Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Invest in instruction, not in unnecessary tests
Sent to the Los Angeles Daily News, July 9, 2012
Because of severe budget cuts, LAUSD is cutting summer school offerings. The situation, we are told, could be worse next year, with no funding for summer school available (“Summer squeeze: LAUSD offers limited summer school classes,” July 9). The same situation exists in school districts throughout the country, with severe cuts in many programs and services known to be of great value to students, such as libraries and librarians.
At the same time American schools seem to be eager to spend billions of dollars of tax money on untested standards, to be accompanied by a massive set of tests that do nothing but enrich publishers and testing companies.
Stephen Krashen
Daily News article: http://www.dailynews.com/ci_21039269/summer-squeeze-lausd-offers-limited-summer-school-classes
I disagree in degree. These policy decisions are commanded from a place way above school systems. It becomes law via the transmission of corporate power, impugned or not. Schools are facing an onslaught of austerity measures calculated by bankers and passed to the hierarchy of administrative / corporate decision making at federal and state levels, not by schools in and of themselves.
ReplyDeleteI feel that this is sad. It is a crazy world when the one thing that we need in the world, education, is deprived or taken away. what has me even more confused is to why actual education is being lessened to a select few, because of standardize test that have been shown to be somewhat ineffective when it comes to actually learning. there are many contributing factors in which thing are the way that they are, and it is all being spearheaded by those who already have biases and education. so with those types in charge i see little fairness being applied in the near future.
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