By Professor Doom
“Fill in the
bubble” tests have been a fact of life in our government-run school system for
a generation or two now. I certainly remember taking them every few years, and
then the biggie, the SAT, in my last year of high school.
Like everything government-run
(see also: vaccinations), the bureaucracy has imposed ever more burdens on the
victims trapped in the system. Students in government controlled schools now
begin their year with a government mandated pre-test, end the year with a
post-test, take a skills test every year in grades 3 through 8, and also
another such test in high school. And now there’s the PARCC test, one more
comprehensive high stakes test that means absolutely nothing for the student.
Oh, in addition
to all these bureaucracy-imposed tests (which can’t count for a grade, due to
the wait times involved from the bureaucratic grading system), students also
have to deal with the “normal” tests, quizzes, and assignments in their classes.
All those standardized government tests assume the test-takers actually give a
damn about tests which don’t matter for a grade, even though the test-takers
obviously have to decide whether to study for the useless test, or the
assignments that count for something. They need a bit of motivation, right?
How do you
motivate students? By making the tests “high stakes.” But as test after test
after test is stacked up on the student, convincing students every test is “the
most important test, EVER” gets ever more difficult.
One question never
asked about all this is the profit motive for these tests. There’s big, big,
money in testing. I, and many academics I suppose, have made money setting up
test banks and submitting questions and such…but the testing companies make
bank on this. We have what, 100,000,000 kids trapped in our schools? Charge $5
a test and that’s half a billion dollars…subtract off the hundreds of bucks you
need to hire a professor to make the problems, the million dollars you need to
bribe the government official to enforce yet another “high stakes” test, a few
hundred thousand collecting (the schools pay the mailing costs, because it’s
high stakes) and grading (all Scantron, so pretty quick and easy) and the
profit margin here is pretty huge.
Seriously, I bid the gentle reader to think about this. We've been burying our kids in standardized tests for at least a generation now, and not one single improvement to education can be attributed to these tests. On the other hand, the testing companies have made many billions, a tiny fraction of which is given to our educrats to have them mandate more tests. It’s really no wonder we keep getting more
of these, the wonder is why nobody is asking about all this, but I digress…
The students are
catching on that all these high stakes tests are, well, bullsh*t. It doesn’t
matter in the slightest how they perform, and wasting time studying for bogus
“high stakes” tests cuts into time studying for tests that actually count for
something.
I’ve mentioned
the SAT (or ACT) as important, but they’ve dropped off a bit. You used to need
to do well on these to get into a “good” school, but the proliferation of open
admissions policies even at what used to be good schools have made these
largely irrelevant to most students.
On the other
hand, AP Exams have risen in importance. Doing well on these exams means free
college credit—doing well on these can save students thousands of dollars in
college tuition and months of their lives as well. The best the student can
hope for by doing well on a “high stakes” test is their teacher not getting
fired a year after the student graduates from high school (I’m serious, most
high stakes test don’t impact the student at all, but can impact the school or
teacher involved quite a bit).
Students are,
justifiably, opting out of taking/studying for these pointless tests which
would otherwise take up a huge amount of their time.
Buzbee, a senior at Wilson High School, said she and other high-performing students either refused to take the test or intentionally flubbed it to focus on Advanced Placement tests, which were given the following week.
--sorry to
quote a fake news source, but it jives with what my friends in the government
education system tell me.
Now, like everything government,
students are forced to take the test…they’re just not forced to study. So, we
do see falling student test scores on the government standardized tests, but we
probably shouldn’t panic that much about it. By the time our students take
their high school “high stakes” tests, they’ve taken around 30 of these tests,
and have never received any benefit for it, have never seen a school benefit
for it, have never seen a teacher benefit for it…how can we blame students for
not doing well on a completely pointless exercise?
Ellen
Leander said her son, who is now a junior at Wilson, answered a few questions
on his PARCC exam and then walked out because he didn’t want to miss a
chemistry lab.
--Ellen’
son is lucky. Most schools absolutely force their students to take the test,
force the taxpayers to increase the revenue to the testing company. It’s a
shame people don’t know what fascism really is anymore…
As the above
indicates, you can have a really good student failing the high stakes test
because…he just doesn’t give a damn, he’s got better things to do.
Like most
government-induced problems, the solution is easy: stop with all the mandatory
tests. Let’s just keep the tests that are only being taken by students that
actually are trying to do well…we can use AP and SAT test scores as a measure
of what our students are learning, the ones that at least care to learn. Yes,
the SAT scores are still dropping (even with dumbing down the tests), but at
least we know the students are trying, which means the evidence there is worth
something.
All we can learn
from students doing well on mandatory pointless tests like PARCC is that we’re
still doing a terrible job of educating our students: even after being suckered
dozens of times to put effort into obvious lies like “high stakes” testing,
they get suckered yet again.
Of course, the
taxpayers are also getting suckered into paying for this crud, so maybe we
should have a test for that, as well…meanwhile, the kids are figuring out what a
scam these tests are, best I can hope for is they’ll remember it when they’re
adults.
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