Re-Visioning Assessment

By reading Delpit, Hillard, Luna, and Carini’s writings I have come to determine that “after all these years of common schooling, we still have no real way of knowing if students are learning”.  When I think about assessments the first feeling that I experience is nervousness and frustration.  I feel nervous because like any other person I want to do well on the exam and frustration because usually teachers expect so much to be covered in one exam.  Then, once the first exam is done and over with, you are left to worry about what is going to be on the following test.  Who can really enjoy learning in school, while having the uneasy feeling of knowing that a test is expected?

I believe that students do grow a sense of competitiveness with their classmates when traditional assessments are being used in the classroom.  For example, I remember when I was in third grade my teacher would do spelling contests.  All of the students had to stand up against the classroom walls and the teacher would sit at the desk with a timer.  She would then proceed to spit out any word she wanted and one by one each child was expected to spell out loud the word in front of all of his/her classmates.  If the child failed to spell it correctly he/she had to sit down while everyone else continued.  I really don’t understand the purpose of this assessment, because not only was I embarrassed and mad that I failed to spell the word correctly in front of all of my friends, I am still not good at spelling.    Students “shared their frustration with the predominant assessment practices that seem, to them, to be more about competition and convenience than about finding out what they have learned.  For these students, and for educators who see the primary purpose of schooling as promoting student learning, the current grading system represents an obstacle to the learning of all students, not just those labeled LD” (Luna 603).  This passage made me think, did my third grade teacher really think that I was learning how to spell through this contest? Did she truly believe that the information she got about her students’ spelling through the contest was sufficient to know if we were learning how to spell? 

Through Delpit, Hillard, Luna, and Carini’s readings I have come to understand that the high stake tests from No Child Left Behind are bias and are not put into effect to measure the students’ learning, but, to only favor the students who speak the Standard English Language.  So how does NCLB take into consideration what all of the other students have learned, if NCLB does not give them a chance to even succeed in their education.  “As Delpit pointed out, the norms and practices of school literacy reflect those of the culture of power; thus, a wide range of nonmainstream individuals and cultural groups have been defined as illiterate and deficient both within and outside of schools” (Luna 597).   

The NCLB act has also taken away the enjoyment of learning and teaching in a classroom.  Teachers are forced to teach to the test and students are mandated to learn certain information to do well on the tests.  Teachers have to step away from the curriculum and from their creative minds to prepare their students for the long exams.  After reading Dr. Tuck’s blog I found the perfect story that describes how a teacher feels when experiencing the demands of teaching to the test.  The teacher, Renata, was so miserable that she ended up quitting the whole education “business”.  “Every day for about a month my ' do now' said 'Get ready to get ready for the test!!!' And I would, like, add exclamation points to it like it wasn't a travesty. It got to the point where I was feeling embarrassed… When a student asks you 'Why do we need to know this?' I feel like a good teacher should have a good answer. To say 'Because it's on the test' is disrespectful to them in all sorts of ways… I was very depressed, I barely made it through that semester… Then all summer I felt so-< /span> heavy about going back… In the end, I just couldn't go back” (Dr. Tuck Re-visioning Assessment).  This passage shows how teachers and students question the existence of these tests…Does it not make you wonder as a parent, teacher, or student what is the real point behind these time and energy consuming exams?

Neoliberalism

  After reading “Education Policy, Race, and Neoliberal Urbanism” by Pauline Lipman and “Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge” by Apple I have come to the notion that The No Child Left Behind Act is a route that Neoliberals have found to be of their advantage.  The idea is to turn the public schools’ entity from a public sphere to a private sector.  What does this mean?  Well let’s take a look at one of the biggest money making private businesses, “Insurance Companies”. Healthcare is financed primarily through private insurance companies and millions of people are uninsured in the United States.  Even though Medicare and Medicaid exist, which are government health programs, you either have to be disabled, 65 or older, or you have to be poverty stricken.  This means that if you don’t have the means to pay for your insurance you are out of luck.  The uninsured are more likely to be poor and low income than higher income.  This is what neoliberalism is all about, a capitalist world, where the wealthy have the tools of production and the rest simply don’t.  If the public school system in the United States did become privately owned then what would happen to the children of low and middle income families? 

