City school are over-crowded with undisciplined apes in human skin suits. Rather than promote teaching how to be a human being and rewarding this behavior, government throws money at lazy solutions like standardized testing. It was an okay idea if you were merely testing basic skills and knowledge, but one size fits all education does not work when you make it too broad.
My own experience with those easy standardized tests was why I never understood that particular opposition to "No Child Left Behind", although now I'm against public education in general.
I'm homeschooling and I like using standardized tests to benchmark progress.
That said, the tests themselves are structured in such a convoluted way that the hardest part is often determining exactly what the question is asking or how it's supposed to be answered. This leads to "teaching to the test" and the propagation of adherence to established hierarchy, rather than actual aptitude.
Standardized tests also play into the one-size-fits-all model of education. They should be a bare minimum but there don't seem to be any complementary aptitude tests to identify strengths that can be further developed. The guiding principal seems to be: if a kid passes, cover them in busy-work to keep then out of the way while we work on improving the failing kids.
This leads directly to boredom in the academic kids and, at the same time, boredom in the non-academic kids who may very well excel at fields that require problem solving, spacial awareness or physical aptitude, but are now stuck doing basic math and language drills.
I remember sitting a science exam and being presented with a partially labelled diagram of a blast furnace.
The first task was to fill in the rest of the labels, the second task was to write an explanation.
This was easy, because I had been presented this exact fucking diagram barely a month ago and told exactly what it was and how it worked. I was told everything about it.
I didn't have to understand anything. All I had to do was remember what I'd been told. A real science education would not have drilled the workings of this particular style of furnace into me. A real science education would have drilled into me the essential physical properties of the materials going into it. If I had known this, I could have answered this question for any design of furnace, not just this one that I'd been familiarized with.
The result is that I have a basic, shallow understanding of how a blast furnace works, but I don't really know the melting point of iron, the energy density of coal, or anything else that would give a me a deeper understanding of what is truly going on.
City school are over-crowded with undisciplined apes in human skin suits. Rather than promote teaching how to be a human being and rewarding this behavior, government throws money at lazy solutions like standardized testing. It was an okay idea if you were merely testing basic skills and knowledge, but one size fits all education does not work when you make it too broad.
My own experience with those easy standardized tests was why I never understood that particular opposition to "No Child Left Behind", although now I'm against public education in general.
I'm homeschooling and I like using standardized tests to benchmark progress.
That said, the tests themselves are structured in such a convoluted way that the hardest part is often determining exactly what the question is asking or how it's supposed to be answered. This leads to "teaching to the test" and the propagation of adherence to established hierarchy, rather than actual aptitude.
Standardized tests also play into the one-size-fits-all model of education. They should be a bare minimum but there don't seem to be any complementary aptitude tests to identify strengths that can be further developed. The guiding principal seems to be: if a kid passes, cover them in busy-work to keep then out of the way while we work on improving the failing kids.
This leads directly to boredom in the academic kids and, at the same time, boredom in the non-academic kids who may very well excel at fields that require problem solving, spacial awareness or physical aptitude, but are now stuck doing basic math and language drills.
I remember sitting a science exam and being presented with a partially labelled diagram of a blast furnace.
The first task was to fill in the rest of the labels, the second task was to write an explanation.
This was easy, because I had been presented this exact fucking diagram barely a month ago and told exactly what it was and how it worked. I was told everything about it.
I didn't have to understand anything. All I had to do was remember what I'd been told. A real science education would not have drilled the workings of this particular style of furnace into me. A real science education would have drilled into me the essential physical properties of the materials going into it. If I had known this, I could have answered this question for any design of furnace, not just this one that I'd been familiarized with.
The result is that I have a basic, shallow understanding of how a blast furnace works, but I don't really know the melting point of iron, the energy density of coal, or anything else that would give a me a deeper understanding of what is truly going on.
The Epoch Times is to boomercon to name the real culprit: demographics.