Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006
NY Times agrees with DDN
Michael Winerip says in Wednesday’s New York Times what Mark Fisher and I have been writing since 2004 — the testing industry is buckling under NCLB.
The cracks already are beginning to show as a host of scoring problems over the last week demonstrated.
In our 2004 national award winning series, Fisher and I looked at the emerging crisis of capacity in the testing industry. Interestingly, Winerip focuses on how capacity problems and high costs have even the U.S. Department of Education encouraging states to take short cuts that might actually lead to less meaningful tests and results that tell us less about how kids are doing.
We’ve seen these trends lead to questionable short cuts in scoring, but the Times suggests costs and capacity may also lead states to uses dumbed down tests to begin with.
As a nation, we put a lot of faith in standardized tests, and we tend to take for granted that the information they give us is accurate and tells us something valuable about the students who take them. But with all the problems facing the test industry, is it time to ask tougher questions about testing?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing
Pretty women free to molest?
Over at one of my favorite education blogs, The Education Wonks, they’re outraged that former Florida teacher Debra LaFave gets no jail time after having sex with a 14-year-old student.
The Wonks thinks there is a double standard. Would any male teacher avoid jail for having sex with a 14-year-old female student?
LaFave, a beautiful former model who plans to write a book and is interested in an entertainment career, did a masterful job of spinning her story. Her camp argued there is no double standard.
According to her defenders, men in her circumstance are just as frequently not sentenced to jail time. They argue that the judge listened to the boy’s family, who did not a trial that would require the boy to testify. I’ve even heard her defenders suggest boys may not be harmed deeply the way girls are by sex with adults women as teenagers and that she face more danger in jail than most women because of her beauty.
Personally, I was stunned she was not punished more harshly.
What do you think the arguments LaFave that resulted in a jail-free plea deal? Is there a double standard in these cases?
