Speaking of education, did you catch that article in the Free Press, or some other Vermont news source, about the NECAP results? (That’s the standardized test VT students take.)
You have to see it to believe how abysmal they are.
So, while the state is concerned that home schooled children are not getting a good enough education, 70% of public schooled children are not able to do math proficiently and 61% are not able to write proficiently.
A common (yet laughable) objection to home schooling goes something like, “I wouldn’t perform surgery on my own child either,” since home schooling parents are not trained professionals.
Interestingly, I would never take my child to a doctor with a 70% failure rate.
And considering the fact that I live in Burlington, and my children would qualify for reduced lunch, let’s make that a 93% failure rate. That is, failure to educate.
What bothers me about this is that if my children fail to make adequate yearly progress, I can lose my right to home school all of my children for two years.
Yet, Burlington can fail to teach math to 70%, fail to teach writing to 59%, and fail to teach reading to 45% of high school juniors and nothing happens.
And we want to let these people run a pre-school?
I wish I could give my children the NECAP, just to see what would happen.
I did, however, administer the CAT to my 4th grader last year. He scored above average.
On the bright side,
[State Education Commissioner Richard Cate] vowed to gather a panel of teachers and professors to study the results and find ways to improve outcomes.
It’s not the outcomes that are the problem; it’s the input. Reading, writing, and math are timeless basic skills. We do not need a new way to teach them. We just need to actually teach them.
“We can’t let this stand,” Cate said. “We have to figure out what’s going on and deal with it.”
Let’s just hope dealing with it does not mean throwing more money at it.
[Cate] also wondered whether schools are teaching the concepts on the test. The NECAP is aligned to the state’s grade level expectations, a series of recommendations on what students should be learning, subject by subject and grade by grade. Schools are not required to follow the recommendations, but the NECAP tests are written with the assumption that they do. Teachers helped formulate the voluminous recommendations and design the NECAP.
In other words, teachers didn’t want to “teach to the test,” so they made a test based on what they were already teaching.
It turns out, they might not even be teaching that.
No wonder there is so much opposition to accountability.
March 13th, 2008 at 6:31 am
No doubt that homeschooling plays an important role in child’s growth. A child learns a huge amount of thing at home. I prefer that children should be made to learn at home rather than at school at their very young age. Child learning can easily be taken care at home rather than at school.