June 16, 2003
Busy, busy, busy
Work is going to be pretty insane for the next couple of days, so I've dug up a few links for you to chomp on while I'm out pondering the mysteries of equating, rater training, and automated essay scoring.
There's a person linking to me of whom I was previously unaware - it's Tim Stahmer of the blog Assorted Stuff. I'm fascinated to discover that I am on his "Regular Stops on the Web" list, seeing as how he is a former teacher who is extremely skeptical of testing and the NCLB act. Wonder if he's been lurking on here. Someone modest enough to name his blog "Assorted Stuff" could very well post under the name, "nobody important," hmm? Sue, what do you think?
Here's a new way to boost test scores - let children learn under natural lighting, not artificial lighting. One study which involved 20,000 students showed that standardized test scores among comparable groups of students could be as much as 26 percent higher for the students who attended classes in buildings which primarily had natural lighting, as compared to students who studied under artificial light.
Opinion Journal's Best of the Web has an "explanation" of what Sacramento Councilwoman Hammond must have meant when she complained about half of Sacramento's schoolchildren being below the 50th percentile. OpinionJournal is of the opinion, as am I, that Councilwoman Hammond was either being dense, unclear, or mean - after all, if all of Sacramento's kids were above the state median, then the kids in some other city might all be below the median, and you know, that's just not fair. We think.
Teachers in Alabama are scrambling to become "highly-qualified", which the NCLB Act requires of them by the 2005 school year. One wrinkle in assessing qualifications is that Alabama doesn't test its teachers - testing was suspended 15 years ago after a group of black teachers sued the state, claiming the test was biased. The federal definition of highly-qualified is deliberately fuzzy, and Alabama's teachers are discovering that, despite being certified and having experience, the state is asking them to re-take classes as well. To simplify things in time to meet the deadline, the Alabama Department of Education is “very close" to - surprise! - creating a new test for qualification. Wonder if this one will be challenged in court as well?
Uh-oh, despite the fact that students and teachers seem to love them, the standardized test scores for New Jersey's charter schools aren't so great. The charter schools are quick to point out that they have to raise their own funding, and need more time to prove their capabilities.
Last but definitely not least, our favorite little Harvard-bound chickadee, Blair Hornstine, was honored with a very sympathetic feature on MSNBC. The article is along the lines of, well, everybody was really awful to her, and if she's an overacheiver, well, so is everyone in Moorestown, so they should really shut up and let her continue her "fight", because they're all just as egotistical as she is. And all the parents are at fault. Or something to that effect.
Enjoy your Tuesday. I'm off to work...
