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9-R should listen to parents, teachers

Thanks to Betsy Kimmick for being the voice of so many in our town, our state and the nation (“The Travesty of Testing,” Opinion, Herald, Dec. 7). The zeal for testing and retesting, data gathering and analysis, followed by more testing, blaming and shaming, is tragic.

To believe that all these numbers really represent children in all their amazing complexity, natural intelligence and creativity, or to believe that these numbers measure the skill and dedication of the teachers who are with these children daily, who spend their evenings and weekends planning for and constantly considering their students’ individual needs, is a huge mistake.

We will discover soon enough that this testing frenzy is not education. It will not produce confident, creative, skilled young people who have loved learning, loved school, and feel valued and ready to participate in their communities. It will not encourage teachers to work harder. It will demoralize and discourage students and teachers, frustrate parents and cause a huge loss of respect for the public schools in our country. It already has.

In my 34 years of teaching (26 in 9-R), I learned that education encompasses so much more than a new program, a new textbook series, a too enthusiastic need to constantly test. School time needs to be spent on all the rich learning activities teachers love to plan, lots of processing time for new skills and ideas to settle in children’s brains, and plenty of encouragement in the application of those skills and ideas. These things create lifelong learners.

I respectfully ask the school-board members to listen to the teachers who are in the classrooms, to listen to the frustrated and discouraged parents, to listen to the retired teachers who have a wealth of experience in the classrooms, and to direct our superintendent to use all this knowledge to drastically reduce this excessive testing, to trust the people who most understand how children thrive in the classroom, and to facilitate the kind of learning environment that we parents, teachers and community members know is best for our children.

Mary Wilson

Durango



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