Tuesday, February 26, 2008

HB2795

Tennessee home schoolers have a job to do. State legislature votes tomorrow on a bill(HB2795) to impose state testing of TCAPS on home schoolers. I know many home schoolers oppose testing at all, but we have our children tested with a national test every year. I use the results from the Stanford and from daily work and tests to plan goals for the next year. However, I would be discontent with a government which forces my children to take additional, unnecessary, and state-centric tests, because they want to have a thumb on my children's education. I guarantee the state does not care about the education of my child more than I do. Why would I want my children to endure three more grueling days of testing to the three they already have? Why has Tennessee stopped using national tests to gauge progress? Is it because we fall so far behind nationally?

A friend Miriam brought this point to my attention. What is to be done about the results of the TCAPS? If a home schooled child gets behind, will the state demand we put the child in public school? There are multitudes of children failing in public school. Will the government demand those children be home schooled?

Call or email your Tennessee reps today on this matter.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The ironic thing, of course, is that the TCAPS were *never* supposed to be used to evaluate children. They were supposed to be used, ensemble, to evaluate SCHOOLS. And TEACHERS.

truevyne said...

hmmmm, funny how times change, almost.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure the idea behind requiring the TCAPS for home schooling *is* to evaluate the teaching; however, they are no more an effective tool for evaluating teachers (or children) at home than they are in public schools. Tennessee (along with many other states, here in Illinois we have the ISAT) has been using BOTH national and state testing for many years--in other words, it's not an either/or proposition--but there is generally no difference in application for the scores of a state-level test than for a national one, at least not as far as I have ever seen. I can completely understand why you don't want to waste your time with additional standardized testing--I felt exactly the same way about the three days of lost classroom time when I was administering TCAPS to my students 10 years ago. Although I doubt the Tennessee legislature is interested in my opinion, for your sake I certainly hope it doesn't pass.

truevyne said...

lisa, i appreciate your insight. the bill didn't pass or fail yesterday, but will undergo revision.

Anonymous said...

Well, at least that's something. I'll be interested to see what comes of it.