What happens when you opt your kids out of standardized tests

boing
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Yes, this is a bit too ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. And how are you quantifying best-performing? Grades, test scores, salary?

Also:

principal and administration alternately cajoled and guilted her over her kids’ non-participation in pedagogically suspect, meaningless, destructive high-stakes testing.

This is a crazy opinionated, close-minded, anti-establishment tirade. It’s really hard to have a constructive conversation when your position is so emphatically against it.
I have 2 kids in 3rd grade, one with adhd, and the tests and quantifiable assessments they give all the kids is critical for making sure they put the right kind of resources, teachers, counseling, to best help every kid. This has proved amazingly effective. The opinion that it’s as meaningless as just showing who’s smart and who’s dumb is just missing the point.
We all want to make sure all of our kids get the best education possible, nothing can be perfect, but professors, teachers and administrators across the country are determined to do their best. What schools need are parents that are concerned about testing to be involved with what their content is and how it’s used and help improve things with their ideas. This opt-out or home school attitude is just bailing from the “system” which is effectively you bailing on your children. If you think you know better, involve yourself, don’t just try to make a political statement, that helps no one, especially your kid.

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Yep. I was the same way. But then, my parents knew that and encouraged me to take those tests.

If my kids do well in school and do not need standardized tests to prove it I’m not going to make them take them. My point is that students need to be seen as individuals and being able to fill in a Scantron doesn’t really show that well.

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Actually reads the stuff on the link and wonder they where they get all this ‘neutral’ data…
PISA… Tests:

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/

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Be careful not to confuse laziness with assignments and an aversion to irrelevant busy-work that was beneath his level of intelligence. Our public education system caters to the lowest-common denominator, so it’s really common that bright students have terrible grades. Not because they’re bad students, but because of a bad curriculum.

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This sounds like a woman who cares about her kid’s educational process and is educated enough to help guide them.

A lot of the “homeschoolers” and “No common core because it teaches liberalism” I see down here in the south are more interested in making political statements and forwarding their religion than they are in the education of their children… and they do NOT know enough themselves to be effective teachers.

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IMHO, this is a bad lesson. Learning how to just put your nose down and finish up the bullshit busywork is an invaluable life skill, because in the real world you get to work on extremely interesting and challenging problems sometimes, but other times you have to grind through all of the support stuff that your amazing solution requires.

I’ve seen too many prima donnas who can’t be bothered to do the “menial work” necessary to make their grand vision a reality. These people are eternally disappointed that their vision is never fulfilled and they never get the glory they think they deserve.

Learning how to plow through bullshit busywork is one of the most important forms of self discipline.

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Not on expert on Common Core - but where does this idea that it is liberal come from? From what I have gleaned it is just a list of what students at each grade level are supposed to learn. It isn’t a teaching method.

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Colleges don’t care at all about K-12 standardized tests. ]

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If the system isn’t satisfactory as a way of educating your kids, and if there’s little evidence that the system is at all interested in your opinion as a parent, it’s perfectly reasonable to bail from it.

People who have bailed in one way or another would be wrong to say that parents who like testing are doing a disservice to their children. That’s because the way we educate our kids is as profoundly personal as the way we feed them, or whether or not we take them to church. It’s factually and politely wrong to suggest that people who thoughtfully choose to do things differently are “bailing on their children.”

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Presumably because it doesn’t teach only lessons from the Bible. The people who rail against it most are the ones that homeschool because they don’t want evil “secular” ideas entering the brains of their children.

Plus, they might include evolution (gasp!) or the carbon cycle (shock!) or anatomy (filthy!) or any other such subject that said persons would object to.

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Actually no. The only ones that matter are the tests specifically for university acceptance. Half, no more than half, of the abysmal tests I took K-12 are were no longer in use by the time I graduated from high school. No one ever cared. They were complete wastes of time and effort.

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32

I don’t disagree with you. But kids are able to learn different things at different times and in different ways. The idea that all kids need to plow through bullshit busywork at the same time in the same way guarantees that large portions of those kids will simply have their time wasted. And it is, after all, their time. Not ours.

I’m just saying that if that’s a skill that kids need to learn, there are much better, more effective, less expensive ways of teaching it.

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33

Cory wrote,

McElroy’s story is a snapshot of an educational system in the process of implosion, driven by the ridiculous idea that schools are factories whose product is educated kids, and whose employees must be made “accountable” by measuring anything we can put a number on – attendance and test-scores – at the expense of actual educational outcomes.

