Re: new member

[Bridget Kraemer <bkraemer1976@yahoo.com>]

Diane
   
  I hope we have teachers that have the passion you do to overcome the restrictions of standardization.  My next step is to get in contact with our school and the parents.  But if the schools are bound to the sanctions, what happens to the programs that are cut because that money had to go towards raising the test scores?  I guess I'm afraid that my children won't get the chance to excel because teachers will have to spend their time testing and worry about AYP. Thank you for reminding me that scores are only part of story.  I just hope we can get NCLB to reflect that.
   
  Bridget

Diane Aoki <dkeikoa@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
  Bridget,
I am a single mother of a daughter and even though she is now 23, I went through the same process that you are going through, wanting to the the best thing for my child. When I moved to Honolulu to go to graduate school, I asked around for what the best schools were, and they were not in the area where I lived. So I tried to get geographic exemptions, and was of course turned down, because there are only so many of these that a school can give out. So I had to settle for the one in which I was geographically entitled, a lower-middle class area. We stayed in that district from 2nd grade until she graduated in high school. If NCLB was around at that time, and the scrutinizing of schools based on test scores, her elementary, middle, and high schools would surely have been ?in need of improvement or under restructuring.?  These are just scores ? they tell you very little. You can get information about the school by talking to parents of current students, and not just one. You
 can go to PTA meetings or school events, most schools have websites and you can learn about them that way. You can talk to principals (I know in my school you can.) You will probably find out that there are positives and negatives, and the way to mitigate the negatives is to be actively involved in your child?s education. My daughter had the best 2nd grade teacher ? but 3rd was a problem, but she got through all of them, some were better than others but none were so bad that I had to ask to have her removed from that classroom. She got into an exclusive private university and won a substantial scholarship to go there. She has now graduated and is working in a field that she loves. The problem is now we have NCLB, and the focus is on testing and standardization. Teachers like me, try to  find ways to keep students excited about learning and going to school. We try not to pass down the pressure to them. We try to do more with less. We no longer have art, music or PE
 specialists, but we try to do these things anyways without that resource. We do not buy into the mindset of standardization that everyone has to be at the same place at the same time because we know that is not humanly possible. You will probably find that there are more teachers like me than the ones who only care about test results and AYP. I hope so anyway. My point- don?t let test scores be your only measure of how good a school is. 
Diane




 
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