Re: Test Prep Company and non-prepped kids

[MONICALUCIDO@comcast.net]

George,
Thanks for the story. I, too, believe in having a large library for my three children. It is the emphasis on reading and the love of it in the home that makes a difference for kids and their success in school. I have also tried another thing with my students at school, and that is books on tape. While we go into intense discussions of novels (yes! we're allowed.), I find that their interest in the books skyrocket when there is music attached to it along with a professional actor doing the reading. They follow along as if they were being read to by a parent and ENJOY doing it. They appear to grasp situational contexts faster, along with vocabulary, and improve their own reading tones. They don't see it as work because they look forward to it. If politicians would just see these children as people with emotion, they would come to the ultimate solution that success in school (and the interest in it!) comes from EMOTIONAL attachment to the content. The complex discussions of such thing
s as author's viewpoint, character and plot development, and fact/opinion happen as a result of student engagement. Their affect is very low, and thus they willing to engage. Good teachers and parents find ways of making situations relate to a child's brain by making things fun and REAL. A "feelingsy" (is that a word?  :-) ) approach, if you will. America, to some degree, has lost contact with today's youth because of the inability (or unwillingness perhaps) to recognize the benefit and value that children bring to the world. If some folks keep looking at kids as "tomorrow's workforce" and that's all that they see, they will miss the wonderful things they have living and loving in front of them. 

