How to teach to the test without teaching to the test

As a future teacher, I am reaching out to other teachers who have some suggestions on how to teach the PSSA content to students without directly stating to the students, "we are going to work on Persuasive essays because that is what is on the PSSA's". I don't want to directly teach the test but I want to best prepare my students. Here are some of my suggestions:

Teach the students the test plus more-If they are working on Persuasive essays, teach them how to write Persuasive essays AND apply it to real life. Work on some vocabulary words and strategies to writing the essay.

Do vocabulary exercises everyday at the beginning of class- kids will be learning vocab without directly relating it to the test.

What are some of your suggestions?

NCLB- What a Joke!

I have seen NCLB do wrong to our students with my own eyes. This past spring, I visited Shaw Middle School in Philadelphia. It is 90% African American and it is located in a fairly rough, economically-deprived area. This school has a lot of problems with violence, gangs and dropout rates. The biggest problem this school faces is that they were not meeting AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) for a few years so they were having a lot of difficulties getting funding. Since they were lacked funding, the school was not getting what they needed to better prepare the students for the test. This is were the problem is really rooted.

I was in a classroom of 9th grade Math students. They were struggling with the geometry unit which is a significant portion of the PSSA test. The students worked hard during class time and were trying to understand what the teacher was writing in the board. Most of the students took notes but continued to look puzzled. The class ended with the students working independently on some problems in the textbook. Then the bell rang.

I asked the teacher after class why the students were having such a hard time with this unit. She explained to me that the school did not have enough money to buy books for all the students, so a lot of the students only learned geometry in the classroom. Students were not assigned homework on a daily basis because they could not take the books home with them. I then asked her why she did not supplement the students with some handouts of basic rules, examples and practice problems. She replied by saying that each teacher was only allowed to have X amount of copies per semester (she said some ridiculously small number that I cannot recall). She said that she had to ration her copies each week. She blamed this problem on the loss of funding the school received a few years back. She explained that the school has not been able to catch up and off set the economic situation.

This is an absolute shame and it needs to change!

What if you were a parent and your child went through this in high school?

Do you think it is fair that they schools with problems get less funding and those schools that do well get more funding?

Reasons why NCLB does not work

When a school does not meet AYP, it is usually because an educational program is lacking. In order to fix this problem, schools need extra funds, remediation programs or other assistance. Instead, the NCLB act does nothing to this nature to assist the cause. How could we support a program that abides by these stipulations?

Testing is not coupled with plans and funding to remedy the problems that are detected from testing the students. Instead, a system of increasing punishment is provided that places the schools resources in danger of being taken away. Often times, this creates a smaller chance of success for the students and teachers alike. Because schools and teachers are punished if they fail AYP, the incentives are to set lower expectations rather than higher expectations to increase segregation by class and race and push the low-performing students out of school entirely. In addition, the schools, districts and states manipulate the system by excluding students who are projected to not do well and to create classifications for dropputs so that they reduce the amount of unfavorable results.

With this said, why would anyone agree with the NCLB act?

Do you agree or disagree with NCLB? Why/Why not?

What other problems come from these types of manipulation by the schools?

What are the challenges to teaching to the tests?

Shouldn't schools that aren't reaching AYP be given extra funding to achieve better scores?

Great News Article

Check out this article on the web below. It is quite controversial. I am wondering if other states will jump on the same wagon as Minnesota and begin to refute the NCLB act. What are your thoughts?

No Child Left Behind: GOP senators want it to be history
DFLers won't necessarily support a Republican effort to pull Minnesota out of the controversial federal school program.
By NORMAN DRAPER, Star Tribune


Legislators have the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law in their cross hairs -- again.
When the legislative session cranks up next month in St. Paul, Republican senators will be ready to introduce a bill that would end Minnesota's participation in NCLB. The federal program is aimed at forcing schools to improve their students' test scores, and slaps many of them with penalties if they don't.
"What we want is to make a real firm stand for local control," said Sen. Geoff Michel, R-Edina, who added that he represents Senate Republicans on this issue. "We've had five years of the No Child Left Behind regime, and I think it's safe to call it a failure now. We're giving it an F and trying to take back our schools."
Senators and representatives from both parties have tried to yank Minnesota out from under No Child Left Behind's requirements over the last few years, but to no avail. For one thing, thumbing their noses at the federal government has a price: The loss of federal school funds.
According to the most recent estimates, Minnesota could forfeit $250 million a year if it decided to buck No Child Left Behind. Also, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been a supporter of the program, though his office was not available for comment on the current proposed legislation.
And ultimately, such efforts have gotten pushed behind more important education priorities, such as funding schools.
Nationally, the law, which was signed by President Bush in 2002, is up for reauthorization. But efforts to change or scrap it altogether have gotten mired down in Congress. Democratic presidential hopefuls have attacked it, and several, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Richardson, have said they will end it. Several leading Republican presidential candidates -- Mitt Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani among them -- have voiced support for the law, according to published reports.
In a nutshell, No Child Left Behind aims to have every child proficient in reading and math by 2014. Every year, schools are responsible for making sure their students attain testing goals in reading and math. Schools can be penalized if a certain percentage of students -- including percentages of student subgroups such as black, Hispanic, poor and non-English-speaking students -- don't meet testing goals that rise every year.
Minnesota educators have generally opposed No Child Left Behind, saying it forces schools to devote too much time and money to testing and can result in tough penalties, such as the forced reorganization of entire schools if they fail to meet their goals for too many consecutive years.
Michel said the state can absorb the loss of federal funds because of all the money it would save by not having to adhere to the law. Indeed, a legislative auditor's report released in 2004 said that Minnesota schools would have to spend tens of millions of dollars to meet No Child Left Behind's requirements. Michel thinks the law's detractors include plenty of DFLers, but he is uncertain how much bipartisan support Republican senators can muster for a total withdrawal from the program.
"My sense is that there is bipartisan agreement that [NCLB] is not working," he said. "There may be some who don't want to go quite as far as withdrawing from it. I think we're just negotiating the terms of the divorce here."
Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville and the leader of a previous effort to get Minnesota out of NCLB, said she wouldn't necessarily support the Republican effort.
"I think they're Johnny-come-latelies," she said. "To me, it's kind of cheap words right now when the president is sinking into the mud on so many issues, and now they can divorce themselves from him on this."
Greiling said that her position on NCLB has evolved into an "amend-it-don't-end-it" stance and that she wants to wait for Congress to decide what to do before committing to state action.
"It's not really a state action anymore," she said.