Week of 3/15/10

So this week the reading that I really found most interesting, and the one I think we talked about quite a bit was the Linda Darling-Hammond reading, Evaluating 'No Child Left Behind' it really was thought provoking. Prior to this reading I'll admit I did not know that much about NCLB, other than what I had heard from the news, and then negative stories about all the harm it was actually doing. In 2002 I was in middle school, and upon NCLB being passed I can remember teachers being worried, I attended a "gifted and talented" school(debate over this is a completely different issue) but we were a school that had usually done very well on standardized tests. The teachers none the less were concerned about how the students would do and expressed that to us, explaining that we HAD to do well, etc. Because of the lack of creativity and limitations standardized tests can put on teachers I think that they are not so great. But at the same time you need some standard, and if you're a great teacher who can teach above and beyond so that when the students take the test it is relatively easy then the teacher should not worry about being held accountable.
Also something that really grabbed my attention from the article was, "For an annual cost of $3 billion, or less than one week in Iraq, the nation could underwrite the high quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually--enough to fill all the vacancies taken by under prepared teachers each year; seed 100 top-quality urban teacher education programs and improve the capacity of all programs to prepare teachers who can teach diverse learners well........" I sometimes feel that politicians/government leaders lose sight of what is really important, I support our troops as it is an issue that hits home for me, my brother is going to the U.S. Naval Academy, but I think the education of the millions of children in school who are our nations future should get a little more attention than it does now.

Lastly, although not directly associated with readings from this week, I saw this in the press & sun today...its a nice short article about the Irish because of St. Patrick's Day but the last paragraph made me literally laugh out loud after learning things in this class...I'm just curious if people agree with the authors viewpoint expressed in his closing line. And do you think that in the future blacks will be able to write an article like this?

http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20100317/VIEWPOINTS02/3170307/1120/VIEWPOINTS/Irish-worked-their-way-up-in-U.S.