1 Here's what I think of that...

2 Yeah, that just about sums it up.

3 As a teacher, this really ticks me off.  My guess is that the pressure to institute this change came from parents who thought it was the teachers' fault their kids were doing so poorly.  Heaven forbid the student should have anything to do with the scores he/she receives--or the parents, for that matter!  Victim mentality...

4

This is why the barely defensible No Child Left Behind thing has some merit.  At some point we have to decide what children should know and be capable of when they receive a High School Diploma because that document is used by prospective employers to make assumptions about their abilities. 

On the other hand, some people are bad at tests.  But they shouldn't be THAT bad.  Some combination of school performance and standardized testing may be necessary.  Or not.

The point is that some standard must exist as to what that document is worth and right now there isn't one.  Everyone gets one no matter how useless they are and that's it.  It's like saying everyone is special.  If everyone is special, noone is. 

Same reason I'm completely against 'everyone going to college.'  A very large percentage of the population should not go to college but that's a rant for another time.

5 While qualifying for my Secondary Edu. license it became more and more apparent to me that every other education-linked factor(students, supervision, unions, gov't, etc...) had priority/control in the classroom over the actual classroom teacher. The teacher must teach to the lowest common denominator(and teach specifically to tests that will arbitrarily determine school funding), to include actual criminals that they are often virtually unable to control or to remove from the classroom. The teachers of a typical public school will not only have 120+ students per day, but those students are revolving students, in custody situations(or involving migrant workers, many of which are illegal, and have little English, which the teacher is also supposed to teach them) that keep them from long term attendance at one school(so no continuity or loyalty can be established with them), and the teacher will be required to donate(mandatory volunteering)time to extra-curricular activities and disciplinary/remedial activities, while still creating lesson plans, grading papers, and meeting with parents and students, and attending to their own required on-going education. I left education entirely, as do a very large percentage of teachers within their first five years, and I do not see positive changes occurring in public education on a national scale beyond a lot of non-reality based yammering. The Edu system in this country is in deep do-do, and the reasons "why" are not being addressed...

6 Right.  Because when these kids get out in the real world, there'll be no consequences whatsoever for turning in shoddy work that's late.  None at all!

7

How is it that the bloody Amish can, up to the 8th grade, educate their students to a superior level to those attending public schools on only $50 a year? (Or thereabouts: these numbers probably need some adjusting--upwards likely in both cases if this story is to be believed.)

Also, why is it that if I crack a textbook from the 60s or earlier, the subject matter, by grade, is far, far more advanced than it is now? Is it even possible to believe that with superior nutrition, technology, etc. that students have become collectively dumber since? I don't think so...

8 Thank the NEA and the gov't that subsidizes them, and state edu unions, ECM...The gov't FAILS at everything it does or subsidizes, except the military, which is actually in its job description.

Education has become baby-sitting service/propaganda arm by the gov't.

9 MP, the problem with having performance rated on a combination of test-taking and in-school performance is illustrated perfectly by this post - you end up with in-school performance that doesn't properly reflect the actual learning going on.  It's not just about learning the material, it's about teaching children that there is an expectation of performance. 

And I'm about to go on a rant here, is anyone surprised?

If I hear one more person bitch about 'teaching to the test', I'm gonna have a damned aneurysm!  If the test contains the material that is supposed to be covered during a school year, then by God, that teacher damned well better be teaching to the test!  And don't give me crap about 'some people don't test well' - test taking is a freakin LEARNED SKILL.  And the skills you learn from test taking are the same skills that help with other situations, like, oh, performance anxiety during job interviews, thinking on your feet, and critical thinking to help choose a right course of action.   Yes, these skills can be learned other ways, but we're doing our kids a disservice if we don't teach them how to demonstrate their knowledge, their capacity, and their ability.

NCLB would be a helluva lot more defensible if the teachers supported it.  The teachers don't support it because a) it was implemented by a Republican, and 2) most teachers have no interest in being held accountable for their work.

I'm about to scream like Howard Dean here, dammit!

