These standardised tests are nothing but PC nonsense, but to know that you have to look at education over the last few generations.
I know I’m talking from a UK perspective, but we are in the process of seriously modifying and indeed throwing out completely certain tests at certain ages, and many of the same arguments were made for and against as the testing program was rolled out.
If you go back far enough, you find that ‘education’ was nothing more than rote learning for the masses, the wealthy of course could afford private tuition and these were the ones who populated our universities and upper realms of public life.
I don’t know if you have any ‘living museums’ over there based upon the daily lives of individuals way back, things like the typical life of a child in the 1930’s - that sort of thing.
What is striking are the kinds of lessons children had to endure, and in some of those living museums you can get to take part as a student.
The curriculum was , to a very large extent, based upon repeating statements of the teacher but with a small change to the wording, so one part of a geography lesson might be,
Teacher ’ Bombay is a major city in India’
Children ‘Bombay is a major city in India’
Teahcer ’ Name me an Indian city’
Children ‘India has a major city called Bombay’
All the children would reply collectively, and toward the end of the lesson the teacher would pick out individuals and ask the same questions.
This actually formed most of the earlier years of education, English, Maths etc were all learned by copying, little or no independant questioning and investigation took place by the children.
It guarunteed a certain minimum level, a standard upon which further education could be built, but since most work was of low skill anyway, little more was required.
Education became far more enquiring over time and much less about rote learning.
Roll on a few years, and we get competition style exams, in these what you did was take some test (in the UK it was called the eleven plus - due to the age of children).
The overall mark was examined and the top say 5% would be sent off to top tier grammar schools, the next 15% went to local grammar school, and all the rest went to secondary school, obviously this makes a huge differance to your future career path.
This system favoured the better off massively and was recognised as being in need of change, but I digress.
At grammar, or secondary school, the student went onwards to what you US might call graduation, though we dont really have such a thing in your sense of the word, students would progress to the main certificated examinations, upon which your whole future could depend.
These too were competition based, so that the top 10% achieved the highest grade, etc and the majority achived the lower passing grades, with a minority of failures which could often be retaken a few months later if the student needed these grades to make it into university.
It was recognised that there were a significant number of students who were just no good at exams but did know the course material, so coursework was eventually added to the overall mark.
In any competition system there has to be winners and losers, and this was seen as being unfair, because it tended to favour the proffessional classes, it was seen to discriminate against poorer backgrounds, such as ethnic minorities.
Competition based systems do have the advantage of promoting excellence, but it was a winner take all system, with those not within the chosen group recieving no reward whatsoever for their efforts.
Its obvious that there really needs to be some form of student streaming as well as some form of minimum educational level, but in the UK we seem to have gone for the minimum educational level through the use of standardised testing.
Take this standardised testing along with the progression form of education - progression through coursework to the end certificate, rather than competition, and you have large numbers of students who are guarunteed to gain qualifications instead of having to shine, its really a system of promoting mediocrity over excellence.
This makes education a homogenised product, everybody is a winner, but the reality is that teachers spend most of their time ensuring that the least talented achieve the minimum standard, and when the whole class qualifies, the gifted students are only slightly differentiated from the journeyman student.
It is strange that for some reason, its right wing governments that seem to want to control education by using standardised testing, Maggie Thatcher was responsible for this in the UK and it was widely seen as a centralisation of power where individual thought and initiative could not be tolerated.
In other public institutions such as say hospitals, police forces etc there was also a form of standardised testing called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and again this was brought in by Maggie Thtacher and her government and was again seen as centralising power.
The idea was allegedly to look at what organisations like schools, police forces etc did, and set them targets and measure their performance based upon these targets, and the rewards for meeting such standards was more money or bonuses for the senior management teams.
As alluded in an earlier post by TomnDebb, the targets became the be all and end all , its a form of management accounting.
The trouble is that you cannot describe organisations in terms of KPIs, important aspects of their service will not appear, and may well be unmeasurable, and these functions become the cinderellas of the organisation, it does not matter wether its education, or filling in holes in the road.
When the KPI targets are set, its rather like what happend in communist Russias 5 year plans, common sense goes right out of the window, you must meet the target, and there will always be someone to fabricate things to toady up to their masters, which then puts massive pressure on everyone else.
The system becomes very cynical, participants in the organisation become used to manipulation of figures and the output can actually fall whilst appearing to rise.
I’ll give you an example, though fairly trivial it will illustrate,
I Leeds General Infirmary hopsitals where I worked, there was a KPI set out using budgetary constraints, this translated downwards so that hospital cleaners were assessed in what their exact role was and they too were given KPIs on peformance.
The budgetry KPI actually pushed the hospital into using the performance data for cleaners into a specification for the work to be contracted out, which it was, and the contracter rehired the cleaners at a lower wage rate, and their number was cut.
The cleaners were then told exactly what tasks they had to perform so that the contractor could meet the KPI set by the hospital, and given the reduction in staff, they in fact only just had enough time to carry out the most basic duties.
The result was that hygiene has fallen, and today its a serious issue with MRSA flesh eating germs around, not only that but the morale of patients has descended.
The reasons are easy to see, the job specification could never take into account that cleaners also talked to patients, even just a simple ‘hello’ to a sick person makes all the differance, and often it would be from patients that cleaners would find out about spillages etc, not only that, but having a large pay cut didnt exactly help their cooperation either nor seeing many of their colleagues dismissed.
The cleaning contract has been taken back within hospital employment.
This is similar to what is happening in schools, teachers are asked to concentrate on one aspect of education, as if this is all that education is about, schools are having to use any means they can to make the targets or face penalties, difficult students are pushed aside, gifted ones are left to educate themselves and to increase throughput, class sizes increase.
What you may well find in the US is that this standardisation of education is actually just one facet of the outlook of the government, and this outlook is then applied to other government functions, it comes from an authoritarian state which centralises power, more concerned with its own maintenance than with carrying out its duties and obligations to the citizen.
We had 18 years of this with the Conservative administration, eventually they were booted out of office, several have been imprisoned for corruption, perjury and at present there is no way back for them they are so far down in the polls you need Hubble to spot them.
This is not really a good thing, as they are a weak opposition and the current administration is not tested properly by being called to account for its actions.
This is a somewhat long rambling post, I thank anyone for reading it.