Mr. Curran is setting up his bracket. A half dozen TA students, randomly assembled, are choosing each match-up winner for him as he enters the info into his laptop. There is a men’s bracket and a women’s bracket at TJ this year.
Meanwhile, for the past two weeks Student K, who is chronically absent from school, has spent every day she’s been here doing test make-ups for the ACCESS sub-tests and then yesterday, the NAEP. Because of all these make-ups and the absences themselves, she is so far behind in every class that coming to school is an overwhelming burden each day.
Speaking of the ACCESS, that albatross of an English proficiency test has finally left the building after taking up residence in our classrooms for all of three weeks. Four sub tests that each require 45 to 60 minutes for over 250 students to complete, while missing all that class time, is beyond madness.
The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), for which students are randomly selected, is shrouded in enough vagueness that the opportunity for parents to opt out their student is virtually nonexistent. Nevertheless, one of our TA students faced down the tenacious federal testing official, to whom he latched on like a dog to a bone, until she finally relented and put him down as “refused test”.
That’s right… a test of national educational progress in a nation that is currently dismantling its federal Department of Education.
March madness indeed.
