Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
If people are against testing, how else do we find if the teachers are doing their jobs? How else do we improve our schools? You can't be sure anything is working unless you have a way of measuring the success. Without testing what can we do to figure out what is working what is not? How do we insure our schools are doing their jobs.
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Problem is, absent objective standardized testing, there is no way to measure how the bottom kids in School A are doing compared to the bottom kids in School B. The testing we have right now is obviously far from perfect, but I'd bet that it gives us more accurate info than the system we had before (which consisted, I think, of teachers saying "we're doing well", and employers saying "um, they can't read, or make change.")
In MN, the teacher's union fought (and is still fighting) testing. When asked for some suggestions concerning how we could measure school-by-school success, they did come up with a formula. The teachers' philosophy regarding this is so entirely self-serving as to be laughable.
It involved not one measure of student performance. It graded schools entirely based on how much the school spent per pupil. If the expenditure was lower then others, then, clearly, the school was doing worse than the others.
NCLB, and its testing component, aren't perfect. Maybe they're not even great. But our teachers' input showed that we need
something that objectively measures some part of what the kids are learning.
