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All of you know why the label of “Judas” is frequently applied to State Senator Greg Lavelle who now is running against Sarah Buttner (3 houses down from Joe Miro) in the 4th Senatorial District of Delaware…
All know he is the one to be blamed for any faults arising from the use of the Smarter Balanced Assessment.
Many of you do not know that some of his children are IEP’d. His gracious spouse, Ruth, is actually New Castle County’s citizen representative on the IEP task force. There recently she stated she was in a meeting last week and said IEP Plus is not user-friendly and questioned whether it is less of a band-width issue but the system itself…..
What is interesting, and very odd indeed, is that the Smarter Balanced Assessment which Mr. Greg Lavelle is solely responsible for making the “law of the land”… is very harsh to any child who has an IEP and must take it. It is as if Greg Lavelle voted against the interests of his own child, … but why would he do so, and for what?
Just odd, I tell you. One of those little things that if you know, causes you to ponder them over and over in trying to find some rational logic to explain what obviously is unexplainable.
Six months ago, or just 3 months before Greg cast the deciding vote, sealing the Smarter Balanced Assessment into the state’s official test…. the American Statistical Association, (ASA), the accountants’ association equivalent of doctor’s AMA, came out and slammed value added testing (VAM) as being impossible statistically to hold anything or anyone accountable… (VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the “value” a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences)… These formulas can’t actually do this with sufficient reliability and validity,
Because math and English test scores are available, reformers have devised bizarre implementation methods in which teachers are assessed on the test scores of students they don’t have or subjects they don’t teach.
But what is odd, is that the major consensus among all educators, is that it certainly does not work for children with learning disabilities. The more disabled students a school has, the lower it’s total average score will be if compared to any school having fewer disabled students, even if the level of teaching is overwhelmingly superior in the first school with more special ed students than occurs in the second with fewer… If everyone inside a building is being rated by a school’s average score in only English and math, then smart teachers will flock to schools with zero IEP students,
Since No Child Left Behind started, the standardized test-based “accountability” era now more than a dozen years old, there has yet to show any evidence that standardized tests have improved student achievement, or that linking test scores to teacher evaluations has created better teachers.
From now on, the Federal Department of Education will not only consider whether proper procedures are being conducted but on outcomes, including how well these students score on standardized tests and the achievement gap, based on test scores, between students with and without disabilities…. The department believes that more testing will help special education students achieve more in school.
Duncun, Markell, and Murphy keep denying this extensive research. And now, very oddly, Greg Lavelle believes that more testing will help special education students achieve more in school. He has joined them even though it jeopardizes the future of his own children,….
Why would anyone who has children on an IEP, vote for them to take the Smarter Balanced Assessments?
It is very odd indeed.
kavips 