Field trip: the voting
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- October
- 28
The voting delegates from the districts are getting their paddles and slowly filing into the convention’s business meeting.
There’s a stack of “resolutions”:http://www.nyssba.org/ScriptContent/VA_Custom/va_cm/Convention_ContentPageDisplay.cfm?content_id=5778 on the table.
The issues up for discussion include state aid, charter schools, teacher discipline hearings, employee benefit and student discipline.
Those that pass will become part of the NYSSBA’s lobbying agenda in Albany this year.
“Garrison”:http://www.gufs.org/home.aspx Trustee Anita Prentice is hoping the resolution sponsored by a group of high-performing school systems in Putnam and Westchester will pass.
The group, called READ, is Briarcliff, Croton-Harmon, Haldane and Hendrick Hudson.
The resolution calls for the creation of pilot programs for alternative ways of assessing students than the standardized tests that now are required.
The programs would be designed to provide meaningful assessments in concert with the state Education Department. That’s disaggregated data – the kind required under NCLB to show student performance by race, ethnicity, income and gender.
The pilots would be created with districts whose performance has exceeded the state standards for two or more years in a row.
“The effect of standardized testing is to dumb down assessment,” Prentice said. “It’s not good for children. Standardized testing does leave children behind.”
This entry was posted
on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 1:23 pm by Lanning Taliaferro.
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Educators definitely need to keep an eye not only on those students who are in danger of doing poorly, but also on those students who excel. A criticism is that it is these exceptional students who are being left behind by NCLB. I once had a mother crying to me that her daughter’s enrichment programs were being cut. She was afraid that her daughter would get bored in school and lose her passion for learning.
I would urge anyone concerned with the effects of NCLB to read the link to the right to Rockland’s NCLB Report. In that report, especially read Tom Sobol’s address to the Rockland educators; it’s galvanizing!