** “There is an obsession with bad teachers. It is destroying the teaching profession.” ~ Diane Ravitch, education historian
** “Right now we have a misalignment. Testing now has replaced instruction, and that’s a bad place for us to be.” Randi Weingarten, AFT president
** “Value-added assessment is all the rage in school reform these days. It involves the use of complicated formulas that plug in student standardized test scores to try to determine how much ‘value’ a teacher has added to that result. Assessment experts say it is a terrible way to evaluate teachers, but it has still been adopted by many states with the support of the Obama administration. …” ~ Valerie Strauss, Washington Post
** “Good-bye Play-Doh, hello No.2 pencils. Because of a tough new curriculum and teacher evaluations, 4- and 5-year-olds are learning how to fill in bubbles on standardized math tests to show how much they know about numbers, shapes, and order. … Kids are getting upset because they don’t understand that they’re meant to bubble in next to the answer. … The young students are not being allowed to help each other with the tests, even though they keep trying to do so.” ~ Rachel Monahan, New York Daily News
** “Give us back our time! Elementary school children need more time to learn as scientists, social scientists, and artists. Science is about how the natural world works and social studies is about how people live in the world. We’d all be better off if schools taught reading as a tool to support learning those big ideas found in science and social studies instruction, transforming reading instruction from its current role as the curricular ‘bully’ in our schools into a role it is better suited to play–being a curricular ‘buddy.'” ~ Arthur H. Camins, Director, Center for Innovation in Engineering & Science Education