No, you're not opposed to standardized testing
So someone posted a gif to facebook (where I've been hanging out most of the time lately) about how finlands education system is so spifftastic because they pay teachers well, give recess, and don't do mandatory testing and that triggered an urge to rant in me.
People who are normally right thinking folk (i.e. liberal) often get their panties in a wad over standardized testing in schools and it annoys the crap out of me. Unless you are one of those complete numb-nut woo-woo types who think there should be no testing of any kind any where under and circumstances (and are thus an idiot too stupid for words) you don't really object to standardized testing.
You might object the amount of time and effort spent on test prep, or the specific materiel the test covers, or the stakes for the children who are taking them. But that is all secondary crap not necessarily part of standardized testing. In many places one or more of those things gets wrapped up in standardized testing but they don't have to be and that is what people who care about school reform should focus on, not the testing itself.
Standardized testing is not really a test of what the children know, it is a test of how well we are teaching them. And that in the long run is more important than the fate of any particular child. As cold blooded as it may seem, any given kid can get hit by a bus, what matters to our society are the aggregate fate of the entire class. That's what standardized testing does a better job of revealing than anything else we have come up with.
In my frutopia you teach the kids the best lesson plan y'all can come up with and then you regularly run the lot of them through the test mill. You do this so often that it is not a single make-or-break event, it provides the kind of massive data you need to really know where every given kid is, both in comparison to their class mates, but to themselves and to kids nationally. You look at the derivatives of the trendlines and compare teachers. The tests themselves are only loosely related to the actual lesson plans so you can get a sort of orthogonal take on the effectiveness of teaching and allow for a variety of lesson plans and teaching styles. You use the outcomes of the test to steer the teachers into the right places for them and the students into the most appropriate places for them.
Believe it or not that is the direction the education establishment is moving towards, but it's big and ponderous, full of (though not as many as is sometimes depicted) over privileged parents, incompetent teachers with seniority, even less competent administrators, hoodlum kids who's only interest in school is the chance to see their friends, and underfunded facilities. But we are always going to have those, we have to design a system that can cope with all of those things and more.
People who are normally right thinking folk (i.e. liberal) often get their panties in a wad over standardized testing in schools and it annoys the crap out of me. Unless you are one of those complete numb-nut woo-woo types who think there should be no testing of any kind any where under and circumstances (and are thus an idiot too stupid for words) you don't really object to standardized testing.
You might object the amount of time and effort spent on test prep, or the specific materiel the test covers, or the stakes for the children who are taking them. But that is all secondary crap not necessarily part of standardized testing. In many places one or more of those things gets wrapped up in standardized testing but they don't have to be and that is what people who care about school reform should focus on, not the testing itself.
Standardized testing is not really a test of what the children know, it is a test of how well we are teaching them. And that in the long run is more important than the fate of any particular child. As cold blooded as it may seem, any given kid can get hit by a bus, what matters to our society are the aggregate fate of the entire class. That's what standardized testing does a better job of revealing than anything else we have come up with.
In my frutopia you teach the kids the best lesson plan y'all can come up with and then you regularly run the lot of them through the test mill. You do this so often that it is not a single make-or-break event, it provides the kind of massive data you need to really know where every given kid is, both in comparison to their class mates, but to themselves and to kids nationally. You look at the derivatives of the trendlines and compare teachers. The tests themselves are only loosely related to the actual lesson plans so you can get a sort of orthogonal take on the effectiveness of teaching and allow for a variety of lesson plans and teaching styles. You use the outcomes of the test to steer the teachers into the right places for them and the students into the most appropriate places for them.
Believe it or not that is the direction the education establishment is moving towards, but it's big and ponderous, full of (though not as many as is sometimes depicted) over privileged parents, incompetent teachers with seniority, even less competent administrators, hoodlum kids who's only interest in school is the chance to see their friends, and underfunded facilities. But we are always going to have those, we have to design a system that can cope with all of those things and more.