Noted Author Sally Gardner on British Standardized Education

From the BBC:

"Wouldn't it be good if we could let teachers do what they do best - teach. Not judge each child on a series of standardized exams. Let schools embrace, not exclude, those like me with a different way of thinking.

"Stop praising literacy with one hand and closing libraries with the other. Let librarians be free to do what they do best: encourage a lifelong love of reading in every child, even the ones without a hope of ever getting an A star."

Meanwhile, across the "pond", high stakes standardized testing has driven the vitality and creativity out of American classrooms once the envy of education systems across the World.

Trending...The Elimination of Professional Teachers

Greetings Fellow Hoosier Teachers!
Not feeling the love from the Indiana General Assembly? There is a good reason! If schools and teachers are going to be judged by their standardized test scores, then teachers and schools have no other choice than to teach to the test within a narrowed curricula. Fine Arts classes? Creativity? Rigor is more important! What about children who are not good test takers? No excuses!!!  Why is the Indiana General Assembly and other policy makers making life difficult for professional educators? Here is an eye opening perspective from Stephen Krashen.

Common Core: Who Benefits?

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The question Indiana Taxpayers need to ask the Indiana General Assembly's Education Study Committee after the 2013 ISTEP testing debacle is this: Was the 95 million spent on McGraw-Hill and the inordinate amount of time taken away from children's meaningful learning experience in the classroom worth it? Now, the Common Core State Standards are under consideration for adoption and with them, even more intensive high stakes testing, data collection and data driven learning experience. 

Since the Stock Market Crash of 2008, standardized high stakes testing of children, data driven learning experience and subsequent test prep activity has increased while school budgets and learning opportunities devoted to creativity has decreased. 

Who benefits from the rigor mortis of the Common Core? This effort to further impose a rigid set of narrowed, mechanized, standardized, educational content on children, assessed through high stakes testing will result in teachers acting on behalf of standardized test publishing companies to standardize human potential. 

Just what I want my child to have, a common, generalized, anesthetic, short answer learning experience rammed down her throat at the expense of under funded schools and economically depressed communities. 

Since 1983 the ginned up premise that public education has been failing, we have seen exorbitant amounts of money spent on high stakes standardized testing with the promise that this would cure the educational and economic ills of America. The reality is something else.

The promise that the top down initiated Common Core is a good thing will make children better educated and college ready is an empty promise. Show me the evidence.