Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 9

Excerpts from this article:

Over the last few years America has invested a great amount of talk into the low quality of education. Most of this talk focuses on teachers. Teacher accountability programs have been mandated by NCLB and created in almost every state. However, as we shall review below, most of the major decisions affecting the quality of education are not made by teachers.

…Education is primarily top-down. Politicians and administrators make the decisions about the methods, the curriculum, and the goals. They give teachers mandates. Teachers are frequently not permitted to draw on their training and experience to contribute to the decisions about curriculum, methods, or student needs.

…This top-down approach is plagued by fads and constant reform.

…NCLB and other reforms place increasing pressure on educators to teach all students the same material – regardless of the students’ interest, skills, or background, or the changing job market. The material that teachers are required to teach is usually defined in a central curriculum office to match specific standardized tests. The standardization process eliminates interesting diversions, application to real life, higher level thinking, and the specific backgrounds and skills of the teaching staff.

…state and federal regulations actually de-emphasized complex high-level problems and communication instead placed great emphasis on short, simple, routine problems and basic skills. As a result many schools now do less to prepare students to deal with real complex issues and communication than they did before the regulations were implemented.

…Standardized test are based on the assumption that all students learn in the same order. Yet, any skilled teacher can tell you that students can and will learn in their own order.

…Standardized tests and textbooks reinforce misleading perceptions about learning and success.

…Politicians and administrators with no experience, or minimal experience, in education make decisions. Teachers get reprimanded for disagreeing even when the orders contradict their best training and experiences. States and school systems use tests that are known to be misleading and based on false assumptions. Teachers and students both get judged based on these unreliable evaluations.

Go to this link for more:

http://conceptualmath.org/misc/ed_regs1.htm