COMMENTARY | According to U.S. News & World Report, the Department of Education wants students, teachers and administrators to use Twitter to provide feedback about education policies and the state of education. Since I do not have a Twitter profile, I would like to provide some opinions of a group of educators who recently lunched together after spending time working on standardized test revisions.
* Accountability for learning needs to fall more heavily on the students. We need to let more kids fail, learn from those failures, then adjust their expectations and performance to succeed. By focusing on preventing underperforming students from failing in the first place, we deny them the ability to learn difficult lessons that must be acknowledged. Letting a 16-year-old fail and taking the heat from said failure might be the wake-up call they need. If a student does not learn to avoid and/or handle failure during high school, the real world, where second chances are few and far between, will be downright cruel.
* We need to de-emphasize standardized testing. Multiple-choice tests are atypical of what students will encounter in the real world. Though it may be painful, states and school districts need to get students writing and exercising thought and reasoning abilities rather than rote memorization. Given advancements in technology, much memorization can be replaced with easier and faster access to sources of information. Ability to write, reason, infer, analyze and improvise cannot be replaced by Google a smartphone.
* We need to find ways to link classroom expectations to expectations students will encounter in their first jobs. Too many students do not understand that school is to prepare them for real world performance and assume that they can underperform at school and simply "turn it on" in the work world. This is inaccurate and will doom many students who are about to end their high school career (either via graduation or otherwise) to a rude awakening.
* Partnerships between high schools and employers should be developed. For students who are not on tracks emphasizing college attendance, a greater presence of employers and employer-specific expectations could help students realize the importance of putting forth good effort in class and completing their high school diploma. Discussions and presentations from real employers insisting on strong academic performance in applicants could open students' eyes to the reality of life after high school, which arrives all too quickly.
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