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Saturday, August 24, 2013

NYC Public School Parents: Your child's state test scores are now posted; read this advice first from Tory Frye

NYC Public School Parents: Your child's state test scores are now posted; read this advice first from Tory Frye:

Your child's state test scores are now posted; read this advice first from Tory Frye

Dear Parents and Guardians,
Your child's scores are now available on ARIS Parent Link.  For what it is worth, there are a few things that I think we should all do:
1) Ignore the test results and do not tell our children what their "number" is, no matter how high or low;
2) Know that these tests are part of a movement to privatize public education by convincing parents that our children are underperforming, compared with other countries, and a massive restructuring of the public education system is the only thing that will save the future of the US; this would involve higher standards, better teachers (which requires a de-unionized teaching force), more charter schools, vouchers for private schools, and market-based methods to make parents consumers of "public" education; they say that this is needed because of the "new" US economy, where because of economic and labor policies, we have an increasingly bimodal distribution of jobs (you are either a Walmart Greeter or a Scientist, with few solid working- and lower-middle class options left);    
3) Recognize that no elite NYC private schools use high stakes standardized tests in this way and that the country that is held up as a model of universal, high quality public education, Finland, also does not use test scores in this way; 
4) Know that our state has purposefully set up our children to fail in order to "shock" us into submission and turn on our children's