If the students do not find the work they are doing relevant to the world they live in, they will lose interest and drop our or fail sooner or later. We need to change the focus of education away from high stakes testing and make the subject matter we are teaching our students relevant to their lives.
Students need to be interested in what they are learning and know why what they are learning is important to them. High Stakes Testing like Leave no Child Behind or Race to the Top is a waste of teaching time. Students do not learn while they are being tested and current testing takes weeks out of the school year and costs millions of not Billions of dollars. It is really that simple. If what they are doing in class is relevant and therefore interesting to them, each student will do their best to learn what is being taught to them.
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