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Alpert Letter to Dr. Raymond Yannuzzi on Standardized Gardening Exam - November 24, 2014
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From: Justin Escher Alpert <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" [email protected] Bcc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Asm. D. O. Diegnan, Jasey Asw. D. O., Asm McKeon, Sencodey, [email protected], Sen. D.O. Allen, Diane Ravitch, Deborah Smith-Gregory, [email protected], Priscilla Sanstead, [email protected], Sen Weinberg, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Asm. D. O. Prieto, Ras Baraka, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], steven fulop, [email protected], Kate Zernike, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Valerie Strauss Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2014 9:35 AM Subject: A Standardized Test Question About Community Gardening
Dear Dr. Yannuzzi: Last night’s Livingston Board of Education meeting started with a fantastic presentation about the community garden that was built at Mt. Pleasant Elementary School (https://vimeo.com/112717466, password: mperocks). This was followed by a presentation of the high school guidance staff that showed the brute number of college applications submitted by our high school seniors (about 10 per) and the competitiveness and diversity of the number of schools that Livingston graduates attend. It turns out that this is a reflection of a lot of hard work, sweat equity, and year-over-year relationship building on the part of the guidance staff. The result? At many of these really competitive colleges, when a student from Livingston submits her application, the reputation of the alma mater itself opens doors. I don’t know how to tell you this, Dr. Yannuzzi, but I don’t think that the standardized test scores are important. To that end, we could ask (and, admittedly, I’m making this up): Question 1:
A classroom of third-graders is building a community garden that will be 100
square feet. What is the length of wood that they will need to build a
perimeter?
And then we could have a cutting-edge sideways pull-down menu to select an answer, but the question would be dry… it would be fake… the testing-based standards model would be a stress-inducing made-up problem that would distract us from solving real world problems. With an experience-based standards model, we could say boldly and definitively, “Every school should have a community garden.” (...and nobody would challenge us). And then we would be looking around at other elementary schools (especially in the urban and Abbott districts) to see how successful their community gardens are. If they were to come up short, like… say… if they had trouble sourcing materials or finding space, rather than marching into town and yelling that they are failing their students (and then underfunding, privatizing, and destroying their public school systems), perhaps the State Department of Education could actually step in with support, financial or otherwise… maybe even participate and get their hands dirty (and it would make for great photo ops as State officials begin to take a more wholesome hands-on approach to education). You could almost hear the reflection in the rest of the country… “Hey, look what they are doing differently in The Garden State.”
From there, we could create the intellectual safe space for the children to figure out real-world math problems about perimeters or buying seeds on a budget… or maybe the experience for them will be about learning to swing a hammer… or discovering where fertilizer comes from...or watching a prized tomato grow. When we look at each child as an individual, the real world answers might be very different... as may be the questions. The fact is, Dr. Yannuzzi, that every hour spent by test writers, by administrators, by teachers, and by students… every hour spent on these standardized hypothetical problems… is an hour of time that could have been spent addressing real-world issues… an hour of time that could have been spent collaborating with others and learning from actually engaging in the world. And, yes, there is still a role for traditional academics (the best way to learn the twelve-by-twelve multiplication table is still a repetitive exercise in memorization), but we would find that it would take on a new context with active and engaged children. Perhaps, after the holiday, you and I, Dr. Yannuzzi, we should together take a tour of some suburban public schools, some urban public schools, and maybe we could stop by Delbarton as well. We could look with our own eyes together and notice the differences… the similarities. Perhaps by aligning our points-of-view physically, we could begin to align our points-of-view philosophically. It would be okay to walk away from the PARCC testing. Mistakes happen. Sometimes we find ourselves so over-committed to a singular proposed solution upon which we have been working, that we lose sight of whether it actually solves any problems. It happens. If we just walked away from the PARCC exams, we would never even have to mention them again. Let me know if Tuesday and Wednesday December 9 and 10 work for you. Perhaps we can put something together for a few members of the State Board of Education for touring a variety of schools and together we can come up with a new plan for implementing and measuring excellence in education. Let’s identify the investments that need to be made and create the political will for pulling it off. We all have a lot to be thankful for here in The Garden State. Thank you for your strong leadership, Dr. Yannuzzi. Have a very happy Thanksgiving. Warm regards, Justin Escher Alpert Livingston, New Jersey (917) 406-2323 For Residents
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