Down East they're plum tested out:
After being encouraged in the 1990s to shun standardized tests in measuring student progress, Maine’s teachers now are feeling overwhelmed by a new wave of state and federal student testing requirements.Maine’s so-called “local assessment” approach to measuring student progress has become so burdensome that Governor John E. Baldacci, Maine Commissioner of Education Susan Gendron and the state’s teachers union have called for delaying assessment-based high school graduation requirements that were supposed to affect this year’s freshmen class...
Further complicating the issue are the federal assessment requirements of the so-called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program. NCLB requires public schools nationwide to demonstrate student proficiency in English/language arts, mathematics and science/technology. To that list Maine has added social studies, health and physical education, career preparation, modern and classical languages and visual and performing arts.
Ambitious? Yes. But having to create assessments on the local level while still developing the standards and having to cover material on statewide assessments would be an overwhelming task for just about anyone, and it sounds like that's what Maine's teachers have been doing. To make matters worse, performance on the statewide assessment that is used for NCLB purposes is not good; less than half the state's 11th-graders are meeting standards on reading, and the numbers are worse for the other subjects.
Thus, it's not surprising that Maine may soon be following Connecticut's lead.
Posted by kswygert at April 13, 2005 07:02 PM