Filed under: testing mom | Tags: new york city gifted and talented testing, nyc gifted talented test prep, testing mom review
More and more parents give their Testing Mom reviews on the internet!
Most are very positive and seems to have a personal beef with the Testing Mom. Not sure what’s going on with that relationship although it struck me as quite odd. Here’s an excerpt of their review of the Testing Mom program:
I think of testingmom as the first semester of test prep. A few months before the test, we switched to ridiculously hard oddball brain teasers that I found in a variety of places. I expected about 50% correct. If you are subscribing to testingmom a month before the test, cover the intro material and skip right to the really hard questions related to the test you are going to take. You will find these on the site, just not 20,000 of them.
Here are a couple more excerpts from reviews of Testing Mom online test prep program that are pretty positive.
This one is from mommy blogger: The Educators Spin On It
My youngest just started Kindergarten this year. I started teaching Kindergarten in 1997 and in almost 20 years quite a bit has changed when it comes to Kindergarten testing and even in Kindergarten Curriculum. I know this causes quite a bit of anxiety in parents. In this video, Karen Quinn, cofounder of TestingMom.com, addresses the difference between tests given for kindergarten admissions and kindergarten readiness. Karen discusses the similarities and differences among IQ tests, achievement tests, and readiness tests. If your child is getting ready to enter kindergarten, a gifted and talented program, or a private school, this video is a must-watch.
This one is from mommy blogger: Love, Peace and Tiny Feet
TestingMom.com is a fully accredited online education and test prep program for students Pre-K to 8th Grade. Their online educational program was designed by parents (with the support of education professionals) to help other parents and their kids aged Pre-K through 8th grade develop a lifelong love of learning.Through the site, you get immediate access to award-winning learning programs from the top names in education to help enrich your child’s abilities overall or in any subject area they are struggling with. These include Printables, practice tests and interactive games – just whatever you find your child responds best to.
Well, it looks like schools punish students who opt out of common core testing. At least according to this Washington Post hit piece. From Florida to California schools are retaliating against younger and older students on a variety of fronts. This ranges from holding back the younger kids to exclude high school students from early college prep programs. According to federal law school districts need to maintain a 95% test taker rate to keep the federal funds rolling in. Anything less than that the districts will be punished by reduced funding. If the schools get punished it seems it’s trickling down to the student level to increase test taking participation rates for the state common core test. In Buffalo, N.Y., for instance, kids applying to competitive middle schools who opted-out of common core testing were shut-out from the application process and even some private schools shut-out middle school students from applying due to no common core test scores. This goes against the NY State Legislature that past this amendment in 2014:
“[N]o school district shall make any student promotion or placement decisions based solely or primarily on student performance on the state administered standardized English Language Arts and Mathematics assessments for grades three through eight. However, a school district may consider student performance on such state assessments provided that the school district uses multiple measures in addition to such assessments and that such assessments do not constitute the major factor in such determinations.” NYS Education Law, Section 305, subdivision 47.
Don’t like common core? Here’s a video to support your point a view. Due to the recent election and President-elect Trump’s pledge to abolish the common core this may be much ado about nothing at this point in time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/603296ec-fc33-11e5-813a-90ab563f0dde
NYC Gifted and Talented Program and Testing 