Students in Illinois may have to take the ACT twice

Illinois educators are warning high school juniors that the decision earlier this year to cut the writing portion from the ACT exams administered in public schools could require many of them to sit through the three-hour exam twice to meet some college’s admission requirements, the Huffington Post reports. The state decided in early July to opt out of administering the optional writing section, a move that lawmakers predicted would save the state $2.4 million a year–writing exams are expensive, and No Child Left Behind legislation doesn’t provide funding for them. Although the Chicago Tribune reports that fewer than a quarter of four-year colleges in the U.S. require a writing assessment as part of their application process, that pool includes many of the country’s top-ranked universities–meaning students interested in applying to those schools will have to sit for the exam twice, an ordeal that lasts more than three hours and carries a $50 registration fee…

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‘National Opt Out Day’ rejects standardized tests

Last year, stress about Pennsylvania’s state standardized tests caused third grader John Michael Rosenblum to start scratching himself so hard in his sleep that he bled. That’s when his mother Michele Gray knew she’d had enough, the Huffington Post reports. So she opted out. “I realized standardized testing isn’t serving our communities or schools,” Gray says. “The amount of money we spend for these tests is in the tens of millions. Couldn’t that be spent on other things, like more teachers?” After conducting some research and finding The Huffington Post blog of opt-out advocate and Penn State University associate professor of education Timothy Slekar, Gray decided to pull her son John Michael and his brother, Ted, out of standardized testing. Instead, after consulting with her school, they spent test periods on writing projects and constructing small machines…

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Study: Once-a-year teacher evaluations not enough

College professors have been evaluated by their students for years.

Once-a-year evaluations aren’t enough to help teachers improve, says a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And school districts using infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best—and their worst—teachers could be making some big mistakes, according to the second part of a multi-year study from the foundation.

Preliminary results were posted online Jan. 6.…Read More

Grade students according to their weight, says celebrity diet guru

Overweight school pupils should be penalised by giving extra marks to slim students, celebrity diet guru Pierre Dukan has said, the Huffington Post reports. In an open letter to the “future French president”, Dukan proposed 18-year-old pupils preparing for the Baccalaureat exam should be awarded more marks if they fall within a specific Body Mass Index (BMI) range. The self-proclaimed expert has sold millions of books around the world and has amassed a cult following. Despite Dukan’s claims of one in two French people being overweight, official statistics show the country still boasts the fourth lowest rate of obesity in Europe. Data released by European statistics agency Eurostat in November last year revealed 12.7% of women and 11.7% of men are obese in France. Of those aged 18 to 24, 4.3% of women are deemed obese, while 2.8% of men fall in the same category…

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10 years of assessing students with scientific exactitude

In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress, the New York Times reports. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York’s long march to a new age of accountability:  DECEMBER 2002 The state’s education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reports to the state Regents: “Students are learning more than ever. Student achievement has improved in relation to the standards over recent years and continues to do so.”

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States move away from exit exams, shift toward college-readiness

Fewer states are requiring students to pass high school exit exams to graduate, but more states are increasing standardized testing in college- and career-readiness assessment efforts, according to a report released Thursday, the Huffington Post reports. The report by the Center on Education Policy reveals that in the 2010-11 school year, 25 states have or plan to implement policies that require students to pass end-of-grade or end-of-course exams to earn a high school diploma–a figure down from 28 the year before. Six more have or plan to implement exit exams that do not mandate a minimum passing standard for graduation. The change comes as Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee changed their exit exam requirements that instead factor student scores from those tests into the student’s final grade in a course required for graduation…

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When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public, says Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author, for the Washington Post. By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen. He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken…

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With online testing on the horizon, infrastructure could be a challenge

Within a few years, school districts in most states will have to have enough computers to allow students to take multiple tests online throughout the school year.

With new online tests being designed to reflect the Common Core standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, school districts in these states will have to replace pencil-and-paper testing with the new online exams as soon as the 2014-15 school year. But school leaders are unsure how the computers and software needed for such a move will be funded.

Last year, the federal Education Department doled out more than $300 million in Race to the Top funding to two groups of states to create next-generation assessments tied to the Common Core standards.

One of these groups, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), includes 23 states and the District of Columbia. The other group, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, includes 28 states. For now, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina belong to both consortia—and Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia belong to neither.…Read More