Recently I visited a school in Haiti, where the kids are desperate to go and break the cycle of poverty. School in Haiti is not free and most of the country is living in poverty and most are illiterate. The only way to escape the life is to get an education, but most cannot afford to go to school. I am currently working with a group to help fund a tuition free school so that these children can live productive lives as citizens. They are absorbing every bit of information that they can, I witnessed a child laying on the ground outside trying to listen in to what the teacher was saying just because he wanted it so badly.
The teachers over there do not give tests. They do not have high stakes tests. They teach. They teach what kids need to know and they teach to the level. Their kids are bright. The middle school class I observed, the students were working on algebra, learning French as a second language, and working on learning some helpful English phrases as well.
Most of all, the students over there are learning how to become an agent of change. They are learning what they can do in order to help other students like them break free and get an education. The education is meaningful.
I walked into my daughter's classroom. Her teacher is excellent, but her teaching skills are falling by the wayside because the demands placed upon her by the higher ups. She is so buried in testing and in paperwork that she has no time to teach. She has to give monthly benchmarks in every subject, and of course that takes away time for instruction. They are assessed by the NWEA (Northwestern Evaluation Association) three times a year (this is to show growth), and then of course, there's those high stakes tests. I get very confused by why we need so many assessments to show growth, but I don't write curriculum.
My daughter is becoming defeated. She says all she does is take tests and she isn't able to learn anything before another test comes up. Information isn't being retained and she is falling through the cracks.
Seeing these two vastly different educational settings, it makes me wonder, what is it that defines education? My daughter is struggling to know the difference between conduction and convection however when we are at the grocery store, she will throw a bag of rice in the cart and tell me to take it with me next time I go to Haiti. Have we in America become so obsessed with testing that we have forgotten about teaching children about what's happening in the world and what they can do to become agents of change? Do the teachers in Haiti have it right? Don't teach to a test, teach to break the cycle?
It's a lingering question on my mind.....what really defines education and growth?
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