Two recent stories indicate that reform is a lot harder to sustain than to initiate. First, Robert Pondiscio offers this smart analysis of the news from the Washington Post that several DC schools that showed tremendous progress on state tests a few years ago are now plateauing:
Test prep and simplistic reading strategy instruction that focus on trivial stories-students learn to predict, to summarize, to infer - does nearly nothing to add to a child's store of knowledge, making such a one-time boost nearly inevitable.???? An absence of background knowledge is the difference-maker??and left unattended it eventually shows up in the test scores.??
Then we learn from the New York Post that 75 percent of the city schools' graduates need remediation as freshmen at CUNY--the same as last year. It's the first time in several years that there wasn't a decline.
Does anyone else find this depressing, or is it just Monday?
??-Mike Petrilli
