Somebody finally gets why I dislike national standards and high-stakes testing in one sentence . . . .

This, from Professor Wayne Ross, in a piece about the struggle for control of the Social Studies curriculum in our public schools, encapsulates what has been bothering me for a long time:

"Resources that might have been directed to assisting teachers to become better decision-makers have instead been channeled into a program dedicated to the development of schemes for preventing teachers from making curricular decisions."

All the talk about finding the best teachers in a world of high-stakes testing and national standards is really a conversation about turning a craft into an assembly-line production, and lowering the status of teachers from responsible classroom leaders and decision-makers to educational technicians who do not design but only deliver instruction.

I do not accept this model as preferable.

Comments

Hube said…

Ah ... I remember the days when my HS social studies dept. designed -- by themselves! -- an award-winning [SS] curriculum for the school. Who'da thought?

(And this was a New Castle County HS, too ...)

January 13, 2014 at 7:38 AM

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