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Big Spring Middle Schoolers Keirsten Singer, left, and Justin Miller, both 14, practice vocabulary in Ann Wolfe's class in June. (Mike Bupp/The Sentinel)
No Child Left Behind: Third in a series
As school starts this week, reporter Tatiana Zarnowski explores the trend focusing on changes being introduced in the classroom to initiate more interactive learning.
Ann Wolfe tells her students to begin, and they hurry to the large pieces of paper tacked on the walls around her classroom.
They scribble answers and run to hand a marker to a classmate, relay style. The seated students plan their next move, discussing possible answers.
Examples of literary alliteration, allusion and hyperbole cover the pages.
A few minutes later, Wolfe switches gears, and the students answer questions on the same words in a Jeopardy game. She combines group and individual work to help students to learn from others and answer for themselves.
"I'll know as a teacher who knows and who doesn't know" the answer, Wolfe says.
Wolfe, an eighth grade reading teacher at Big Spring Middle School, helped design the Reading Increases Students' Excellence (RISE) class to prepare students for the ninth-grade standardized writing test.
The test is part of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) that scores how well students meet state standards that align with the federal No Child Left Behind law.
School districts now offer more remediation courses than ever, thanks in part to the drive to improve students' PSSA scores.
At Big Spring, for example, every eighth-grader takes the reading class that Wolfe helped design. The approach is more interactive than traditional classes she has taught.
Practice part tough
When she started incorporating the relay race into the class, students who thought they knew the words but didn't know them well enough to write their own examples were "devastated," Wolfe says.
They had memorized the definitions for a test in other classes, but "they didn't actually know that they had to know it for knowledge, for life."
Other districts have made similar efforts to teach information in a new way.
Many remedial classes take students with low test scores and try to get them up to speed.
Cumberland Valley School District has hired reading and math coaches to train teachers and help them analyze test data.
Teaching students how to take the test is also a part of many classes.
Students must learn "good test-taking skills" to do their best, says Jean Walker, superintendent at Cumberland Valley, comparing CV's strategy for the PSSA to the SAT.
"There have been courses aimed at helping students get the highest scores they can on the SAT test," she says.
Walker aims to build test preparation into each class so "we don't have to stop what we're teaching and practice sample items from the PSSA," Walker says.
Remediation programs are more numerous on the elementary level than for middle and high school students.
Big Spring aims to change that at its middle school by adding a period for remediation for all students, says Jeanne Temple, director of curriculum and instruction.
Because clubs such as band and chorus meet during an existing remediation and enrichment period, some students miss out on extra help, she says.
Proficient not enough
All students, not just struggling ones, need time for remediation, Temple says. "Even though they are proficient, maybe they could move to advanced."
District officials point out they always had remediation programs to help students succeed.
But implementing new programs costs money, and some officials say their districts don't get enough from the government to put programs in place.
David Lovett, a board member at Shippensburg Area School District, says Shippensburg is an example of a district stressed by the costs of the No Child Left Behind Act.
"We have limited tax dollars. This plan is supposed to put us on equal footing with the wealthier suburban districts, but if you have a shortfall in the budget, it is difficult for us to match a district like Carlisle, for example."
It's one big game
Getting the right answers on a state standardized test is a "game," says Donna Benson.
It's a game many of her students refuse to play.
Benson teaches gifted students at Cumberland Valley High School, and says highly intelligent students tend to ignore test-taking conventions, especially when writing essays.
Instead, many write creatively, and as a result score low on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA).
"It's done kind of as formula writing," Benson says of how the writing portion of the PSSA is scored. "I want the kids to know what the formula is, but ... I want the kids to go beyond that," she says.
One student actually had to do remedial work because he failed the writing test. That shouldn't have happened to a teen who has great writing talent and is working on a novel, Benson says.
"I think creativity is really something that's being lost in this high-stakes testing type of atmosphere." Gifted students make up the top 5 percent of the population.
Highly intelligent students often have trouble with multiple choice and true-or-false questions because they "over-analyze" the question, Benson says.
She worries gifted and bright children get left behind when schools emphasize remediation.
Especially in the elementary and middle school levels, smart kids are "sitting there waiting for the rest of the kids to catch up," says Benson, who serves as president of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education.
When schools make proficiency their goal, they miss chances to enrich bright students further, she says. "Proficient isn't good enough for the progress we're facing in the future."
"I'm glad my children aren't in school anymore," says Candy Shively, who works for Cumberland Valley School District and used to teach special interest classes. "I think we're really skimping on the enrichment things and the higher level of thinking."
Wednesday: No Child Left Behind influences teachers in and out of the classroom.
Sentinel Correspondent Willa Jessee contributed to this story.
