One Major Problem With Standardized Testing...

... the people scoring it.

Please read this. I'm going to order the book and would be happy to share it. I'm not surprised by this, but I wish I were:

Farley tells of test scorers who arrived each morning hung-over, and didn’t make much progress on their daily quotas until they had taken several “fortified” coffee breaks, test scorers who were far more interested in studying for the bar exam than in carefully reading the papers they were scoring, and foreign-born scorers who could not understand simple English.

These stories are funny until one realizes that students’ fates hung in the balance. The results of some of these tests, like the California High School Exit Exam, may determine a young person’s future. Others, like the fourth and seventh grade writing samples of the California Standards Tests, may help decide which schools are closed and which stay open.....

Several years ago one of the largest high schools in the Oakland was moved to a more punitive level of Program Improvement, which would have been avoided if only two students had received higher scores.

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Volunteers

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The Endless Cycle of Teacher Strikes

As I write this, teachers in San Francisco Unified School District are on strike for the first time in almost 50 years. Principals and custodians are also striking in solidarity. I looked up salaries to see how bad they were and... they're bad. If you're reading this from outside of the SF Bay Area and thinking "oh, this isn't this bad," please remember that San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. I think it may be number two after Manhattan. The average rent for a TINY studio apartment (400 square feet) in the city is $2,415 per month. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment is $5,637. A month. (Teachers can't afford to buy property without generational wealth or a spouse who makes good money, so I'm only talking about rent) So when I tell you that a beginning teacher starts at just over $80,000 a year in SFUSD , Again, that may sound fine in many places. That is, literally, poverty wages in San Francisco. ...

Bronwyn Harris, Author

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