10 Wow...someone's gotten defensive!
"Teaching to a specific test" to a conglomerate of students at all points on an entire spectrum does not teach anything but that test, which is the reason for the use of the word "specific". There have been recent example in the news of teachers cheating, giving the actual answers to the students just before the test, and most of them failing.

After leaving teaching behind I became among other things, since it is seasonal work, a professional test-grader, where open-ended questions require written descriptions, or lists, or categorization, or demonstrated problem-solving to be evaluated and scored. The majority, and do mean majority of the many hundreds of thousands of tests that I graded, in math, in English, in science were poor, to be generous...

I don't attack Bush on this issue, in fact a recognizable standard must be established and upheld(which is where the problems start), but that standard can not be consistently met if no responsibility can ever be affixed to ANYONE in the entire universe. The students are not meeting that standard, and for whatever multitude of reasons, they are not being taught to that standard. even of mere rote facts. The USA now stands at about 15th in the world in education and we are spending more on education, by far, in percentage than any other country. We are being handily "whipped like the family pig" by third world backwater slum countries, to taxed to death for our abject FAIL.

11 I don't think you understand the meaning of the word defensive, J David.  I'm not defensive about our educational system, I'm furious.  And you're showing your lack of knowledge of how NCLB is practically applied in your overbroad statements.

12

Education Rant (all assertions are based on personal experience so your mileage may vary.)

Here are my favorite myths about the education system.

1) Teachers are underpaid:  Teachers are WAY NOT underpaid.  If you consider the actual skill set required to teach any non-specialized topic up to and mostly including High School you are dealing with very common abilities which can be trained relatively quickly to almost anyone.  Therefore, the supply of people that can do that job is WAY WAY bigger than the demand.  This tends to lower the price.  Even at this lowered price, teachers get paid (in Wisconsin anyway...) above the national income average to START and get graduated pay increases and eventually tenure no matter HOW SHITTY of a teacher they are.  Combine this with getting 3 months off per year PAID and you've got a pretty fucking awesome job that pays much more per hour worked than it probably merits. 

I hear all the comments about how important teachers are and how we can't punish people for creating the next generation or whatever "it takes a village" bullshit we hear but in reality what I want out of a teacher is to FUCKING TEACH MY CHILDREN FACTS and how to think.  That's not exactly rocket science, especially considering that the material is provided for them in handy-dandy books.  I honestly could go ON AND ON with this.

2) Some people aren't good at taking tests - Okay, I can't PROVE that some people aren't but I have a strong suspicion that people that "aren't good at tests" don't normally have a solid grasp of the material.  I mean, it asks you a question.  You answer it.  There may be cases where this isn't true but it can't be at more than 1 in 1000.  I know for a fact that the people I went to school with that failed tests failed because they weren't prepared.

3) The education system needs more money - This is patently, provably ridiculous.  Adjusted for inflation our per-student expenditures have DOUBLED in the last several decades with a notable decline in performance.  Money, particularly government money is not the answer.  I guarantee that, were competition reintroduced into the system, the quality of education would skyrocket while the cost would decline noticably.  Oh, and while we're at it, let's fire about 95% of the middle-management bureaucrats nation-wide. 

/RANT

13 I was not, in my original comment, making anymore than a "broad" comment on the unwieldy education system, and more specifically on the fact that "teaching" is being taken out of the hands of teachers, by a number of factors(of which arbitrary standardized, one-size-fits-all tests are just one), while the expectations of those same teachers is being increased.

When someone has a "screaming" fit over a defense of teachers(and not a slam on standards, or tests, or whatever), and NCLB, which I never once mentioned, then I am bound to call that "defensive". Now if you wish to get in some kind of flame war over things I didn't say because you have a wild hare about some personal problem, that would seem to me to be poorly expended effort on both our parts.

14 Thomas Sowell has an article somewhat along the lines of my thinking linked in The Conservative Grapevine today, where he questions an education system which is consistently out performed by homeschooling "amateurs".

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