Testing Wars in the Public Schools

Testing Wars in the Public Schools PDF Author: William J. Reese
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075676
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Despite claims that written exams narrowed the curriculum, ruined children’s health, and turned teachers into automatons, once tests took root in American schools their legitimacy was never seriously challenged. William Reese puts today’s battles over standards and benchmarks into perspective by showcasing the history of the pencil-and-paper exam.

Testing Wars in the Public Schools

Testing Wars in the Public Schools PDF Author: William J. Reese
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075676
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book

Book Description
Despite claims that written exams narrowed the curriculum, ruined children’s health, and turned teachers into automatons, once tests took root in American schools their legitimacy was never seriously challenged. William Reese puts today’s battles over standards and benchmarks into perspective by showcasing the history of the pencil-and-paper exam.

The Battle for the Public Schools

The Battle for the Public Schools PDF Author: Tim LaHaye
Publisher: Fleming H. Revell Company
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


The Pedagogy of Standardized Testing

The Pedagogy of Standardized Testing PDF Author: Arlo Kempf
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137486651
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Based on a large-scale international study of teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Ontario, and New York, this book illustrates the ways increased use of high-stakes standardized testing is fundamentally changing education in the US and Canada with a negative overall impact on the way teachers teach and students learn. Standardized testing makes understanding students' strengths and weaknesses more difficult, and class time spent on testing consumes scarce time and attention needed to support the success of all students—further disadvantaging ELLs, students with exceptionalities, low income, and racially minoritized students.

The Education Wars

The Education Wars PDF Author: Jennifer C. Berkshire
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620978717
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
A perfectly timed book for the educational resistance—those of us who believe in public schools Culture wars have engulfed our schools. Extremist groups are seeking to ban books, limit what educators can teach, and threaten the very foundations of public education. What’s behind these efforts? Why are our schools suddenly so vulnerable? And how can the millions of Americans who love their public schools fight back? In this concise, hard-hitting guide, journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire and education scholar Jack Schneider answer these questions and chart a way forward. The Education Wars explains the sudden obsession with race and gender in schools, as well as the ascendancy of book-banning efforts. It offers a clear analysis of school vouchers and the impact they’ll have on school finances. It deciphers the movement for “parents’ rights,” explaining the rights that students and taxpayers also have. And it reveals how the ostensible pursuit of “religious freedom” opens the door to discrimination against vulnerable children. Berkshire and Schneider outline the core issues driving the education wars, offering essential information about issues, actors, and potential outcomes. In so doing, they lay out what is at stake for parents, teachers, and students and provide a road map for ensuring that public education survives this present assault. A book that will enrage and enlighten the millions of citizens who believe in their public schools, here is a long-overdue handbook and guide to action.

An Age of Accountability

An Age of Accountability PDF Author: John L. Rury
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 197883229X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
An Age of Accountability highlights the role of test-based accountability as a policy framework in American education from 1970 to 2020. For more than half a century, the quest to hold schools and educators accountable for academic achievement has relied almost exclusively on standardized assessment. The theory of change embedded in almost all test-based accountability programs held that assessment with stipulated consequences could lead to major improvements in schools. This was accomplished politically by proclaiming lofty goals of attaining universal proficiency and closing achievement gaps, which repeatedly failed to materialize. But even after very clear disappointments, no other policy framework has emerged to challenge its hegemony. The American public today has little confidence in institutions to improve the quality of goods and services they provide, especially in the public sector. As a consequence, many Americans continue to believe that accountability remains a vital necessity, even if educators and policy scholars disagree.

Off the Mark

Off the Mark PDF Author: Jack Schneider
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248414
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"Today's regimes of testing and grading satisfy only the politicians who forced them on America's schools. Yet discarding assessment also serves students poorly. Off the Mark proposes an alternative, replacing motivation-killing tests and grading systems with well-designed assessment that accurately captures learning and fosters students' potential"--

Testing and Inclusive Schooling

Testing and Inclusive Schooling PDF Author: Bjorn Hamre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135178983X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Testing and Inclusive Schooling provides a comparative perspective on seemingly incompatible global agendas and efforts to include all children in the general school system, thus reducing exclusion. With an examination of the international testing culture and the politics of inclusion currently permeating national school reforms, this book raises a critical and constructive discussion of these movements, which appear to support one another, yet simultaneously offer profound contradictions. With contributions from around the world, the book analyses the dilemma arising between reforms that urge schools to move towards a constantly higher academic level, and those who practice a politics of inclusion leading to a greater degree of student diversity. The book considers the types of problems that arise when reforms implemented at the international level are transformed into policies and practices, firmly placing global educational efforts into perspective by highlighting a range of different cases at both national and local levels. Testing and Inclusive Schooling sheds light on new possibilities for educational improvements in global and local contexts and is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in international and comparative education, assessment technologies and practices, inclusion, educational psychology and educational policy.

Kill the Messenger

Kill the Messenger PDF Author: Richard Phelps
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351510185
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In response to public demand, federal legislation now requires testing of most students in the United States in reading and mathematics in grades three through eight. Many educators, parents, and policymakers who have paid little attention to testing policy issues in the past need to have better information on the topic than has generally been available. Kill the Messenger, now in paperback, fills this gap.This is perhaps the most thorough and authoritative work in defense of educational testing ever written. Phelps points out that much research conducted by education insiders on the topic is based on ideological preference or profound self-interest. It is not surprising that they arrive at emphatically anti-testing conclusions. Much, if not most, of this hostile research is passed on to the public by journalists as if it were neutral, objective, and independent. Kill the Messenger explains and refutes many of the common criticisms of testing; describes testing opponents' strategies, through case studies of Texas and the SAT; illustrates the profound media bias against testing; acknowledges testing's limitations, and suggests how it can be improved; and finally, outlines the consequences of losing the ""war on standardized testing.

How We Teach Science

How We Teach Science PDF Author: John L. Rudolph
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674240383
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A former Wisconsin high school science teacher makes the case that how and why we teach science matters, especially now that its legitimacy is under attack. Why teach science? The answer to that question will determine how it is taught. Yet despite the enduring belief in this country that science should be taught, there has been no enduring consensus about how or why. This is especially true when it comes to teaching scientific process. Nearly all of the basic knowledge we have about the world is rock solid. The science we teach in high schools in particular—laws of motion, the structure of the atom, cell division, DNA replication, the universal speed limit of light—is accepted as the way nature works. Everyone also agrees that students and the public more generally should understand the methods used to gain this knowledge. But what exactly is the scientific method? Ever since the late 1800s, scientists and science educators have grappled with that question. Through the years, they’ve advanced an assortment of strategies, ranging from “the laboratory method” to the “five-step method” to “science as inquiry” to no method at all. How We Teach Science reveals that each strategy was influenced by the intellectual, cultural, and political circumstances of the time. In some eras, learning about experimentation and scientific inquiry was seen to contribute to an individual’s intellectual and moral improvement, while in others it was viewed as a way to minimize public interference in institutional science. John Rudolph shows that how we think about and teach science will either sustain or thwart future innovation, and ultimately determine how science is perceived and received by the public.

Beyond Test Scores

Beyond Test Scores PDF Author: Jack Schneider
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674976398
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Test scores are the go-to metric of policy makers and anxious parents looking to place their children in the best schools. Yet standardized tests are a poor way to measure school performance. Using the diverse urban school district of Somerville MA as a case study, Jack Schneider’s team developed a new framework to assess educational effectiveness.