Word: maths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pick. Time and again, most notably during the government shutdown in 1995, the Clinton Administration has beat up on G.O.P. lawmakers and in the end subjected them to painful public embarrassment. So when House Republicans forced a showdown last week with the President over his treasured plan for national math and reading tests for students--despite a White House threat to veto an entire spending bill if the testing money was not included--it seemed on the face of it that these guys were just gluttons for punishment...
After all, the President's proposal to develop voluntary fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math tests by 1999 has enjoyed public support since its unveiling last February. Education experts agree that American public schools badly need tougher--and higher--national standards. National testing would enable parents and schools from Cambridge, Mass., to Compton, Calif., to measure an individual student's performance against a common yardstick. A well-executed national testing system might also ease the transition to charter schooling and public-school choice by providing a standard method of assessing different schools' strengths. In a TIME/CNN poll last week...
What's more maddening to national-test advocates is the defection of their supposed friends on the left. Liberal critics assert that the math test will stigmatize poor and minority students who don't perform well. They fret that schools will use national-exam results in determining who to promote to the next grade. And they even complain that the reading test discriminates against students who don't read English. Feelings run so strong in the House that virtually all members of the left-leaning black and Hispanic caucuses plan to vote against the tests this week. "If national testing...
...matter of the test questions. Test designers have released a few sample problems, but no one knows exactly what the exams will look like. And so everyone is anxious. Critics charge that the committees drafting the exams are using them to promote faddish pedagogies like "whole language" and "fuzzy math." Last month a disgruntled group of teachers and academics penned a letter to the President contending that the eighth-grade math test isn't tough enough in measuring basic computational skills. On the other side, the Cambridge-based watchdog group FairTest opposes the exams, executive director Laura Barrett says...
Enlightened and responsible math educators [EDUCATION, Aug. 25] know they are preparing students to be effective citizens for the 21st century, not the horse-and-buggy days. What successful scientist does long division? The issue in math education is professional development, not regression into arithmetic. CYNTHIA TUTTLE Deerfield, Mass...