GoBigEd

Posted 10:04 AM by Susan Darst Williams

TEXAS TESTING MALARKEY GOES ON IN NEBRASKA, TOO

Here's a good explanation of how the "assessments" that are driving so much of what goes on in schools today is a bunch of nonsense. They got started in Texas and now are being spread throughout the land with the hammer of the fed ed law and the punitive regs attached to federal funding, No Child Left Behind:

http://www.dallasblog.com/will-lutz/2006/8/1/texas-flim-flam-where-35-is-a-passing-grade.html)

Nebraska "test scores" are full of these same euphemisms and deliberate deceptions in a world in which a school is judged A-OK by a state education bureaucracy if 35% of its students can get 53% of the "test" questions correctly.

Jiminy creepers. We really need to scrap all these dumb-down tests, and go back to local control and an emphasis on the Carnegie units -- so many years of English, so many years of math, so many years of science, and so forth -- with judicious use of objective standardized tests as quality control measurements. It's time ix-nay all these worthless "assessments" that are nothing but educratic busy work.