[ale] Going OT: Cobb Laptop Deal

[Mark Wright]

On Aug 15, 2005, at 11:15 PM, Pete Hardie wrote:

> On 8/15/05, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> I grew to hate Accelerated Reader with a passion.  It basically wrung
>> all the desire out daughter had to read out of her when she was in a
>> Gwinnett County school.  The books were classified crazily, with  
>> widely
>> varying books put in the same classification, only a fraction of the
>> books the AR instance knew about were actually available in the  
>> library,
>> and, what really got our goat was that the competition between  
>> teachers
>> for AR points resulted in good readers getting their backs broken by
>> unethical teachers who were setting individual kids' goals.
>>
>> The school staff had nothing to say about any of this; in fact, they
>> told us that the only reason they had AR was because a long-gone
>> librarian refused to believe that some of the kids were actually  
>> reading
>> the books they said they were reading.  And, no telling how much this
>> all cost, but it had to be thousands.
>>
>
> What ever happend to the SRA reading tool?  I remember it from my
> youth, and it seemed quite easy to manage without computers.

I think they still have it but it does not grade the students for you  
and it requires more input from the teacher to use.  AR is the  
perfect example of the deception of politics.  As I mentioned  
earlier, I was hired to among other things install the networked  
version of AR at a private school.  I had to prioritize some of the  
other things so I asked the teachers what they needed most.  AR was  
at the top of the list.  They would regale me with stories of how it  
helped the kids learn and how the parents that put their kids here  
wanted to see this school do it because the gov school did it.   One  
teacher of preschool children said she had to have it because she had  
kids that needed reading material above the picture books that she  
had.  That really got me to wondering what this incredible program  
was and I was worried it might be a nightmare to install.  Again,  I  
was amazed to see all it does is ask questions and tally grades.  The  
kids get a book from the library, read it and take the AR test on the  
book.  At this school the student printed the test page and put it in  
their "show to mommy" book.  It is sold as "learning through  
computers" but it is just grading through computers.

Mark
>
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