Katrina evacuee tasks: Find shelter, eat a decent meal, put on dry pair of pants, sharpen Number 2 Pencil, take the TAKS:
Louisiana students who fled their homes after Hurricane Katrina and are enrolled in Texas schools will be required to take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and, like Texas students, will be required to meet passing standards...Student victims of Katrina also must pass all tests at the third-, fifth- and eighth-grade level to be promoted and must pass exit exams to graduate. TAKS testing begins as early as February for some grade levels.
Testing standards between Texas and Louisiana are different, said Scott Elliff, who heads the Corpus Christi Independent School District's Curriculum and Instruction Department. But evacuees will be treated the same as any new student coming into the district.
Potential federal standards changes won't be known until the spring of 2006.
Michael, who's guest-blogging at Joanne Jacob's site, had this to say about Michigan's decision to exempt Katrina evacuees from state tests:
I know some people are going to think I'm hard-hearted, but really there's no reason that a kid who's ready to go back to school can't sit down and take a test.It's. Just. A. Test.
You sit down, and you take it. All this fretting about students' being in the "right frame of mind" for standardized testing is a waste of time, energy, and only serves to reinforce the specious premise upon which it's based. In a way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You hype the test as something scary, something for which you need to be emotionally prepared... and it becomes more significant, it becomes scary.
Nothing would help those displaced kids more than being put back into the routine of life without grief counselors, without a bunch of fretting and worrying, and without special testing exemptions.
I've been saying for years that the critics who constantly insist that all tests are evil and scary and hard and biased against everyone except dead white right-handed men have no business yamming about test anxiety, because it's their hyperbolic comments that do much to increase that anxiety. If the students are truly traumatized, they should not be at school. But if their head is clear enough that they can show up and sit at a desk, give them the test. My guess is they now want to fit in with their new peers as much as possible, and having them all take the same exam is at least one thing they'll have in common.
Posted by kswygert at September 19, 2005 12:27 PM