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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Dr. Vitti on testing, does he get it or is he putting teacher's jobs on the line

Dr. Vitti said all the right things in an interview with WOKV:

“I actually wanna go back to the days where we talked about just good teaching and learning,” Vitti says.

For Vitti, we have fallen in to an “FCAT craze.” He says teachers have fallen in to this mindset of needing to teach to the test, and they must now be “deprogrammed.”

“My first step is eliminating a lot of assessments we have in the district right now. We have too many,” he says.

He says when teachers are given the liberty to bring creativity back in to the classroom, it will excite them as well as the students, and the higher test grades will fall in after that. He realizes it may be a tough sell because so much emphasis is now placed on teaching to the FCAT and the funding that results from that, but things must change because the district has gone “too far.”

The problem is teachers jobs are now based on how their kids do on standardized tests. Yeah what Dr. Vitti said sounds great and I agree with him 100 percent but how do we ask teachers to put their jobs on the line?

The district needs to give some here. Several counties are already on record as saying they won't count standardized test scores against their teachers or at least initially, if Dr. Vitti wants teachers to risk their jobs it sounds like Duval needs to follow suit.    

1 comment:

  1. It will be fantastic if he eliminates a lot of the assessments. FCAT material can be incorporated into lessons without all the days lost to district assessments. I think most teachers will welcome what Dr. Vitti says here if they are truly devoted to good teaching and learning.

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