Liberal Words:
Obama: “Less standardized testing in schools.”
– ASSOCIATED PRESS
. . . . Washington — President Barack Obama said Monday that students should take fewer standardized tests and school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results. Too much testing makes education boring for kids, he said.
. . . . “Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools,” the president told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish language television network at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C.
. . . . Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said policymakers should find a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.
. . . . At the same time, Obama said, schools should be judged on criteria other than student test performance, including attendance rate. (Daytona Beach News-Journal, 3/29/2011)
Discussion
. . . . Obama makes a single point with which an expert in testing may agree: That tests should not be used to punish students or punish schools. It is the many ways that test results are used or administered that make all the difference in the world. If the results are focused upon what students learn from their teachers, – then nationally standardized content area tests are vastly superior to all other tests that one may “find”. Obama’s teachers’ union guidance against standardized testing is simply dead wrong for student learning.
. . . . When “high stakes” testing is applied to teachers, schools, and school systems, the pressure to succeed may produce less than honest test results, as has been clearly demonstrated in the Washington DC, Atlanta, and other school systems. This is not a reflection on the tests, but on the ethics and professional standards of some within each school, system, or state.
Antidote
. . . . When nationally standardized content area tests are carefully administered and profiles developed within each school of student growth from year to year with specific teachers, by grade level, and for each school as a whole, the stage is set for using tests to focus like a laser on improving instruction. The belief that throwing out standardized testing will somehow improve the schools is tenable only by those who know nothing about testing. They are blaming the messenger.
. . . . The essence of this argument is the same as a marriage as being for better or worse. If we throw out marriage, we eliminate the problem!!! If we throw out testing, we eliminate the problem!!!
Hello!!! Obama!!! Please grow a brain. Your masters do not serve you well.