As in Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment that is. I’ve spent the last two days administering these tests to my students and reflecting on their purpose and value. In light of some of the recent revelations from DC and Atlanta, I cant help but think we dodged a bullet over the past couple of years when a Republican legislature wanted to use high stakes testing to determine teacher pay. While testing is useful as part of the equation in determining education policy, certainly the heavy reliance on using scores to determine teacher effectiveness has backfired.
It’s hard to imagine my colleagues and I getting together over Pizza to erase incorrect student answers and replace them with correct ones, but the opportunity would definitely be there. I would consider almost all of the people I have worked with in public education to be highly ethical and motivated to help students learn. It isn’t surprising to me that the person -Michelle Rhee- who claimed to put “Students First” by attacking teachers, more than likely helped foster, and then later cover up, an environment of cheating and corruption. Frequently, I have found that when someone blames a teacher for their failures, it is because they don’t want to recognize their own mistakes.
Michelle Rhee claimed that “cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.” It’s not too hard to see why she failed as a school chancellor. I hope people remember that Public Education is an important and complex endeavor, which has had tremendous successes to go along with some failures. As we work to improve the schools in Minnesota, don’t be fooled by a snake oil salesman who has a quick fix. I tell students all the time, the most difficult questions are the ones that teach you the most. It is because public education is so important, that the answers are not easy to find.
