Brief Manifesto: Standardized Testing is Testing Patience
Standardized testing is certainly effective at ONE thing: testing the patience of teachers and its "test subjects"--the students. What about teaching for an exchange of knowledge?? That's a novel idea! Sure there are some of us who do not teach with the test in our immediate conscious thoughts, but it is always looming. The students are aware of it too. Testing has made teaching and learning a robotic process--there is no REAL thinking. More teachers are becoming mechanical in their pedagogy and more students are becoming mechanical in their responses. Isn't this a danger to the future of our larger society?? The greater lesson being taught is that education is FAILING its students but that's okay as long as they are producing high test scores!!!
posted by Barbara Buran @ 2:47 PM
1 Comments:
I agree with you 100%, sometimes I feel like I would be better off, or ever our students would be better off moving to a state where they do not have such rigourous state assessments. The state continues to "improve", which means making more "challenging"(difficult), the state-wide standardized tests which in turn is forcing teachers and students to teach to this test like you say. I also agree that we are becoming robotic and in a way clones in our teaching because we are required to teach the same things at the same time as every other teacher at the very least in our building, if not in our state. And I feel that education is failing because students study solely to pass for the test and their way to study is to cram the information and they end up losing it the very next day. I think it's very sad.
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