Joe Lucido
Educators and Parents Against Test Abuse
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Csubstance@aol.com
> 12/3/07
> 
> Colleagues and friends:
> 
> I know the hype about test prep, but the fact remains that the best 
> preparation for the tests is to know a lot about the subject matter and to have 
> led a 
> childhood where the child's interests and passions have been encouraged by the 
> family (or families if there has been some separation along the long road of 
> life).  
> 
> I "taught" in the Kaplan test prep stuff in Chicago 15 years ago, at the dawn 
> of the Vallas era, and learned how simplistic (stupid, really) the approaches 
> were. CPS sponsored Kaplan as part of that overall attempt to help kids goose 
> up their scores. It was sad, really, given that the same time devoted to 
> intensely reading a couple of good books might have achieved the same results.
> 
> But there is more than that for us personally. 
> 
> Over the past three years, the Substance web guy (my son Dan) finished high 
> school in Chicago at Whitney Young. He studied hard through all his years in 
> public school, and did well on the PSAT. (He's now studying engineering at 
> Berkel
> ey).  
> 
> When Dan headed into his final years of high school (and in the face of all 
> that high stakes testings), we had a sort of a contest. He would pit his test 
> taking skills on both the SAT and ACT "against" the other top students in CPS. 
> Virtually all of them did some form of test prep -- at considerable expense to 
> their families. All also took the test(s) more than once to achieve their 
> highest scores, often at equally great expense. These things need to be checked 
> against reality.
> 
> Three students at Whitney Young last year (class of 2007) score a "perfect" 
> 36 on the ACT. Other students in Illinois got a "perfect" 2400 on the expanded 
> SAT.
> 
> Dan didn't do quite as well as the "top" scoring students, so he wasn't 
> featured on TV (which was OK with all of us, I think). 
> 
> But a 35 (ACT) and 2350 (SAT) are pretty good considering (a) no test prep 
> and (b) he took the ACT twice, the second time from ACT itself (as you know, CPS 
> and now Illinois supposedly imbed the ACT into the "Prairie State" Illinois 
> test).
> 
> Dan's ACT and SAT scores certainly don't correlate to our family income 
> (which is sadly not too high right now). They do correlate to the second major 
> factor (emphasis in the home on education; size of home library; etc.).
> 
> It might be worthwhile to try and tell families that instead of spending all 
> that time and money on test prep (and making Kaplan and the others wealthier), 
> they should invest in home library materials, magazine subscriptions, decent 
> computer systems for their children (hardware and software), and a broad range 
> of materials that flow from the child's interests at all stages in life. 
> 
> I still laugh about those stages and how we worked them in. At a very young 
> age, for reasons that still puzzle me, Dan was proclaiming he was going to be a 
> "Chiropterist" when he was five and six. He loved bats and studied them, 
> during which time he was a member of "Bat Conservation International" and we 
> reread "Stella Luna" dozens of times, among other bat books. 
> 
> One day, bats were no longer a passion, and he was going to be a 
> "Herpetologist" or "Paleontologist" (lizards, snakes, and dinosaurs). So from 
> about seven 
> to nine there was a a subscription to "Reptiles and Amphibians" magazine was 
> part of that process. The passions were so great that his Mom (from whom I've 
> long been divorced) once took him to a Reptile show in Florida. When Sharon and 
> I married in 1998, half our kitchen (safely separated from the main part, as 
> Monty and others have seen) was devoted to our collection of Herps and 
> Arachnids. There was a sign on the wall that said "Caution: Tarantula Crossing" 
> and a 
> tarantula (named Timmy), a Bearded Dragon (named Lizzie) and assorted other 
> lizards and snakes nearby. Then with Lizzie's death, that ended. I was a bit 
> sad when I didn't renew "Reptiles and Amphibians" and we gave away Timmy. 
> (Lizzie died of digestive tract problems). 
> 
> From about age ten on, when baseball took over, Baseball America, Sports 
> Illustrated, and Baseball Digest.
> 
> Home wasn't the only factor, but I have a hunch it helped a lot. Despite 
> having a "blended family" (divorce and all that) he got support in his schooling 
> and passions for learning from both homes. That's a big one, and I'd say much 
> more important than all that money families are being tricked into wasting on 
> hustles and hypes from "Hooked on Phonics" for the little ones to "Kaplan" for 
> the older ones.
> 
> The New York Times (which we read regularly from sixth grade together) would 
> probably be a much better investment to help your kids "score" better.
> 
> School is also a part. Mostly, it has to be safe and challenging, with a wide 
> variety of curricular and extra curricular offerings. (Small schools are out 
> because they simply can't do this, and nobody should pretend to claim they 
> can).
> 
> Dan went to a huge elementary school (Beaubien, with nearly 1,000 kids most 
> years) and a larger high school (Whitney Young) and never suffered from all of 
> those supposed pathologies that supposedly some with large size and which 
> supposedly can be "cured" with smaller or smallest solutions. One of my friends, 
> Grady Jordan, talks about how sometimes you'd think that "small schools" 
> project is to reduce the dreams of children in the inner city: from small to 
> tiny to 
> nothing. 
> 
> One of the keys to "success", in addition to home, was having teachers at 
> just about every point along the way who (a) really knew what they were 
> teaching, 
> (b) were really committed to teaching it and (c) had the support in their 
> schools to do so. Attending Chicago's Whitney Young Magnet High School helped, 
> because one of the tragic results of 12 years of corporate "school reform" here 
> has been the destruction of the departments in the general high schools. You 
> cannot get AP Statistics or AP Calculus in most Chicago public high schools 
> today, and in some of them that version of "AP" is not very challenging, more 
> window dressing than reality. 
> 
> This is all very sad, in many ways, but worth at least noting. Since I now 
> have two younger sons (Dan's step brothers, one of whom is six and the other of 
> whom is three), we'll probably stick with the same formula we used 
> successfully before. 
> 
> I know it's not going to include wasting money on Kaplan. But last night, we 
> were reading "A Christmas Carol" to Sam. Sam is in first grade at a Chicago 
> public school. He likes "A Christmas Carol" very much (but has yet to see any of 
> the movie versions).
> 
> I don't know whether subscriptions to Reptiles and Amphibians or Baseball 
> Digest are in the future, but Sam already has access to the Internet and has 
> spent a lot of time in some of the Kids sites. 
> 
> Anyway, just thought we'd share for the holiday season. If you're 
> contemplating holiday gifts for the children, books and videos and magazine 
> subscriptions 
> are probably a much better investment than Princeton of Kaplan. And we have 
> the miniature data sets to "prove" our side of this argument.
> 
> George N. Schmidt
> Editor, Substance
> 
> www.substancenews.net   
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