My 11yo son is in a public school in the US and this is how they teach kids to write.

He comes home with a paper that has 250-300 word article. He is supposed to respond with a 20-word sentence reacting to the mini-essay.

And when they say a 20-word sentence, they mean a 20-word sentence – no more, no less. They actually print a 5x4 grid at the bottom of the worksheet and the instructions are that the student has accomplished the task when all 20 boxes are filled in with a word.

And this is why I pay an individual who works at the nearby university to tutor my son to develop genuine writing skills.

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When my kid doesn’t understand long division, it doesn’t help him at all to spend an hour on bullshit busywork for his social studies class. All it does is guarantee he’s not going to understand math at a level he’s going to need to in order to succeed.

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Our educational system is incredibly dysfunctional. There are LOTS of fixes out there in the literature, but nobody has the time to read them. The people who DO put the effort in to learn about education’s problems will tend to not have the time or skills to actually create the fix. And in the event that they try to go out and pitch their solution, even if they’ve invested a lifetime into studying the problem, people are going to take a huge sh*t on their idea. It’s what we all like to do. It’s built into us to do this.

Some organizations like the National Academies see all of this, and imagine that the solution is to professionalize the education research discipline. In other words, more simply put, they want to constrain the types of research which can get funded. The problem is that the people at the National Academy of Sciences – such as Bruce Alberts – have failed to even demonstrate that they are even paying attention to the findings of education research. They seem more interested in prescribing solutions than listening to peoples’ attempts to define the problem.

Meanwhile, I encourage people to pick up a copy of Future Jobs by Ed Gordon. The unemployment is not going away. It will be with us for the rest of our lives, because it has little to do with the economic collapse. It’s a skills gap between the universities and industry, and everybody is in denial. This is a global problem which is going to stagnate the entire world’s economy. And there are no guarantees at this point that this “knowledge economy” will actually happen within our lifetimes, unless we actually MAKE it happen.

Part of what is stopping it though are the corporations themselves. They want quick fixes, and they think they can avoid paying for the skills they want. That is why they always turn to offshoring. Well, guess what? India and China also want to be a knowledge economy. So, people …

WHERE ARE THESE KNOWLEDGE WORKERS GOING TO COME FROM?

It’s time for the world to wake the f*ck up to global stagnation, never-ending recession and unemployment. This is “the future”, until people decide to start paying attention to the crisis that is happening right now with the skills gap.

This is what’s happening in the real world today.

So, given that there are a zillion ways to assess people, and the SAT is really just one tiny sliver of an assessment which hardly even correlates with success, the very fact that people are even talking about the SAT still says to me that there is really little chance that we’ll be solving the skills gap anytime soon. The SAT measures just a handful of skills. To succeed in the knowledge economy, many more are required.

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Some conservatives dislike Common Core because it won’t teach their kids creationism. Some liberals dislike Common Core because it de-emphasizes literature and art to some extent.

It’s hard to believe the implementation won’t simply end up being a very standardized version of what is already not working in American public schools.

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I’ve idly wondered what the result would be if the school funding that is tied to standardized test scores currently were instead tied to the performance of those students at the next school they went to. Change the emphasis from making the students perform now to making sure they can perform later on down the road, as it were.

There are of course all sorts of possible issues with the idea, but it seems like a large part of the current problem is that a clear answer has been given to “how do we get more funding?” and it is sadly different from the answer to “how can we provide the best education to our children?”.

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They were not a complete waste of time for everyone. The time and effort was to gather proof (flying-fucking-V-air-guitar-quotes there) that teacher unions were holding back the students or keeping bad teachers at their jobs or whatever rhetoric was needed to further decouple labor and unity in public education.

They really seem to be reaping rewards for those interests.

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So we’re all going to call our members of congress and make an impassioned plea for more funding for education? Right? Right?!!

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Not just the US. The UK is exactly like this too.

I got nothing like what I should have done out of maths between the ages of 11-14 because I had to work through a prescribed set of maths textbooks that bored me rigid. I’d always ask for more challenging stuff and I’d be told I could do those when I’d worked through the earlier stuff.

Net result was I largely messed around instead. That teacher was a lazy moron waiting to retire.

My GCSE and (especially) A-level maths teachers were a billion times better.

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