There are many problems associated with the No Child Left Behind Act which gives an alternative to privatizing public schools.   Because of NCLB a lot of teachers have had to put their focus off of the school’s curriculum to prepare their students for the high-stakes testing that the NCLB act demands for.  Schools are bound to the teachings of these tests to raise the test scores.  The problem with this is that schools that are found in low income neighborhoods are not equipped with the necessary materials to adequately educate their students.  Due to the lack of funds the students are not able to enjoy the advantages that the schools in the wealthier neighborhoods have.  For instance, computers, smartboards, textbooks, libraries, sports, etc.  The lower down the socio-economic ladder you go, the poorer the quality of education students receive.  In the long run these schools are most likely to fail the benchmark and are forced to close their doors.  The NCLB Act has opened the doors to neoliberals by identifying these schools as a failure to the concept of education.  Apple states that Neoliberals believe that schools have not prepared the students for their future as capitalists and this is why they view schools as “black holes”.  They do not believe that schools are doing their job in which they have failed to educate our children.  “Underpinning this position is a vision of students as human capital.  The world is intensely competitive economically, and students- as future workers- must be given the requisite skills and dispositions to compete efficiently and effectively” (apple 38).   Apple believes that if we “return to a “common culture”, make schools more efficient, more responsive to the private sector we will be able to solve a lot of our problems (Apple 35). In the long run, I don’t believe neither Apple nor the neoliberals really care about furthering children’ education, but they are more consumed about the money they will profit from by getting their hands on the public school system.  I believe that by privatizing schools we will be facing the same problems that we are encountering with our healthcare system. 

Give Literacy a Chance

I believe that through multiple literacies our ELLs able to not only further their education and successfully dominate the English language, but they will also enjoy the learning experience.  The concept of multiple literacies offers teachers and students a window of opportunities.  By considering such a literacy practice teachers are engaging their students through the use of the students’ background knowledge, connecting the two worlds (the outside school and in school literacy learning) and building a positive environment in the classroom.

 By connecting the lessons being learned in the classroom to the students’ background knowledge and interests the teacher is able to engage the students.  Teachers are able to build upon the students’ prior knowledge and challenge them with the new information presented to them.  If the students are not being challenged in the classroom they will become bored and at the end it will impede their learning, for instance, this is seen in the case of Almon.   “As a student who was limited English proficient, he experienced heavy doses of basic reading and writing instruction at school” (Haneda 340) by doing so the students is not being challenged and is missing out on furthering his education.  “Schools should give students opportunities to engage in a wide range of literacy practices so that they become critically literate-not just passively decoding and retrieving the author’s textual intentions but also analyzing texts and using literacy to act on the world” (Haneda 341).

Haneda pushes the idea of connecting the two worlds, the outside and in school learning.  “I would argue that, for all ELLs, it is important for teachers to develop an understanding of students’ personal and community literacy resources and to try to incorporate them into classroom practices in locally relevant ways” (Haneda 343).  By bringing the students’ personal interests and community resources into the classroom the students are able to personally relate to the academic studies and they are able to express and explore their identities in and outside the classroom.  This positive outcome was experienced in the state of Arizona, where the “teachers collaboratively created lessons that drew on the community resources” (Haneda 342) and they tapped into the students’ interests.  By doing so the students were able to learn through an array of projects which were based on hands on learning to the development of their reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills. 

It is very important to build a positive learning environment in the classroom.  By providing a learning nurtured environment the students will feel a sense of stimulation to participate in the classroom discussions and interact with their classmates and teachers.  “It is equally important for teachers to reflect on what it means to help students to become literate and, on this basis, to create learning environments where students feel safe to express their ideas in a developmentally appropriate manner and to engage in critical discussion of substantive issues by using reading and writing as tools for thinking” (Haneda 343).