Chapter 5: Ending Readicide

This last chapter in Readicide highlights some very important issues. One statement that stood out to me was about the rising test scores but how the state lowers standards to meet law's demands. It is very saddening to know that we as a nation and as educators have to compromise with law's demands to help meet test scores. I hope that by me saying this is not contradictory to how I really feel, but how is that out of all the years education has been around that no one has developed a better solution to help our children. I mean honestly, I strongly believe that there should be more accomodations or variations made for low achieving students when it comes to taking standarized test instead of the solution we have now. Just think about it, how many low achieving students do we have compared to our average learning students. Also, is it considered fair to those students to actually be tested on something that is below their standards or actual abilty. This leads to the next topic in the chapter, "are we fixing the wrong things?". In my opinion yes, we are fixing the wrong things. For one, these kids who actually want to attend these great colleges are being deprived of information that is essential to survival in college. Although there are some kids who may not feel that it is important there are some who want to learn. The book also mentions how we as the United States are teaching our kids to become creative thinkers and think outside the box. All of that is fine except not everybody has that ability. There are students who survived upper level college courses, grad courses, as well as professional level courses due to being able to think creatively. Is it wrong that they have this ability? Absolutely Not! If a student is able to express and explain the information in an ability that we as educators can understand than by all means, but what about the kids who aren't as creative in thinking, and need to know everything about a particular subject in order to retain the information. Toward the end of the chapter the book mentions how the country finland scored higher on standarized testing and how we can't really compare ourselves to them. Well have we ever thought about adopting some of the strategies etc from other companies. I believe we Americans live in a country that does enough to get by and it is becoming more and more contagious which is why one of the main issues we have is with our children losing the love for reading.