What It Takes to Get *Very High Test Scores*

Parent – Shut up and do your work.

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I belong to the job review site, Glassdoor. On occasion, the site sends emails about possible information of interest based on my previous page views. On Jun 21, 2016, I received an email about recent salaries and other info on New-York-based Success Academies (SA).

I write often about SA, in part because SA does get very high test scores– extraordinary test scores, in fact— and high test scores are the single most important measure of success in corporate education reform. To the corporate reform mind, little else matters.

But what about the cost for SA’s very high test scores? For there is indeed a cost, and such cost is well represented in SA employee reviews on Glassdoor.

In adhering to Glassdoor’s terms of use, I will not directly post employee review information. However, what I will do is paraphrase and leave it up to interested readers to sign…

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The skill of competence

There are two fine lines splitting spoof and serious. See David Didau, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education
June 17, 2016

Making Learners Extraordinary ™

It is becoming increasingly clear that none of the jobs that people do today will even exist in five years time (apart from maybe undertaking). Therefore, there is no point in teaching students to regurgitate rote, disconnected facts. We cannot predict which facts they might need because we don’t know what they will be doing and, even if we did, the jobs of the future will not require low-level cognitive skills like fact-knowing. Instead, these tasks will be done by computers – Google will know facts for us. Careers will require higher level cognitive processes. Neuroscience shows that these are the executive skills that coordinate the brain.

At the Extraordinary Learning Foundation™, we have been working on better ways of developing the higher level skills of comprehension and communication. When you look at the performance of experts and scan their brains in a scanner then different areas ‘light-up’ when they are…

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