A common topic of debate between the parent and the teacher community is how growth will be measured. Some of our “friends” who maintain legal sites (they are lawyers and have NEVER taught students) tell us you must demand goals be written based on growth on standardized testing.
I have regularly argued against this, in favor of good curriculum-based measures. I was on the CA State Dep’t of Education website this am, reading various and sundry special ed. publications and articles. I found a very thorough treatment of teaching reading to LD. The statement is made in this article that curriculum-based measurement is preferred over standardized (norm-based) tests.
Go read the article yourself, it is very informative and not, in my opinion, biased toward schools:
www.cde.ca.gov/spbranch/sed/readnit.pdf
Re: Assessing Reading Growth
I can certainly agree about the frequent moves causing a problem. We are a military family, my older son went to a school in TX for k-garten, and first half of first grade, FL for second half of first grade and VA for 2-5.Of the three VA has the best system.My son was unable to read throughout first grade and in FL(you know the one with the lottery for ed. funds) I was told there was no money for a reading teacher and his report cards stated that he was on grade level. The other problem he had was that in three grades in VA, he had long term subs, 2nd and 4th at the beginning of the year(teacher maternity leave) and in the middle of 3rd(teacher surgery).
Anyway, it didn’t take long in 2nd grade for the teacher to see a problem, he was referred to child study by both the reg.teacher and reading spec. Long story short, he was failing in TX, on grade level in FL, and finally helped in VA.Of course now we are in Germany but he will be able to finish all his middle school years in one place.
A side note, even though we arrived at a DODDS school with an IEP, we were told there was unsufficient evidence for DODDS sped eligibility.We had to go through another test and meetings to establish eligibility. The ADD diagnosis was enough thank goodness, even though their tests showed him having average ability.
One of the things that I worry aobut is children who move frequently.
If you go to three or four schools in childhood, they are frequently totally incompatible in skills taught, philosophy, etc.
One of the things that I like about the idea of norm-based standards is that a first grader should know X, a second grader should know Y, and a third grader should know Z.
What I don’t get is why everyone is now jumping on the bandwagon to develop their own tests. Didn’t the old California or Iowa tests do a good job of evaluating people everywhere on a defined set of skills? I mean, if South Carolina and Mississippi (traditionally at the bottom of the national heap) do their own testing, it won’t help people moving to places like that evaluate how well the new school does when compared to the old school. You get apples and oranges.
That said, if parents put the energy that goes into complaining about tests into daily working with their children, I bet the children would being doing better in actuality AND on their tests.