Metro Nashville school board member Will Pinkston said this week that Gov. Haslam’s letter to students to motivate them for standardized testing “might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Pinkston took to Twitter Monday to make his comments about the April 10 letter.
This might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Headline: @BillHaslam Pressures Kids to Do Well on Standardized Tests. #number2pencil pic.twitter.com/2TmF8FQYcj
— Will Pinkston (@WillPinkston) April 18, 2017
In attempting to strike a friendly and encouraging tone, Haslam wrote “you may feel excited or maybe a little nervous” about standardized testing and somewhat oddly compared it to a yearly visit to the doctor’s office for a check-up.
Far from feeling excited about standardized testing, students and teachers alike in recent years have said testing takes up too much time and that tests are poorly written and too often address topics not covered in the curriculum, causing students to despair.
Schools across the state are engaged in TNReady testing this month, trying to leave behind the problems of last year when procedural glitches forced the state Department of Education to cancel its contract with the testing vendor and find a new one for this year.
Haslam’s letter implies that students will be pleased to know that a nonprofit with a bureaucratic-sounding name is behind them.
“The printing of this letter, along with the attached No. 2 pencil, was donated by the State Collaborative of Reforming Education (SCORE),” Haslam wrote.
Yep. Took all that Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation money over the years, got Woodson to push the Race To The Trough special legislation then exit to be Bill Frist’s spending partner for all those Bill & Melinda Gates millions to propagandize Common Core. Achieve Inc. national co-chair Bredesen, B. Fielding Rolston and Bob Cooper all lying on that Race To the Trough federal grant application for $500M+, claiming every school district director, school board chair and union rep. signed the memorandum of understanding provided by the federal government….ahhhh those were the days…
Didn’t Will Pinkston and Phil Bredesen start the SCORE Organization. Sounded good at the time, huh Will?