All the political arguing and all the media reports of test scores generated as a result of NCLB tend to cast education as a giant monolith to be “fixed” with one master solution.
However, Jenny at Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It reminds us that education is really about millions of individuals with different needs and learning styles.
He is an unusual example because he is autistic. For him, time spent taking this test is not helping him learn and for us, it is not giving us useful information about his learning. But, he will still spend four days this year taking practice SOL tests and five days taking the actual SOL tests. That is five percent of the school days in the year.
As she eloquently points out, we do need accountability. Our schools and classrooms should be open for anyone to observe what is going on.
But the hours of testing and the even more hours of practice for those tests is doing nothing to improve student learning for the vast majority of those individuals.