I am relieved to hear Gallagher support state standards while remaining critical of them; I like how he does not point out a critique without offering solutions to fix it. His main point on the subject of state standards are that there are too many of them; and teachers sometimes ruin valuable texts by beating them to death with every possible standard available. I like how he explains the taboo phrase “teaching to the test” as a positive teaching method: that is what all good teachers should do, provided the test is a good one. This speaks to the alignment we talked about in class, between what is being taught and what is being assessed.
Reading the section on the Paige Paradox, I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Why would schools with low test scores be monetarily punished when it is those schools that need the most help, financially and otherwise? While I value the use of well-designed standards, I am totally against high-stakes testing, both for the students and the districts. The section on the Texas Miracle/Mirage is interesting...wasn’t George W. Bush, founder of No Child Left Behind, FROM Texas? Weird. Another text I read this quarter (cannot remember which one) pointed out how after the implementation of NCLB over 10 years ago, college applicants have shown no improvement on placement exams.
The word poverty concept reminded me of when my sister got my son a joke book for his birthday. It was at or just above his reading level, and I thought it would be a fun way to get him to read more. However, as I thumbed through it, I was grossly disappointed to realize most of the jokes would go right over his head. Being able to pronounce them was not enough, he also needed to understand the vocab and the contextual relationships.
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