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| Programs 2004-2005 | |
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Our meeting last March was about standardized testing. For a long time, many members had been (and more now are!) worried about overemphasis on standardized testing informing mandates flowing from both Albany and Washington. You might recall the fairly recent Math A Regents debacle, or the botched Physics exam, or the Bowdlerized and edited for political delicacy material students were asked to respond to on recent Regents English exams. School districts are whip-sawed by many of these often contradictory and poorly thought out mandated testing requirements; they are expensive and time-consuming to implement, and growing numbers of us are certain these manifestations of the on-going standards and accountability movement actually damage public education and lower standards—even while secretaries and commissioners of education claim to be raising them. (The State Education Department almost conceded this recently when it back tracked on its own tweak to the math curriculum sequence.) Peter Sacks, author of the important Standardized Minds: the High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It, addressed our March meeting. He summarized major pieces of his research that led to his strong critique of standardized testing and sketched out arguments and ideas about more “real” or more “authentic” kinds of assessments than standardized test scores. Regent Phillips’ First
Official Visit to DCSBA At a dessert meeting on November 16, Regent Harry Phillips concluded his first official visit to DCSBA. Members greeted him and listened to his views and on-going educational concerns. Regent Phillips addressed important member concerns, among them the Board of Regents’ plan to overhaul how mathematics is taught in our schools; member worries that new and higher math standards may produce more low test scores, more student casualties; member observations that SED reforms sometimes conflict with NCLB mandates; member concerns about the burden on school districts of SED data collection, and questions about whether data collected is returned to the districts in a timely and useable fashion; and member observations that the way college prep and vocational curricula are configured may express an unwholesome institutional bias or express a built-in assumption that vocational programs are intrinsically less rigorous and therefore inferior and less important and desirable than college prep. Regent Phillips prompted discussion about an appeal process whereby a student could appeal a failing grade on a Regents exam. He also solicited ideas about how to decrease the drop-out rate. Members suggested that if we could afford to pay more attention to at-risk kids earlier than we do, afford to allocate resources to meet the needs of students who have language arts and math deficits but do not qualify for special education (paraphrasing a recent memo from Red Hook Resource Room teacher, Marie Barnes), we could significantly reduce the drop-out rate. Regent Phillips is very interested in progress local districts are making toward SED goals, in difficulties districts have experienced in reaching these goals, and in any solutions they might propose to critical problems facing public education in our state. He expressed keen interest in visiting local school districts and we encourage districts to extend invitations to him for visits. General Membership Meeting
Teresa Vilardi, who heads the Bard College Writing and Thinking Institute, will be our presenter at the March General Membership Meeting. The Institute is very well known for its emphasis on the uses of writing to learn and the presentation should be compelling. A description of the Writing and Thinking program, with some emphasis on its rationale, will be the core of this presentation; we will be learning about the connections between writing and thinking—and one can think of very few better ways to look for new and strong angles on the subject of teaching high schoolers and how better to assess their performances than by learning more about the ways we might explore the connections between writing and thinking. We can infer—but we’ll have to query Ms. Vilardi on this--that, to some degree, the Institute’s formation was prompted as a response to and critique of certain public education practices; over-emphasis on first-order learning, for instance. Over-emphasis on learning “facts,” of which Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind is one of our best literary examples, restricts the possibility of second order learning—the learning how to learn part of the job. And if that part of the process is neglected, all the references to creative and critical thinking standing out in the foreground of so much education chat and policy statement are so much hypocrisy. This presentation should go a long way toward helping us see new ways to put meaning back into the boilerplate phrasing—about independent, creative and critical thinking (for only a few examples)—that we use to define so many of our practices and goals. We expect the meeting will be well-attended. Board members, parents and educators are invited. Please phone 845.257.2820 and register with Lynne Cruger, our Executive Director. Local board representatives to the Dutchess County School Boards
Association will be receiving some informational material from the
Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking; please distribute
it to your board colleagues, faculty and parent organizations. In
the meantime, please note two events presented by the Institute
for Writing and thinking listed in the Spring 2005 Bard College
Calendar: Conference for Teachers “Report? Paper? Essay? Making Connections.” Presented by the Institute for Writing and Thinking. Registration
and fee required Writing Workshops for Teachers “Writing and Thinking”; “Writing to learn”;
“Poetry for Today’s Classrooms”; “Reading
and Writing Nature”; Dutchess County School Boards
Association Annual Meeting The Annual meeting of the Association will be held at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck. After a short business meeting, which will include the election of officers for 2005-06 and the acceptance of revised By-Laws, we have invited Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, who represents the 101st Assembly District. In our invitation, we identified some of the concerns we have, which he might address. These include:
As there is a chance Assemblyman Cahill may be required at a meeting of the Assembly, we are also preparing an alternative program. We hope to share with you in Rhinebeck.
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