RE: Exemptions to STAR and other standardized testing

Ze'ev Wurman writes:

> you do not know which standards will be tested in a given year.


I have heard that the same test is administered year after year; that this is one of the reasons there is so much "secrecy" and security surrounding the delivery and collection of the test booklets. Apparently, it is too "expensive" to come up with all of the norm-referencing & etc for original questions year after year.

JS Kelly
Parent
jskelly@jskelly.com

PS Ze'ev -- you worry about my daughter's progress in school, and that I perhaps overestimate her abilities. Do not worry: I know that she is doing very well, that she is already reading at a 3d grade level if not beyond, that she is already experimenting with multiplication, division and fractions in her spare time (at home), so I suspect that she will still be interested in such things in the 7th grade. I do not need a test to show me these things, I can see them simply by spending time with her. I also speak often with her teacher, who is a wonderful person. I mentioned her age and her progress at school in my original post only so that readers would see where I was coming from -- as a parent, as a parent of a young child facing testing next year, as a parent of more young children who will someday face testing, and as a parent who is opposed to testing, not because I worry that my child will not do well, but for other reasons.