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Saturday, December 13, 2008

British Columbia Teachers to Boycott Tests

When will teachers in the States get as fed up one day?

A solid majority of B.C. Teachers' Federation members voted this week in favour of a controversial plan for a province-wide boycott of the tests - known as the Foundation Skills Assessment and delivered in Grades 4 and 7 - unless the government agrees to stop testing every student and introduces random sampling instead.

"It's clear that teachers are ready to take a strong stance," BCTF president Irene Lanzinger said in an interview as her union announced that 85 per cent of teachers who voted were in favour of the boycott plan. Slightly more than half of the 41,000 members cast ballot

Read full piece at http://www.vancouversun.com/teachers+vote+boycott+standardized+tests+unless+changes+made/1063369/story.html or at norms notes.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousThursday, December 18, 2008 at 10:00:00 AM EST

    Great... here is a test that predicts future school drop-outs with a pretty high degree of accuracy.

    No one has figured out how to raise scores or properly account for poor results.

    The main claim is that children of well-off parents do better.

    So the conclusion is to hide the results [especially of the poor]. This from a labour union that claims to have social equity values? Sounds more like one that is trying to hide a problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousThursday, December 25, 2008 at 2:45:00 AM EST

    See PISA and TIMSS results !Finland and Sweden ! Soaring in academics and don't give standardized tests until the students are in high school.They say it takes the fun out of learning. Project based learning and authlentic assessment meaningful and connected. US out of 40 countries placed 19th in reading,20th in science and 28th in math. Testing created costs and administrative challenges that have caused some states to abandon their performance assessments.End the mandates of NCLB and it's not working ! Higher order learning = funding centrally and equally. Way to go and good luck !If you haven't checked out the video with The Forum for Educational Democracy it's great !

    ReplyDelete
  3. dmacTuesday, December 30, 2008 at 4:01:00 PM EST

    FYI - your link to the Sun's piece is missing a /

    here's how it should look:
    http://www.vancouversun.com/teachers+vote+boycott+standardized+tests+unless+changes+made/1063369/story.html

    ReplyDelete

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