NECAP Testing

With the school year newly in session, it is time for students throughout Vermont and New England to sit down and spend an entire week taking the government mandated NECAP tests. Now for those who may not be familiar with NECAP (New England Common Assessment Program), they are tests that students in all school districts in New England must take in order to receive any federal funding. Schools whose students do miserably are cut off from government money. In a nutshell, and in my opinion, this means that the students and schools that most need money to provide a better education receive a slap in the face for receiving failing or low test scores.

Tests cover the basics: Reading, Math, and Writing. According to the Principal's Guide, tests are broken into three sessions for each topic and each session takes 90 minutes. Children from the third grade up must take the NECAP tests, so in all it comes to six 90-minute sessions to complete the entire NECAP exam. Is it any wonder children dread this test?

In order to properly prepare children for this test, many teachers spend hours teaching the children how to take the test. That's right, focus is pulled from actually teaching school and instead teaching kids to take long, drawn out tests. I have spoken to many teachers that dread the NECAP tests just as much as the students.

Parents who want an idea on what the questions are like are welcome to answer the following questions taken from the sample test. These are fifth grade questions, so it truly is time to find out--Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

Now that you have a better understanding of the NECAP tests. It leads to my frustrations, and I'm sure hundreds of other parents feel the same way.

1. Parents are flooded with letters from the school principal and teachers urging parents to move up bed times and ensure the children are fed a full breakfast on testing days. Apparently research shows that children with a full belly are better prepared. While this may be true, the average parent gets home at 6pm if they are lucky. Dinner has to be cooked and homework must be completed before a child can even think about bed time. Now teachers swear they won't give out homework during NECAP weeks. If this is true, I'd LOVE to know why my son had fifty algebra problems and spelling definitions to write out last night.

2. It is also made general knowledge that the children will NOT be allowed to take bathroom breaks during the testing period. When I was admitted into the hospital for dehydration eight years ago, my doctor told me that a person is really supposed to drink enough so that they are peeing every hour. Test sessions are 90 minutes long during which kids cannot drink or use the toilets, let alone walk around or stretch. I am adamantly against keeping a child sitting on a hard plastic seat for a full 90 minutes before offering them a ten-minute break. Can you say thrombosis?

3. Students experience tremendous amounts of pressure by the school before and during these tests. I remember my son and daughter both coming home from school in tears in 4th grade because their teacher kept telling them that students who didn't score highly were letting their teachers down by not having tried hard enough. The teacher and I had words that year. A child should NOT be pressured by anyone, and for a teacher to make a child feel bad if they don't do well on the NECAP tests is horrifying.

What the government has done to our education system is unforgivable. It is time for them to sit down and take a long hard look at suicide rates and talk to the kids feeling this pressure. Childhood is the only time a person can truly enjoy life and act like a kid. Is it really necessary to take that away from them?

Education Today

My daughter is in the 4th grade and has been struggling (very frustrated) with math this half of the year. Our school uses a program developed by the University of Chicago and in my opinion it is worsening the way children are learning math.

In the past month, I have kept notes regarding what she is learning from day to day, week to week. In mid-February, they switched from learning multiplication to division. They started by memorizing basic division (the tables). It hasn't come horribly easy to her, but she's working on it.

The first trouble came when the unit jumped into long division in mid-January. They still didn't have their tables memorized and this suddenly became a huge challenge to many of them. My daughter learned this odd way that I can't see how it helps and now the frustration is kicking in because she cannot understand my way and I think her way is making the paperwork and time involved triple.

So to divide 7 into 320, the kids have to guesstimate how many times 7 would fit into 320. My daughter did a problem similar to this, guessed 30 and that leaves you with 110. She then has to figure out how many times 7 fits into 110, etc. At the end, she adds all of her "guesstimates" and gets the correct answer eventually.

Most of us learned to divide 7 into 32. Subtract, bring down the 0, and continue. It is so much faster, and neater!

Anyway, a week after this assignment, they jumped to geometry and started working on triangles. A week later they were working on surveys/polls. The next week they worked on fractions. Supposedly this breaks up the boredom. Meanwhile, we are back division now, but they are learning how to turn fractions into decimals and she's utterly confused because the division wasn't enforced for long enough that she can get the problems done. Come to find out, not that it was on the homework papers at all, they are supposed to be using a calculator now until they have learned division.

Why not just learn division before you start showing children how much easier and quicker it is to use a calculator? I think it is sad that they are teaching kids to use a calculator before they are teaching them how to do the actual math.

I'm working with her now to teach her my way of division and we are working daily so that it sticks. Sadly, I know many schools started using this "Everyday Mathematics" and I don't think that this system is truly going to help children in the long run!

Damn... School Systems Today

My ten-year-old recently informed me that she refuses to miss another day of school. She's missed one this year and I had to fight her to stay home that day -- fever of 100.8 and she was fighting me every step of the way.

Anyway, a situation came up this week where it would have been beneficial to me to have both kids take the day off from school on Friday so that we could travel to the other side of the state, only my daughter burst into tears at the thought of missing school. It took me three days to get her to explain why -- especially when she announced that she wish it would snow so that she could have a snowday. (Vermont has been virtually snowfree all season.)

Last night, she finally told us why she doesn't want to miss school. Now, the school and I have battled on things before. I don't blame the teachers fully, I know a lot of today's problems lie with "No Child Left Behind." However, until school systems put their feet down and tell the government to get real, nothing is going to change. I'd love to not pay my taxes, but one person is not enough - the entire country needs to revolt and demand changes!

As it turns out, if a child here misses a day/days of school, they are not allowed to have recess until they have caught up on all their work. They are sent to another teacher's room (like detention from my day) where they have to catch up on all they missed before they can return to recess with their class. So in my daughter's case, she would typically miss her math chapter for the day, spelling work, short story writing, and whatever history/science they did while she was out. When I made her stay home in the fall, she wound up missing recess for three recesses (days).

This leads me to question:

1. why are we punishing kids for staying home sick???
2. Why not send the work home as homework?
3. Why are we send a message to kids that NO SICK days are allowed without punishment?

I don't know about everyone, but my friends, family, and husband are all given at least three sick days per year paid. Teachers that I have questioned admit that they get 10 sick days per year and those can be accumulated.

So if teachers are allowed to be sick without punishment, why are we sending the kids a strong message that if they skip school, they will be punished. It's wrong!

The state of the school system is depressing. I wish something would change and soon!