Jay Mathews writes an interesting article for the Weshington Post that deals with the ramifications of No Child Left Behind and all that testing. Here is a sample:When we say "teaching to the test," we should acknowledge that we are usually not talking about those drill fests. Rather, we often use the phrase to refer to any course that prepares students for one of the annual state assessment exams required under the No Child Left Behind Act. For reasons that escape me, we never say a teacher is "teaching to the test" if she's using a test she wrote herself. We share the teacher's view that what she is doing is helping her students learn the material, not ace the test. But if she is preparing the class for an exam written by some outsider, the thinking goes, then she must be forced to adhere to someone else's views on teaching and thus is likely to present the material too quickly, too thinly, too prescriptively, too joylessly -- add your own favorite unattractive adverb.This has been one of my biggest problems with those complaining about the testing. Their complaint isn't that the children aren't learning; but rather the children aren't learning what the teacher wants to teach. That's a problem in my book.
I'm not one of those Big Government Republicans who thinks it is alright for the federal government to come in and mandate all sorts of things that should be handled at the state level. Education should be regulated at the state and local level as was written in the Constitution. The Department of Education is one of the biggest mistakes our federal government has hit the citizenry with...
That said, I don't think these tests are as bad as we're being told. Shouldn't a tenth grader in Ohio know the same "stuff" that a tenth grader in California does? How else are we to determine whether or not that is actually happening? Testing is the only means we have for this.
Teaching to the test is what every teacher does every day whether they choose to admit that or not. They have always done so.
