Great Article About Consequences of Teaching to the Test

[SundayCrepes]

My SIL posted this on facebook. I responded, "This is one of the many, many reasons we homeschool."

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0606jw.html#.Te7PvATjgk0;facebook

[GirlBoyGirl]

That is really sad!

[momtokea]

Very interesting article.

Just yesterday a friend of mine called me up to ask me if I knew of any websites where she can "download some study notes" for her 7th grade son to use to study for his finals.

Apparently he is the "best in his class... better than all the other kids... his lowest mark is 92%", but she calls me to ask for "study notes".  Apparently, since I homeschool, I know all about accessing great websites with study notes for every 7th grade kid  (my dd is in 7th grade, but we don't follow the local curriculum we do our own thing -- she knows this).

Um ... if he has been sitting in his classes all year listening to the teacher, and he is at the top of his class, shouldn't he know what's on the test and what to study?  Why does his mother have to find study notes for him??

Apparently he doesn't have any notes to study from, nor can he tell her the topics they studied this year.

Um .... okay.  Go figure.

[Lisa1970]

One thing about teaching to the test, beyond the other things, is in Texas, very few things are actually tested. So, then the schools will stop teaching everything except those. So, handwriting, spelling, grammar are not tested. And calculators and charts on how to do things are allowed in the math tests so math is not really tested, just how to use the calculators and figuring out which things from the chart to apply.

[Cyllya]

I've done data entry for two different government organizations, and I've noticed that some people are just really bad at filling out forms. For example, there's an area on the AZ individual tax return where you put in your number of dependents, people 65+ years old, etc, and to the side, it says, "Enter the number claimed. Do not put a check mark." It baffles me to see how many people put a gosh-danged check mark! And sometimes the section of the form for the paid tax preparer has the phone number where their employer id number is supposed to go... what the heck? The paid preparer should know how to fill out the gosh-darned form!!! Those are just the two most consistently baffling examples of people filling out forms wrong.

My point is that tests are also a type of form. I wonder how many kids get a worse grade than they should because they are bad at filling out forms.

On a totally unrelated note, I wish I had been able to figured out this "get a good grade without reading the material" thing when I was in high school.