A few days after President Obama pledged to cut the number of standardized tests students take each year, high school art teacher Molly Pankhurst sat with her kids in a Chicago classroom, apologized for what she was about to do to them, and forced them to take another central-office-mandated test.
Those would be the PARCC—Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers—and the NWEA—Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress.
And they have to be tough on teachers because students in Illinois and the rest of the country score below students in countries like, oh, Denmark, and not because of poverty or discrepancies in school funding.
Curiously, the REACH is graded by the teachers who give it. In other words, the teachers are evaluating themselves—sort of.
Already I’m confused—I’m not sure what they mean by “aspects.”
From there, students have another ten minutes to “explain the image you could create to represent one or more aspects of your chosen global or social issue,” and “provide three separate pieces of evidence that describe how these images relate to an aspect of your global or social issue.”
