Searching for Superman Amid Clanging, Rattling, & Smell of Hot Tar

I had an email on Monday from a friend you teaches in a public school in the USA. It was an intersting account of the struggles she is currently facing which (I'm sure) is typical of what 10s of thousands of teachers are facing across the country. Currently she is teaching in a room while roof repair goes on overhead and hot roofing tar bubbles outside her windows. Her 120 students span a range of abilities and attitudes towards learning and many of the more troubled are often not in school. Her performance will ultimartely be measured by how these kids do on some standardized test.
Today in the middle of a review lesson for the bimester exams that the school requires me to give  the guidance counselor walks in to take out the 3 lowest performing kids in the class for their MAPS test. The assistant principal had asked if this was o.k. at the end of last week and I said, "NO!!! These are the kids who really need this." Anyway away they went. I wished them good luck on their bimester exam and told them I was available recesses and after school to go over what they were going to miss. Maybe I can send them to the guidance counselor to do their required remediation after they fail their first attempt at the bimester exam - but somehow I think she'll be involved with pulling other weak students out of class for more standardized testing.

In 2006 the Center for Education Reform awarded my wife and I an award for our efforts with the school where we were working during and after Hurricane Katrina. Even if they hadn't given us an award and flown us to Washington to receive it I think we would support the organization. I certainly believe in their philosophy of educational choice within the separation of church and state requirements of the Constitution. a good organization and I am on their email list. I've had a few of their emails touting the video "Searching for Superman". I've heard it is a documentary about 5 families searching for the right school for their kids. Without knowing much more about the film than that I wonder how much variance there are in school choices. The school I was at in New Orleans had a language immersion progam and kids went into a classroom where they theoretically heard either French or Spanish all day starting in kindergarten, but we still had to measure our success based on how well the kids did on standardized state achievement tests. There was no credit given to the fact that the kids could have taken the tests in 2 languages.
Hopefully someday there will be a "Superman" who will stand-up and say "Hey. Leave these kids alone! We are not giving any standardized tests. Our measure of success is based on how well the students perform on objectives related to the  mission and goals of our school."