Eric Seidman of Granite Bay is the author of “On Standardizing Education,” one of the five most compelling stories submitted to the Right To Learn Campaign.
California’s method of checking for student achievement, the infamous STAR tests, doesn’t sit well with Eric Seidman, a senior from Granite Bay High School in Granite Bay.
“The way standardized testing goes on, there is no incentive for students to participate or put forth their best effort,” Seidman said. “All it checks is how well students can bubble in answers.”
Most students don’t understand their school’s API score or what it means, and administrators do little to explain it to students in an understandable fashion, explains Seidman.
Seidman is president of his student body, meaning he pretty much has the most powerful voice in his school. But he still acknowledges that students don’t have enough say in the state government or even in the things they are learning in school. Students have plenty of ideas about how to improve achievement testing, if school and state officials would just ask, he said.
“Teachers don’t get through the entire curriculum by April because there are still two months left in the year,” he said. “There is a better way of assessing schools; we should judge them based on other factors, such as graduation rates, the number of students taking AP courses and the number attending school each day.”
He also suggested that there should be additional funding given to schools that do poorly on tests to help them boost their scores as well as rewards to schools that did well to keep them doing well.
Eric wrote multiple stories for Right To Learn, including one about mandating preschool and another about how the school system is being run like a business.
“Mandating preschool just seems to make sense,” Seidman said. “I can’t understand what it’d be like to go to Kindergarten without a day in preschool. It’s too important to come with a price tag.”
Even with all the challenges to the California school system, Eric hopes to attend the University of California at Berkeley and major in mechanical engineering. He hopes to work in the automotive industry to help prevent global warming or to become a Disney Imagineer and help design rides at the park.
Eric is also very involved with his synagogue, where he teaches Hebrew, and has played soccer for Granite Bay for four years.
Tags: engineering, funding, Granite Bay, preschool, standardized testing, STAR tests
