On my day and the finale of Kozol's "Shame of the Nation..."



I spent 6 hours today in a meeting with the 7th grade team from one of the public schools I work with as they planned out their next few months. I don't / shouldn't / oughtn't write about my work or the schools that I work with, but I'll make one small exception here. At some point it was brought up that the principal wants them to spend 6 hours a week taking practice tests between now and the "high-stakes" tests, to which the veteran teacher declared that the total number of hours of instruction lost to this was deplorable. I think she said something to the effect of, "we can't spend that much time reminding them what they don't know yet instead of teaching it to them". The testing regime and all the rhetoric about accountability that's in place now often seems disjoint from the practice of education.

Needless to say, this got me in the mood to finish Kozol's "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America". I'll come back to this in a few days after it sets in a little more.

Posted: Wed - December 28, 2005 at 11:59 PM      

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