10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The reality of No Child Left Behind, September 4, 2007
This review is from: Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade (Hardcover)
"Tested" by Linda Perlstein should be required reading for anyone going into teaching and also every politician who thinks they are an expert of what is happening in our schools as a result of No Child Left Behind. I recently finished reading this book and then wrote a letter to Senator Clinton and inserted it into my copy of the book and gave it to one of her campaign coordinators. This book portrays the reduction of curriculum to teaching to the test especially for Title I schools who can suffer greatly if they do not hit the mark of making adequate yearly progress. As a middle school counselor involved in testing over 1100 students the annual testing required in our building has resulted in students experiencing test anxiety and loosing valuable learning time devoted to the test itself. Linda Perlstein's accounting of one elementary school's exoerience is on the mark when it comes to the loss of creativity and risk taking by seasoned professionals who in spite of knowing what is best for kids have to constrain their efforts to mandated curriculum, schedules and more. Buy this book and then share it with everyone you know so they can understand what public schools that are underfunded face each day.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Required Reading, August 13, 2007
This review is from: Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade (Hardcover)
Linda Perlstein's TESTED should be required reading for all politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators who propose or implement education policy. As a 4th grade teacher in a county adjacent to the one highlighted in the book, I can attest to the accuracy of Perlstein's account of the impact testing mania has had on teaching over the past few years. The book is very readable--not weighed down by education jargon--and gives the reader a clear, real-world sense of the good, the bad, and the ugly of No Child Left Behind.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Passionate reporting adds to the NCLB debate, January 8, 2008
This review is from: Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade (Hardcover)
No Child Left Behind inspires passionate rhetoric from both its supporters and its critics. If you're a supporter, NCLB is a watershed law that finally pulls failing urban and rural schools into the light of day. If you're a critic, NCLB is an oppressive law that cruelly burdens teachers under siege with even more demeaning job requirements. For laymen trying to get an informed position on the law, it's very hard to find books and articles where you can familiarize yourself with the issues and come up with your own opinion. In "Tested", Perlstein provides a powerful story that shows how a successful NCLB school in Annapolis develops a laserlike focus on the tests and ends up getting the scores.
Perlstein clearly dislikes the law and strongly criticizes NCLB in every way. A teacher Perlstein admires ends up leaving the school at the end of the year after becoming overly stressed by the school's focus on test success at the expense of learing. We frequently see some of the artificial techniques that are used to help boost scores such as breathing exercises, incentive plans and even a mascot led assembly. She portrays students as losing the meaning and the life of education as they seek to become masters of BCRs, the mechancially graded Brief Constructed Response questions. And in the end, she questions whether the tests measure anything useful. In the later portions of the book, she alludes to how the test writing process is flawed and how students who struggled with basic writing ended up getting scores that surprised the adults. The third graders who teachers are convinced will fail based on their day to day experiences working with the kids often surprise their teachers with passing scores.
This book falls short of being a definitive text on No Child Left Behind. We're only looking at one school. This Annapolis Middle School is one isolated low-income school in a relatively good district and the experience probably differs in some ways from nearby schools in Washington, DC, Baltimore, or Prince George's County. Perlstein's book would be much more powerful if she provided some stories from other neighboring schools so that we could see how typical the experience in this school is. Perlstein also overlooks the argument that many NCLB supporters will make. NCLB did spur this school to attempt to reach more kids than it did before testing. Yes, the school artificially pursues scores. But NCLB has lit a fire under the administration to succeed that may only need to be better channeled.
The book ultimately succeeds because you develop a real compassion for the kids she describes, the struggles of the principal and the tough choices that the teachers make on a day to day basis. Parents who are new to understanding NCLB can really gain from the stories in this book.
There's still room for a more balanced classic book on NLCB that addresses a wider range of schools and informs and changes the opinions of both supporters and opponents of NCLB. But Tested is a good first step and will help that book get written. I hope this book does well so that publishers can see that there is an audience for well-written, accessible books that help policy makers and the concerned public understand this controversial legislation.
4 stars
--SD
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