The Maine Learning Results are basically various numbers that tell how well and what the students in Maine are learning. While the results make it easier for teachers to see what the students need to improve on, they also make it harder for accelerated students to continue to excel. These results will make Maine more educated on several different facets of school based learning, but where Maine is above average already the scores will drop.
Between The Maine Learning Results and No Child Left Behind, students are becoming less specialized and more like clones. With the way students are being homogeneously taught, programs like Gifted and Talented will be all but wiped out in the near future. Honors classes will be taken away to have every student learn the same concepts. This can be a problem for students who learn quickly, but also those who are strong in some areas, but not others. A student with a weak English background will be placed in a class with some of the better writers in his or her class. A strong math student will have to hold back his or her abilities to wait for the others in the class to “catch up”. It is no secret that some students are better than others in certain areas of learning. To ignore this fact is to ruin education.
Common Assessments are a good idea that could be used to make students aware of what type of skills are required of them. What is needed is a method for teaching all levels of students so the children that do no quite understand why subtracting a negative number is the same as adding it don’t have to be pressured to figure that out by the kids who can figure out the derivative of 6×2. Instead of forcing the quicker students to slow down and the slower students to speed up, all kids should be able to learn at their own pace. This can be achieved by developing different rubrics based on the level of learning. Students in an AP English course should have more expected of their writing than students just getting started with their freshman year. Thus there should be separate rubrics that detail what is expected at each new level of achievement. The trials are being run now. Hopefully by the time the elementary school children make it to high school, the system will be running more smoothly.
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