Loved when Prez was going through the kids' tests and basically got fed up and said he was going to try to just teach them anything he could. Season 4 was the best
There is a difference between being able to read and write and what they have on those tests. Some of the most intelligent people I know did terrible on the SATs but are highly successful. Standardized tests are worthless.
I think this is the first thread I've ever agreed with MojoMan on. This just seems like a common sense idea. The purpose of a teacher is to teach. And in grade school, a large and critical part of that is teaching the basics. You have to have a way to measure how well they are doing at that, and you have to be able to reward/penalize teachers who are or aren't doing their job well. Now, the specific form/quality of testing can be debated. But they already reward teachers that do their job well according to the test scores, so there's no reason it shouldn't also work the other way.
That is a small percentage of kids, really. Blaming the kids for the failures of the schools and teachers is really bunk. Crappy teachers and crappy parents let kids get away with that.
So you expect kids to be able to make that decision for themselves? Or let the parents decide? You do realize the outcome of such a policy, don't you?
Yeah, classrooms filled with kids who want to learn while not draining resources. In America you should have the freedom to make decisions yourself, sorry.
Yeah, give the choice to a kid if they want to go to school and learn, or stay at home and play video games... Hmmm, wonder which most will pick.
Standardized tests are far from worthless. Are they a perfect measure of a person's intelligence/knowledge? No, of course they aren't. Do the results of standardized tests correlate pretty well with intelligence/knowledge? I would guess the answer is yes. There are always outliers. However, I think most people scoring 1500+ on the SAT are better prepared for college than those scoring > 1100.
Kids typically, nearly 100% of the time, aren't capable or responsible enough to make those decisions for themselves. What you're suggesting would be a complete disaster that would send literacy rates crashing through the floor and poverty through the roof.
Compulsory education laws combined with a lack of school choice have made public schools the failed prisonesque entities that they are. The Amish and American Indian are exempt from this government coercion. The "pursuit of knowledge" should not be enforced by the state, for then it becomes, what it really is, government indoctrination.
Compulsory education isn't going anywhere, and shouldn't. I'm all for choice, competition, and accountability, though.
This must come from a sound bite somewhere. No substance whatsoever. You need to provide a proven alternative instead. Compulsory education, despite its faults, are 10 times better than nothing.
I'm not sure what is preventing Shovel Face from emigrating to that libertarian paradise- Somalia. Nobody's going to make him or his kids go to a stinking government indoctrination center, I mean "school" there.
The original post says it's based on improvement not the grade. It's easier to improve people, when they are at the bottom than when they are scoring near perfect on their tests. For example, if a person scores 40 the previous year, and the next year they get 60. That's a 50% improvement. Somebody that scores 90 and then scores 99, will show only a 10% improvement.
