Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Educational Equity blog

Angela Valenzuela is a professor at the University of Texas who is an outspoken critic of high stakes testing which leaves children in low SES settings, students from a particular ethnic group, critical thinking and/or good classroom instruction behind. I have received her email updates on issues relating to educational equity and school reform since she spoke as a distinguished lecturer at Texas Tech in April 2004. My previous post “School refinance, vouchers, generational compact and class warfare?” reflects some of my thinking about the ideas she shared, as well as links to my original notes from her presentation. I am pleased today to learn she has been maintaining a blog in addition to her free mailing list, titled “Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas.” The description of her blog is:

This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, dropouts, bilingual education, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level. With the help of UT graduate student in educational administration, John Gasko, neoliberal, free-market reforms in education will constitute a new focus. This blog further reflects University of Texas Professor Angela Valenzuela’s work as a scholar and researcher of Texas education policy and politics.

It is great to see an academic scholar and activist like Dr. Valenzuela embracing web 2.0 communication via a blog! If you are interested in school reform issues, and especially a very informed perspective about topics like Texas school finance reform as well as high stakes testing, Dr. Valenzuela’s mailing list and blog are outstanding sources of both opinions and diverse perspectives (since she shares a wide variety of articles relating to these issues that reflect many sides of the debates, not just hers). Her blog homepage also includes a blogroll of other “Texas Capitol bloggers.”

Dr. Valenzuela’s response to Jay Matthew’s article in the Washington Post last week, “Let’s Teach to the Test,” is representative of her views and why more people need to be listening to her perspectives. She writes:

The point here is that inordinate weight is attached to a single indicator. Hence, it is hardly far-fetched-as Mathews would like his readership to believe-that this results in a narrowing of curriculum and the pushing out of children from the schooling system as alluded to above. Why? Because combining both the assessment of the children with the monitoring of the adults in the system (teachers and principals) via test scores-two distinct functions in one-corrupts the assessment.

I also want to challenge another view that Mathews has, namely, that teaching to the test and a focus on test prep are aberrant behaviors limited to only a thin slice of deviant teachers nationwide. In response, I draw here from a published piece of mine (with co-author Nathalia Jaramillo) that appears in a UCLA on-line journal called, INTERACTIONS. You may download the whole article if you wish here….

Tomorrow I will be speaking at ESC10 in Dallas on the topic, “The Vocabularly of 21st Century Learning.” Dr. Valenzuela’s ideas that rather than a narrow curriculum defined predominantly by test-prep, we need a robust, deep curriculum which challenges students to think critically and engage in meaningful problem solving is right along the same tracks of my own thinking. I’ll be posting my presentation from ESC10 later this week as a podcast.

David C. Berliner of Arizona State is another outstanding scholar who publishes and speaks out on issues related to high stakes testing and its short as well as long term impacts. His article “High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning” with Audrey L. Amrein is representative of his scholarship in this area.

Check out Dr. Valenzuela’s blog. Kudos to her for for writing and speaking out as a light in the darkness of this environment in which we are now embroiled, called the 21st century educational landscape.

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On this day..


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