I believe the idea is that the entire curriculum is then centered around teaching the test, versus what kids actually need. As to whether that's the primary issue, no idea.
I'd be far more okay with standardized tests if the requirement also banned homework until at least Junior High. Otherwise it's a race to the bottom to see which schools can suck up as much of the children's and families home time to help improve the schools scores.
Some of the reason schools start homework so early is that parents demand it. I've seen parents complain that a first grade class isn't academic enough because the teacher didn't assign enough homework.
If you measure it less, you'll have a weaker argument for how the education system is doing!
Your comment is precisely the problem: objective metrics will always support their proponents' arguments for more measurement, while any upsides to a lessened objective grading will be difficult to show because they'll involve subjective assessment or less assessment.
Do not confuse the investigator's convenience in accessing a truth value for the truth value itself.
That argument has been made many times and in great detail. See for instance the work of Diane Ravitch, former US Assistant Secretary of Education (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch)
School-funding and even whether a school closes or not is tied to these tests, so there would be some work involved in replacing that aspect of standardized testing in US schools as well.
No, the opposite. We didn't understand the decline of US public schools until we started trying to systematically measure their performance.
Standardized testing has been around for decades, but was a tool for sorting students. It is only within the last decade or so that we have tried to measure the performance of schools, districts, and states, as systems.
It always blows my mind when I see people on HN complaining about school testing and measurement. If you tried to run a web application or a business with zero ways to measure its performance, how do you think that would go?
The thing is, what do you gain by knowing that school X scores 13% lower on standardized tests than school Y? That school X is worse than school Y? How does that help you provide a better educational experience for the students?
My mom's been a teacher for ~40 years, and one thing to realize about standardized tests it that they don't provide any new information to the teachers---the teachers already know which students are struggling and which students aren't. In fact, standardized testing reduces teachers' ability to respond to variation in student ability, because all students need to be prepped for the same test. Preparing lesson plans is one of the most time-consuming aspects of being a teacher, and standardized tests make that task more difficult by adding more requirements. IMO, it would be better to focus on ways to reduce teachers' administrative burdens---perhaps by making it easier to collaborate and share lesson plans with other teachers[1].
[1] And I mean genuinely make it easier to collaborate, not forcing teachers to spend 90 minutes a day trying to enter their plans into the latest and greatest ed-tech website. If you want the information standardized, hire someone specifically to transcribe paper plans into whatever system the school administrators pick.
It is possible (even likely) that our current standardized tests need some adjustment to fit the needs. However the purpose of standardized tests is there are standardized needs. As a member of society I want everybody to know some things.
If a kid passes first grade without getting the correct answer to 2+2 there is a problem, it isn't acceptable to say your school doesn't teach math until second grade. In a single school that is just fine, but people move and so on a national scale that does not work.
Now I understand that not all kids have the same abilities or backgrounds, and both make a big difference in how far those kids can go. That needs to be managed, but it needs to be managed in the standardized process.
It does seem to me that teachers should have a few common lesson plans to choose from. There is no reason a teacher should have to create their own plan. Being a good teacher within a plan should be easier because they can prepare to use a working plan.
Now I understand that not all kids have the same abilities
or backgrounds, and both make a big difference in how far
those kids can go. That needs to be managed, but it needs to
be managed in the standardized process.
If our society were prepared to manage the fundamental issues that plague our educational system, then your rationale makes perfect sense, assuming that the standardized lesson plans were designed to facilitate the assessment of meaningful programs. But we're not prepared. Rather, the standardization efforts were an excuse to avoid addressing the fundamental issues, and have become a distraction that causes authorities to focus on the wrong aspects of educational reform.
The overwhelming factor in educational achievement of a population is the quality of home life, and in particular the participation of adult family members. Poor families have neither the time, money, nor enculturation to facilitate meaningful improvements in home life. Without a social commitment targeting the root causes, such as by providing free day care, the standardization efforts achieve nothing, and unnecessarily constrain local control.
