WASHINGTON —
As the final school bell rings next week, the summer will probably take on much of the same rhythm and flow as every summer before it. Vacations, little league tournaments and family outings will dot the 90 days that every student looks so forward to during the rest of the school year.
However, when students take their seats in the fall, everything will have changed.
The new standards affecting both students and teachers will come into play — and both will find themselves judged by test scores and evaluations that will seriously dictate their future.
Individual teachers’ success and failures will be at least partially based on how their students score on standardized testing. Essentially, one might spent most of the year “undoing” someone else’s philosophy from a previous year. Other teachers will find themselves “teaching the test” throughout much of the year, sacrificing creativity for a more “production line” type of approach.
Administrators will now spend an enormous amount of energy and time evaluating and reevaluating their co-workers, regardless of the success that teacher may have had in the past.
One might liken it giving babies and elderly travelers the same exaggerated scrutiny at airports, as they would to someone buying a one-way plane ticket to Somalia in cash. Instead of focusing on where problems truly are, many administrators will spend time determining “where problems are not.”
Students will also find that with the new IREAD-3 program, along with ISTEP and end-of-course assessments, much of the year’s accomplishments will come down to how well students test.
Entire communities will be looked upon by the way they score, and terms like “free and reduced lunch” or “English language proficiency” will become as important to assessing success as the actual accomplishments of the students.
We are well aware that dollars will flow to schools that are successful, but does that really take the most important factor into consideration — the level of support and direction students are getting at home?
Nowhere in the sweeping educational reforms that have trickled down from the apex of state government have “parental responsibilities in regard to education” been addressed.
Students whose parents are involved, attentive and engaged in the educational process are the students who do the best, those who are not, do the worst.
Sometimes when a car doesn’t start, it is best check the battery, before rebuilding the engine.
Change can be good and helpful. Accountability is also a postive thing, as long as it is not about finding blame somewhere else to avoid blaming oneself.
Columns
Do we change just to change?
- Columns
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Pacers miss golden opportunity
The Indiana Pacers had the Miami Heat right where they wanted them in the waning moments of overtime Wednesday night, but they couldn’t get out of their own way long enough to secure their most important playoff victory in more than a decade.
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SeaPerch sets bar high for WHS
It may seem uninteresting, even trivial to some, of the accomplishments of the Washington High School SeaPerch teams as they won in national competition over the weekend.
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Stop acting like sports are life and death
I’ve followed sports for much of my 27 years on earth, but one inescapable fact has caught my attention lately - sports make people crazy. You can't get around the fact that rooting for your favorite team can enrage you and turn you into a ravenous sports junkie. Passion isn’t always a bad thing, but combined with hatred for the rival of your favorite team can turn into something ugly and disgusting.
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A confession directly from Genoa City, Wis.
I am a confessed hopeless addict. And, after a conversation this week, even my co-workers know the ugly truth. I rarely go an entire week without catching up on my soap opera - The Young and the Restless.
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Quite simply less is more
Money can’t buy happiness, or at least that’s what you have been told. In Major League Baseball there has been a hot debate on when and how much should a team spend to improve the team on the field.
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Daviess County talent runs deep
Oakland City University head men’s basketball coach Dr. Mike Sandifar has a long and successful career.
He has a combined high school and college mark of 631-383 and is 427-234 at Oakland City in a career that covers 1987-1999 and 2003-2013. -
The thrill of the grass
In the spring, they say a young man’s fancy turns to — baseball.
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Jackie still a hero after all these years
Too often in our society we put elite athletes on a pedestal so high that they are referred to as heroes and we talk about the so-called adversity they face. This, of course, is laughable on every level.
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A lifelong love of golf
It was an unusually cold, snowy day in April as I looked out the window at the clubhouse nearly 20 years ago.
Winter was hanging on, and golf on that particular Monday was not going to happen. -
All she needs is GPS, notebook
Lately some residents may have seen an out-of-county car driving aimlessly around town in search of some destination that even the youngest kiddo could find in a matter of seconds. That car would be mine, and the driver, who on occasion has nearly turned the wrong way down one way streets would be me, Lindsay Owens. Fear not though. I have GPS and a collection of maps Columbus would have envied.
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