Portfolios and Prisons

Portfolios. Hmmmm…I like them. I am not a big fan of standardized testing and I think portfolios could be another way to display and assess a student’s progress. Portfolios also give a concrete look at what the student has actually constructed in class. Grades do not tell a parent much at all and I wonder, if a parent could see what a child is capable of, would there be more involvement and support at home towards the child’s overall enrichment and education? Because right now, all we do is throw numbers and percentages that are supposed to represent that child’s progress but you need a decoder ring and some whiskey to actually be able to decipher the information (decoder ring for the complicated number system and graphs and the whiskey to keep you patient and sane in the process). I realize that looking through portfolios and assessing them will be very time consuming and costly and that a trained monkey could run a scantron machine. But it is hard to take education seriously when no one is willing to fork over the dough to make things happen in that arena. And I wonder who we are hurting when we are not willing to pay up for better opportunities for our students. There are tons of studies (yes, I used the super scientific word “tons”) that connect education and literacy to future performance or future imprisonment. If we know that a student doing poorly now has a greater chance of going onto becoming incarcerated later, then why not really invest financially in education to turn this around? The way I see it, we will be paying for them one way or another and I am pretty sure the prisons are already over crowded. Phew, rant over. Tune in next time when my tangent from Macs vs. PCs leads me to discuss all that Lady Gaga stands for. Until then…