Since the Bush-era standardization reforms, the achievement gap has only _grown_. And we're still matriculating kids without the requisite skills as the alternatives, like holding kids back year-after-year, are neither desirable nor practical.
With some competitive pressure from school choice at the margins, coupled with per-student funding, it would also provide incentives for schools to improve.
In practice, it seems to create a black hole where a school that serves a population that isn't good at tests (e.g disabled kids, non English speakers) gets low scores so everyone who could get a good score leaves and then the school does even worse and gets less funding and then the school is failing and the "fix" is to fire the administration, spend money bringing in new staff who don't know the area or the students, and expect that to solve the systemic issues revealed by poor test scores.
To avoid this, schools are indeed incentivized to improve - for instance, by directing low performing students to stay home on the day of the test, or by discouraging students with learning difficulties from attending at all.
That means we are not using the tests results correctly though. Knowing there is a problem is the first step in fixing it - but it doesn't tell you what the next step is.
No it doesn't. It could easily result in less social utility by promoting self-segregation and the concentration of funding into high achievement schools where the marginal utility of each additional dollar is substantially diminished at the outset.
The reason why kids from poor families do poorly in school is also the reason why those families are _least_ likely to be selective in their choice of schools. These are not independent phenomena.
So unless the only utility function that matters is freedom to choose your school, approaches like vouchers are unlikely to improve things and could easily not only perpetuate but exacerbate achievement gaps and derivative social issues, like crime.
The evidence indicates that voucher systems improve test scores, graduation rates, and other aspects of both public and private schools, not just the latter:
Scaled-up voucher programs like those previously advocated
by Secretary DeVos show the worst effects. There have
recently been four statewide voucher programs: Florida,
Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio. The Florida study is
inconclusive, and the others show large negative effects. In
some respects, the Louisiana results are more convincing
because the results have been corroborated by two different
sets of researchers and students were assigned to vouchers
by lottery—the most rigorous way to evaluate vouchers. In
terms of providing convincing results, the Indiana and
Ohio programs, are somewhere in between, but these show
negative results as well.
Voucher supporters argue that the results have been worse in
the recent statewide programs because they have been
“heavily regulated,” by which they mean the requirements
that students be tested, that these results be made publicly
available, and that schools must let in any student who is
eligible for the voucher. The fact that this fairly minimal
oversight is considered controversial or heavy-handed,
however, only reinforces that private schools are designed
to be exclusive and have little interest in external
accountability.
I wouldn't expect charter schools to actually change much because the evidence is very clear that the most important factor in achievement, overwhelmingly, is the child's home environment.
If your metrics for your web application aren't a good proxy for user experience, those metrics can drive you to make your application worse.
Focusing schools on testable performance leads to unintended consequences. My kids had heavy homework loads starting in first grade. They were still kids! and got robbed of much of the joy of childhood that should been afternoons playing at the playground and running around the neighborhood. All so the schools could pump up their test scores, by forcing their "customers" to carry the load.
There's some relevant business wisdom: "what gets measured gets done".
By aligning our educational institutions towards testing we created educational institutions that teach the test and not the rest.
Standardized testing is super important. I agree, though, it's a pretty poor proxy for how well schools are performing and who needs what... By way of example: schools with low-scoring test takers likely have environmental issues that impact school performance. The conclusion should likely be beefing up the budget and expanding the schools role to being more "community centers" full of social workers.
Poverty is a cycle, individual disruptive elements in school hurt all students, and that little 'war on drugs' has removed a lot of the support structure we expect in those families... Reducing the budget of schools with students in bad situations who can't test properly because their students are in bad situations and therefore can't test properly seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. A prophecy that happens to align very nicely with the ideology and stated goals of the group that pushed "no child left behind".
> By way of example: schools with low-scoring test takers likely have environmental issues that impact school performance. The conclusion should likely be beefing up the budget and expanding the schools role to being more "community centers" full of social workers.
This is a great idea I would be fully in favor of. But we can't start having these types of conversations unless we know how schools are actually doing.
