I've updated my permalinks to include more edubloggers, including the Catholic School Blogger, Brian's Education Blog (from England), and the beautifully-named Our Horrible Children, which focuses on the idiocy of zero-tolerance policies.
This last blog is chock-full of inane decisions by school officials, including suspending a kid for having red eyes, kicking kids out for possessing prop weapons for class plays, and booting a kid out for three days over a "You Might Be a Redneck If..." t-shirt. Sheesh.
Both Brian and JP of Catholic School Blogger posted about famed teacher Jaime Escalante earlier this month. They're reacting to an earlier posting of Escalante's trials and successes, which were somewhat enhanced for dramatic effect in the movie Stand and Deliver. Rest assured, though, the article is sympathetic to Escalante's teaching efforts, and places the blame for the subsequent decline of the AP Calculus at Garfield High School on the administrators, not the teachers.
I bring this up because what I remember about this movie, not surprisingly, is how ETS was presented in such a bad light. If I remember correctly, the men who arrived to retest Escalante's students were literally "men in black" - ominous-looking creatures who were obviously being unfair. The movie tries to convince the audience that the only reason these kids were being retested is because ETS is an evil, racist entity that assumes Hispanic kids can't do calculus. As is almost always the case with Hollywood, what makes for good drama isn't always close to the truth.
ETS had valid reasons for retesting the kids, but unfortunately I can't reveal those reasons here. Ultimately, ETS was proved incorrect, which is what really matters for the story - but it's amusing to me to see such nefarious depictions of testing company representatives go unchallenged...
Posted by kswygert at July 29, 2003 12:04 PM