Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
Your post seems to state that we need to put together good tests and grade them with quality people. Who would argue with that? But it doesn't seem to argue against testing.
If people are against testing, how else do we find if the teachers are doing their jobs? How else do we improve our schools? You can't be sure anything is working unless you have a way of measuring the success. Without testing what can we do to figure out what is working what is not? How do we insure our schools are doing their jobs.
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I am with you. Heck, even my sister the teacher is with you.
But -- there are lots of problems with this. (I might note that, thanks to the whole federalism thing, every state -- heck, every school district in every state -- is doing very different things for very different reasons.) First, my sister the teacher might point out that if you simply test a student, it doesn't really tell you how much a student learned in her class. So why would you say that she is doing a crappy job because of one test? She would suggest that teachers and schools should be measured based upon the progress of the student.
Fact -- when the Not Bobette was in elementary school, she did pretty well on a standardized test regardless of who her teacher was. You can't compare her score to that of a girl the same age who didn't speak English at home, or the one whose single parent father didn't have the time or inclination to read to her, or the one who had poor nutrition, etc. And this stuff is cumulative, such that by the third grade, there is a huge disparity between schools made up of haves and those made up of have nots (and, yes, there are individual exceptions).
However, the tests don't take that into account. And I agree that any kid can learn, and you shouldn't dumb down the curriculum, but the fact is that if a kid tests at the beginning of the school year at x less than where she should be, the measure of her teacher ought not to be simply "is she at grade level?" at the end of the year, but ought to consider "how far did she come this year?"
Many of the states that test don't do this. And those states that reward schools and teachers for high test scores will never attract good teachers to the schools where they are most needed.
