Wednesday, December 24, 2014

High-Stakes Testing

A new book about high-stakes testing collects essays, speeches, poems, and interviews by teachers, students, parents, and administrators: More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing (Dec. 2014). The editor, Jesse Hagopian, is a teacher at Garfield High in Seattle. Hear KUOW's interview with him here.

Also of interest is this essay by a professor of education at UCLA: Mike Rose, School Reform Fails the Test, American Scholar, Winter 2015. (If you want more of Rose, see Mike Rose's Blog.)

KUOW Series on Poverty and Education

If you missed "Behind from the Beginning," KUOW's series on poverty and education last fall, you can still listen to Ann Dornfeld's great reporting:




Two-Generation Programs to Fight Poverty

Check this out: Alana Semuels, A Different Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Poverty, Atlantic, Dec. 24, 2014.  Program offers pre-school for kids and job help for parents.

The Tweet that led me to this highlighted a quotation from the article:
“We hear that all the time, people say, ‘That sounds expensive, all that work for little kids . . . My response is, it’s much more expensive to have to intervene, whether you’re talking about rehab or prison.”
-- Leah Austin, deputy director of the Atlanta Civic Site

Yes. What she said.