Here's an article saying that high schoolers are taking tougher courses and getting higher grades, but apparently learning less. There's a very ironic quote in the article:
"We know the root to solving the problem is having more rigor in classes, starting in 9th grade," said Norma Rodriguez, chief of high school curriculum and instruction for Chicago Public Schools.
I bet this quote came from the written transcript of a spoken interview. And I bet that Norma Rodriguez was actually talking about the route to solve the problem. Apparently journalists (and their editors!) are aren't immune to the national trend towards lower reading scores.
Posted on February 23, 2007 10:37 AM
More culture articles
I read that article too, and my take on it was that perhaps, students actually are getting smarter, just not getting better at taking standardized tests. And it seems to me that past some point, standardized tests become a bad thing. You end up with overfitting: students learn how to pass the tests very well, but do very badly at just about anything else. Like actual reading of actual books.
Posted by: crzwdjk at February 26, 2007 09:12 PM