people to break the laws. That is what the laws are for. Schools get less funding if scores are low, so everybody simply turns a blind eye.
Those Atlanta teachers made some enimies along they way to get caught like that. I suspect it was not out of the goodnesses of their hearts that other teachers squealed. I suspect they were simply jealous that they were not getting the bonuses that the cheating teachers were getting (which is why as a teacher I do not endorse merit pay). From what I’m hearing, there were many people quite happy to see the ring leader of that group do the perp walk.
When I started out last fall as a first-year teacher, I found myself dealing constantly with student cheating, laziness, and social promotion. My sons, who are now both in college, advised me that the biggest cheaters are among the smartest and highest-level students. The lower-level students are just clumsy about it and get caught more often. Comparing my students in an inner city general bio class with those in a suburban AP Bio class, I would agree. The former students would get caught communicating in class or looking over at a neighbor's paper. The AP students cheated on their home assignments by looking up instructor keys online or by 'collaborating' on online assignments. I could tell from wording when some of the work was not original, and when I looked at the statistics on how long it took students to do the online work. I gave some zeroes, which shocked them.
Unfortunately, admin would not let us fail any of them, so even though many of my students failed tests, I had to give enough busy work on which they could 'earn' points and pass classes. This is in parochial school, so it's not just a public school phenomenon. It is a widespread problem, and it starts in the home. When students don't see a reason to work hard, learn, and go earn a living, it erodes their motivation in school. Why work so hard when you can coast, collect your piece of paper at the end, and go work in a do-nothing government job or go on welfare?
I spend more time prepping for my scholars’ classes than the others, and it’s because I have to combat the cheating that is so rampant. They hate me for it, and I’ve never been chosen to receive one of thier end of year awards at their special scholars’ breakfast. The teacher that always receives the most accolades is one that they cheat on quite frequently. She rarely reads an original research paper. The sad thing is that she thinks the scholars’ students hang the sun, the moon, and the stars. As an urban school teacher, I actually have a little more respect for the known drug dealers. They don’t try to hide what they are. I won’t let them use the restroom because I know they’re going to make a sale. I called a kid out on it last year. I rarely had problems with him after that. It’s almost like he gained a little respect for me. The scholars ask to use the restroom after quizzes and tests so that they can text the questions to thier friends next period. When I told them no and called them on it, my phone was ringing by the end of the day with parents demanding to know why I accused their precious babies of cheating.
I completely understand. I had an agreement with our school disciplinarian that there were a handful of students who were not permitted out of my class under any circumstances. She actually wrote a list and asked me to put it on the bulletin board. It really ticked off the kids, but they were all involved in drugs or they were borderline kids getting sucked into it and we didn't want to give them any more opportunities. I also seized a lot of cell phones, but I have no illusions about catching it all. If they put half as much effort into learning as they do cheating, drugs, and socializing, most would be passing with honors.
The sample math questions seem an odd combination of the easily guessed and needing to explain the obvious in terms of how they got there. Lots of easily guessed fractions.
But check out the sample English questions at the site. They are nothing but sample SAT questions, perhaps dumbed down a tad—because they are written for third to eighth graders!—but full with stupid nuance only about why one possibly correct answer is better than another possibly correct answer. (I just looked at the sample questions for the third and eighth graders, not for the grades in between.)
No, the kids aren’t all right and their level of educational attainment is often attrocious, but this test is a poor measure IMO of where grade school students should be in either subject. It’s scary that this is now what at least 45 states are trying to coach their children to master.
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